Broder, Portland

I celebrated my birthday in Portland and we picked Broder to have my birthday breakfast.  It was definitely the right choice.  This place is fantastic - I can imagine that if I lived in Portland I would bring all of my friends here when they came to visit.

The space itself is on the small side (though fairly large if you compare to here) and feels very homey.  It seems like a lot of places we ate at had a similar feeling, as if you were eating in someone's house. I liked that - it felt very unpretentious.  

We got to sit at the window seats in the front which were open because it was such a beautiful day. Really, every day we were there was a beautiful day. Sunny, blue skies and 80 degrees is much nicer than San Francisco summer weather.

These strange looking things are called aebleskiver.  Since I can't pronounce that, I'm going to call it a Danish pancake.  These are served with two dipping sauces, and I chose the lemon curd and the ligonberry jam. The jam was good - but the lemon curd was amazing. It actually reminded me a lot of one of my favorite items at Tartine.  But back to the pancakes: they were such a fun treat! Maybe it's because I never had them before, but something about having these for breakfast felt a little celebratory, which was perfect since it was my birthday.  Also I now have it on good authority that Trader Joes sells aebleskivers as well, so I'll be needing to try that. 

This is the Swedish hash, or pytt i panna, if you speak Swedish. I am so glad that it tasted as good as it looked.  In the dish is potatoes, peppers, roast beef and ham, and on top of the eggs are pickled beets. It is the perfect savory breakfast dish. I could not get enough. 

Because we thought it might be nice to have something healthy, we also ordered the yogurt and granola parfait.  That's healthy, right?  I only had a few bites of this one, since I was too busy power eating my pancakes.  I really liked what I had - and Kev named it his favorite granola dish in Portland (we did eat granola at most breakfasts there). 

I know I've already showed you all of these dishes, but I thought I'd share picture of the whole meal together, so you can see how Broder appealed not only to my stomach, but to my general aesthetic sensibility. 

It was a great way to start what turned out to be our best day in Portland. We followed this meal with a trip to the Japanese Gardens, which I highly recommend if you are going to Portland, and then finished the day with a meal at Le Pidgeon. Stay tuned for that post!

Stumptown Coffee and Clyde Common - Portland

People keep asking me what we did on vacation. I keep explaining that we ate. We ate and we walked around. And when we walked around, we were frequently walking to another place to eat. Stumptown Coffee and Clyde Common are two more places where we killed some time (eating) while waiting for our next meal.

Both Stumptown and Clyde Common are part of the Ace Hotel. We didn't stay at the Ace, but maybe we should have since we spent so much time over there. Another reason to stay at the Ace is the view of the Fish Grotto across the street.  I may have been slightly obsessed with the Fish Grotto mural, and I seem to have more photos of it than anything else from our whole trip. If you need such a picture, let me know, I have quite a selection. 

These pictures are from happy hour at Clyde.  $3 for some pickled veggies, $5 for the charcuterie board and $5 wine and cocktails. We sat at the outdoor tables, which was great because the weather was so nice. What was not great was the amount of smokers walking by. This is the most confusing thing to me about Portland. For such a healthy, active city it is really surprising to see so many cigarettes. 

We spent a few mornings in the Ace lobby, drinking our coffee and PG Tips. We were very excited to see PG Tips on the menu since it is our favorite.  I love all of the succulents on the table and the branding inside the mug.

I also love that the saucer says Good Luck. How random. But thank you - I'll take it.

Lovejoy Bakers and Pearl Bakery - Portland

In between eating, we did some more eating. 

We stopped over at the Pearl Bakery.  Check out this pastry. 

It had the texture of a doughnut with subtle orange and anise flavors. Kind of like a very sophisticated doughnut. 

We also went to Lovejoy Bakers, which is a little further out in the Pearl District. We liked that there was less traffic - both pedestrian and cars.  There was also loads of outside seating which made for a great place to relax and read while waiting for our next dinner reservation.

We ordered some sandwiches and then just hung out. I love vacation.

Little Bird Bistro - Portland!

We just returned from having spent five days stuffing our faces in Portland. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I was out of control doing research on all of the places we needed to eat and when we'd go where.  And by "out of control" I mean I plotted and color coded my list on a google map so I could see, by neighborhood, where everything was and then made a daily agenda of all of our meals. Yes, I am just that kind of obsessive person.

