Like all the other Jews and Chinese people, we found ourselves looking for any open restaurant to celebrate Christmas Eve. I originally was planning to make dinner, but Verde was orphaned for the holiday so we decided to make a night of it at Aviary. This restaurant had the unfortunate luck of burning down shortly…
Tag: new american
Gary Danko
My apologies for my absence from the blogosphere. After a long day of work, I usually come home and cook dinner. Portland just doesn’t have the same dining options that LA did, so its forced my hand to cook more regularly. If anyone knows me, I don’t like to cook instant or even semi-instant sh*t….
Little Bird
It’s always nice to already have some friends when you move to a new city. Big Spoon and The Gunner are just a few of my fellow Portlandians. We kicked off my first weekend in the new city at Little Bird, a relatively new French restaurant in Portland. Ordering wine turned out to be a…
Fraiche
There’s been a lot of buzz about Fraiche and its new chef Ben Bailey. Despite the 3 star ratings on Yelp, I had it on my list of to-try places even before Ben Bailey arrived because I really enjoyed their offering at Taste of Beverly Hills. Plus, Wontuan gave it his seal of approval. So with their…
Paley’s Place
My tour of Portland’s fine dining establishments continues with Paley’s Place. It is owned by executive chef Vitaly Paley, who was awarded the 2005 James Beard Award for Best Chef Northwest. It’s located in a Victorian style house in the Northwest area of Portland. Reviews on Yelp complained about the place being small and cramped. …
Beast
Beast is a unique dining experience. It is a restaurant composed of a staff of 5 (2 chefs, 2 servers, 1 busboy) and 2 communal tables (20-30 seats) with a large open air kitchen. Dinner service is only offered Wednesday through Sunday with two seatings at 6:00pm and 8:45pm. Brunch is offered only on Sundays…
Waterloo & City
Dine LA used to be an event that inspired excitement. What delicious new foods would I discover? What great deals would I get? After many a Dine LA has come and gone, I have just become very tired of the prix fixe snooze fests. I’d rather just pay the extra money to have the more interesting dishes…
Veritable Quandry
When it comes to the food in Portland, I will have to admit, I do have a case of food “beer goggles.” I’m a little more generous on my compliments and generally hold food in a Portland to a lower standard than to food in LA. Why that is the case? I’m not quite sure….
Tabla Pasta e Vino
Some of my dinners in Portland don’t end as well as they start off. Dinner at Tabla was just such a meal. Strong starters, good wine, weak finishers. Sometimes its actually easy to forget bad appetizers if the entree and desserts are a smash hit. Unfortunately its not so easy to forget when its the…
Beaker & Flask
Apparently Portland has a big happy hour scene as well as a cocktail scene. People love to get the party started after a long days hard work and they like to get their drink on with some stiff cocktails. What I find strange is that a lot of the happy hours only go until 6pm. …
Lola
So in Seattle, Tom Douglas is King. You may ask why? Well when you own 6 restaurants and 1 bakery that garners outstanding reviews and is wildly loved by the masses, then you can be king too. Oh, when you stick all those restaurants within a 1 mile radius of each other, that just shows…
Restaurant Zoe
So for our first dinner in Seattle, we decided to go with Restaurant Zoë. This was Dumpling Man’s choice, and what a nice choice it was. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it beats a place like Providence or comes anywhere near it, but it definitely holds its own. Fresh ingredients, simple but…
Overworked. Underfed. 