McMinnville July 2024

Once spring arrives and before fall closes the summer growing season, we try to get back over to McMinnville in the Willamette Valley to shop at the farmers market and to revisit the town where we used to live before coming across the Cascades to Bend. We have a goal of making the trip once a month, centered around Thursdays, the day of the McMinnville Downtown Farmers Market.

After getting in our morning workouts, we grabbed a couple of to-go trays of sushi at Market of Choice on our way out of town for our combination breakfast-lunch. We got away from Bend at 12:30 and that put us in McMinnville at about 4pm, traffic in Salem trying to get across the bridge into West Salem being a bear.

The timing of our first trip of 2024 could not have been better. It was the prettiest trip we have ever made across the Cascades because the timing placed us right in the middle of an exquisite wildflower bloom.

The wildflower show kicked off between Tumalo and Sisters where the forest floor under the widely-spaced Ponderosa Pines was highlighted with sulfur-yellow blooms of wild buckwheats, spikes of blue lupines, and masses of yellow balsamroots. As usual, traffic is a total pain in the rear in Sisters, but the trip out was far less a pain that the return trip on Friday afternoon when traffic was backed up a mile into Sisters.

As we climbed up toward Santiam Pass, we saw more and more penstemons along the roadside, both Royal penstemons and big patches of mat-forming ones, like Cardwell's. From the pass down into the Willamette Valley, the roadsides were colored by blooming rhododendrons, lupines much larger than we see east of the mountains, acres of oxeye daisies, red and black elderberries, masses of tall yellow dandelion-looking Cat's Ears near Detroit Lake, and ditches full of digitalis, more than I’ve ever seen in one place before. As we descended into the valley proper, masses of fuchsia sweet peas and acres of white to light purple Himalayan Blackberries added to the day.

On arriving in McMinnville, we went back to our old neighborhood and dropped in on friends Pat and Mary Jo. Unfortunately for us, it is hard to go back and see what has become of our magnificent gardens. We spent about 90 minutes catching up with them before heading to check in to our room conveniently located downtown near the county office, court, and jail complex.

After resting for a few minutes and changing into dinner clothes, we walked the block to dinner. This was our first visit to Pinch which opened last December. Located in the former Red Fox Bakery space next door to McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon, it is run by Paul and Emily Bachand, former owners of an old favorite of ours, Recipe, in Newberg.

Having dined at Recipe many times in the past, we already knew that the food would be really good. While it is a new restaurant, it is really pretty much a known quantity to us. 

Champagne to Start
It Would be Rude Not to

Starters: Sardinian Carta da Musica aka Pane Carasau
Olives, Pickled Peppers, Feta, and Manchego

Barbaresco with Dinner

Isn't She Beautiful?

Grilled Octopus, a Gorgeous Plate

Rigatoni with Lamb Ragù

While our preference would have been to have grazed small plates, the menu is a more traditional appetizer-entrée style. No matter; we certainly enjoyed our dinner. While the octopus plate was absolutely gorgeous, the lamb rigatoni stole the show. 

Ann and I agonized over choosing between the two pastas, rigatoni with lamb and cavatelli neri with Dungeness crab. While we much prefer the thicker cavatelli to rigatoni as a shape, really the Barbaresco dictated our choice of lamb over crab. We did not regret the choice at all and the rigatoni could not have been more perfectly cooked. That's our style: simple food, brilliantly executed.

After dinner, while chatting with Emily, Ann had mentioned our indecision and that she was intrigued by seeing a video that they had posted of their cavatelli maker in action making the black cavatelli. Emily retrieved the maker from the kitchen so I could see it. The first thing I did on going back to our room was to order one from Amazon, the price being extremely reasonable. I am not one to buy special purpose kitchen gear, but this machine looks to be a huge labor saver and thus worth finding a place to store it in our kitchen. It will actually fit in the drawer with the rest of our pasta gear.

Coffee at Flag & Wire

Well-served and well-sated, we walked the block back to our room and soon enough it was Thursday morning. The options for good coffee in McMinnville are slim so we always go to Flag & Wire over in the Grain Station building. Their coffee is always good and it is an easy walk from anywhere downtown. If we did not have a more-than-a-decade-long relationship with another Oregon roaster, we might order our beans from Flag & Wire.

After coffee and a brief return to our room, we were on to the main reason for our trip to McMinnville, the farmers market that opens at 11:30 on Thursdays. It is one of the main things that we miss about McMinnville. We managed to fill our cooler to overflowing with green onions, sprouting cauliflower, broccolini, beets, cucumber, cavolo nero, salad mix, small carrots, chives, dill, asparagus, hakurei turnips, sugar snaps, squash blooms, chicken eggs, and duck eggs.