The point is, we ate a lot.  Seriously, I don't know that there was ever a time in my life where I have eaten so much every single day.  So while this is a blog about eating in San Francisco, I  couldn't let our Portland food experience go undocumented.

Our first Portland dinner was at Little Bird Bistro.  Because the restaurant was just 2 blocks from our hotel I thought it would be nice to go there on our first night, as we were getting the lay of the land.

We decided to share an appetizer and picked the smoked trout gougeres. We had recently tried an amazing gougeres in San Francisco (cheddar and black pepper from Tell Tale Preserve Co) so we were curious what this one would be like, especially with the addition of the smoked trout. I am so so happy we ordered this, as it actually was probably one of the best things we ate our whole time in Portland. The texture of the gougeres was different than what I would have thought - it was more like fried dough than the croissant-like interior I was expecting.  The addition of the trout was intriguing - you could taste it, but not in an overtly fishy way.  The beet salad seemed a little strange to go with it, but it was incredible. I couldn't remember what the dressing was, and at one point I said to Kev, "there's a flavor in here that reminds me of Jewish deli".  He thought I was crazy, but I wasn't far off - the dressing had caraway in it - the same seeds that are on rye bread. If any chef in San Francisco reads this - can you please put this on your menu? I will be your #1 customer. 

It seemed fitting to order the salmon, since we were in the Pacific Northwest. The salmon entree changes daily. This was sockeye salmon on a crepe of creamed corn and fennel. The flavor on this was amazing, and like the trout, it wasn't super fishy - it felt very meaty.  We were sharing both entrees and I think we were fighting over this one - we both couldn't get enough.

We also ordered a side of what they referred to as macaroni gratin, which is just a much fancier way of saying mac and cheese. This was a perfect mac and cheese - it had lots of crispy bits, it wasn't too creamy, but just creamy enough and the cheddar had a nice tang to it. 

Our second entree was the pork shoulder with a fried poached egg, just in case a regular poached egg on your pork shoulder isn't decadent enough. The thing with this one was that the meat tasted incredible, but there wasn't much meat - it was nearly all fat. Now, I am not one to send things back to the kitchen, it really makes me uncomfortable, but this just didn't seem right. We spoke to the waiter who was incredibly apologetic and told us he'd get us another piece.  When the second piece arrived - perfectly cooked - we were stuffed. But we persevered because we couldn't let such an amazing piece of food go to waste.  So we had pork for dessert. Delicious, tender, you-don't-even-need-a-knife pork.

If you're going to Portland, I can't recommend Little Bird highly enough. The food and service are  great and it's just a really cute spot - so much so that we even went back our second night to get an after dinner drink.  If this place was in San Francisco I know we'd be regulars.

ps: If you are going to Portland and want to take advantage of my OCD tendencies, email me and I can send you my Google map and agenda.

Plow, Potrero Hill

You know how sometimes you hear something mentioned multiple times in the span of a couple of weeks, even though you had previously never heard of it? For me, that was Plow. All of a sudden everyone kept talking about it. I enlisted my trusty friend and food partner (and frequent tastingsf hand-model) Britt to join me.

We headed over there on a Saturday morning to find that perhaps we were the only ones who hadn't heard of Plow.  The place was packed with a whole bunch of people waiting outside. We put our names on the list and were seated about 30 minutes later at the counter, which gave us a good vantage point of what was happening in the kitchen.

Do you see what's happening in the kitchen? Those are lemon-ricotta pancakes on the grill. Normally I'm more of a savory breakfast person, but they looked so good we did a side order (1 pancake) to have with our eggs.  That was a mistake though because it was my favorite thing and I wish we had ordered a full stack.  The owner told us that it is all made from scratch, right down to the ricotta. They were light and fluffy and not too sweet. Really a perfect pancake, in my opinion. 

For our main dish we ordered the scrambled eggs with lambs quarters. I will admit I had no idea what lambs quarters were when we ordered this and I expected to find something meaty in my eggs. Please stop laughing at me. It turns out it is really a type of weed that you can use in food, kind of like spinach.  The eggs also had a generous amount of goat cheese, which I love, and the potatoes were nice and crispy on the outside and soft and creamy on the inside (aka a perfect potato).

