I’M NOT QUITE SURE when it happened. Maybe it was while I was standing atop a dune in the Mars-like Saudi Arabian desert, wearing a ghutra (the customary Saudi headdress) on loan from Soliman al Buthe, a Saudi civil servant whom our government...
BUD CLARK planned his long-shot 1984 mayoral campaign over beers in booth 12. Mercedes Deiz, who became Oregon’s first female African-American judge in 1969, sometimes ducked in for lunch. Gus van Sant occasionally drops by, and celebrity chef...
IN A TOWN where debating the merits of arugula versus mâche seems to trump discussions about Sam Adams’s chances of winning the mayoral election, we have a hunch there’s a plethora of home cooks who dream of going pro. But if you’re not quite...
FOR THE PAST DECADE, Valentine’s Day has meant curling up with my husband and a chocolate cake, which I always bake. If my cakes have occasionally been dry, well, that’s what whipped cream is for.
Two years ago, perhaps on the heels of one of...
HOW DID IT ever come to pass that a working-class, Northwest
river town abandoned the delight-fully utilitarian fog-cutter known as the Irish coffee for some flaming rum-and-Kahlua number? It began 32 years ago, when James Louie, then a...
LET’S GET ONE THING straight: A restaurant with a French name that includes the word “salt” should know how to salt its food—all of it. When it doesn’t, you begin to worry that your tastebuds have taken to playing tricks with your head,...
A FEW WEEKS AGO, after being seated in the rustic dining room at A Cena, a new ristorante on Sellwood’s main strip, I watched as car after car pulled up out front. Out of each stepped dapper, bow-tied old chaps followed by several genteel...
THERE ARE THOSE who scoff at the idea of dipping their bacon into the maple syrup that graces their waffles at breakfast—other unorthodox combinations, like, say, foie gras ice cream probably don’t appeal to them either. And then there are those...
IT’S A TYPICALLY inauspicious evening at the intersection of NE 82nd Avenue and Oregon Street: The aroma of frying fat wafts from Pappy’s Drive-In, and a sign on Hawker’s Locker exhorts passersby to “Buy, sell, trade!” Yet the mood is slightly...
You spent much of the past seven years overseas, where you helped NPR win a Peabody award for your reporting on the war in Iraq. Were you ever in danger? I probably felt in danger more than I was actually in danger. One of my most vivid memories...
ON THE SECOND episode of last summer’s hit reality cooking contest, Top Chef: Miami, a dozen or so culinary wunderkinder must each prepare an entrée for a high-end feast. By the show’s end, predictably, one will be eliminated.
For the most part,...
THE SPARE BEDROOM of my house looks like an REI store during one of its used-gear sales, only not as organized. Where a bed and a nightstand were once visible, there is now a pile of dinged-up skis, scuffed helmets and climbing ropes snaking...
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ON A RAINY WINTER afternoon, the Miracle Theatre Group’s basement studio bears scant resemblance to the sun-baked village in southern Spain where Bodas de Sangre, the play currently being rehearsed there, takes place. There’s no sun, for one...
TRADING IN her trademark samba for more conventional sounds, Pink Martini diva China Forbes steers straight for the middle of the road on ’78, her first solo album in more than a dozen years (Heinz Records). In the interests of stylistic...
SURE, THERE ARE PLENTY of home décor stores that sell the couch, vase, or color di moda. Cielo Home is just not one of them. In fact, owners Matthew Boyes and Frederic Koeleman make a point of offering what the chain stores (and their catalogs)...
MANY ARE THE Oregonians who travel this month as a means of escaping the season. And while there’s nothing wrong with hopping a flight to Mexico and plopping your lily-white buns on la playa for a week, sometimes the best way to beat the cold...
