The city of Portland started life with a lot of advantages. "Out in Oregon," an 1843 immigrant enthused, "the pigs are running about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked." The pioneer exaggerated, but not by much. A land of plenty lay at the end of the Oregon Trail, everyone knew that. The port city founded at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers drew on an extraordinary natural larder—Dungeness crabs, razor clams, and oysters from the sea, and river runs of steelhead, salmon, and sturgeon. In the forests and mountains there were elk and deer, and mushrooms and berries beyond imagining. After the valleys went under the plow, a profusion of fruits and vegetables flourished in the rich alluvial soils. Now there's even more to celebrate in this paradise for cooks and eaters, which once again is ripe for discovery.
DOWNTOWN
In the shade of stately century-old elms, the Portland Farmers Market occupies one of the most beautiful green spaces in America. This is no small claim in Portland, where even in the heart of the city there seems to be a tranquil green space, an inviting plaza, or a cascade of water around every corner. A block before the market, I smell the acrid char of chiles roasting, and then bursts of color come into view. Some farmers have traveled far with Jonagold apples and Starcrimson and Red Bartlett pears from Hood River. The Clatskanie River Valley is represented by River Run Farm's certified-organic, pasture-finished Black Angus beef. There are hops for the home brewer, pickling advice for the home canner, Kumamotos from Tillamook Bay, and a basin of fresh trout "caught last night in my neighbor's pond."
I nibble my way through the market—a chocolate Marionberry truffle here, a spoonful of lavender-blueberry jam there, a bite of Tumalo Tomme from Juniper Grove Farm, known for its chèvre. Snacking gets serious at the Canby Asparagus Farm stand, where one woman grinds asparagus and jalapeños in a metate for "asparagus-amole" and another molds masa into tamales, steamed on the spot. Your Kitchen Garden, a seven-acre farm in Canby, in the Willamette Valley, has the market's whitest leeks, gorgeous Purple Rain eggplants, and at least 6 of the 35 varieties of heirloom tomatoes it's known for. Sheldon Marcuvitz and Carol Laity (his Ph.D. is in botany; hers is in molecular genetics) grow a variety of year-round greens and vegetables eagerly sought after by local restaurants. "We're offering chef Greg Higgins thirty-two different vegetables today," Laity says.
Later that day, I see the results. At Higgins, a restaurant smack in the Downtown area, you taste the soul of the region. Higgins, who grew up on a farm near Buffalo, New York, was in the vanguard of chefs-from-elsewhere who have transformed the Portland dining scene in the past decade. He is also the greenest, dealing only with producers and growers he trusts to take care of their animals and their soil, and serving only sustainable Northwest seafood (and no trawler-caught fish at all). His prosciutto (he cures his own) is as sweet as any I've tasted, and his natural pastrami—on an open-faced sandwich with grilled onions and melted Bandon Cheddar—is arguably the best sandwich in town.
A few blocks away at The Heathman Restaurant, the menu is an ode to the Northwest: crusty salmon hash for breakfast, and a dinner that begins with a salad of organic arugula, Chester blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries and goes on to Oregon fallow venison with bourbon-glazed squash and huckleberry sauce. To chef Philippe Boulot, the Oregon countryside is just like his native Normandy. (In fact, Stephen McCarthy, of Portland's Clear Creek Distillery, even distills a Normandy-style barrel-aged eau-de-vie de pomme, using Golden Delicious apples from orchards on the slopes of Mount Hood.) Boulot raves about the "fantastic berries," the wild mushrooms ("chanterelles for two dollars a pound!"), and the local truffles.
NORTHWEST
Portlanders may dine downtown, especially on theater and music nights, but they are firmly attached to their neighborhoods. A warm day brings everyone out of the woodwork in the leafy Northwest district, sauntering along NW 21st and NW 23rd to soak up the sun, drink cappuccino, parade rosy-cheeked babies, and browse the shops in old Craftsman houses. Many of these sell something to cook with or eat on. It takes stern resolve to resist the kitchen gadgets, cookware, and pretty linens at Kitchen Kaboodle, a complete lifestyle store. At Liner & Elsen, the city's premier wine shop, I find some of the Oregon Pinot Noirs and Pinot Gris I've fallen in love with.
Northwest is also a great neighborhood for casual eating. Papa Haydn specializes in seriously baroque sweets—pansy-strewn, chocolate-ribboned clouds of Swiss meringue and chocolate mousse and custard, to be spooned up with guilty giggles. I like the savory menu more, especially the grilled Black Forest ham croque-monsieur with a creamy cucumber salad—and the scene from a sidewalk table. At Tapeo, an excellent Spanish tapas spot, try a brandade-stuffed roasted pepper or fat, house-cured anchovies on tapenade toasts while deciding among 40 or so other little plates.
Two of the city's best-loved restaurants opened on the same block of NW 21st Avenue within a few months of one another. After making his name at the Cypress Club, in San Francisco, in 1994 native son Cory Schreiber came home with Wildwood. It is eloquently expressive of place, from the mural of the Wildwood trail in Forest Park—a 5,000-acre urban wilderness less than a mile away—to a menu written around Oregon's seasonal bounty. Wildwood classics include morels and asparagus on toast, a salad of crisp fried oysters and pancetta, polenta-crusted razor clams, and salmon (either fennel-cured or grilled) that always tastes as if it's just been pulled from the sea.
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.
A good sandwich—say, roast chicken and cranberry chutney on Como bread—is also a given at Grand Central Baking Co., credited with reviving artisanal baking in Portland nearly a decade ago. At the comfortable Bread and Ink Café, Greek flatbreads, buns for a juicy hamburger, and Sunday morning blintzes offer other improvisations on the theme.
