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Nordic Chef Explores Backyard, Draws Worldwide Acclaim - NYTimes.com

Noma Restaurant in Denmark voted best restaurant in the world. Cooking without rules in Copengagen.

via www.nytimes.com

The chef René Redzepi’s restaurant is gaining global attention and acclaim.

By FRANK BRUNI

Noma's Shrimp and Sea Urchin Powder

Slide Show

 WHEN a cook is said to be in the weeds, it usually means he is tangled up in too many orders coming at him too fast.

But on a recent afternoon on the seashore here about an hour’s drive from Copenhagen, the Danish chef René Redzepi was, quite literally, in the weeds. Up to his knees. And what he was doing was snacking. Browsing. Like a rabbit, albeit a rabbit in charge of a restaurant that has set the culinary world abuzz.

Treating the windswept brush as an unkempt salad bar, he plucked a thin green blade.

“This is how the Vikings got their vitamin C,” he said. “It’s called scurvy grass. It has a horseradish tone.”

So it did, and the wild garden sorrel that he found seconds later tasted every bit as sharp and lemony as he had promised. For 15 minutes he and a companion nibbled on various petals, leaves and shoots, attracting stares from onlookers in a campground nearby, who no doubt wondered at their sanity and zest for roughage.

“So much of what you see here, it’s edible,” said Mr. Redzepi, who regularly dispatches his staff to collect the scurvy grass and sorrel, as well as what he called sea coriander, beach mustard and bellflowers. All of these make their way into his dishes, along with puffin eggs from Iceland and musk-ox meat from Greenland.

He is omnivorous in his exoticism, but restrictive in his geography. If the Nordic region doesn’t yield it, Mr. Redzepi doesn’t serve it, with rare exceptions (coffee, say, or chocolate).

That approach might well seem a recipe for obscurity, which is what many chefs, diners and critics predicted for his restaurant, Noma, when it opened in Copenhagen in 2003.

“You have to understand how hard it was for them at the start,” said Daniella Illerbrand, the general manager of Mathias Dahlgren, a restaurant in Stockholm. “People didn’t understand what he was cooking. They wanted foie gras. He gave them cloudberries.”

Seven years later, Noma is an international sensation, as is Mr. Redzepi, 32. On a trip to New York early last month to promote his cookbook, “Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine,” to be published by Phaidon Press in the fall, he was treated to a hero’s welcome from some of the city’s most celebrated chefs: Dan Barber, Daniel Humm, David Chang, Paul Liebrandt, Wylie Dufresne. (Mr. Chang and Mr. Dufresne have, over the last few years, become close friends with him.) “Nightline” taped a segment with him, and he was invited to sit in that somber, ennobling darkness otherwise known as the set of “Charlie Rose.”

The following week, when he had returned to Copenhagen, the stream of visitors into Noma included the chefs of two restaurants in Spain with three Michelin stars apiece (Noma has two) and a sommelier from the Chicago restaurant Alinea. An assistant to the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten called to ask if Mr. Vongerichten and three companions could come in for lunch the next day. Mr. Redzepi paced the Noma kitchen nervously trying to figure out some way to fit them in, but couldn’t.

“We have to come up with some kind of system,” he said, sighing heavily. Noma books up three months in advance, and with just 12 tables accommodating 40 or so guests, it doesn’t have much wiggle room.

A fair share of the demand and attention flows from Noma’s anointment in April as the best restaurant in the world, at least according to an annual poll of food writers, prominent restaurateurs and other industry insiders conducted by San Pellegrino, the Italian mineral-water company. Most years, the survey draws little notice. But when it lifts an establishment in tiny, wintry Denmark above legends like El Bulli in Spain and the Fat Duck in England, there’s considerably more chatter.

Denmark, after all, isn’t Provence or Catalonia. For a locavore chef, in particular, it has limitations. But Mr. Redzepi has air-dried, pickled, cured, foraged and researched his way around them. He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings, his culinary accomplishments drawing all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them.

“There’s so much more out there than we realize,” he said over a lunch after his nature expedition, referring to what can be harvested not just in Scandinavia but almost anywhere.

The lunch, it should be said, was in an old-style Danish restaurant and consisted of old-style Danish food: pickled herring, rye bread, smoked halibut, rye bread, smoked salmon and more rye bread, with beers and shots of aquavit liberally thrown in. Mr. Redzepi is no purist and no saint.

At Noma, he said, “We’re not trying to change the world, and I’m not being judgmental.”

