Image: Jordan Michelman
A confession: I haven’t been to half of the restaurants on our list of the 50 best restaurants in Portland right now. I remember my first trip to any of the places on the list, when I treated myself to lunch at Higgins while proofreading a similar list in the early 2000s for Willamette Week, where I worked then. It cost a lot more than my usual pizza slice or food cart tacos, but I was new in town and wanted to see what all the farm-to-table fuss was about.
Of the others I’ve been to, a handful were also work-related, and a good number were a onetime splurge for a special occasion. A friend gave me a gift certificate to Ox as a thank-you gift for officiating her wedding, and that same friend celebrated her 50th birthday at Kann. More birthdays and out-of-town guests have landed me at Kachka, Han Oak, and Le Pigeon. I had a great meal and a great time at all of them, but they live in my head as special-occasion places.
While I’m in no way a regular, I’ve had many a to-go pastry or weekday lunch at Måurice, which for years was in view from Portland Monthly’s office windows, calling to me with its rosemary scones and buttered radishes. As a North Portlander, I often find myself at Tulip Shop Tavern (including with some colleagues one day in June, pictured above). During COVID dining restrictions, I’d sometimes get a tavern burger and a mason jar of beer for takeout and have a picnic in nearby Peninsula Park, realizing too late I’d forgotten to order extra fry sauce—a mistake Portland Thorns player Morgan Weaver definitely doesn’t make when she goes to Sammich, one of her regular haunts.
Higgins is another one I’ve been back to, sometimes taking my dad straight to its bar after picking him up from the airport, sometimes meeting a friend before a concert or reading or heading there postshow to debrief. As Greg Higgins prepares to hand over the reins of his namesake kitchen, I’ll find reasons to squeeze in more visits before he retires, and of course will have to return to see how the transition is going.
And maybe I won’t wait for an out-of-town visitor or a multiple-of-10 birthday to check out a few other spots our food critics Karen Brooks and Jordan Michelman have gushed over, not just in their months of intensive research for our winter issue, but in their years of eating and writing and thinking and dreaming their way through the city’s restaurants. Any day can be a special occasion.
Margaret Seiler
Editor in chief
Published in the Portland’s 50 Best Restaurants issue of Portland Monthly.
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