With Paley's Place, Kimberly and Vitaly Paley have created an intimate restaurant that feels like a warm and gracious home. The porch is strung with tiny lights, and inside the rooms are cozy and romantic. "I've always believed that cuisine should be produce-driven, not chef-driven, and Portland is the source for that," he says. "Here, it's not about foams." What it is about are lyrical salads of "George's gathered greens" and plump Puget Sound mussels with thick hand-cut russet fries and mustard aïoli, succulent duck leg confits, and sublime peach cobblers.
PEARL DISTRICT AND OLD TOWN
Some say that everything that matters in Portland is on one block at the edge of the Pearl District. It's hard to disagree. Powell's City of Books—and it is a city, teeming with new, used, and hard-to-find titles—is the world's largest bookstore. Yet a great deal is happening north of Powell's, in an old industrial neighborhood that artists, artisans, antiques dealers, cooks, and bakers have converted into Portland's new cool place. Wander around the Pearl on the first Thursday of any month, and you're part of a huge block party and art walk. People stream through the streets gallery hopping and snacking on free hors d'oeuvres; taste the variously "sassy" and "bodacious" wines at 750 ML, a wine bar; and sip espresso after espresso from little Deruta pottery cups at Torrefazione Italia.
One night at Bluehour, the Pearl's (and Portland's) most exciting new restaurant, a glamorous couple sit down and don their own silver bibs, an elegant fashion accessory for a huge silvery room where sheer green fabric shimmers to the floor, creating private corners. From the delicate potato gnocchi and sweet Alaskan scallops, smoky with bacon, that begin dinner to an artful tart of black Friar plums at the end, it is clear that chef Kenny Giambalvo (a protégé of Terrance Brennan at Manhattan's Picholine) is cooking the most sophisticated contemporary food in town.
Any neighborhood would be blessed to have Pearl Bakery. Since 1997, this bakery-café has proved how high bread can rise with such French and Italian loaves as whole-wheat levain studded with green olives and pane pugliese and paesano. With savory sandwiches, sweets such as an almond orange cake, and lattes and espressos made with Illycaffè, Pearl Bakery could become a daily addiction.
And just three doors down, at Café Azul, no one who samples the barbecued goat or the whole snapper swathed in a fiery salsa called "nose of the dog" will ever think of Mexican food in quite the same way again. The Archibald sisters, Claire and Shawna (Claire, a former dinner chef at Chez Panisse Café, studied with Diana Kennedy in Mexico), spent much of their youth in nearby Dundee in a family that once owned the prestigious Archery Summit Winery & Vineyards. Which means this is one very wine-savvy Mexican restaurant. Where else could you wash down tortillas wrapped around achiote-marinated pork with a 1998 Beaux Frères Pinot Noir?
In the drip, drip, drip of a Portland winter, the sun always shines at Le Bouchon. Co-owners Claude Musquin and Christian Geffrard have created a nostalgic little corner of Lyon filled with the fragrance of onion soup and steamed mussels. Naturally, there's rich chocolate mousse and a homey tarte Tatin. Monsieur Musquin's domain is the kitchen, and his wife, Monique, the irrepressible Madame, bustles about the dining room dispensing cheery bonjours and radiating joie de vivre. She doesn't miss a trick: When one of us splashes a glass of Santenay onto shirt and table, she rushes over with a towel and a reassuring "Ah, you smell delicious!"
The Pearl District runs right into Old Town. What draws me there, apart from the beauty of cast-iron-fronted buildings, are the oysters at Jake's Famous Crawfish (on the fringe of the neighborhood, and founded in 1892) and bowls of oyster stew at Dan & Louis Oyster Bar (1907), where the history of the local oyster industry unfolds through illuminated portholes. And then there's Bijou Café (1978), the breakfast gem. The cheerful, spotless interior inspires immediate trust, the commitment to local and organic ingredients is genuine, and the line cooks never fail to turn out fluffy pancakes and perfectly textured omelets (don't miss the ones with oysters or chanterelles).
A new Old Town attraction is the Portland Classical Chinese Garden (Lan Su Yan), designed in Suzhou, Portland's sister city. A tranquil urban retreat, it presents a stylized world in which the choice and placement of every plant, pebble, and pocked limestone rock are fraught with symbolism. In the Tower of Cosmic Reflections, you can sip Chinese tea and snack on steamed vegetable dumplings, roasted fava beans, and "pressed plums," all the while contemplating the lotus lagoon, the waterfalls, and the swooping roofs that remind the Chinese of swallows on the wing.
HAWTHORNE
Lucky are the people who live in Hawthorne, southeast of the Willamette River, where Berkeley and the Haight meet Mayberry and Rodeo Drive. Well, sort of. You can walk from a funky tie-dye shop thick with incense smoke, past shops stocking everything for the birds, the dogs, and the cats, to the The Perfume House, with 1,500 or so fragrances from around the world.
The Middle Eastern cookbook you despaired of finding, the gardening guide you didn't know you needed—these and thousands more line the shelves of Powell's Books for Cooks & Gardeners, one of the book giant's special-subject stores. (It also has hundreds of gifts for the hard to surprise.) Browse until you're famished, then walk through a passageway to Pastaworks, Portland's leading specialty foods shop, where sheet pastas cut to order (and a dozen different take-home sauces) are one reason you start reading the local real estate flyers closely. It's a dream world for a cook, from the beautiful Northwest produce and meats to the cheeses, delicacies, and wines of the world, particularly wherever Italian or French is spoken. Immediate hungers are sated with salads to go and sandwiches on crusty breads.
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