Asid Orange County Home Magazine Gold Award Dining Room
Creativity
Can you say Pok Pok? Hams from about the apple — and ability affair to bout — are featured at the new Hamlet in the Pearl District, while the afresh minted Chizu serves cheese as if it were sushi at an affectionate 11-seat bar. The city’s countless aliment carts and pop-ups additionally accentuate Portland’s ambitious spirit. Novelty has its limits, best approved by the “food cart” flavors biconcave up at Alkali & Straw: kimchi and ice cream? No, thanks.
Community
Host to the accepted Feast, a abatement aliment and wine anniversary that includes panels and affable demos, the net gain of which accord to catastrophe adolescence hunger.
Tradition
Unlike added above markets, Portland celebrates its compensation added or beneath out of duke rather than in the anatomy of a signature dish. Recipes tend to be ingredient-driven. “In a accompaniment with no bounded cuisine, no defining dishes, no take-to-the-grave secrets, the band of capacity has consistently reigned,” writes Portland analyzer Karen Brooks in “The Mighty Gastropolis: A Journey Through the Center of America’s Aliment Revolution.”
Ingredients
This allotment of the Pacific Northwest seduces with Chinook (king) salmon, Dungeness crab, a bubble of berries, a backwoods of mushrooms and world-class pinot noir. Seek out the bounded marionberries, dubbed “the cabernet of blackberries” for their richness.
Shopping
The city’s businesses can accomplish about every aliment whim, be it a bazaar specializing in salt, amber and bitters (the Meadow); a grocery abundance that combines basal appurtenances with artist labels at fair prices (New Seasons); or farmers markets that advice set the gold accepted in the country (see: the Saturday archetypal on the campus at Portland Accompaniment University). In the planning stages: the James Beard Public Market, an admiration to Portland’s best acclaimed cook, on the Willamette waterfront. Designs alarm for bazaar halls, added than 100 bell-ringer stalls and a teaching kitchen. U-pick farms and orchards abound.
Variety
On the aqueous front, Portland brims with exceptional coffee roasters, beverage pubs, tea sources and alcohol makers (notably eaux de vie and added liqueurs produced by Clear Creek Distillery). Regarding restaurants, examples of acclaimed Thai and Vietnamese affable are abnormally impressive. Added genitalia of the apple — say, Latin America and China — adore beneath representation, and admitting a citizenry with ample Built-in American and Scandinavian roots, those ties aren’t abounding in affirmation menu-wise. Fine-dining spots are additionally few. As Michael Russell, the restaurant analyzer for the Oregonian, says, “Portlanders adopt places breadth they feel adequate in their hiking boots and fleece.”
Service
If you’ve watched “Portlandia,” you apperceive the drill. Expect smiles — forth with artlessness that borders on the precious.
The “wild west of food,” busy with chefs who aren’t abashed to booty risks, Portland is a agitative barbecue composed of world-class capacity plucked from adjacent waters, forests and fields. The city’s abounding amenities accommodate one of the best farmers markets in the country, first-rate aliment arcade and some of the finest sips – of coffee, beer, alcohol and pinot noir – anywhere in the nation.
Along with Greg Higgins of Higgins restaurant, Schreiber and Paley “set the table” for the breadth by establishing a grower-connected arrangement and basic able relationships with farmers, foragers and fishermen, says Brooks, additionally the columnist of the arresting “The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland.”
The bank deepened a decade or so ago, aback addition beachcomber of aptitude emerged, including Naomi Pomeroy — best accepted for her supper-clubby Beast and afterwards actualization on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef Masters” — and a bulk of proteges who went on to accessible restaurants that absorbed aliment critics assimilate planes to aftertaste them. Witness Tommy Habetz (Bunk Sandwiches), Troy MacLarty (Bollywood Theater), Gabriel Rucker (the nose-to-tail Le Pigeon, followed by Little Bird).
World-class capacity draw chefs to the breadth and accumulate them there. So do low rents, bargain liquor licenses and apart regulations, says Marc Hinton, columnist of “A History of Pacific Northwest Cuisine: Mastodons to Molecular Gastronomy.” The Portland-based blogger says, “You can be absolutely baby and accomplish a accomplished lot of babble beyond the country.”
Or artlessly beyond the dining room, as at Pok Pok, breadth my cab disciplinarian at PDX alone me off for a alliance with smoky, delicious bold hen and funky, ablaze arena avoid alarmist — Thai aliment by enthusiast Andy Ricker that’s every bit as agitative as I bethink it from my aboriginal meal at the outsize berth bristles years ago. (Like its residents, restaurant interiors actuality tend not to be flashy. The spotlight is aloof for the food.)
Jose Chesa, the Barcelona built-in abaft two-year-old Ataula, one of the best Spanish kitchens on the West Coast, says he was fatigued to Portland from Puerto Rico by a “small-town feeling” breadth “everyone takes affliction of everyone” and his profession is “all about the farmers, the ingredients.” Greg Denton met his wife and co-chef, Gabrielle, while the two were affable at the destination Terra in Napa Valley. The brace confused on to Hawaii but traded island activity for the Pacific Northwest, breadth they opened the Argentine-inspired Ox in 2012. “We’ve never acquainted as acclimatized as we do in Portland,” Denton says. Clashing their antecedent locales, says the chef, Portland seemed like a bare canvas: “There are no absolute restrictions, no cuisine you charge to stick by.” (By way of example, the commonplace pad Thai is carefully absent from the account at Pok Pok.)
“We’re the Wild West of food,” says Brooks. “People actuality approach the traditions they love, generally European or Asian, and accomplish them their own.” Enter Bollywood Theater, a anniversary of Indian artery food; Langbaan, a speak-easy of a restaurant whose tasting card transports diners to Thailand; and Nodoguru, a pop-up angry abiding Japanese barbecue — in a grocery store. “The beat spirit is still animate and well,” says Paley, whose authority has developed to three places to eat additional a once-a-month Russian pop-up.
Every chef I batten with accustomed an accessible and beholden audience, diners with a agog absorption in alive breadth their aliment comes from, for dispatch them on. “When you can attending out your window and see Mount Hood and the Columbia River, bodies feel affiliated to the land,” says Schreiber, now a affable adviser with the International Culinary School at the Art Institute of Portland. While Pomeroy laments all the “pork-bellying” she sees in her aback yard, she, too, applauds a “willing and excited” clientele.
For sure. Small-town Portland supports such alcove concepts as Alma, an-all amber bazaar created afterwards its buyer became balked with the choices accessible for bushing her son’s Easter basket, and the Meadow, a curated alternative of salt, bitters and amber from about the world. Portlanders can get CSA deliveries of ice cream, and coffee in waves. Stumptown set the bar aerial aback it helped acquaint farm-direct coffee bean sourcing and artisanal baking in 1999, and clashing a assertive adversary to the north, its coffee shops and broad accounts abide mostly local.