He is, instead, acting on the premise that the most special, inimitable contribution a restaurant can make is to serve the food that is freshest and truest on its given patch of the planet, to sift through that region’s flora and fauna for unfamiliar flavors, to scour its forgotten traditions for ingredients that cooks have stopped using. (Mr. Redzepi works with two Danish food historians.)

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Eleven Madison Park Restaurant, NYT 4 Stars, New Cookbook and Video. Maddeningly Beautiful Photography!

Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook from Eleven Madison Park on Vimeo.

New York Times Chief Restaurant Critic, Sam Sifton, Gives His Final Review. And Four Stars It Is to Per Se

Sam Sifton names Thomas Keller's Per Se the best restaurant in New York City.

 

via www.nytimes.com

 Chef Eli Kaimeh, far right, oversees the preparation of an eagerly awaited dish at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s restaurant in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle.
By SAM SIFTON
Published: October 11, 2011

 

SO this is the best restaurant in New York City: Per Se, in the Time Warner Center, just up the escalator from the mall, a jewel amid the zirconia.

I make the argument unreservedly. I have eaten in restaurants five or more nights a week for the last two years, always in search of the best and most delectable, the most interesting and important. And I have come back again and again to Per Se to find it.

The restaurant opened in 2004, an East Coast satellite of Thomas Keller’s legendary French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. It was Mr. Keller’s first venture in New York since the late 1980s, when he walked away from Rakel, a yellow-tie expense-account establishment buffeted by the recession.

Per Se astonished diners from almost the very first. In a review published in September 2004, Frank Bruni of The New York Times awarded the restaurant four stars, the newspaper’s highest rating.

Mr. Bruni was not unreserved in his praise. Per Se in its early days could be a marvel of pretension and clock-gobbling silliness. I had a dinner there that first year that appeared to seamlessly combine French pretension with control-freaky West Coast pedantry. I learned a lot about the provenance of the caper berries, the butter, a single frond of micro carrot green. There were tight smiles and stifled yawns.

“Maddening,” Mr. Bruni called such a night in his review.

But in recent years, and particularly under the kitchen command of Eli Kaimeh, who has been Per Se’s chef since early 2010, Per Se has matured. Its synthesis of culinary art and exquisite service is now complete. It represents the ideal of an American high-culture luxury restaurant.

Per Se’s signature starter course is Oysters and Pearls, a dish Mr. Keller developed at French Laundry and brought with him when he moved East. It combines a sabayon of pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters (small, marble-shaped, from Duxbury, south of Boston, fantastic) and a fat clump of sturgeon caviar from Northern California. These arrive in a bowl of the finest porcelain from Limoges. Paired with a glass of golden sémillon from Elderton, they make a fine argument for the metaphor of transubstantiation.

The appetizer is not food so much as a poem about creaminess, a meditation on brine, a sculpture about the delicious. It is a complete introduction to the restaurant and its pleasures.

But perhaps foie gras is more to your liking? At one dinner at Per Se, I had a torchon of moulard duck foie gras from Élevages Périgord in Quebec, served with a crystallized apple chip, some celery-branch batons (taken to 11 on the flavor scale by some compression and sous-vide cooking), Granny Smith apple marmalade, candied walnuts, frisée and juniper-balsamic vinegar. I spread it thickly on brioche toast that a server kept replacing every few minutes, since (he said) it should never be eaten cool. (This is true, as it happens: the bread grows heavy and stiff.) I ate it silently, as one can do only with friends and family, savoring the experience as I might have a massage or a sunset.

Such excitements have a real effect on who ought to go to Per Se and why. The restaurant is not a place to book for a business meal. Nor is it a restaurant for those who do not eat well together. A meal at Per Se can stretch to four to five hours — a long time to sit with anyone, even a client with whom you are trying to close a multimillion-dollar deal. The restaurant more handsomely rewards the companionship of those who love one another as much as they do pleasure and indulgence.

Nor is Per Se a restaurant for those who do not understand that such pleasure comes at a cost. The menu has a set price of $295 a person, excluding wine. Nine or more courses are prepared, along with canapés to start and mignardises to finish. A conversation with a sommelier can easily double the cost of the buy-in. Dinner for two can scratch at $1,000 — or about the same as the median weekly household income in New York State.

By point of context, though, an aisle orchestra seat at the Metropolitan Opera for Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” runs $330, also excluding wine.

And to some, a simple garden salad is the functional equivalent of an aria — particularly as sung at Per Se, with compressed figs and young red beets, Hakurei turnips (small, plump and white, very cute in aspect), red ribbon sorrel and a coulis of pine nuts. Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs.