Our Farmers Market Haul

After stowing our two overflowing shopping bags in the refrigerator back in our room, we set out for the half block walk to Two Dogs Taphouse to see our friend Brady. Two Dogs, when it was located on Third Street at Ford, was our old stomping grounds and a must-stop after the farmers market before our walk back to our house on the very northern edge of town.

Lunch at Two Dogs

After lunch at Two Dogs, we headed out to see our former next door neighbor Barb. Her dog Sierra is in a really bad way but was super happy to see us. I'm afraid the poor thing is about at the end of her stay with us and we really feel for Barb. It was great to catch up with Barb and see Sierra, whom we've known since she was a puppy, for perhaps the final time.

Our old neighborhood has really changed. Situated on a hazelnut orchard when we lived there, it felt nestled away and secluded on the far northern edge of town, with lots of wildlife: birds, tree squirrels, ground squirrels, skunks, coyotes, and deer.

The School Board owned the orchards, having bought them some years ago for expansion purposes. The trees were no longer neither young nor in good shape and the production costs for hazelnuts no doubt far exceeded the income that they could generate, so sadly, they decided that trees had to go. And with their demise, the character of the neighborhood changed overnight. Now with the trees all cut, it seems more urban and less welcoming. We moved at a good time.

Speaking of moving, our move across the Cascades took us away from the vast hayfields that hit peak bloom in late May and early June. We could see waves of pollen on the breeze. We arrived back in the valley at peak pollen time and it really hammered Ann. I felt bad for her; on the way back from Barb's, we stopped at the drug store to get some meds for her.

After the drug store, we spent a few minutes resting back at our room before changing for dinner at Humble Spirit on Third Street. We tried this restaurant with Dyce and Rob on our last trip on our last trip over and we were impressed. We were probably even more impressed on this visit.

Pink Shrimp Rolls

Hazelnuts and Pork Belly

Hot Mess Croquette

We started with Champagne and an order of shrimp rolls, hazelnuts with pork belly, and a croquette called a hot mess, a dish we ordered on spec, not really understanding what it was. It turned out to be very similar to a charcuterie dish that I used to make at the restaurant in which I would pick shreds of cooked meat (often turkey neck meat) and pack it into a loaf mold. Then I would set it with highly reduced stock and after refrigerating, would slice it and fry it to serve as an appetizer. In many respects, it is similar to souse or headcheese, but served warm. This one, made of pork, was breaded and fried and served as a croquette. Delicious.

Clams and Chorizo

We still had some Champagne left, so we ordered a dish of small clams braised with chorizo and Sherry to go with it, before moving on to red wine and red wine food. The unusual thing is that it was served on top of a croustade smeared with a beef liver pâté. Ann and I fought over this bread that was soaked in the braising liquid.

2010 Tondonia, Still Too Young

We had been chatting with our server all night long and it is was clear to us that he is as passionate about food as we are. In the course of talking about the restaurant sourcing many of its products from its own farm, Ann mentioned that we are looking for a supplier for a skin-on pork belly from which to make a porchetta for the holidays. She wondered if their farm might be amenable. And while we didn't get an answer other than it would not hurt to ask, it seems a seed was planted.

Unbeknownst to us, the restaurant was hosting a large table of family that evening for which the chef had prepared a special meal, including porchetta. After we ordered a red to accompany dinner, our server asked us to hold off on ordering anything else and went to find out if there was any porchetta we could have. He did; there was; we killed it. As good as the porchetta itself was, the beluga lentils it was sat upon were fantastic, having been cooked with smoky ham hocks. 

Porchetta, Beluga Lentils, Fennel and Herb Salad
Cherry Gastrique

After killing the porchetta, we got a piece of cheese with which to finish our remaining wine. All in all, a terrific meal and one that reinforced for us that Humble Spirit might be the best restaurant in McMinnville.

The following morning, I packed up our vegetables and we set out for coffee once again at Flag & Wire. Caffeined up, we headed south toward Salem, getting gas and sandwiches for lunch along the way. Our goal was to stop at Silver Falls State Park on the way home for a nice walk which is described in the next post.

Eurasia, Virginia Beach

After such a wonderful night the evening before, it was really disappointing to think about leaving Asheville, if not because Asheville is such a wonderful place then because it meant that our only vacation period of the year was quickly drawing to a close and that we would soon be staring workaday reality in the face again for another 51 weeks. Our final breakfast at Carolina B&B started with fantastic blackberries in a basil-infused syrup with loosely whipped vanilla cream. After this, we were served a bacon and broccoli egg bake with asparagus and a banana muffin. It was a great breakfast, but we couldn't linger, as much as we would have liked to, facing a 7-hour drive to Virginia Beach.

