Honeymoon: Thistle Restaurant, McMinnville OR

Before we left Virginia, Ann had booked us for the Chef's Whim tasting at Thistle in downtown McMinnville. Chef Eric Bechard, sadly, has done a lot of damage to his reputation locally and many, many of the locals were warning us off the place because of Eric's allegedly hotheaded, confrontational nature. Being a chef myself, I wasn't deterred and I am glad we went: this food is very similar to what I make and so I felt right at home.

We never got to experience Eric because he is off in Portland at his newest restaurant The Kingdom of Roosevelt, so his understudy Kyle was in the tiny open kitchen, but I can say that Eric's partner Emily is quite the charming hostess, sommelier, and orchestrator of the tiny dining room that might seat 24. And of all the many wonderful meals we ate in Oregon, this was the one that pleased us the most and the one that is most on par with the food we produce at One Block West.


Cognac Crusta Cocktail

Our reservation was for 7:00 and we arrived at 6:30 to sample the much lauded drink mixing prowess of bartender Patrick. Emily immediately showed us to the bar which is a side room just off to the right of the entrance. Ann's first drink was a Cognac Crusta, a classic cocktail and progenitor of the Sidecar made from Cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice, simple syrup, and Fee's old fashioned bitters poured into an old coupe rimmed with orange and sugar. For me, he mixed a Brooklyn, which is similar to a Manhattan and made from rye, vermouth, Luxardo maraschino, and Amer Picon.

The two things that I noticed were that there were no mixers on his bar, just piles of lemons, limes, and oranges. And second, I noted that that Patrick always uses a jigger for his drinks, so "if you come back in a year, you get the exact same cocktail." In between his running back and forth to the dining room to serve tables, we got to chatting about cocktails and talking about St. Germain in particular, which prompted him to make a mixture of lime juice, gin, simple syrup, St. Germaine, sparkling wine, and a shot of Fee Brothers celery bitters for Ann's second cocktail, which tasted a lot like grapefruit juice. My second cocktail was made from Dewar's and something with a clove flavor, possibly Becherovka.


Brooklyn Cocktail

Because we booked a tasting menu, we didn't need to order off the nightly menu which is written on a large chalkboard in the dining room. Depending on where you're seated you might not be able to see the chalkboard and might have to get up from your seat to go look at it, something that has caused the restaurant endless grief on TripAdvisor and Yelp. I'm just going to say this once: you people need to relax and get over yourselves or just start going to chain restaurants where everything is predictable. So you have to remove your precious behind from a chair to go look at the menu. BFD! Grow up.

We didn't order wine either, leaving ourselves in Emily's capable hands and she made great use of their extensive half-bottle selection to provide wines for our dinner. I didn't have the energy to wade through what looked like a deep, well thought out, and most reasonably priced wine list, though I could knock it for being a bit heavy on French wines where it could have been a touch heavier on local wines to go with the cuisine. But frankly, I was on vacation and didn't really want to think about the choice of wines. Besides, although I know my own list, I have no clue about other restaurants' lists and though I can make educated guesses about wines, I always ask for help in making my selections, when help is available.

For our first course, Emily brought us glasses of Blanquette de Limoux, a delightful sparkling wine from the southwest of France, typically made from the Mauzac grape. This was paired with a plate of delightful Kumamoto oysters with mignonette. I love these small oysters with the intricate shells, oysters of Japanese origin which were introduced to American Pacific waters in the last century.

Kumamoto Oysters, a Rare Treat for East Coasters

Click to See the Awesome Detail on This Shell

After clearing the oysters, Emily brought a half bottle of Domaine Huet Vouvray Sec "Clos du Bourg" 2010 that we drank with our next two courses. First up, a course of two salads: mustard greens and chard with radishes and a yogurt dressing and an arugula salad with candied hazelnuts with preserved lemon and herb vinaigrette.

Arugula, Candied Walnuts, Preserved Lemon Vinaigrette

Mustard, Chard, Radishes and Yogurt Dressing

One of the two standout dishes of the night was the plate of tiny radishes, split in half, and tossed in warm butter, then sprinkled with sea salt. This is a dish a chef can love. It just says "Spring is here!" in a perfect way and it takes a confident chef to let the ingredients do the talking, which is why I like this restaurant so much. It's about the ingredients more than it is about the chef, just like my restaurant is. Some people don't get that and I am sure that Thistle could take a lot of heat for this dish from customers claiming that they didn't do anything, that anyone could make this dish. Those people just don't get it and never will.

Radishes, Butter, Salt: Sublime

It was about now that Emily brought a half bottle of Chehalem Pinot Noir 2007 Reserve to the table for the next two cold courses, pork rillettes and steak tartare. The rillettes were great and as good as the ones that we serve at the restaurant. The steak tartare Ann loved better than the one we do at the restaurant. I prefer more texture in the meat, she prefers less: this was very soft. In any case, it is splitting hairs. This tartare was great.

Nice to Get an Older Vintage

Delicious Rillettes, as Good as my Own

Splendid Steak Tartare

Then it was on to two warm courses: a saffron yellow omelette filled with spinach, goat cheese, and what looked to be rapini tips, followed by a bowl of stinging nettle gnocchi. The omelette was workmanlike but not particularly memorable. On the other hand, the gnocchi were fantastic, the best dish of a stellar line up and the single best dish of our entire trip.

Omelette Stuffed with Rapini, Goat Cheese, and Spinach

Stinging Nettle Gnocchi: Best Dish of the Trip

And finally on to the hot meat courses, the first of which was pan-roasted ling cod steak on a sauté of morels, asparagus, and fiddleheads, well seasoned with super crispy skin that I stole without Ann seeing. This fish was in sharp contrast to that which we had the evening before at the Irish Table. The vegetable sauté is one that we do frequently in the spring and is a classic with fish.



