→ July 22, 2022
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Los Angeles eats, 2022 edition.

I’ll start with the two remarkable meals I had in Los Angeles, starting with Pizzeria Sei, which has already received quite a bit of good press for their incredible “Tokyo-style Neapolitan” pizzas. I had the funghi, with fior di latte, several types of mushrooms, entire cloves of garlic, pecorino, oregano, and thyme. This might be in the top five of pizzas I’ve ever had, from the ingredients to that incredible, airy dough, perfectly baked, just a little charred on the edges and spotted on the underside. I did take the garlic cloves off before eating it, because I am a 49-year-old man who will sweat garlic out of my pores for two days if I eat all that, but the garlic/thyme flavor combination is one of my favorites to have with mushrooms – and those were exceptionally high quality, with cremini, shiitake, and I’m pretty sure porcini on there. I would eat any pizza these folks make given how good the dough is.

Sushi-Tama was my splurge meal for the trip, which I think I earned after we got through ten rounds. It’s one of those sushi places where the fish arrives daily on planes from Japan (and, as my server informed me, elsewhere around the world) and where the staff all pronounces everything as if they’re native speakers. I stuck to nigiri and a mozuku seaweed salad, which was itself unlike any other seaweed salad I’d ever had. It wasn’t bright green and vaguely briny, but dark olive (I’ve had that before) and extremely vinegary. Enough about the seaweed, though … the fish was comparable to the best I’ve ever had. I would especially recommend the kinme dai, golden eye snapper served with a little lime zest and salt. Its slightly higher oil content gave it more flavor than the madai, true snapper that was one of the daily specials. I also tried the nogoduro, fresh sea perch that they serve lightly seared, a new fish to me; the anago, salt-water eel; and the medium-fatty tuna, which the server actually recommended even over the much more expensive, fattier tuna cut. Twelve pieces of nigiri plus the seaweed salad was under $100, which I think is a bargain by L.A. standards.

Tacos Baja was my first meal after landing, Enseneda-style tacos, burritos, and other dishes mostly revolving around fried shrimp and fish. I kept it simple, getting two fish tacos with beans and rice. The fish was baja-style (of course), very crispy with a beer batter, served with a giant amount of shredded cabbage, salsa, and white sauce. There was so much stuff on the taco I could barely fold the thing, but the important part is that the fish was good and perfectly fried so it stayed moist in the center. I probably should have skipped the rice and beans and tried another taco. They have three locations, one in LA proper and two in Whittier.

Ronan on West Melrose is a pizzeria with a bunch of small plates and three other mains on the menu, although I was just there for the pizza. Ronan’s dough is actually lighter and fluffier than Sei’s, or really any Neapolitan place I have tried – enough that I’m not sure you’d even call it Neapolitan any more, although it’s still great, just too airy for that style. I had the Sweet Cheeks – guanciale, ricotta forte, and black pepper honey. It was sort of a salt-and-pepper bomb, although that was good after I’d been out at the Futures Game for several hours. The dough was the real star, though. I felt like I just had delicious salty bread for dinner. With a little bacon. It turns out that the owner of Pizzeria Sei previously worked at Ronan, although I think he’s surpassed his former employers.

Angry Egret Dinette is set back in a courtyard off Broadway in the Old Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, so it’s not visible from the road, which meant I drove past it twice before just parking and walking to find it. This Beard-nominated spot has a large patio seating area and a take-out window, offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with inside seating available at some point in the past but perhaps not currently. I went with their shrimp po’boy, fried shrimp (and a lot of them) with cabbage slaw, salsa negra, pico de gallo, and avocado. Salsa negra is made from chiles mecos, a type of chipotle pepper, which is itself a dried and smoked jalapeño; mecos are ripened for a longer period, giving them a deeper red color, and then smoked for a longer period as well. To make salsa negra, you fry the chiles mecos in oil for several minutes until they turn dark brown, and then add garlic, salt, sugar, at the very least, with some recipes calling for vinegar, cumin, other spices, even soy sauce. Whatever Angry Egret uses, my Italian-American palate was not ready for that heat – this was very spicy, delicious, but whoa boy that was hot. The shrimp were quite fresh and fried just enough to cook them, still tender throughout. I liked this combination of flavors but I can’t pretend I tasted everything with my face on fire.

