PICNIC

I walked up to Belly Timber last night for a dinner by myself. They are a very strange restaurant, devoted to a sort of Victorian style of cooking. Like everything in Portland it is of course Victorian/Portland food. This is now the third time I’ve been. Previously I would order whatever sounded most exotic and exciting: Deep fried pigs tail, roast cauliflower with anchovies, french fries with bone marrow aioli. This food was all well made yet the flavors were rather unappetizing. I made an effort to order the most simple and restrained items this time. It was good.

The salad has a mustard, sour cream, and vinegar dressing. The pears are roasted with lots of salt, then sliced when cool. They were firm and tasted pickled. The ribs came with mashed potatoes (it’s a color balance issue making them yellow) and root vegetable dice.

Where do I eat sandwiches? There’s a few places that are really good, and it seems like more restaurants are opening with the premise of local and slow sandwiches. The Willamette Week issue of January 14th, in an article about new sandwich places, mentions ‘former El Gaucho chef Michael McFarlane will open Petisco, a sandwich joint, in the near future.’ El Gaucho is a terrible restaurant. They have $80 steaks, and yet the salads are made with iceberg lettuce and ranch dip dressing. An old school fancy place. And yet this seems like a story, possibly, of a good chef wanting the freedom to do his own thing with an honest and low key sandwich place. 

Bunk Sandwiches is all about that. Tommy Habetz was the chef at a few good restaurants, now he’s running his own place. Everything is very rich and oily. I watched a sous chef reheat some brussels sprouts on the grill and then, after he plated, carefully pour an ounce of butter over them. Everything is delicious.  I’ve had pork belly, sauerkraut, russian dressing and gruyere on a toasted kaiser roll; medium rare meatballs (these were delicious) and spaghetti sauce on a toasted hoagie with cheese; salted cod spread, chorizo slices, and olives on focaccia. 

Little T Bakery is just down the street from me. The bread is really good. They only make a few sandwiches. I’ve had bacon, egg, and cheese on thick slices of toasted white bread; ham, salami, gruyere, and spicy pickles on a heavenly mini baguette. I usually get a little side salad, and the greens right now are thick, small, crisp, and intense winter greens like kale, chard, and mustard.

Meat Cheese Bread is a really, really great little place. They make their own bread, most of the food is local, they don’t put everything in the panini press. I’ve only been there once, and got the flank steak, pickled onion, blue cheese sandwich called ‘park kitchen’. It came on a carrot and polenta foccacia. The small amount of corn grit gave some nice texture and a bit of sweetness. They’re serving greens from the same farm as Little T.

Toast bakes one type of bread, a very fluffy white loaf. It is almost always toasted, of course. They have really good breakfast sanwiches but I haven’t been for lunch.

Evoe is in the same space as the Pastaworks on Hawthorne. The design of the space is very minimal and clean, as are the sandwiches. They are all open faced on a single slice of bread. Yesterday I had the Highland: rare roast beef, horseradish, bread toasted with olive oil, and a poached egg with pepper. I don’t think any sandwich has more then 3 ingredients, sometimes less. Others are pate and frisee; salami, roasted peppers, and manchego cheese; procuitto and asiago. I’m not sure whether an open faced sandwich is an insult to the idea of sandwich or an homage to it’s genius. You can’t pick it up and hold it and the bread is difficult to cut with a knife, so it’s sort of like a medieval trencher, a sop to save the juices of the meal.

Elena and I made some good progress in frequenting quite a few restaurants. Last night we went to a tapas place called Olea. I had a glass of Bojelais from Gamay grapes. It tasted like my wine from this year, green, a little yeasty, bright, with an almost total absence of wood. Elena had a glass of Prosecco. We got oysters; small tuna fish stuffed sweet peppers with a lemon cream sauce; roasted Haloumi cheese with a spinach cream sauce and a pepper butter sauce called, I beleive, harissa.

Afterwards we had dinner at Stone Home Wine Bar, a rather trendy looking restaurant. We got a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin while we waited for our table. Elena wanted to get a bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir, but, as much as I hate to say it, there is somewhat of a monotonous cleanliness and simplicity to them. I suggested we try some Burgundy instead. We got an endive, olive, pomegranate and frisee salad with some a cilantro vinaigrette; seared scallops with very tasty lentils in a red wine reduction (I briefly peeked into the kitchen and saw a large box of red Franzia in their fridge); pollack, which is a kind of fish, on top of a fried pollack and potato cake with a leek cream sauce; elk loin, sweet potato puree, bittersweet chocolate sauce, and kale with roasted garlic; a cheese plate with among others, an excellent English cheddar that tasted of hay, pine, and chicken coop. 

We got some coffee in the morning at Smooch. This is the kind of hipster place where each piece of furniture is old and dilapidated, yet the shop is kept in a state of perfect cleanliness. Everyone was young and good looking, they sat in their chairs with a kind of pert boredom. I had an espresso and Elena had a small skim late. The coffee was stale and the size of the shot, about 2 ounces, would certainly trouble Joel. But it wasn’t bitter, and seemed to be made with some care.

I had gone jogging the night before and went again before lunch. It’s amazing all the smells floating around in New York. Fried dough, sweet curry, sautees of meat, sewage and trash, fragrances from cheap soaps, grinding metal, paint… endless smells like no other city.

We had lunch at Maggie Browns and then more coffee at Bittersweet. I bought a croissant for the plane. The espresso here was terrible and I dumped it out in a nearby park. Elena wondered if I’m satisfied with any coffee. I’ve gotten so used to drinking Joel’s amazing and fresh beans that it’s difficult to be satisfied with anything else. I had heard of a roaster called Brooklyn Beans, and Elena and I actually tried to walk to it. But it turned out to be a place which was unrelated to that roastery but which had a similar name, and they were out of business anyway.

I’m pretty excited about Bunk Sandwiches, which is set to open this Thursday or thereabouts. Tommy Habetz is the chef and he’s planning on making meatball parmigiana and duck confit BLTs, among other things. It’s at 621 SE Morrison, as you can see in the photo, right between Portland Swimwear and some kind of pawn shop.

A good sandwich is a rare thing, which is strange. Most restaurants that try to make good food are always wanting to do something exotic or highly refined. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what about devoting some effort to a humble american classic? So, we’ll see what Tommy does here.