Our Restaurant Critics' Dream Meals
When your job is to winnow the wheat from the chaff, to advise the dining public on where to get their 'za, Bangkok street snacks, and Chinese wok-fried crab, people inevitably want superlatives. What’s the very best? Who’s the current reigning champ...of hot wings? Tea leaf salad? Panna cotta? Pizza pie? With a few exceptions, a single dish doesn’t make a restaurant. However, more than a few dishes floating around the city are well worth seeking out on their own. While assembling this year’s list of our top 50 restaurants in Portland, we asked our critics to name a few, to make a fictional meal of them. This is what they came up with. DISCLAIMER: You can’t do this, and you shouldn’t, but we did.
Food critic at large Karen Brooks went for fireworks, as she’s wont to do. Scotch Lodge’s towering purple painkiller sets the tone for Kann’s icy kampachi crudo, which is balanced by Yaowarat’s salty-crispy-chewy chive cakes. Favorite pop-up Le Clown’s ceremonious, full-blown duck service takes center stage—a perfect high-low pairing with Canard’s soft serve parfait for dessert.
Image: Rebecca Nguyen
Image: Rebecca Nguyen
Associate editor Matthew Trueherz put Scottie’s Pizza Parlor’s plain Jane pepperoni front and center (because there’s nothing plain about it). It appears alongside Rangoon Bistro’s crunchy cabbage tea leaf salad, deliciously filling the meal’s vegetable quotient. French cheese—specifically a fresh-shaved poof of Tête de Moine from L’Orange—comes between the mains and dessert. The latter is kind of a two-parter: Luce’s tangy and perfectly wobbly panna cotta, unchanged for as long as anyone can remember, rides with a cookie and boozy milkshake from the Love Shack, G-Love’s bar.
Image: Rebecca Nguyen
