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Playing with Their Food
Well Portland Oregon and sloe gin fizz / If that ain’t love then tell me what is Rock critics and restaurant critics have traditionally had little in common, but I’ve covered both pop music and rarefied food (and vice versa). Lately, however, the two disciplines are becoming more and more aligned. I started noticing it in Montreal. Around the same time the city was breeding indie rockers like Arcade Fire and Stars, there was a similar buzz around the dining scene, with the opening of such progressive places as Brontë, Au Pied de Cochon and Le Club Chasse et Pêche. (Anthony Bourdain even dubbed the food at Au Pied de Cochon “a greatest hits of every old-school classic.”) The avant-garde restaurants Moto, Tru and Alinea all make their home in Chicago, a city renowned as a hothouse of music experimentation. Currently, a lot of my favourite bands are based in Portland, Oregon: the Shins, the Decemberists and Modest Mouse. I’ve had a crush on Portland since I first started visiting in the early 1990s. I was living in Victoria then, and Portland seemed like the big city by comparison. Those trips coincided with my developing a professional relationship with food, so there was a cosmopolitan thrill in securing a table at Saucebox, and at the Red Star Tavern we ate what seemed like everything on the menu. It was time to go back. Four consummate days restaurant-hopping on the Oregon trail would test the theory: Where there’s a thriving music scene, there will be a creative culinary one, too. Call it something in the cultural water. The Portland sound is exuberant and lyrical, sophisticated and intelligent without being overwrought. The same could be said of many of the meals I’d eat there. Restaurants like Navarre and the newly opened Pigeon – basically holes in the wall with more or less open kitchens – have that same scrappy DIY “let’s-put-on-a-show” attitude as their musical counterparts, serving innovative, honest food in a no-nonsense way that mixes the formal and casual. With a commitment to sustainability and progressive agricultural suppliers, a model new-world wine and spirits scene and the ability to attract and nurture creative young entrepreneurs, Portland is forming one of the hottest dining scenes in North America. It won’t be long before the whole country is listening in. The exact moment that the food and music scenes in Portland first began to coalesce can be traced to 1995 – the same year local legends the Dandy Warhols released their first album – when transplanted New Yorkers Kimberly and Vitaly Paley opened Paley’s Place. Situated in a converted Victorian home, the restaurant has grown into a Portland institution. Musicians value honesty and authenticity in the same way chefs value sustainability and seasonality, and at Paley’s Place, the menu adheres to the mantra of local and organic. “I don’t think you could open a place in Portland now that didn’t celebrate the area,” my waitress tells me. “People just wouldn’t go.” Chef de cuisine Ben Bettinger’s lyrical menu pairs Dungeness crab with local black “truffles” (a funky and complex tuber, though not quite as profound as those from Périgord) and moist and powerful house-made bacon and apples. The effect is at once earthy and aquatic, soft and sharp. Tongue and Cheek is just that: confit of pork tongue with luscious pork cheeks, which gets added zip from the wah-wah of horseradish aioli and fresh hazelnuts. |