Hawthorne is also home to Castagna, an artfully spare, luminous restaurant and a kitchen with the same aesthetic. A recent chanterelle soup was as evocative of damp woods as heirloom tomatoes and mozzarella were of sunny climes. The frequently stellar renderings of lamb, quail, and fish demonstrate an abiding devotion to Italy and France, as does the wine list.
Nearby, in neighboring Belmont, Genoa has led Portland on an adventurous tour of regional Italian cooking for 30 years. The cooks (led by chef Cathy Whims) marry Italy and prime Oregon ingredients in revelatory seven-course dinners (menus change every two weeks). One autumn evening brings a sensational Sicilian pasta alla Norma with delicate housemade taglierini, a peppery Roma tomato sauce, crisp eggplant, and walnuts.
SAUVIE ISLAND
Ten miles northwest of Portland lies Sauvie Island, an agricultural preserve and wildlife refuge that Cory Schreiber calls a 15-mile-long "piece of solitude." For the city's cooks and chefs, its small farms—from U-pick peaches, raspberries, and corn to Christmas trees and flowers—are a precious resource close at hand. But Sauvie Island, I discover, is also food for the soul. I drive there one day with Janie Hibler, author of several definitive Northwest cookbooks. She points out where to spot bald eagles, tundra swans, and sandhill cranes. We pass the orchard that grows her favorite Rosa and Hale Haven peaches, and the patch where her children picked out Halloween pumpkins. At Kruger's Farm Market, bags of cucumbers destined for pickling are loaded into the car. I had not expected an island so pastoral and unspoiled near a city of half a million. It's one more thing that sets Portland apart.
NORTHERN WILLAMETTE VALLEY WINE
Only two regions in the world are known to have the favorable synergy of climate, terrain, and soil that can produce Burgundies of character. One begins about 25 miles southwest of Portland in the gentle hills of Yamhill County. This is prime Pinot Noir country—and its reputation is also on the rise for Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, and Chardonnay from Dijon clones. Wine touring can be as limited or leisurely as you wish, a day's outing or a long weekend. But before heading off on the wine trail, pick up the widely available Guide to Yamhill County Wineries, essential for double-checking open days and hours for tasting rooms. Many of the smallest wineries, such as Brick House Vineyards and Chehalem, are open only by appointment, if at all. Cameron, Ken Wright Cellars, and The Eyrie Vineyards (winemaker David Lett pioneered Pinot Noir plantings in the 1960s) are among those that welcome visitors only during the annual open-house weekends on Memorial Day and Thanksgiving.
On two-lane State 99W, the main wine route, winery design ranges from lord-of-the-manse Rex Hill Vineyards, in Newberg—groomed gardens, modern sculpture, an antiques-filled tasting room—to turn-of-the-century farmhouse at Argyle and Erath, in Dundee, the latter with a broad veranda for picnics and scenic vineyard views.
Off the busy highway, country roads ramble over hill and dale where wine grapes compete with other crops such as mustard seeds, hazelnuts, and pears. One cloudless day, we are the only visitors negotiating the twists and turns to Elk Cove Vineyards, in Gaston. Our reward is the stunning vista at the top—waves of wooded hills and vines rolling eastward, the misty peaks of the Coast Ranges to the west—and a tasting room all to ourselves.
There's nothing flashy about wine country eating places until you read the wine lists and see rare Pinot Noirs you've only dreamed of drinking—but then the winemaker is likely to be dining at the next table. In McMinnville, Nick's Italian Cafe (521 East 3rd Street; 503-434-4471), a former soda fountain, believes in abbondanza, five-course menus in which the pasta alone—perhaps a lasagne with hazelnuts, mushrooms, and Lord knows what else—could take you from breakfast through dinner. Farther south, in Dayton, wild mushrooms—in chef Jack Czarnecki's tarts and soups—are one specialty at The Joel Palmer House (600 Ferry Street; 503-864-2995); another is the charm of the 1850s landmark, built by an early Oregon settler.
Tiny Dundee is disproportionately endowed with wine-friendly restaurants. In a new contemporary complex, the Ponzi wine family has created the agreeable Dundee Bistro (100A SW 7th Street, Route 99W; 503-554-1650), where one day's lunch brings pork loin on black-eyed peas, braised beet greens, and a Mission fig sauce. Next door, the Ponzi Wine Bar (100 SW 7th Street, Route 99W; 503-554-1500) is a one-stop tasting room pouring the best of the region. Besides Ponzi's current releases, there are flights of five or six prestigious Pinot Noirs, along with other varietals from a rotating roster of 50 small producers (many of which have no tasting facilities of their own). The wineries include the likes of Domaine Drouhin. Light plates such as a green salad and cheeses with fruit are served.
"We have the last of the line-caught chinook for the year," a waiter announces at Red Hills Provincial Dining (276 Route 99W; 503-538-8224), a sweet old house by the highway with homey fare and a cosmopolitan wine list of encyclopedic length and depth. The just-baked focaccia is sprinkled with rosemary and fleur de sel, and dinner begins with warmed Montrachet cheese wrapped in grape leaves to savor on crostini served with whole roasted garlic. There's deep satisfaction in drinking a fruity Domaine Serene made from Pinot Noir grapes grown just up the hill.
The artfully simple food is a tipoff that Tina's (760 Route 99W; 503-538-8880) is no ordinary roadhouse—that and a temperature-controlled wine cellar with stellar bottles such as an unfined and unfiltered Archery Summit Red Hills Estate Pinot Noir. Here, a juicy rib eye is likely to be from a Painted Hills steer, and a goat cheese soufflé in a chunky tomato sauce made with Cypress Grove chèvre. The kitchen's pear puff pastry tart and plum and blackberry cobbler vie with Portland's best sweets. Tina's, in fact, is a restaurant you'd go out of your way for, and from Portland you easily can.