Delicious Blackberries

Bacon and Broccoli Egg Bake, our Final Breakfast in Asheville

We were checked out and on the road by 10am, tentatively putting us into Virginia Beach around 5pm which was fine but I was worried about Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. We didn't have dinner reservations until 8:15 so there was no real rush. The drive east and north from Asheville was a long boring interstate trip with no views, but we did note that the rest stops in NC are super, clean, and very well maintained.

Leaving Asheville, it was a beautiful sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s and we were rolling with open windows, blaring classic rock on the radio. By the halfway point though, it was clouding over and getting noticeably chillier. By the Virginia state line and cruising east on US 58, we had the windows up and were struggling to find any radio station not playing Christian music or conservative talk. Both my families are from Southside Virginia but that still doesn't make it feel like home. And what a culture shock after leaving the crazy and totally leftwing Asheville.

Seven hours after departing peaceful spectacular Asheville, we arrived in the land of the 6-lane interstates and high-rise buildings just in time for bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic and a low gray ceiling that shrouded everything in a mist too large to be a fog and not enough to be rain. It was a cold, dreary, damp, aggravating afternoon when we pulled into the hotel near the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts where Carter and his fellow students from all over the state would give their performance on Saturday afternoon.

After resting for a little while at the hotel, it was a dark, rainy, crappy night when we set out for Eurasia just a few blocks off the beach. Friends had recommended that we try this restaurant, located in a strip mall. Sorry in advance for the crappy photos; the lighting was just low enough to make everything on the cellphone camera grainy.

We started with cocktails. Ann had a cocktail called Absolutely Perfect made from Absolut Mandarin, St. Germain, cranberry juice, and prosecco. It was quite nice and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't rip it off for the restaurant. Jazzed by the Crusta that I had at Rhubarb, I asked for a Sidecar and I sort of got a Sidecar, but really, in a rocks glass with a little ice and a slab of lemon? Not the best bar work that I have ever seen.

"Absolutely Perfect," A Really Good Cocktail

A Sidecar?

I was just glancing at the wine list in preparation for digging into it when I saw the same wine we had the night before in the 2012 vintage and I looked no further. This was equally delicious as the 2001 but without the benefit of bottle age. It was however, way, way less expensive.

Baby Barbaresco

As usual, I pretty much let Ann figure out the food while I figured out the wine. She decided on Ahi Tuna Tartare with ginger, sriracha honey, diced egg white, quail egg, and wontons. If you're going to do a dish that everyone does, you need to step up your game to make it shine. Sadly, this tuna was really middle of the pack. The tuna itself was underseasoned and needed texture. The egg whites were crudely whacked making me wonder about the care that the kitchen actually puts into their dishes.

Tuna Tartare

Served alongside the tuna was a beet and burrata salad with "grains" (whatever they were), an avocado mousse, preserved lemon, black pepper crackers, and toasted almonds. The dish really didn't hang together as a salad for me, the burrata was OK but not memorable, and the beets were woefully undercooked.

Beet and Burrata Salad

Next up was olive-oil poached octopus with orange, grilled scallion, hoisin, and a plantain chip. The octopus was fairly good, but I don't understand how the other ingredients play together or help the octopus in any way. It reminds me of a junior cook throwing a bunch of ingredients at a plate because they sound cool.

Olive Oil-Poached Octopus

The best dish of the night and the one that hung together best concept- and flavor-wise was rock shrimp with cavatelli, oyster mushrooms, and ramps in a butter sauce. The delicate shrimp and pasta was buried in an avalanche of cheese and there was way too much butter sauce for the amount of ingredients. This could have been a stellar dish, yet it ended up being heavy-handed and clumsy.

Shrimp and Cavatelli

Ann was also intrigued by the dish called Chef's Steak & Eggs: Guinness-braised short ribs, white polenta, crispy poached egg, and braising jus. The egg was really well done but the rest of the dish wasn't at all memorable. I'd hoped for some awesome short ribs; they weren't.

Steak and Eggs

We wanted to have more wine but with us having to drive and it being dark, rainy, and us in an unfamiliar place, that wasn't a good idea. So I took a chance and asked the server if we could get another bottle of wine to go along with a cheeseplate. She made both happen in fairly short order. Back at the hotel, we had our dessert: cheese and Barbaresco from Dixie cups.

