Tastebud in SW, Washington Post on Portland, Top 100 Wine Restaurants

3 Portland Restaurants in Wine Enthusiast top 100 Best Wine Restaurants

Wine Enthusiast Magazine has just revealed their 2015 100 Best Wine Restaurants in America, and three Portland restaurants made the list:

Ava Gene’s

Le Pigeon

Muselet

You can view the complete list here.

Tastebud’s long awaited Multnomah Village restaurant is finally getting underway

Yesterday they launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund it. I never link to these fundraisers – I get so many every week it would be hard to keep up, but I’m making an exception because this restaurant has brought me a ton of email from people asking if I knew when it was going to open. If all goes well (and it almost never does in the restaurant world), the opening will be in October.

We are officially a few short months away from opening our new Multnomah Village restaurant, and we are seeking partial support via a Kickstarter campaign, which we just launched today. We’re offering some truly unique backer rewards (including cooking lessons from me, a year-long “pizza subscription,” and seats at an exclusive preview dinner), and we’ll be announcing the restaurant’s official opening date to our Kickstarter backers first!

You can read the complete press release with all the information and incentives here.

Washington Post Features Portland Food Scene

The Washington Post has jumped on the Portland bandwagon, featuring our city in an article on “The Search for America’s Best Food Cities“. Portland is the third city they’ve covered, and critic Tom Sietsema has done a fine job, though he seems to have had a bit too much hyperbole for lunch:

Imagine a city where no one honks their horn and drivers pause mid-block to assure pedestrians safe passage from one sidewalk to another.

Picture an urban landscape painted in rivers, forests and mountains — Frontierland as if created by Alice Waters.

…Welcome to Portland, as in Oregon, the land of milk and honey — also coffee, tea, beer, wine, game, berries, crab, salmon, ice cream in flavors lifted from food trucks and olive oil that chefs compare favorably to Italy’s liquid gold.

I’d like to imagine a city like this, and I think this was what Portland was like 10 years ago. Not so much these days. Try to cross a busy street mid-block these days and people are likely to slow only because they are busy looking for their horn button.

But these are silly quibbles. The article is a well written history of our food scene, and worth a read.

Aaron Barnett, Owner/Chef of St. Jack Opening Mussel Bar

According to the Oregonian, Aaron Barnett is opening a bar specializing in mussels in the old Savoy Tavern space on SE Clinton.

The new bar, La Moule, will feature mussels in a half-dozen “flavors,” Belgian and local Belgian-style beers plus an approachable cocktail program crafted by a local bartending ringer.

…Literally “the mussel,” though also a French slang term, La Moule will feature Pacific Northwest mussels in at least six varieties from a classic white wine, lemon, butter and fresh herb broth to one with sherry, merguez sausage, harissa and mint. Barnett is playing with a Spanish style, with chorizo and piquillo peppers, an American, with Budweiser and Old Bay seasoning and a Chicago-specific version, with kielbasa and sport peppers. The fries, tossed in gremolata, are modeled after the ones at St. Jack, and will be served with a choice of aioli or ketchup.

Barnett hopes to have it open by late August.