Like impatient readers who sneak a look at the last page of a novel, I have a tendency to scan the dessert selections on a menu before checking out anything else. It’s probably because I want to gage my appetitive capacity to decide if I’ll save room for a sweet, or simply wish to plan – Read more…
One Dish at the Heathman
Every so often a dish comes along so transcendent that even though you inevitably expect great things from the restaurant the preparation looms as a huge surprise, a boon to everything that precedes and follows. Such was a recent experience at dinner at The Heathman, and it once again reminded me how all the clichés – Read more…
Review: St. Jack
Liberté, Egalité, Gastromie! The French Revolution has come to town, and the only guillotine in sight is a chef’s cleaver hacking at a pig. Within a month of each other two French bistros have opened in Portland—Little Bird downtown and St. Jack, in the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood, across the street from Vindaloo. Gabe Rucker’s not so – Read more…
Review: Gilda’s
You hear all the time that one of the lamentable gaps in Portland’s culinary scene is the absence of great Chinese restaurants. Understandably there is little here to compare with the Chinese food palaces of San Francisco or Vancouver, B.C., but sadly we fall down in that department relative to Seattle as well. But a – Read more…
Review: Kin
10/17/2012 – This restaurant is now closed. There’s a wonderful Yiddish word, “ongepotchket.” meaning something that is excessive or overly baroque. In his “relaxed lexicon” of Yiddish, Leo Rosten tells a joke which perfectly illustrates the word. Fleishman, an art collector, buys a painting much admired by his friend Meyerson. It consists of a large – Read more…
Roger Porter Visits Momofuku Ko In New York City
My contributions to this website have so far been reviews of local restaurants, and I assume this will continue to be my main interest. But during a recent trip to New York, largely to eat and to expand my gastronomical horizons (at the cost of expanding my waistline as well), I thought it might be – Read more…
Review: Ate-Oh-Ate
Nostalgia can do odd things to people. It can turn strong men weepy, and make normally sensible folks act with puzzlingly sentimental yearnings. The word “nostalgia” literally means a sickness for home, and when Ben Dyer set out to re-create the food (no one ever accused it of being a “cuisine”) of his native Hawaii, – Read more…
Review: Fin
NOTE: FIN HAS NOW CLOSED. If you’ve ever gazed longingly on the sumptuous food images in coffee table cook books, you may have thought the dishes came to the photographer straight from the stove; but no, they were doubtless doctored, sculpted, and re-assembled by a professional food stylist. Such people work not only with chanterelles, – Read more…