Slideshow

Slide Show: Far-Flung Plates at the Lostine Tavern

July 14, 2014

Left: A pint of Terminal Gravity ESG from LT's Oregon-based tap list. Right: A thick, wooden L-shaped bar attached to the LT's locally-quarried stone masonry.

The LT was built in 1902 as a pharmacy and doctors office, and then it was an old-school soda fountain. In the 1940’s it became a tavern and an Eastern Oregon landmark. It was rebuilt and rebranded in the spring of 2014.

Left: The “Rancher’s Choice” burger, which rotates with each new cattle purveyor. Right: An ancient coffee mill donated to the Tavern.

The game-changing pastrami reuben with homemade sauerkraut and a Grand Central Bakery bun. To make the pastrami, fatty beef belly is cured, smoked for 18 hours, and sous-vide for a full day.

Skillet-baked chicken pot pie.

Rare teres major, sliced thin on a house-made smoked salt bun.

Lynne Curry (center) with co-owners Lisa Armstrong-Roepke (right) and Peter Ferré (left)

The Lostine Tavern (read our full Q & A) is a little bit outside of Portland Monthly’s usual orbit—by roughly 300 miles. But if you’ve ever stopped for a bite in Eastern Oregon, you’ll know that good food is scarcer than a Prius with Obama-Beiden bumper stickers in the mountain towns that surround the Alp-like Wallowa range. The Tavern, Eastern Oregon’s first farm-to-table (but not fancy!) restaurant, is the exception: some of the best locally sourced, hand-made food for a hundred miles in any direction.

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