One breakfast spot to recommend – Aroma Tea & Coffee, which offers a smoked salmon “stack,” their take on a benedict that replaces that awful Canadian ham product with smoked salmon and replaces the English muffin with a crispy potato pancake. I’ve had this combination before, including over at Square One in LA, and I’ll never not order this if I see it on a menu. The salmon here was solid, which is the main differentiator – if that’s not up to par, the whole dish fails.

I did try two coffee places recommended by a friend in the specialty coffee business. Kumquat, over in Highland Park, brings in specialty coffees from small roasters all over the country, and focuses on espresso rather than brewed coffee, although they do offer a drip coffee each day. They do a daily blend for their regular espresso and a single-origin espresso that changes daily. I love the space, but there’s no indoor seating at the moment, just a shaded patio. They also offer some baked goods; I enjoyed the blueberry cornmeal scone, which was nice and crumbly and not too sweet, so it didn’t overpower the coffee. Go Get Em Tiger has multiple locations and a sizable food menu, although I just had a drip coffee, their Ethiopia Yukro, a tart, fruity coffee that’s less citrusy than beans from other Ethiopian regions that I’ve tried. They don’t have wifi, if you’re curious, which did matter as I was trying to work on draft recaps by that point, although I still recommend the coffee.

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→ June 25, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 6/25/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my second mock draft for 2022, with a change right at the top – and a key note on what we don’t know about Baltimore’s plans; and scouting reports on five draft-eligible players in the CWS finals, which pits Oklahoma (which hasn’t won since 1994) against Ole Miss (which has never won the whole shebang).

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Sarah Langs of MLB.com about several rookies’ performances so far this season, with a deeper dive into some of the Statcast data. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter will return in a day or two once I gather my thoughts and can translate my anger into words. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

  • “The American Medical Association is deeply disturbed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nearly a half-century of precedent protecting patients’ right to critical reproductive health care.” Read the AMA’s full statement here.
  • A new Indian film inadvertently highlights the growing racial/religious tensions in the country, which is ruled by a Hindu nationalist Prime Minister. The Kashmir Files is an unsubtly pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim, and its director parrots dubious claims about terrorism by the minority Muslim population in this interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker.
  • Amy Kaufman, the ex-wife of convicted abuser Jonah Keri, spoke to the LA Times’ Bill Shaikin about her ordeal with Keri, including his pattern of manipulative & controlling behavior as well as graphic descriptions of domestic abuse.
  • Writing for Andscape (formerly The Undefeated), Clinton Yates writes about the side of Omaha you don’t see during the College World series – the city’s Black neighborhoods, overlooked in a city that is 75% white.
  • The FX/Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven seems likely to win a few Emmys in the next awards cycle, especially for Andrew Garfield as the series’ star, but the sister of Brenda Lafferty, whose murder forms the basis of the series and the Jon Krakauer book from which it’s adapted, says the seven-part show does not represent her sister fairly.
  • The owners of Prince Street Pizza in New York City have stepped down as managers – but not as owners – after their own racist comments to customers resurfaced online this week. There are plenty of great pizzerias in New York City that are owned by people who do not have a history of racist behavior.
  • Texas AG Ken Paxton said of the massacre in Uvalde that “God always has a plan.” Ignoring, for a moment, the question of God’s existence, does anyone truly believe that a benevolent God’s plan involved the parents of 19 children burying the partial remains of their kids?
  • Cyberpunk 2077: Gangs of Night City certainly looks like a Warriors/Escape from New York sort of board game, which isn’t a bad thing, and CMON has a great reputation for high-quality components and heavier games. This new title is already funded on Kickstarter.
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→ April 3, 2022
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Phoenix eats, March 2022.

I ate at four new places in my run through Arizona last week, as well as hitting several old favorites – The Hillside Spot, FnB, Crêpe Bar, Matt’s Big Breakfast, and Cartel Coffee – and making a day trip to San Diego, where I went to The Mission for breakfast and Juniper & Ivy for dinner around a visit to see Brooks Lee play. I’m thrilled to see so many places still open given the industry attrition during the pandemic.

