Huber’s is the oldest restaurant in Portland, and has done a fine job maintaining the charm of the earliest of its thirteen decades, especially in the back bar: handsome, dark wood paneling; Gothic arches that jettison the ceiling into an elegant curve reminiscent of New York’s famed Oyster Bar at Grand Central; skylights overhead with a distinctly Art Deco pattern.
Old-timey still are the sartorial conceits of the capable bartenders, who wear vests and arm garters as they pour drinks with a flourish. Behind them, you might catch a glimpse of the turn-of-the-century cash register, a weighty and formidable bronze hulk next to the glowing flat screen of a computer terminal.
The latter decades of Huber’s life are also apparent, in less-flattering forms. The tables and chairs evoke a 1980s pizza parlor; the front room is nondescript in that 1990s sort of way; plates are of the thick, cheap Denny’s-circa-1970 variety. But… [More]
9.6 Le Pigeon
9.5 Park Kitchen
9.5 Pok Pok
9.4 Clyde Common
9.3 Beaker & Flask
9.3 Ping
9.3 Apizza Scholls
9.2 Tabla
9.2 Thistle
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If Portland is the great postmodern restaurant city, then Park Kitchen is its great postmodern restaurant, unique in its ability to reach across the divisions that mark this gastronomic era, almost singular in its ability to touch—sometimes along the arc of a single dish—the locavores and the hedonists, the eco-watchdogs and the offal fiends.
Consider a simple chilled soup that showed up on a recent lunch menu at Park Kitchen. It was a match of the simple—local beets, bright yogurt—with the profane–bracing chili pepper, gnarls of fatty oxtail. Yet it was also a mini-essay on culinary postmodernism–a movement that’s marked by a newfound appreciation, sometimes to fetishistic proportions, of the foods that the world’s poor have long taken for granted. For generations, Russian peasants have found comfort and sustenance in borscht, while their counterparts in the Caribbean have found it—as we now do too—hanging off the ass of one of the… [More]
Britain’s Sun recently reported that supermarket giant Tesco sold two bottles of counterfeit Louis Jadot Pouilly-Fuissé, distributed by Hatch Mansfield, to a customer named Danny McGowan of Clacton, Essex, who described the fake bottle as having a label that “looked photocopied.” Apparently, the bottle was on sale for £5, down from a usual £14.49. (As of this writing, the Pouilly-Fuissé was on the price list at the Tesco website for £12.99.)
The Sun article, which was sent my way by the illustrious wine-counterfeiting scholar/economist Günter Schamel (whose work I’ve previously discussed here), has the amusing title “You Plonkers” and an equally amusing photo of a nonplussed McGowan.
The most unusual thing about this story is that while has been much discussion of counterfeit wine in the high-end rare and fine wine market—Jefferson bottles… [More]
