David Schargel, in blue, offers “epicurean excursion” participants a sampling of Portland’s culinary prowess; below, a sampling of the single-source chocolates from Sweet Masterpiece, one of the excursion’s ports of call. |
(Photos by Aaron Rabideau) |
The last stop on my paperback tour for The House of Mondavi was Portland, Oregon, where I can truthfully, if somewhat reluctantly, report that I found what seems to be a city even more obsessed with good food than my own San Francisco Bay Area.
Although I only spent about 48 hours in Portland, I managed to pack in a whirlwind tour of the city’s culinary delights, thanks, in large part, to a couple of hours spent with David Schargel, founder of Portland Walking Tours, and his company’s recent offering: an “epicurean excursion.”
I’d been tempted by an email pitch from David’s public relations firm. Knowing I’d have a few hours between interviews and my talk at Powell’s City of Books, I plunked my $59 fee down for a guided tour of the city’s marvelous Pearl District, a former industrial area now populated by all sorts of artisan food producers.
To make sure I savored this safari in search of good food, I’d skipped lunch and was ready for some serious noshing. First stop: Elephant’s Delicatessen, where the man behind the counter, clad in chef’s whites, sunglasses, and a black baseball cap worn backwards, confessed his own skepticism about the soup we were about to try.
“If you’d asked me to try tomato and orange soup, I would have said, No! I don’t like it!” But, sure enough, this unexpected combination, smoothed out with just a small amount of cream, was a surprising treat – and a promising start to our tour.
David bustled me out of the deli quickly and we headed to a Portland institution, the Stumptown Coffee Roasters – which serves coffee made from beans purchased through “direct trade” with the coffee farmer, an arrangement the company feels is better, because it gets the best beans and the farmer gets “at least 40% above Fair Trade price,” according to Stumptown’s explanation of its practices.
I tried a sample of coffee made from Honduras Finca el Puente, from Stumptown’s impressively large “library” of beans. Like a fine wine made from estate-grown grapes, the folks at Stumptown believe in terroir — the idea that the flavor of the beans comes from the unique combination of soil, climate, and cultivation technique from where they’re grown.
The sample I tasted didn’t strike me as anything special, though I’ve acquired a taste over the years for extremely strong coffee from Peet’s, and seem to have lost my ability to appreciate milder, more delicate coffees. Having gone through so many wine tastings in the course of reporting my book, I’d love sometime to sit in on a “cupping” – the formal tasting process coffee buyers use to rate bean quality. Who knew?
Next stop: the artisan Pearl Bakery, co-founded by Eric and Mary Lester with assists from their three children, who’ve all pitched in at one point or another. We met Mary when we went beyond the counter to the bakery’s production area, donning goofy-looking hairnets.
Flinging flour onto the canvas of a roller, a female worker in jeans and a white “Pearl Bakery” then gently placed croissant dough onto it the canvas before flattening it out. Nearby, we lifted the lid on a bubbling yeast mixture as it fermented.
Mary, a delightfully down-to-earth person, can be found selling her family’s bread at Portland’s Farmers Market on Wednesday and Saturdays. From a 10’x10’ booth, Mary says she sells almost as much bread as at the retail room during the week. She glanced down at the sliced samples laid out on a plate before us.
“Gibassier is our pride and joy,” she told us. A pastry invented by a former baker at Pearl, who based the recipe on his memories of a Christmas treat from his native Provence, it is a delicate creation, with candied citrus and sugar on the outside. But the treat I enjoyed most was Pearl’s Sicilian Fig Cookie. An aristocratic cousin of a Fig Newton, with dense, flaky pastry and a fig filling with high notes of citrus, it was heavenly.
David, my tour guide, thought so too. “I love this stuff,” he said, grabbing his tummy and rubbing for emphasis. “I’m a natural!” David is a former concierge at the downtown Portland Hilton, but is true foodie at heart. With his epicurean walking tours, now just a few months old, he really seems to have hit on something he loves to do.
But could he possible lead me to even better stops than the Pearl Bakery? Or were we headed for a let-down? Well, if there’s anything closer to my heart than artisan bread, it must be artisan chocolate. And that was our next stop: Sweet Masterpiece Chocolate & Coffee Bar and its single-source chocolates.
“Literally, some of the people who have been in here have never had anything other than a Snickers bar,” Crystal Pyatt, the owner told us, as we gazed longingly at the array of chocolate samples laid out before us, including Venezuelan “Sur de Lago,” Swiss Felchlin, Maracaibo, and Cherry and Ylang Ylang.
But the stunner of this stop was a concoction invented by Derek Monioz, the shop’s barman and tech support guru. It was a drink he called the “Velvet Kiss,” and it consisted of drinking chocolate with a 1/8th inch layer on top of Fonseco Porto Bin 27. David and I both loved it: “It’s mine now,” my guide moaned, pulling the demitasse we were sharing towards him for another taste.
It’d be more accurate to say that I rolled out of Sweet Masterpiece, rather than walked out. I felt as if I couldn’t possibly take another bite, sip, or swirl of anything. I considered (albeit, very briefly,) halting our tour then and there.
But no. And how glad I was not to have bailed out then and there. Because David had saved what was, in my view, the very best for last. And, as we entered a gem of a place called “In Good Taste,” a cooking school, bookstore, and food lover’s heaven, I was glad I’d carried on.
By the time we got there, just before 6:00 p.m., the store was in a state of excitement because a cooking class with Pascal Chureau, one of the up-and-coming chefs of Portland and the executive chef and co-owner of Fenouil, was just about to begin teaching his class about French cooking.
We met Pascal briefly, and also Barbara Dawson , co-owner of the school and shop with her husband, Matt Katzer. With traces of her South African accent still evident, Barbara and I immediately found something we had in common: collecting cookbooks. Starting in her teens, Barbara’s collection contains 1,500 or so cookbooks.
“I’m sort of embarrassed about it,” she said. “It’s too many books.” That said, I couldn’t resist buying a copy from her of a cookbook that got a lot of attention at this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “The River Cottage Meat Book,” published by Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press. I lugged this giant 544-page hardcover home in my luggage, and although my husband sporadically declares himself a vegetarian, I’m looking forward to cooking from it for my boys and I, since we remain un-conflicted carnivores.
So what delicious treats had Barbara and her team laid for us? If there’s anything better than chocolate, in my book, it is cheese. We tried a sheep and cow Perrydale, paired with hazelnuts from the 160-acre Freddy Guy farm in the Willamette Valley. We then went onto a “River’s Edge” smoky chevre, which was extraordinary, and a cave-aged Rogue Blue Cheese. An hour later, I made my way to Powell’s to give my talk, still tasting the bounty of Oregon.