Parents, Portland, Le Pigeon

The glorious part about having my parents come to town is that they feed me I can take them to all of these decadent extravagant delicious restaurants. They landed two Saturdays ago from three thousand miles away, delayed by an engine failure that allowed me to dally an extra hour at the Portland farmers market (to which I took them a week later; they were delirious with envy and, perhaps, the strain of lugging seven plants on the handlebars of their borrowed bicycles).

After introducing them to my housemates and my house--which my mother would proceed to spend the next seven days mentally renovating into a four-star establishment and physically restoring to something akin to the condition it was in before being abused by a rotating cast of college characters--I finally dragged them away from inspecting the smoking detectors and up to Lower Burnside for a bar-side meal at Le Pigeon, preceded by perhaps a few too many glasses of wine down the street at Kir. The sommelier was extraordinarily nice: my mother mentioned my never-ending quest to collect enough wine corks to create a board, and he bagged up the night's assortment for me without saying a word. Also, we sampled about a dozen wines and drank our way through six glasses. My favorite by far was Terra Novo, this feisty little biodynamic red wine from Spain.


I wanted to show them this restaurant because it's the kind of place that embodies the heart of cuisine right now: transforming the freshest local ingredients into the freshest preparations, whether that's using classical French techniques (beef cheek bourguignon), Japanese tradition (soft-cooked eggs), or modernist innovations (powdered foie gras). This restaurant is kind of incredible for including the entire spectrum of what's happening in food, from a green curry duck that wouldn't be out of place in a French three-star to a ridiculous dessert featuring foie gras in all of its four components. That duck (pictured top right corner) is the best duck I've had in Portland, hands down, and possibly the best curry. And I never thought I'd be saying that of a French restaurant. Here is proof:

Not pictured: beef cheek bourguignon, which looks like a brown lump of caramelized but unattractive bliss no matter how you photograph it; and a crême brulée with a coconut pot de crême accompaniment, because one crême is never enough. Oh, and here is the ridiculous dessert that I refused to share.

To my left is a chilled foie gras mousse, wedged between a profiteroles incorporating foie gras into the butter, drizzled with salted caramel sauce incorpoating foie gras into the sauce, sprinkled with a dusting of powdered foie gras. There were three of those little suckers. I ate them all. Had I not been in public, I probably would have licked my plate.

Welcome to Portland, ma and pa.