There are certain ingredients (goat cheese, burrata, heirloom tomatoes, nectarines, pluots) that I am always drawn to.  Whenever I see it on a menu, I'll order whatever that dish is. That is how we wound up with this salad. Also I love little gem lettuce, it always seems to be really crisp and fresh. This salad had little bits of mint in it too, which was a nice surprise every time you got a bite of it. Plus with the nectarines and pluots it made it feel so summery. If only there was some goat cheese on this salad, that would be perfection.

If you are looking for a brunch place to quickly pop into, or to have a big group meet up at, this isn't the place for you. But if you have some time and you don't mind waiting a little while for some good food, I'll see you in line. I'm having the pancakes.

Farm:Table, Tenderloin

Today I had breakfast at Farm:Table, and it is quite possibly the tiniest restaurant I have ever been in.  Tiny as in they have one small communal table that seats 8 very small people. What they have done though with their teeny tiny space is incredibly impressive and should make me ashamed when I complain I don't have enough kitchen space.

In this tiny kitchen are two very, very sweet guys making some excellent food and drinks. 

The coffee beans they use are from Verve, which is out of Santa Cruz. I heard a woman from Australia telling the guys that this was the best coffee she had had while traveling in America. It was pretty damn good.  They also make hot chocolate (using local TCHO Chocolate).  My two year old friend who was with us thoroughly enjoyed hers - it was the first hot chocolate she had ever had, and she spent the rest of the day talking about it.

I just liked these two quirky details

We had the quiche of the day (different sorts of quiches daily) which was light and fluffy.

We also ordered the granola with yogurt and fruit. This is actually one of my favorite breakfast dishes and I don't order it as much as I should.  Or make it at home as much as I should. Maybe if I had more kitchen space....

I ordered the hard boiled eggs with bacon and brussel sprouts and zucchini. This was great! Kind of random with the hard boiled eggs, but it totally worked. I really liked the bacon. The bread was toasted, which made it really crunchy on the outside.  The inside was nice and chewy, and they gave us some spiced butter to put on it and that was excellent.  

All in all, this place was pretty adorable, and you should check it out.

Farm:Table
754 Post St
San Francisco, CA 94108

(415) 292-7089

Wise Sons Deli, Mission

People, the rumors are true: You now can get really great Jewish deli in San Francisco. Wise Sons Deli has had tons of press but I didn't get to try it until yesterday. We headed over to Heart to check it out, but next week they move on to The Beast and the Hare.  They are still operating as a pop-up restaurant with no official home - but they are looking. And I am keeping my fingers crossed that they stay in the Misison, close to me, because this place is legit! And I do consider myself an expert: not only am I a Jewish New Yorker, but I am a Jewish New Yorker who spent 5+ years working in a NY Jewish Deli.

The pastrami is house cured, sliced by hand and excellent. And they have real rye bread! Real rye bread! Why has this been so hard to come by in San Francisco?

Perhaps you think 10AM is too early for a pastrami sandwich? Not to worry - you can get a bagel with lox instead. Two of the employees at Wise Sons run a pop-up bagel shop within the pop-up deli: Beauty Bagels. Cross your fingers that they open their retail shop soon (too bad for me that it will be in Oakland and not San Francisco).  

The guys who worked there were also super sweet and seemed to really enjoy what they were doing. One of them saw me snapping pictures and came over to ask if I wanted to take some of him making an egg cream (egg cream!!).  For those of you West Coast people that don't know what an egg cream is, see below for instruction: 

(Truthfully, I'm not that into egg creams, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate them, and I am happy to see that they have found a place here in San Francisco.)

Mmm, babka. Have you tried babka? Imagine a hybrid combination of coffee cake, brioche, chocolate and cinnamon and that is basically babka. Also it is fun to say: Babka.

Dear Wise Sons Deli,

Thank you for filling the hole in my heart (stomach?) that is reserved for Jewish deli. You have made it so that there is (nearly) no longer any food craving that San Francisco can not fill. I say nearly because I would still love a knish. Could you guys help me out with that one?  

Thank you, 

Tasting SF