Fabio on Fire is an Italian restaurant out in Peoria, less than ten minutes from the Padres/Mariners complex, across Lake Pleasant Parkway from Sala Thai, which I recommended in October. Fabio was indeed running around the restaurant, although he was not actually on fire himself. I went with a friend for the pizzas, which were fantastic, Neapolitan-adjacent but with more toppings than you’d find in traditional Neapolitan pizza. I got the white pizza with prosciutto and arugula, one of my favorite combinations, and it was a real effort to stop eating it at the two-thirds mark. The edges are crusty but not charred, so I assume their oven temp is a little lower than the traditional Neapolitan standard, and have the flavor and texture you get from slow fermentation. There was so much on the pizza it could hardly hold the weight of the toppings, and despite a generous amount of prosciutto and shaved Parmiggiano on top, the balance of salt was good. We also shared a starter of fried calamari and zucchini that was a little underdone.

Myke’s Pizza is located in Mesa inside Cider Corps, a huge craft cider bar with a great selection of crisp ciders on draft with different flavors. Myke’s grew out of a successful pizza truck business and operates independently in the same space – the cider folks seat you, then you go to the pizza stand in back to order food. I got the arugula pizza, a margherita with smoked gouda and arugula added. It’s not quite Neapolitan style, but probably closest to that among common types of pizza, with a thin crust and a lot of air in the outer edge, just not as puffy on the outside or soft in the center. I enjoyed the cider as well, which for whatever reason never hits me the same way that beer does despite similar ABVs.

Kabob Grill-and-Go in downtown Phoenix has shown up on several best-of lists in the last year; I tried to go there during my trip to Fall League in October, but the wait for the food was too long for my narrow windows on those trips. I had some more time to work with this year, and was eating early enough that I only had to wait about 20 minutes, which is around the minimum they request for any order, to get my food. I went with the chicken thigh platter, which was probably two meals’ worth of food: two skewers of incredibly flavorful grilled chicken thighs on a bed of rice with a grilled Anaheim pepper and two enormous grilled tomatoes, along with a side of sauce and a small shirazi (cucumber & parsley) salad. The food is Persian-Armenian, and I think what I ate was jujeh kabob, chicken marinated in saffron, onion, garlic, and lemon juice. It was bursting with flavor – salty, tangy, a little spicy, the kind of dish you want to keep eating even when it’s too hot to eat or you’re already kind of full, both of which I experienced. The rice had very little taste, even of salt, so I assume the point is to just eat it with the meat. When I go again, and I will, I’m going to get one skewer and get a grilled eggplant salad on the side instead.

Da Vàng is a popular Vietnamese place in Phoenix just east of I-17, in an area with a cluster of other Vietnamese restaurants; it made Eater’s top 38 restaurants for Phoenix last May, a useful resource that includes many restaurants I already know and like (Tratto, Welcome Diner, Barrio Café, Glai Baan, Pizzeria Bianco, FnB, Little Miss BBQ, Chou’s Kitchen, Haji Baba, and Tacos Chiwas). It’s solid and very reasonably priced, with all of the staples I am used to seeing on Vietnamese menus; I went with a scout friend and we ordered spring rolls, bun (vermicelli noodles), and the savory crepe called bánh xèo, a crispy rice-flour pancake folded over a filling of shrimp and pork. I’d recommend getting that regardless of what else you order.

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→ March 13, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 3/13/22.

I released my first ranking of draft prospects for 2022 over on The Athletic, and held a live Q&A to take questions about it. I also wrote up the two trades from Saturday night, involving Chris Bassitt and Isiah Kiner-Falefa/Mitch Garver.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Adventures of Robin Hood, a narrative game from the designer of the Legends of Andor, but with simpler mechanics and a clever encounter system with a two-layered board.

I spoke with the Locked On Dodgers podcast in a two-part interview you can watch here and here. I also sent a new issue of my free email newsletter, talking about Monty Python and the development of my sense of humor.

And now, the links…

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→ January 16, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/16/22.

Still working on the prospect rankings – I started the actual writing this week, after several weeks of prep – which will run starting January 31st at the Athletic. I appreciate your patience. My podcast and my Paste reviews will return this week.

And now, the links…

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→ November 24, 2021
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Puerto Rico eats.

I had a lot of mediocre food in Puerto Rico this time around, which was disappointing, as I would have generally said I like that cuisine, but did manage to sneak in a couple of good meals before we headed home on Sunday night. Most of the good eats are in San Juan proper, in the Viejo San Juan, Santurce, and Miramar neighborhoods in particular, while we stayed at a hotel near the airport for the conference my wife was attending, so that limited our options a bit.