To others, joy may be found in a simple omelet, with mushrooms, leeks, mizuna and a crucial drizzle of barrel-aged tamari. (Standing-room tickets are not sold, but there is an à la carte menu available in the salon up front, and careful diners could eat there for less than $100.)

 

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The restaurant’s truffle-stuffed fat-chicken thigh — crisp, soft, juicy, deep in flavor, with Medjool dates made into marbles, a Nantes carrot mousseline and buttery truffle sauce — might be a tenor’s great turn. And the beauty of Christofle flatware and Raynaud china, as well as a polished view of the Christopher Columbus statue below, the twinkle of gas firelight and the feel of linens ironed to the texture of freshly sanded pine, can be exactly analogous to towering sets and a thundering orchestra, to the kind of stagecraft that can lead to tears and applause.

For such people, Per Se exists.

A meal at the restaurant at the end of September brought pan-roasted Massachusetts cod, with applewood smoked bacon, briny littleneck clams, pickled garlic, celery and shoots of parsley. “Clam chowder” was the description on the menu, as “shiny glass” might have advertised a diamond. The cod had a sweetness beneath its crisp, salty exterior that was distinct from that of the clams, which claimed the texture of the bacon. It was a pure distillation of autumn east of the Bourne Bridge, a Hopper painting made edible, seafood squared.

Another Keller Klassic followed: butter-poached lobster, with melted leeks and horseradish crème fraîche, thin-sliced potatoes roasted in clarified butter, watercress and a lemony red-beet emulsion. There was pressed duck on the table, too, blood-mineral against the funk of Burgundy truffles. Rabbit with cherry tomatoes and sweet corn, a wave of frisée and a beautiful swoosh of truffled hollandaise. Charred eggplant with compressed cucumbers, more red ribbon sorrel and fresh market peppers. Course after course arrived: tiny, rich little plates of food running into one another as if to create a montage sequence or a kaleidoscopic dream that ended in a castle of chocolates and macarons. You may ask to tour the kitchen afterward, or linger over coffee, or simply stare out at Columbus and his dour expression, and contemplate Nirvana.

Per Se has competitors up on restaurant Olympus, Heras and Poseidons with dominions of their own.

The towering Deco ceilings of Eleven Madison Park are a marvelous frame for the precise, artful cooking of Daniel Humm and the genial, mind-reading service style of the restaurant’s general manager, Will Guidara. You can eat in well-upholstered Continental luxury, with virtually your every need addressed and hunger sated, at Daniel or Del Posto. (And you ought to.) Jean Georges is among the best places in the world in which to celebrate a business deal. And I had a serving of shaved razor clams with sea urchin sauce and Osetra caviar in the beautifully renovated new dining room of Le Bernardin that was the most fully realized and delicious combination of flavors I have experienced in 2011. Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, that restaurant’s owners, stand tall amid these ranks.

But no restaurant in New York City does a better job than Per Se of making personal and revelatory the process of spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on food and drink.

Before all that, however: “How are you doing?”

This is how meals often end at Per Se, with a captain checking in on his charges, the table crammed with candies and truffles, with coffee semifreddo and the stray ends of exquisite doughnuts. The question is sincere. If you asked for a Coke and a Marlboro, surely these would soon appear. (Most ask for a check, as if to say, “Uncle.”)

Observation and reporting would seem to suggest that such coddling is the case for most who eat at Per Se, not just those who are regulars or who are, like me, dining professionally. With just 16 tables in a huge space in the center of Manhattan, no restaurant can afford to snub people paying such long money for meals.

Not that it is the opinion of others that seems to matter most to the restaurant’s staff. As Michael Minnillo wrote in a charming essay in Finesse, a magazine that Mr. Keller publishes and distributes at the French Laundry and Per Se, the point of their enterprise is that the staff’s standards for excellence are higher than anyone else’s. (No surprise: Mr. Keller’s father was a Marine.)

Mr. Minnillo has been a captain at Per Se since its first day, and was at the French Laundry for seven years before that. “So, if I impress the fish cook and he impresses me, then the blogger at table 3 has no chance,” Mr. Minnillo wrote. “He is going to be blown away.”