Barbaresco in Dixie Cups

Out on the Town, Asheville NC

After our late lunch at HomeGrown at which I only ate a fun watercress salad to save room for dinner, we went back to the B&B to rest, shower, and get ready for Happy Hour on the front porch. Back to the swing, we stayed for a serenade by the Song Sparrows and a glass of wine before heading downtown to celebrate our final night in Asheville and our final true night of vacation before heading to Virginia Beach to watch Carter perform in his concert.

The night before, Neil had suggested to us that before we went to Rhubarb for dinner, we should go to the Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in the Grove Arcade for a little pre-game. It sounded kind of strange and he mentioned nothing about dogs (dogs?) but he seemed rather insistent that we would like it. Being a sucker for Champagne, I figured it might be worth a stop to have a glass of bubbly before dinner, but I was wholly unprepared for the ridiculously eclectically cool experience that is this bastion of hip urbanity in downtown Asheville.

I was kind of stunned (Screw that. I was totally stunned) when I walked in the door. Think upscale smoking room meets library meets swank bar meets hipster coffee shop with gay queen over-the-top attitude. Blacks, reds, luxurious leatherclad furnishings, warm and eclectic lighting, nooks and crannies, marble and brass: it's all way, way too much to take in at a glance. Think exposed industrial hip-warehouse HVAC, throwback schoolhouse lighting, red railinged mezzanine overlooking oriental-motif carpets, moosehead on the wall, leatherbound books, heavy drapes, grandfather clock, espresso bar, and dogs, dogs, dogs. Can you even wrap your head around all this?

Ever Seen This in a Bookstore?

This Explains it All. Not Really.

As I was standing in the entry trying to take things in, letting my eyes adjust from being outside in the sunlight, and generally trying to avoid Mary Poppins scolding me ("Close your mouth please, Ed. We are not a codfish."), Ann spied dogs, abruptly left me, and made a bee-line directly for the dogs. You now know where I rank on Ann's hierarchy, somewhere way south of dogs.

Dogs in a Bookstore?

Meanwhile, I spied this lovely collection of sparklers on the bar counter and made my way to a stool where I started to go through the wonderfully curated list of Champagnes and other wines.

So Many Choices

After her dog fix, Annie finally joined me at the bar for what turned out to be two glasses each of Jacques Copinet brut. I didn't know Copinet, but I do now. It's really good grower Champagne.

Dogs and Champagne? Annie's in Love!

Marble Bar, Engraved Stemware, $$$$

Really Nice Champagne

We reluctantly had to get going to make our 8:00 reservation at Rhubarb a couple blocks away. When we got there, Ann asked the hostess if we could sit outside and she predicted a 15-20 minute wait for a table, so we sat at the bar until about 8:25 waiting for a table to clear. The first thing that I noticed was real fruit, real eggs, and a collection of bitters on the bar, a clear indicator that this was a serious bar making serious cocktails.

Ann was looking for something different and not sweet so the bartender suggested a Rhubarb Collins made from vodka and house-made strawberry-rhubarb soda. I took a chance on the bartender and ordered a Crusta, an old cocktail that is the forerunner of the modern-day Sidecar. The bartender had never heard of it before so I ran him through it. Aside from the garnish, which should be a wide strip of lemon rind, it was perfect and so superbly balanced. I complimented him on the fine work and tipped accordingly. It is so hard to find a quality bar where we live. Rhubarb has an excellent bar.

Crusta Cocktail

We finally got seated outside in perfect weather and watched the street performers on Biltmore Avenue while we were waiting for our menus and the wine list.

Enjoying the Street Show

Chef John Fleer is widely known for doing creative food and we were really looking forward to sampling his menu. As we like to do, when we don't do tastings, we like to sample several small plates to get a broader perspective on a chef and the kitchen.

The Rhubarb Menu

Some of the Street Performers

My first order of business, while Ann decided what we were going to order, was to find a bottle of wine. The list is quite a bit smaller than I might have imagined a list for a restaurant of this caliber would be, but it seemed to be fairly carefully curated with some interesting wines, though it seemed weighted to French wines especially on the red side. I didn't spend much time on the list because almost immediately I spotted a Barbaresco from a producer with a good reputation. The only question in my mind was that it was a 2001 vintage, and though Barbaresco certainly wants and can take that kind of age, it's always a crapshoot about how it has been stored. I needn't have worried about that: from first whiff of it's lavish perfume of raspberries, tea, tar, roses, violets, and dried leaves to the final sip with it's lip-smacking acidity, the bottle was stellar.

2001 Sori Paitin Barbaresco, So Good!

Fried hominy with chile and lime was outstanding. I want more, more, more. Think ancho-lime Doritos for grown ups.