Jungle Bird was by far the best place I ate on the trip, which is funny because it’s more of a kitschy tiki bar than restaurant. Their “crack eggplant” lives up to the name, though – the eggplant is dried and I assume quickly pan-fried, then doused in a mildly spicy sambal sauce with slivered almonds. It is addictive, and messy, and I think it’s the best eggplant dish I’ve ever had. Usually the texture of aubergines throws me off, and the seeds can be rather bitter if it’s not cooked correctly, but this dish had none of those issues; whatever they’re doing to the berry, it gives it a toothy, chewy texture closer to that of grilled meats. The coconut and corn fritters with queso fresco (pictured here) were sweet, balanced by the spicy and slightly tangy sauce and the salt from the cheese. The kimchi fried rice was a giant plate of exactly what it sounds like, with the kimchi well-integrated into the dish, so that it was present but not overpowering, boosted by a generous helping of peanuts and some fried chicken thighs (an add-on). That was actually the spiciest of the three dishes we tried. Everything was fantastic, although I actually thought the cocktails were on the weaker side for tiki drinks, which tend to hide a lot of rum – especially the Zombie, which contains some 151-proof rum – behind fruit juices.

I didn’t expect to find Neapolitan-style pizza in San Juan, but I stumbled on Verace while walking around the Isla Verde area outside our hotel. It’s located in a boutique hotel just off the main drag, but caught my eye for the actual wood-fired pizza oven on its patio. I ordered the prosciutto and arugula pizza, which had some other name, and got exactly what I expected: fresh mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, and a modest serving of arugula on top, with crushed tomatoes rather than sauce (and certainly not sweetened like so many sauces). Everything on top of the pizza was superb. The one knock I have on Verace is that they didn’t cook their pizzas at anywhere near 800 degrees – the patio oven wasn’t even lit, so I’m not sure how they were cooking the pizzas that day – so there was no charring on the outside or underneath, and the outer crust didn’t have any crispness. The flavors were great, including that of the dough itself, and they were using good-quality ingredients for the toppings. I am just a little skeptical about the veracity of their claims to be Neapolitan-style.

Breakfast options were scant, but if you’re on Isla Verde, at the eastern end of that main road with all the hotels is a bakery called Las Canarias that does a credible job with fresh breakfast sandwiches, made to order, along with pancakes and waffles – the closest I saw to an “American” breakfast outside of hotel restaurants. (I’m aware Puerto Rico is American, too.) I had an egg and bacon sandwich on a crusty baguette, less airy than French bread but crunchy and sturdy enough for the fillings, which were a little saltier than I’d like – but I’ll take that over undersalted eggs. It was more than I could finish, too.

A friend introduced me to Gustos Coffee on my last trip to Puerto Rico, and I was dying to get back there both to drink their coffee and buy some local beans to bring home; Puerto Rico has a small coffee-growing industry, but the beans generally don’t leave the island. Gustos has a large, gorgeous new café in the Miramar neighborhood of San Juan, offering a full array of coffee drinks and beans of varying roasts as well as some breakfast and lunch items. They do offer pour-overs, which the day I was there was made with a blend that included Puerto Rican and Central American beans. I might just take drip coffee if I went again, as they use the same beans in that, and in the espresso drinks as well. They had several options for locally grown beans for sale, roasted either medium or dark (they don’t do light roasts – my recollection is that they felt it wouldn’t sell), picking the ones grown at the highest altitudes. I’ll update this post when I try them.

If you can’t make it to any of their locations – they also have one at the airport that is open quite late – there’s a tiny coffee stand inside the Verdanza hotel, right by Verace, called Espresso Lab that is more than adequate. They know how to pull a shot correctly, and that’s all they do – they don’t offer drip coffee, just an Americano if that’s your speed – although their milk game isn’t as strong.

The airport also has one of Metropol’s eight locations on the island (there’s a ninth in Miami), and you’re not going to do much better with airport food. It’s mostly Puerto Rican food with some Cuban dishes included, and their specialty, a stuffed Cornish game hen with maduros (fried sweet plantains), was actually great, even for something that was obviously not made to order, given how fast we were served. The menu has a lot of options, although it is heavily weighted towards meat eaters. They offer the Cuban rice dish arroz congri (black beans and rice, cooked together) and the Puerto Rican arroz mamposteao (rice with stewed red beans) as side options, or as individual small plates, and I’d be happy with a big bowl of either of those.