Delicious and Perfectly Cooked Ling Cod

You can see from the photo of the fish that the sun is setting fast and we're just about out of light for photos, so this will be the end of the photos, even though we had two more dishes in our dinner. It was at this point on one of her forays to the ladies room that Ann picked up Tony, a 75-year old bar rat who joined us at Ann's invitation (Emily rolled her eyes at me) and regaled us with tales of his Navy days. I might have preferred to have been on a solo date with my wife, but what is a guy to do? Anns are going to be Anns. Speaking of restrooms, just to the right of the bar is a door labeled "Yes!" and when Ann asked Patrick if they had a restroom, he pointed and theatrically trilled "Yes!"

Patrick's Prop

After the fish plate was cleared away, Emily brought us each a glass of Chinon to go with the beef, our next course. I just loved her wine choices of underappreciated French appellations that most Americans don't know, wines on which I cut my proverbial wine drinking teeth. We were served a combo plate of medium rare beef hanger steak with a big chunk of spare rib as well. The hanger in particular had super flavor.

Our dessert was a lemon panna cotta with rhubarb compote, which I have gleefully stolen for my own restaurant now that rhubarb is coming out of our ears. Because it was served in an 8-ounce canning jar, they didn't have to use as much gelatin as for a panna cotta that has to stand on its own after being unmolded, so the texture was very light and silky, softer than crème brûlée.

The whole experience was relaxed, fun, and refreshingly non-pretentious. The best way for me to sum up this meal is that it was in the top five restaurant meals I have ever had and that the food could have passed for my own at my restaurant. I would be a regular at Thistle if I were in McMinnville and not cooking for a living!

Honeymoon: Irish Table, Cannon Beach OR

Monday April 29, Cannon Beach OR

The Irish Table is the restaurant that the Sleepy Monk coffeehouse becomes after the coffee crew goes home at 4pm. Or is it the other way around? And on a Monday night, is one of the few restaurants open in Cannon Beach. They don't take reservations, but we called ahead and were told that a table would likely be open at 7:30. It seemed to be an early crowd; the place was rocking when we arrived, but was all done by about 8:30, still, not a bad crowd for a Monday night.

I like the place; I liked it in the morning as a coffee house and I liked it in the evening as a restaurant. What I most liked about it aside from the rustic décor that I have already described in the Sleepy Monk post are the people. Crystal and Sean Corbin and Sean's brothers run the place and they are extremely warm and friendly people. Crystal is the chef and everyone else pitches in. And they seem to be having fun, which is something that you have to do to make a long run in this crazy business.


We Started with Delicious Soda Bread and Butter

If you're a wino, the wine list is extremely limited, but after all, the place is an Irish gastropub of sorts, so no big surprise there. The menu is also extremely limited with 5-6 appetizers and 5-6 entrées. I'm OK with that. As long as what you do is first rate, I can be OK with a menu that consists of a single item.


Domain Serene: Overpriced

Sean's brother Luke was our affable server and he brought us a couple of nice Riedel glasses without our having to ask when we ordered the Domaine Serene Evenstad 2008. Ann noted that not everyone was drinking from decent glassware. I enjoyed this juicy and highly ranked Pinot, but there is no bang for the buck. I've tasted scores of wines that I like better at a fraction of the price.

We started with Curried Mussels, which proved to be big plump Penn Cove mussels in a very tasty broth with shallots and cream. Crystal used a deft hand with the curry that other chefs have used to destroy dishes. Alas, the mussels were just slightly undercooked (another 60 seconds on the heat and they would have been perfect) and the tasty broth was too acidic for even a huge acid fiend like me. It was too dark inside the candlelit restaurant for the photo of the mussels to work.

We also had the roasted beet salad with greens, pickled onions, Cashel blue cheese, toasted hazelnuts, and a citrus vinaigrette on the sweet side with honey. The presentation surprised me: each of the ingredients was composed on top of the greens; I was expecting it all to be tossed together. Funny how we start to picture a dish before it is served! I loved this salad except for the beets. They were a bit woody and undercooked.


Beet Salad: Nice Presentation, Vast Quantity

And oh by the way, the portions are vast. One appetizer would have been plenty.


Ling Cod on Potatoes

For one entrée, we ordered roasted ling cod with roasted fingerlings, grape tomatoes, some kind of shredded green (I couldn't see in the dark), and a very light creamy lemon sauce that Luke referred to as an aïoli. The ling cod was beautifully cooked, but wasn't seasoned, enough or at all it would seem. Moreover, I really didn't get the whole presentation of fish atop a pile of roasted potatoes with some grape tomatoes strewn about. Roasted potatoes and mild white fish just don't work in my culinary lexicon.

When I see roasted fingerlings on a menu like this, I think cop out. It seems the kind of dish you would throw on as a special at the last second because you need something to fill out the menu and that is all you have left in the cooler. It seems just the idea that I would have rejected out of hand in a menu meeting if one of the line cooks had brought it up. Now maybe take that lemon idea and do a lemon thyme-infused potato tart topped with greens and fish, maybe, maybe that's something to work with.


Irish Stew on Colcannon

It was a chilly evening and the Irish stew on colcannon sounded just about perfect for the weather. It turned out to be our least favorite dish of the meal, being too heavy on the sticky sauce which was somewhere between a glace and a demiglace. The sauce wanted to be lifted with some acidity to help offset the mouth-coating nature of the super-reduction. Sadly, I couldn't taste the lamb for the sauce.

After dinner, we spent a good while chatting with Crystal (and Sean) and swapping war stories and then took our leave into the chilly darkness to go back to the motel. All in all, we had a good meal despite the technical issues. We would go back, but more for the people than the food.