Portland

We just got back from a trip to Portland, OR. I was excited because the latest "Every Day" Rachael magazine featured the city, plus the "Tasty Travels" episode had just been on TV. To be honest there wasn’t really any place I was enticed to go to, except for Moonstruck Chocolate Café. One restaurant sounded OK but when Rachael said the meal was under $30, that was more than I would want to spend.

In the end, I didn’t eat anywhere Rachael went, but I was able to stop by a few places. I went to the Chocolate Café on NW 23rd, supposedly it is popular also because of Oprah and the Academy Awards puts their truffles in their gift bags. I am a bonafide chocoholic but I could not bring myself to pay $3 for one piece of candy. There wasn’t anybody in the shop either.

On the way back to the hotel from dinner at a diner type restaurant (shrimp dinner for less than $9 - nothing fancy but it was rather more that you got what you paid for, I think it was called "Joe’s"), I saw "Anna Bananna’s" and vaguely remembered it from the show. The next day I checked it out, it looks like a coffee house, very comfortable inside, with places to sit and all kinds of newspapers. Our hotel had coffee and I’d had my quota already.

We stayed at the Inn at Northrup Station. It's a funky place in the Nob Hill section, the kind of place that seems like it would have been featured on the show. It's very clean, has a good continental breakfast, and has jars of taffy on the tables in the lobby. "Not Yo Mama's hotel" comes to mind, as far as the furniture goes. Definitely not your typical hotel decor.

While in Portland, there was a letter to the editor about a recent article in the Oregonian, about Rachael’s Portland "Tasty Travels" episode. Apparently people were disappointed that she did not go to what they thought were the primo places, they thought she went to the second-place spots. I found the original article online. It mentioned that one featured place, Valentine’s, was given an assignment of making a sandwich and a latte for the camera…except they didn’t have an espresso machine and couldn’t afford one and didn’t want one. Yet in the episode, the article goes on to say, "Valentine's did make the final cut billed in Ray voice-over as a place for lunch and . . . a latte. Yes, right after seeing the restaurant's signature brie and sauteed greens sandwich sizzle in a panini press (rating a "Yum-O!"), the camera magically transitioned to milk steaming in an espresso machine. ‘It's surreal,’ Bokros says of the virtual latte. This sleight-of-hand was only part of the strangest Portland restaurant piece ever, as mostly second- and third-tier places were hyped as stand-outs. (You wonder if all cities are this poorly chosen.) Ripe had closed, as producers knew, but the Ripe segment went on anyway, though the food looked terrific."

The "Hollywood magic" aspect of Rachael’s show was interesting to me, that what was on TV was not what reality is. So far I haven’t eaten at any place she has recommended, has anyone else? I did go to a restaurant in Austin that was shown (but not mentioned specifically) during the "Tasty Travel’s" for that city. I liked the food there, unfortunately can’t remember the name of it, it was very "California-ish" with healthy sandwiches on wheat bread, in an outdoor setting.

Anyway, we stopped by the Farmer’s Market, and they had all kinds of good-looking produce there. At the time it seemed expensive, but it turned out to be reasonable. Peaches were something like $1.99 a pound, and at Whole Foods around the corner, organic peaches were $4.99 a pound. I saw the Indian food cart around PSU that was shown in the magazine, and people were lined up for gyros and sausage sandwiches.

Great city! No trash on the roads. Businesses even are pet-friendly and have water bowls out on the sidewalk. Public transportation worked like a charm. I miss the West Coast soooo much.