We had a full afternoon before the flight back to Philly, so we took a day trip to Charco Frio, a series of small waterfalls in the same rainforest as the famed El Yunque (which required more time than we had). It’s a lengthy hike, 15-20 minutes, along a muddy trail, so I recommend bringing water shoes if you go there. On the way back, we visited Luquillo, a gorgeous beach on a small peninsula the north shore that faces west, so the water is calmer than it is at the hotel beaches in Isla Verde and San Juan. Towards the southern end of the beach is a long series of food stalls offering all manner of food – mostly Puerto Rican foods like alcapurrias (corn meal stuffed with meats or fish or cheese), bacalaitos (breaded and fried dried salt cod), and surullitos (fried corn and cheese sticks), all of which we tried. It’s all greasy and mostly good and I think best served with a cold beer. And a lot of napkins.

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→ May 22, 2021
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Nashville eats, 2021 edition.

 I went to Nashville to see Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, but only saw the former as the latter was scratched with little explanation. I did eat extremely well for just spending one night and getting four meals in that enclave of sanity, however.

Folk is a new artisanal pizzeria and Italian restaurant from the folks behind Rolf & Daughters, a pasta-focused restaurant that might be my single favorite dinner spot in the city. Folk’s pizza is Neapolitan-adjacent – high heat, blistered crust, but not with the wet centers or very puffy edges of true Neapolitan pizzas. The menu does have many other things on it, including vegetable dishes and some proteins, but I just went for the pizza. I had the margherita, which was good if a bit salty, a grade 55 pizza, with the quality of the toppings very evident; and a starter of Cantabrian anchovies with lemon, mint, and olive oil, which was fine but which I didn’t think benefited from the mint. The best thing I had at Folk was actually a cocktail: the Everyday People, with gin, Amaro Montenegro, dry vermouth, and Maraschino liqueur. That and the pizza would have been perfect.

I had dinner before the Friday game at the Hattie B’s location right near Vandy’s campus. I’d never had Nashville hot chicken before this, because while I like some spicy foods, I don’t like any food that is so spicy I can’t taste anything else, and too much chile pepper has never really agreed with me. I felt like this was something I had to at least try once, especially given the number of times in Nashville and the fact that my hotel was, quite literally, across the street. I got the medium – they have no spice, mild, medium, and I think three levels of insanity beyond that – and it was exactly right for me. More and I would not have enjoyed the experience on any level; less and I would have regretted wimping out. This is excellent fried chicken, perfectly crispy outside with the cayenne in the coating, still juicy inside, and with more than just pure heat for flavor. I got collard greens, because I always get collard greens; and the potato salad, because I figured that would be an appropriate counter to the heat. The collards were great, but I also really just love slow-cooked collard greens, and the potatoes served their purpose. This is about the chicken, though. And yeah, I know Prince’s is probably the original, but it wasn’t right across the street from my hotel.

I had lunch before the Saturday game from Thai Esane, which Eater tabbed as one of the best restaurants in Nashville right now, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I got pad see ew, since I wanted something I could reasonably eat in the car, but the dish was flat and – I know this is a weird complaint – there were a lot of carrots involved. I think of pad see ew as a pretty specific dish – noodles, egg, a protein, and some sort of green brassica like broccoli. Maybe I just chose poorly.

I have a real soft spot for Fido, right on Broadway near Vandy’s campus, which has been my go-to breakfast spot in Nashville for probably a decade now. I’m glad to see they’re still open, and were busy on Saturday morning, although I just popped in to get a bagel sandwich to go. I also hit Barista Parlor, one of my two favorite coffee spots in Nashville along with Crema, with Kaci, one of my editors at the Athletic, and we ended up visiting two different locations in search of outdoor seating. I know people who find BP too hipster for them, and I probably should be one of them, but I love their coffee and could sit in any of their locations for hours and be quite content.

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→ November 16, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

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→ September 28, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 9/28/19.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week had my six postseason player award ballots, all hypothetical as I didn’t have any vote this year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and another Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Silver and Gold, a tremendous new flip-and-write game from the designer of Gizmos and Bärenpark, where players fill in polyomino shapes on their own cards, trying to complete as many cards as possible while racking up various bonuses. It’s due out in late October.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now available for pre-order on all the usual sites. The release date is April 21, 2020.

You can also get more updates from my free email newsletter; the next edition will go out some time this week, before I head to Arizona for an abbreviated trip to the Fall League.

And now, the links…

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→ March 24, 2019
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Portland eats.

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. 

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