Portland Oregon in January

July 16, 2016 by Mariah 8 Comments

Howdy, blogging friends!!! I thought I would pop back in and finally share my post on our trip to Portland Oregon this past January. We liked Portland so much we are actually going back this month! So needless to say we loved our trip in January. I’m actually so glad we went in January (the off-season), it was a lovely trip and I got Voodoo Doughnuts (original location) with NO wait ? The weather wasn’t too bad either, we actually had some sunshine, and overall it was not too cold. Of course the trip was ALL about the FOOD and BOOZE, like we seriously did not do anything else. We did stop by Powell’s books, which I fully intent to pay a longer visit to on our trip back and that was about it other than walking or riding to our next bar or meal.

FOOD

Dinner

Beast

My favorite first! Beast was AMAZING, I highly recommend it. Do the late seating (they only do two seatings a night) and get the wine pairing. The food was great and we enjoyed the overall experience. The seating is communal and you are all served at the same time, our table mates were so friendly and all around our age. There are no menu choices, other than drinks and you get six courses. I thought it was well worth the price. Pictures are in order of courses, the second being my favorite course, the foie gras truffle is in the far back with the square gel on top (so good).

Le Pigeon

This is considered a Portland foodie destination, and it was certainly good, but Beast won out if I had to choose just one. With that said we did have a very good meal. Le Pigeon went on the must-go-to list as soon as I read that they had Foie Gras profiteroles. We enjoyed the 5-course chef tasting menu, all our dishes were lovely and huge. I could never have made it through the 7-course. My favorite course was the first one, the scallop crudo. It’s a very small space, with communal tables, not exactly a relaxed fine dining experience, it’s a bit uncomfortable to get in and out of the tables. The profiteroles were good and unique but I would have liked a little more saltiness than sweetness. The foie gras truffle we had at Beast was better. I’m very happy we got to say we tried Le Pigeon and add it to our foodie passport.

Taylor Railworks

Some of the dishes were really good, some were pretty blah, continuing down to the dessert being just terrible. It’s hard to leave with a good perspective on the overall meal when the final dish is SO terrible. No flavor, the pear was undercooked, the whole dish was ill-conceived. If you don’t want to come up with a decent dessert than just offer cheese and be done with it. The scallops that started our meal were amazing, though. This is one of those places you can walk away with an amazing meal or a blah meal, just depending on what you choose to order. Pictured below the best dish and the worst dish.

Breakfast/Lunch/And In Between

Tasty N Sons

Just look at that biscuit sandwich and bloody marys, the picture says it all. In need of a cure for (maybe) overindulging the night before? This is your spot. We went for breakfast, but I’m sure their dinner would not disappoint.

Voodoo Doughnuts vs Blue Star Donut

The Portland donut/doughnut smack down. While I’ve wanted to try Voodoo Doughnuts FOREVER, I’m ruling in favor of Blue Star Donuts. I’ve been ruined by our neighborhood donut shop,Nomads and just prefer the less sticky sweet version of the yeasty breakfast bite. Again, glad I got to check Voodoo Doughnuts off my food bucket list, but it’s not on the revisit list. Blue Star Donut’s fancy flavor combinations won me over.

Blue Star

Voodoo Doughnuts

Olympic Provisions (Southeast)

Such a cool interior, and of course you can’t keep me away from any place that the central theme is cured meats. We stopped in for a later lunch, where neither one of us were all that hungry. So we opted for the cheese and meat plates, both great. The sandwiches looked amazing, and I wished we had more stomach space to try one.

Genie’s Cafe

This was a last minute change to the itinerary based on our Lyft driver’s suggestion. He won us over to change directions by his description of over 10 varieties of bloody marys. The food was good, in a laid back kitchen cafe vibe. I liked my bloody mary from Tasty N Son a bit more, but not bad and such variety!

Beer & Booze

I’m sharing my two favorites first.

Commons Brewery

Exceptionally done Belgian style beers and cheese, what more could you ask for. Oh and a big, open space, they still felt warm…perfection. I just HAD to order a cheese plate, even though we had dinner in less than 2 hours. I love cheese and cheese with good beer is hard to beat. Very friendly staff. This is on our revisit list!

Hamlet

A bar that serves only ham…how could we not go here?!? Very friendly, funny bartender, beautiful interior and one of the more memorable cocktails I’ve had. Trumper’s Revenge, house-infused horseradish vodka, mint and fresh carrot juice, OMG so good. This and the Dream Weaver (from Husk in Charleston) are two of my top cocktails ever. This is also on our revisit list!!

Baerlic Brewing Company

My favorite space award for a brewery goes to Baerlic, really cool, well designed, and well lit tasting room. The beer was good too, but I just really liked how bright and fresh their space felt. It’s tucked away in a neighborhood which only added to it’s cool factor (not that anywhere in Portland would try to be cool or anything).