Fried Hominy! Amazing!

The goat cheese burrata was tender and really well made. The beet, strawberry, and basil garnishes didn't do a lot for me, however. Some Benton's ham and ramp pesto (to put a Southern drawl on prosciutto and pesto) would have been awesome.

Goat Cheese Burrata

The rabbit-leek rillettes sounded better than they actually were, being melted to the point where they were runny as you can see in the photo. The house-made "sel-tines" were outstanding.

Rabbit Leek Rillettes

Beef belly! What a great concept! I look forward to trying it myself. The result was really beefy and intense in flavor, though a bit lean for me. I would have loved a slice with more fat. The farrotto on which it sat was a loser, being overcooked to mushy blandness.

Beef Belly with Saffron Farrotto

We ordered a cheese plate and asked our server to pick some of her local favorites. Since the cheese plate ended up coming last, it made a great dessert and accompaniment to the last drops of Barbaresco. I couldn't really tell you the names now, but the plainest looking of the bunch on the far right turned out to be the most awesome. I think it was Castanet from Three Graces Dairy in Marshall NC.

Local Cheeses for Dessert

After dinner, as we walked back through downtown to the B&B across I-240, we got to further experience the street life of this eclectic and vibrant town, taking in the various street musicians, artists, and characters. And sadly our arrival back at the B&B pretty much concludes the story of our stay in Asheville. It's wonderful place to visit though it's a little too big for us to want to live there.

Ashby Inn

Sunday, I wanted to take Ann out for a nice lunch to celebrate our anniversary, which quite naturally given my business, falls on a work night this year. There's a new chef at the Ashby Inn in Paris, Virginia and I wanted to go meet him and see what his food is all about, professional curiosity if you will. Moreover, customers ask me daily about his food and whether they should dine there and I wanted to be able to finally answer their incessant questions.

A couple of my former employees work there so I asked one of them to set up a lunch for us. I had asked that we not order, that the chef send us whatever he thought was a fair representation of dishes, so that we could get to know his cooking style. Also, knowing that it was Sunday after a hard Saturday night, I sent word to keep it simple.

We arrived about 1:45, just before the close of their brunch seating at 2:00pm. I let them choose the hour of our dining to best fit their reservation book. Despite it being a rainy Sunday, the parking lot was nearly full when we arrived.

St. Innocent Pinot, A Gift

No sooner than we had sat down than Stuart Brennen, the sommelier, appeared at our table with a bottle of St. Innocent Pinot as a gift from Rory, the former employee who set up our lunch.

Smoked Salmon, Avocado Mousse, Egg, Pickled Ramps

The first course was this smoked salmon plate which was mainly fine, but the avocado mousse tasted to me to be made from overripe avocado.

Chanterelles, Braised Chicken, Frittata

The second course was this goat cheese frittata with a sauté of chanterelles and some pieces of braised chicken. It was plated with a sauce that was entirely too sweet.

Crepe, Goat Cheese, Honey, Walnuts

This crepe filled with goat cheese came next and was so sweet it could have been dessert. It should have been in retrospect, even though it is offered on the menu as a savory course.

My Lovely Annie

The Star of our Meal

After the Pinot, which was a very young fruit forward wine typical of Eola-Amity and the 2012 vintage, we started talking to Stuart about another wine to follow. I mentioned that we have been drinking a lot of Nebbiolo recently and we discussed the local Virginia producers. We ultimately decided to go Italian (never any question in my mind) and Stuart returned some minutes later with this bottle of Marchesi di Barolo Barbaresco, a very fine choice. It was the best thing we had all day.

Dessert

The prior "savory" crepe course was sweeter and more dessert-like than this almond sponge, meringue, and lemon curd dessert. Although this dessert looks pretty, it certainly is not the kitchen's best work, the cake being tired and a touch dry and the figs being underripe.

Relaxing Outside, Barbaresco in Hand

Because of the timing of the second bottle of wine and the dessert course, we had plenty of wine left. Not wanting to keep them from turning the dining room, we asked if we could take our wine outside and finish it, which we did. The rain had subsided and it was pleasant enough, in a soupy kind of way, to sit out back and peer through the mist.

The Ashby Grounds are Beautiful

The grounds certainly are beautiful and there are many times when I wish my restaurant were situated in such a lovely setting, but then I think about the upkeep and shudder. Annie and I had a great time and truly enjoyed the Barbaresco: that part of our mission was a great success. My mission to meet the new chef and understand his food was pretty much an utter failure. I still really don't know any more about him and his food than I knew before we ate there.