 

This is Sam Sifton's last review. A new restaurant critic will be named later

10 NYC Food & Dining Trends That Are Officially Dead - Trendwatching - Eater NY

via ny.eater.com

Wednesday, June 1, 2011, by Greg Morabito

Some food trends stick around for years, others last only a few weeks. Here's a list of 10 dining fads that recently kicked the bucket:

10) Old-Timey Dining Rooms: For years, many of the city's hottest new restaurants had dark dining rooms with a bunch of retro junk on the walls, ornate chandeliers, vintage tables and chairs, and maybe a few pieces of choice taxidermy. But now, these kinds of restaurants are starting to look dated, in a different way. New York has officially reached its old-timey dining room saturation point. The hot new restaurant spaces of 2011 are the ones that feel like old-school classics, but that don't blatantly steal from the past. See: The Dutch, Peels, Fedora, The Brooklyn Star.

 9) Growlers: As a general rule, a dining trend is officially dead the moment it's co-opted by Duane Reade. And while there are still a lot of growlers available throughout the city, cans full of local beer are the new hotness. They're much easier to cary, and they don't require a hungover trip back to the beer store the next day to get your deposit back. [Photo]

 8) Discount Fine-Dining: Gone are the Damon Frugal Fridays, the four-star early bird specials, and the Baucus Bail Outs. Two years after the economy tanked, the fine dining world seems to have rebounded to the point where the city's best restaurants don't need to offer truffled mac and cheese, or off-hour discounts to fill some seats (for proof, take a peek at Ryan Sutton's The Price Hike blog). Sadly, restaurants like Matsugen, Chanterelle, and Cru weren't able to make it through the dark times, despite offering these kinds of deals. [Photo]

7) Speakeasies: My Little Secret signaled the end of the trend when it put up an awning announcing itself as a speakeasy (it closed less than a year later). But many other "secret" bars and restaurants also disappeared in the last few years. Maybe undercover operations just don't play these days because there are too many food blogs out there to keep anything a "cool secret" for very long. [Photo]

6) Tiki: Painkiller, The Hurricane Club, and Lani Kai all opened within a few months of each other last year, and for a moment, it seemed like NYC was on its way to becoming the swizzle stick capital of the world. But the fad died, and New York was left with three and only three new Tiki bars, plus enough hollowed-out pineapples and cocktail umbrellas to last a lifetime. [Krieger]

5) Asian Sandwiches: The Asian Sandwich Boom of 2009 is but a faint memory at this point. A few tight operations continue to do really well — Num Pang, Baohaus, Baoguette — but many others have closed. And, thank the lord, banh mi sandwiches have stopped popping up at restaurants that don't serve any other Asian dishes. [Photo]

4) The Gastropub: Actual British gastropubs (of which are there are only a handful in New York) are still very popular, but the trend is most definitely dead in terms of other restauranteurs copying the style and laying claim to the title. These days, it's much trendier to offer "small, shareable plates of locally-sourced seasonal fare and raw bar items" in a dining room full of rustic American ephemera, than to blatantly rip-off The Spotted Pig. [Photo]

3) Tiny Menus: Although prix fixes are having a moment these days, a la carte menus with just a few appetizers and entrees, are on the way out. Restaurateurs now want to give diners as many options as possible, on a page full of boxes and sidebars. And the menus seem to be getting physically larger, too: if you go to The Darby, Osteria Morini or Donatella, you will be handed a piece of paper the size of a bath mat. [Photo]

2) "Pies are the New Cupcakes": This trend was DOA when it was first announced by several media outlets last fall. People aren't lining up for pies (unless it's the day before Thanksgiving), they don't debate which bakery or restaurant serves the better slice, and there just aren't that many shops in this city that are devoted to the dessert. Actually it's hard to believe that any sweet treat will every become "the new cupcakes" anytime soon, because New Yorkers have a deep, profound, and at times maniacal love for cupcakes, similar to what a mama grizzly feels for her baby cub. [Photo]

1) American Comfort Food: There were a lot of new restaurant serving "elevated American comfort food" following the onset of the recession, and many of them failed. Now that diners have more money to go out, they seem to be choosing places that offer something satisfying, and out-of-the-ordinary. Perhaps that explains why the two big recent hits in terms of American restaurants are The Dutch and Red Rooster, which offer a number of ethnic soul food dishes, along with fried chicken, burgers and biscuits.

Wiseguy Pizza Pie - yum! - Winter 2011

The Valley's Best Restaurant critic, Julie Molema of Sun Valley Magazine, talks up our favorite place for pie, Wiseguy's. We like a thin crust and this is the closest you're gonna get to a NYC-style pizza experience in the WRV. Go Eric and the Wiseguy crew!