Hair of the Dog Brewing

This is one of the original breweries of Portland, so we just had to go. I’ve never been a huge fan of their beer, but it was neat to visit their space and get to try a wider variety. We stopped here before walking over to Taylor Railworks for dinner. We had a little fun on the way while waiting on a train to pass.

Ex Novo Brewing Co

This was our very first stop for a bite and beer when we landed in Portland! It was a great choice, the food and beer were both great. Cool space to boot, that filled up quickly as people started to get off work.

Base Camp Brewing Co

A very open, warehouse style brewery. Cool space and nice variety of beer, I especially liked that one of my tasters came with a toasted marshmallow. We are actually staying in this neighborhood on our return trip this month.

Burnside Brewing Company

Home of a million beers. We got every single one of their beers as a taster (15 beers!). Not my favorite brewery of the trip, but very friendly staff and worth a stop in (just maybe stick to a few tasters at first to see how you like it).

Lodging/Transporation

We stayed at the River’s Edge Hotel. I would not recommend it, it’s a bit out of the way and the rooms were clean but not overly nice. We did the Priceline Name Your Own Price, and it was the one that was furthest away from downtown. We got a good deal so I don’t have too much to complain about, but if I was paying what the asking rate was I would have been disappointed. Really we didn’t mind the location too much because so many of our destinations were on the other side of the river anyway, and we would have been calling a car even if we were closer to downtown. Portland is fairly spread out and while they have public transportation (which we did use for some trips), it’s not that convenient/quick to get from neighborhood to neighborhood and requires a quite a bit of walking to get to stops. Lyft/Uber rides were readily available so no problem there, just be prepared to do some car rides unless you are only concentrating on downtown for your itinerary.

I’m looking forward to reporting back on our Portland adventure this month, hopefully, it will not take me 6 months to get it published ? We have decided to do AirBNB for this trip that way we can stay in more of a neighborhood area. I will let you know how that works out for us.

Finally Thoughts: I highly recommend visiting Portland in the off-season, our trip in January was awesome!

Have you been to Portland, Oregon? If so, what was your favorite stop?

Weekend Jaunt: Los Angeles

September 21, 2015 by Mariah 24 Comments

P and I finally made it on a little weekend trip to Los Angeles (LA) in July. To be honest LA has never been on the top of my travel list. I think I always assumed if I traveled to the West coast I would go to San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland. However with LA only a few hours away, we can’t pass up the opportunity. Since it is a shortish drive we decided to only focus on a few areas/activities this trip and then plan a few other future trips.
As I already revealed, we somewhat planned our trip around trying out Animal. Which was a good experience, so yay!! Of course that was not our only eating stop 🙂

Friday

Our first stop was Ink Sack, which is one of Chef Michael Voltaggio’s spots (Top Chef). Now this is just a tiny little sandwich shop, more take out than dine-in. The thing that really shocked me is their pricing, all their sandwiches are $5 or $6 and they are GOOD. I was not disappointed with this choice. Also they had housemade pork rinds!! I was not disappointed with those either. If you follow me on IG you saw my little quip about it being funny the very first thing I try in LA is a pork rind. I had the cold fried chicken and P had their take on banh mi. Now that we had a little something solid to eat it was onto beer.

First brewery stop was Golden Road. There was no way that we could pass up checking out Golden Road, as part of our first trip to LA. We have loved most of the beers we have tried from them so we made a beeline straight to the source. I have to say, I did not love their pub space. It was too restaurant focused for my taste. They also didn’t have that many beers that were not widely distributed anyway so I was a bit disappointed overall. They certainly have good beers and some neat aspects to their space. I’m glad we got to go.

With the first brewery checked-off, it was time to ditch the car and focus on places that were a bit closer by. We decided to stay in Koreatown at Hotel Normandie. It’s a cute little historical hotel. Would I recommend it? Umm…maybe. It was cute and clean, I actually liked Koreatown. LA is not a walkable city, it’s not one of those places where you can fly in and go all weekend without a car…but I’ll talk more about that later and more on the hotel at the end. Now that we said goodbye to the car, we are off to the Art District.

Here are a few scenes from the Art District…We basically walked around and then had a few drinks and a few bites here and there.

Wurstküche for a couple of beers and a taste of fries. I always have to try out the curry ketchup option, not bad, but not the best I’ve had stateside. Of course they are all compared to the fries we had in Antwerp.

Then a stop at Angel City Brewery, such a cool space!!! I loved the feel of the space and the people were friendly. The beers were only ok, not something I would seek out. I would certainly recommend going though. Though do not drink the water…it was terrible, like really terrible!!

