I had less than a day in Portland this past weekend, but it was my first visit to the city in 20 years, so I had a little catching up to do, and very little time in which to do it.
I had two particular food targets for my weird trip through Portland – I was headed to Corvallis to see Oregon State play, and thus had small parts of two days in Portland after I flew in Friday morning and before I flew out Saturday evening – in Apizza Scholls and the ice cream parlor Salt & Straw. Apizza Schools has come recommended to me for years, by industry people, by baking teacher and cookbook author Peter Reinhart (whose The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is still my go-to source for making any kind of artisan bread), and by many readers. It was a little different from what I expected, but still very good, a solid 55 on the 20-80 scale.
Apizza Scholls’ pizza splits the difference between Neapolitan pizzas, cooked fast at around 900 degrees with a very airy crust that has some charring at the exterior, and both New York and New Haven styles, so their pizzas’ crusts are more evenly browned without charring, and have a hard crunch without the softer bread-like interior of Neapolitan crusts. Most of their menu combinations contain meat, and I was looking to avoid that, so I went with their “plain” pie (which still has sauce and fresh mozzarella) and added mushrooms and arugula, which meant a huge portion of the latter. The center of the pie wasn’t wet as in Neapolitan styles, but the crust was thinner than New York slice, closer to New Haven, while the toppings as a whole were correctly seasoned. I appreciated that, for lunch at least (only served on weekends), they offered an 11″ option for one person.
Salt & Straw now has locations in a few other cities – I know it’s in LA – but I’d never been to any of them before this trip. They’re legendary for the quality of their product and for the way the servers outright encourage you to sample all the flavors you want; I think I tried five before settling on one of their two most popular flavors, Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache, and one of their special flavors at the moment, Wild-Foraged Berry Slab Pie. The surprising part was the the ice cream itself wasn’t heavy or dense – more like a semifreddo in texture than super-premium ice cream. The flavors were absurd; actually everything I sampled was excellent, although the Chocolate Gooey Brownie wasn’t really my thing, since brownie bits get too dense and chewy in ice cream.
Canard was one of two places recommended to me by Jeff Kraus, the chef-owner of Tempe’s Crepe Bar (which you should all try when you go to that area of Arizona), and was open for lunch on Friday, allowing me to hit an extra spot before going to Powell’s Books, which was a bucket-list item for me. (It exceeded expectations by a few orders of magnitude.) They had a placard out from suggesting the “duck stack,” and if you’ve read this blog before you’re aware of my affinity for the meat of the Anatidae. This dish was a bit different, though: it’s a small stack of pancakes topped with some grilled onions, a rich duck gravy, and a duck egg cooked roughly over-medium. The gravy has ground duck – I’m almost certain this was only white meat – with a little bacon, some reduced duck stock, a little brown sugar, and a lot of salt and pepper. It was delicious, but I don’t think I would have known that was duck if I hadn’t ordered it. The flavors I associate with duck were muted enough in the gravy that this could have been any other lean poultry. It was expertly made, just not quite what I expected.
Eem was Jeff’s second recommendation, a cocktail bar and restaurant with Thai-influenced dishes, including a handful of curries and many small plates. I asked my server for a few recommendations without red meat, and ended up with the roasted beet salad and the stir-fry with mushrooms, long beans, cashews, and one of the most convincing meat alternatives I’ve ever tasted. The beet salad was good, as they were cooked properly and came with puffed rice that gave the dish some needed textural contrast, but that stir-fry, which came with a rich, deep brown sauce that was some sort of umami bomb, salty and complex and a little sweet, was superb. The meat alternative was soy, but it was much firmer than any tofu product I’ve ever tried; it seemed to be compressed and braided to mimic the texture of chicken breast prepared in the same method. I arrived at 5 pm, right when they opened, and there was a line already there; I got one of the last open seats at the bar and by 5:10 the host was telling parties of two there’d be a 35-40 minute wait.
I tried two Portland coffee places, which seemed like a better way to experience the city than getting a tattoo and a man-bun. (In truth, I did see far too many men with man-buns, clutching their yoga mats. It was a bit too on the nose, really.) Coava Coffee was recommended by writer Matthew Kory, recently of The Athletic. Coava uses Chemex for pour-overs; the Guatemalan Finca las Terrazas I tried had a great semi-sweet chocolate note with very low acidity. I was already familiar with heart roasters, having had their coffees at several other shops around the country, including Crepe Bar (which now uses local roaster Presto) and midtown Manhattan’s Culture Espresso. Heart offers a single-origin espresso in addition to their Stereo blend, so I tried that, just for something different; the Kenya Kiachu AB beans they used were fruity but not citric so it had good body without that lemon-drop flavor you can get from a lot of Kenyan or Ethiopian beans when made as espresso.
Townshend Tea Company has a huge menu of loose-leaf teas, steeped to order and with a CBD infusion available for another $2. I skipped the weed and just went with a hojicha, my favorite green tea because it’s roasted, usually made from leaves harvested after the first two flushes. The roasting removes the grassier notes in some green teas, and also reduces its caffeine content, although for reasons I’ve never understood I don’t get the same caffeine hit from any kind of tea that I get from coffee.