The Gallegos Clan

via www.sunvalleymag.com

By Guest Blogger
Julie Molema
Wiseguy Pizza Pie

Whatta YOU lookin’ at? Yeah, you. Okay, I know. Poor De Niro circa Taxi Driver impression. Sorry. But what about New-York-style pizza in Ketchum, Idaho? Sweet! I haven’t actually been to New York (yet anyway), but I’m thinkin’ the pizza at Wiseguy Pizza Pie is pretty damn close to the real thing. Am I right? Or am I right? Fuggedaboutit!

There are two things I do know about New York pizza however. It’s large and it’s got beautiful thin crust—like Kate Moss-thin. Hence the large slices can be easily folded and eaten while walking to the subway. Or in our case, while walking to the bike path since that’s Idaho’s version of the underground.

Hotel Noriega Wins James Beard 'American Classics' Award. Video Below:

Noriega Hotel, a Basque cultural landmark in the West, has received the prestigious James Beard Foundation’s American Classics Award, which is bestowed annually upon a select group of restaurants.

 “The America’s Classics award is given to restaurants with timeless appeal [and] beloved for quality food that reflects the character of their community,” the foundation said in a statement announcing this year’s five honorees.

Noriega Hotel has been a Bakersfield institution for decades. A former Basque boardinghouse, the restaurant and bar are housed in the historic building that used to be the Iberia. It was built in 1873.

 The restaurant has a fronton, or handball court, where crowds once gathered to watch action-packed pelota matches between some of the sport’s top athletes. The court has been standing since around 1928.

The honorees will be celebrated at a ceremony Monday May 9 at the Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. The other restaurants are Chef Vola’s in Atlantic City, NJ; Watts Tea Shop in Milwaukee, WI; Le Veau d’Or in New York and Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, NC

 

The Le Pigeon Crew In Action

Some cool footage of the le Pigeon crew in action. Chef Hal and I strive to emulate Mr. Rucker in our cooking styles.  We do lament the fact we don't have the Willamette Valley nearby and our base clientelle are not devotees of organ meat preparations, but, we do the best we can. See you soon at The Main!

Yours,

Chef Derek

 

Gabriel Rucker of Portland's Le Pigeon, Little Bird wins 2011 James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year | OregonLive.com

I ate at Mr. Rucker's resto last June. It was the best dining experience I've had in Portland. Previous bests for me have included Bluehour, Higgins and Wildwood- Wildwood back in '99 when Cory Schreiber was still manning the stoves.

At Le Pigeon I ate braised lamb tongue with peas & morels, cold-smoked foie gras with egg yolk "crumbs", bone marrow boudin blanc with mashed carrots (my fave), and foie gras profiteroles: these were the highlights. I chatted it up with sous chef Erik and Mr. Rucker signed my menu. I very much want to get back to puddletown and pay a visit to Rucker's new bistro 'Little Bird'. Below a snippet from Oregonlive on this year's James Beard rising star chef award. Enjoy!

Yours,

Chef Derek

via www.oregonlive.com

Gabriel Rucker gets to pop the champagne after winning the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year on his fourth try.

Le Pigeon and Little Bird chef Gabriel Rucker was named the James Beard Foundation's 2011 Rising Star Chef of the Year.

It was the fourth consecutive nomination for Rucker, who turned 30 late last month, meaning this was his last year of eligibility for the national award.

Rucker thanked his parents for letting him take the time to figure out what he wanted to do and "for not pushing me into college," as well as his wife and customers at Little Bird and Le Pigeon.

Rucker is the first Oregon chef to win the rising star award, according to the foundation.

Other nominees included Aaron London of Ubuntu in the Napa Valley, Thomas McNaughton of San Fransisco's flour + water, Christina Tosi of New York City's Momofuku Milk Bar and Sue Zemanick of New Orleans' Gautreau's.

-- Michael Russell

Pioneer Saloon—Surviving the Test of Time - Sun Valley Magazine

The Sun Valley Magazine's food blog "YUM" talks up one of my favorite Ketchum dining and drinking spots: The Pio. The first time I went there was in the summer of '87 when I was helping my Father, sister and brother in law remodel what was to become the "Mama Inez" Restaurant on Warm Springs road. Let's just say I've drank and ate in that critter infested bar many times since. Enjoy the review below. Ciao! Chef Derek

  
via www.sunvalleymag.com

By Guest Blogger
Julie Molema
Pioneer Saloon—Surviving the Test of Time

“Steakhouse.” The meaty word conjures up images of Outback, Ruth’s Chris and ummm… Sizzler. What do these three eating establishments have in common? Cities—all are located in cities. And chains—all of them are national restaurant chains. So how lucky are we to have the Pioneer Saloon as our local “steakhouse?” A one-of-a-kind restaurant in our one-of-a-kind, kind of town.