What is a vacation without pie? So we popped on into Pie Hole. Umm…it was ok. Overall I found it too sweet, from drinks to pie, and the crust was not that great either. Cute place though, but I’m sure there is better pie to be had in LA.

We finished our night of course back in our hood, Koreatown. What would be the point of staying in Koreatown and not eating at a Korean place, that is a no brainer. So we yelped our hearts out and narrowed it down to two places and went with the one that had less of a wait, Ham Ji Park BBQ 🙂 It was certainly an experience. The food was great, once we figured out what was going on and the service was attentive. Seriously the hottest bowl of soup I have ever seen! And I didn’t know what any of the little dishes were but it was all good.

Saturday

Breakfast Saturday took us to the Salt’s Cure, which got high reviews. Lucky for us LA is a late rising kind of town so we beat the wait easily. The interior is small and I liked being able to sit at the bar and watch the action. The food was good, but not that creative or rave worthy in my option. Also I’m pretty sure an actor came in and sat on the other side of P, but I could not place him. He was definitely someone.

Then we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which I have always wanted to see for some reason. I don’t know, it always sound so cool and it were close by, so why not. Well, color me disappointed. It was not exciting at all and there is very little to see. I was not that impressed, and we walked around, but didn’t think it was worth paying to go through the museum part. Oh well.

After that disappointment, we went straight to another tourist trap/disappointment. I figured again, since we were in the general area we would try to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame. HUGE mistake. It was crazy, SO many people, so dirty, so loud, I HATED it. Some woman was screaming and peeing on the middle of the sidewalk, which only prompted me to walk faster to get the hell out of there.

We drove around a bit more and headed over to the Silver Lake area to regroup and see what it was all about. I wished I had brought my tennis shoes and we had tried to do the Hollywood Sign hike or explore the Griffith park, but alas I had not planned on it this trip. In Silver Lake we stopped in and had a little coffee break at Lamill Coffee. After coffee we figured lunch was in order, and we walked up to the Knuckle and Claw, mainly because it was in the area and we could walk there. Meh. It was fine, but not great. I think there are more interesting lunch places to find. To be honest we were just one that side of town, and I didn’t feel like getting back into the car yet. It was nice to have a place to walk to 🙂

We had looked to see what other breweries were close by and knocked another one off the list, Eaglerock Brewery. Beers were ok, and space was not that inviting. I don’t know, just wasn’t feeling it. We decided to head back to the hotel, nap and get ready to go towards the area of town Animal is located.

We had a few pre-dinner drinks at the Melrose Umbrella Company, and it was perfect. Loved the drinks, the space, and the bartenders. Great experience! It put us in the right mood to enjoy our dinner at Animal.

Sunday

Again, wanting to make the most of Koreatown, we stopped by to try out California Donuts before heading to brunch. Yes, I said we stopped for donuts before going to eat somewhere else, totally normal. I wasn’t overly impressed with it, a basic donut…certainly no Nomads 🙂

We drove around a little more and then headed to Faith and Flower. This was one of the best brunches I’ve had in a while and certainly the second best meal of our LA trip. They serve “sharable” dishes, so we started off with the oxtail agnolotti, deviled eggs, and malt waffle. After these dishes we weren’t quite full, so we went crazy and ordered eggs benedict pizza and I’m glad we did. Of course we kind of dug into the pizza before I remembered pictures..oops. The pizza was SO good and the sauce on the pasta was AMAZING, like I wanted to lick the plate. This place was tasty. A nice way to finish off our trip and head back to SD.

We did take a tiny detour, for one more brewery on the way back. Stopping at Noble Brewing in Anaheim, which was not too far off the highway. We have had a lot of Noble beers and knew they were worth the stop. I was happy to see that they had a lot of varieties available you don’t see on the shelf.

Now my review on the Hotel Normandie: My complaint is the noise. We stayed on the 5th floor out of 6, but it was one the alley side of the building which also included an outdoor area for their bar. It was crazy loud until after 3 am, that is a no go for us. They did move us to the 6th floor street side the second night (after complaint), but I would only consider staying here again if I was guaranteed a room on the street side. Honestly, if they invested in better windows the noisy would be less of an issue. Also, if you are there for a weekend, we found street parking fairly easily, so you can save the $20 a night valet fee.

I have to say LA did not win me over. I felt like it was dirty, sprawling and all the rumors about horrible traffic, 100% true. It just did not have the same big city feel I get visiting NYC or Chicago. We will certainly go back to check out the beach area, the Hollywood Sign, and Catalina Islands, but I would not rank LA high on my travel list. I like to walk to experience a city and LA just doesn’t have it. It’s just not my style, though I know some people love it.