Portland.
In terms of its climate and overall disposition, the Pacific Northwest is as close as our miserable little country gets to the greatness of Scandinavia. The climate plays some small part of it, I am sure. Gottenburg and Portland share a similar, gloomy, cloudscape, with a grey ocean thundering just a ram's run away. Just think of it. Giant trees covered in moss, on which to tie captive maidens. It wrenches the heart to know that the churls and cretins that founded this stupid berg thought not to preserve a single oak, fixated as they were on farming every square meter with the humble harvest of corn, corn, and more corn.
Formerly a logging town, haunt of junkies and hippie burnouts, Portland was a place where a wretch with a methamphetamine addiction could while away his or her last days thumb-strumming an acoustic guitar with a loyal dog barking to the broken rhythms. The benevolent, yet not overtly sunny weather and relative lack of ultraconservative mongoloids has been good to the town, of late, and it is now a city enlightened enough to sport a performance venue dedicated to Metal-the Satyricon. Eager to settle a score with our old Black-Metal Enemies, Indian, my bandmates drove our tourbus overnight to reach the place, but I digress.
Portland is possessed of the most incredible cuisine. Among other things, the Starbucks there are empty. Barely a soul in those terrible cafes. And no wonder, the one Starbucks coffee I had there was particularly atrocious-not the standardized, solid, boring but effective flavor of a typical Starbucks house coffee, but a pale, watery, brew tasting of dishsoap. Clearly, they have given up. Vanquished, but a hoard of independent coffeehouses that brew coffee fit for the mighty Thunder God himself, the empty green rooms are a laughing stock there. Stump Town, the mightiest of them all, is a formidable coffeehouse. Stump Town is the equal of our vaunted Intelligentsia, and is is one of many independent coffeehouses there. One by one, Chicago has let its independent operations go, and lameness is triumphing here. Sad fate. Northwest Coffee Roasters, on Burnside, is a pleasant room with admirable lattes. I caffeinated there daily and contemplated the sad fate of Filter-closed, by an idiot who had so little respect for his customer base, and the generosity they had shown him by patronizing his business, that he neglected to renew his lease as a Bank of America usurped his spot. Fool. Ungrateful, short-sighted fool.
It seems that, to triumph over mediocrity, one has to wage constant war. Customers need to be educated at every opportunity, to avoid equating a homegrown Chinese Restaurant with tacky decor and strange fortune cookies, from a Panda Express. Burger Baron is not the same as Mc Donalds, and yet the cretins will have you think otherwise because they fill the airwaves with their shit.
For now, good food, and the nuanced, pleasant lifestyle that goes with it, triumphs in Portland. Among other things, there are more strip clubs there than any other place I can imagine. These are colorful places, not the fleecing operations of Atlanta, or mere JerkOff dens. Each is different. Again, I digress.
Easily, the best Tapas I have had outside Spain, was at El Torro Bravo, on the City's West Side. They serve incredible Paella as well, have an appropriate wine list, and the servers do not flinch at the sight of a seven-piece black metal band, in corpsepaint, sitting down to dine.
I wish I could say I liked Farm, but I did not. The operation was buckling under the strain of its own success, and they made mistakes like undercooked lentils, unattentive service, and a Dungeness crab risotto that tasted like risotto, yes, but not Dungeness crab.
Other culinary highlights include the city's battery of "roach coaches". These hardy operations, based in trailers, delivery vans, and mobile homes, line the inner-city parking lots, serving a dizzying array of foodstuff in a kitchen smaller than a decent amplifier. In Chicago, we persecute gyros vendors for the fun of it, so enthralled are we with regulating away charm and adventurousness, in the name of cleanliness, that we forget that each of these operations is a small microcosm of cuisine-a world of possibilities from which greater things might sprout.
Sadly, the city's churches were mostly stone, and well-guarded, but again, I digress.
No comments:
Post a Comment