The Pioneer Saloon (located at 320 N. Main Street, Ketchum) has been serving up mouthwatering steaks since 1950, and has long been a dining and imbibing tradition for both locals and visitors alike. Its red leather booths, cocktail waitresses clad in denim skirts and cowboy boots, and classic menu seem to never change.

The “Pio” bar is one of my favorites. They know how to do ambience. Dim lights, warm wood surrounding you, and mounted game that seem to approve as you wash down those free chips and salsa with your third or fourth drink.

We dine on a Monday night. The bar is PACKED. But it’s the bartender’s 80th birthday, so it’s sure to be clear by 9pm (Zing!). We only wait 15 minutes or so for a
table, despite the standing-room-only bar and head to our seats.

Idaho Trout is flaky and tasty at the Pio; Sirlon Steak with carmelized onions is mouth-watering.

I forget how friggin’ small the Pio’s kitchen is. We pass by it on our way to our table downstairs. This is one small kitchen. Like, tiny. It looks like room for only two people, and I’m guessing they better get a long preeeetty well. Nonetheless, they crank out some incredible food.
We arrive at our table and are seated next to the classic Pio patrons. Six guys with huge plates of prime rib, several holding their knives and forks like spears. I love it.

Mounted animal heads keep you company at the Pio bar.We quickly scan the menu, but each of us seems to have already made up our minds before we sit down—Sirloin Steak ($16.95) for our friend, Kevin, Idaho Trout ($18.95) for Peter and the Pioneer Sirloin Burger ($9.95) with sautéed mushrooms for me. Each dinner comes with a dinner salad that is not skimpy. Lots of lettuce, tomatoes and croutons topped with an excellent balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

Shortly, our meals arrive and we are all pleased. My burger comes with rice or baked potato, and neither seemed too appealing to me with my burger, so I had my salad on the side and I was happy as could be. (Although the Idaho baked potatoes ($2.95 with dinner) are the size of hiking boots and can be dolled up with all the fixins' if you are feeling slim) Peter’s trout was flaky and tasty and Kevin’s sirloin was like butter. The only bummer was we all had a craving for the cobbler the Pio is famous for, and they had replaced it on the menu with a rootbeer float. Humph. Hopefully—hint, hint, nudge, nudge—they will bring the cobbler back soon!

We stayed for several hours talking and drinking and eating… and drinking… we couldn’t help but talk about how Ketchum has changed in the past 20 years. (Crap! We’ve become those people!) But one comfort for long time lovers of the Valley is that the Pio hasn’t changed a bit—(except for maybe the cobbler).

Top 10 places to eat in Portland, Oregon | Travel | guardian.co.uk

Some links below to some very cool restaurants in Puddletown. The only one at which I have dined is Le Pigeon. It is good, Very Damn Good. If the  braised lamb tongue with peas, morels and truffles is on the menu when you go- Get IT! I'll be checking out the others on our next visit this spring. Ciao! and enjoy the links.  Chef Derek

via www.guardian.co.uk

Top 10 places to eat in Portland, Oregon

From modern bistros and steakhouses to a gourmet food cart scene, Portland has arrived on the foodie map. Mike Hodgkinson takes us for a taster.

 Portland food carts À la cart ... Portland is renowned for its food carts, some selling gourmet dishes at low prices.

Over the past decade, Portland has confirmed its credentials as a destination city for food lovers. A combination of great Pacific North-western produce, low start-up costs and innovative kitchen talent has provided visitors to Stumptown, as the city is affectionately known, an impressive variety of restaurant choices and cooking styles, often on a budget that makes larger US cities look grossly overpriced. It's not just bricks-and-mortar hostelries: the last couple of years have seen a proliferation of gourmet food carts – semi-mobile cooking sheds assembled in clusters, or pods, in various car parks and street corners through the city. There's a cart to suit pretty much every palate, whether your preference is for Bosnian or Thai; Czech or Mexican; vegan bowl or bespoke burger. Throw in a posse of cutting edge chefs, many of them carrying armfuls of tattoos (in keeping with the city's left-field, rock'n'roll leanings), and you've got a west coast city that has emerged from the shadow of Seattle to the north and San Francisco to the south. Here's a taste: