Another reason I love Le Pigeon

Chef Gabriel Rucker and the Le Pigeon team hold a special Halloween dinner each year.  I've read about them in the past, but earlier tonight I was able to attend this year's special meal.  Its theme was to spoof a certain spike-haired food TV personality. 

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The menu looked both appropriate to the theme and intriguing. 

Every single dish was delicious.  I'd be hard-pressed to pick a single favorite, but I did absolutely love the small cup of brisket chili,

the foie gras eggroll dish,

and the General Tsao-Kung Pao shortrib.

Heck, I truly enjoyed every course. 

As I've said many times, if you live in Portland or just visit here, you need to make Le Pigeon a regular stop on your food journey.  Rucker's inventiveness and gift for combining ingredients in unusual and unexpected ways is second to none. 

The tasting menu at Le Pigeon

is enormous, varied, and incredibly delicious.  It is also probably more food than anyone should eat at one sitting.  Nonetheless, we ordered it tonight, and, as usual, it was amazing.  Chef/owner Gabriel Rucker and his team produced seven amazing courses, one with two desserts.

I also had the non-alcoholic drink pairings, a lovely treat for a teetotaler like myself.  One of my favorite touches of the meal was this innocent-looking beverage.

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That little glass contains one of the most sinfully wonderful drinks I've ever tasted, the Foie Gras Coke Float.

Astonishingly rich and strong and delicious, this beverage alone is reason enough to visit Le Pigeon.

I've said it many times over the past decade, but it bears repeating now:  if you ever get a chance to eat at Le Pigeon, take it.  Do not miss this place.

I have to get up at 5:30 in the morning

and it's a great deal later than the timestamp on this post would suggest, so I'm going to keep this short and simple:  Le Pigeon remains an amazing, wonderful restaurant.  A group of us ate the seven-course tasting menu there tonight, and I loved every single dish.  Chef/owner Gabriel Rucker and his team produce innovative and delicious food that you absolutely should sample if you are ever in Portland--and if you live here, get down to Le Pigeon ASAP.

Do not miss Le Pigeon.

A hot day in Portland ends in a delicious meal

Temperatures here once again reached into the 90s, as they have all week.  I always expect to relax in the cool air here in the summer, but not this trip; this trip, Portland delivered the heat.

I spent the dinner hours in the cool interior of one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  Chef/owner Gabriel Rucker was working tonight, which made the usual cooking show even better than normal.

As always, every single dish was wonderful.  The stand-out was an offering not on the menu:  truffled pasta.  In this case, the Le Pigeon chefs made the pasta from scratch with Italian flour and tons and tons of black Australian truffle, so the pasta itself was infused with the delicious goodness of truffles.  They covered it in a cheese and truffle sauce, and finished the dish with--you guessed it--grated truffles.

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This bowl provided bite after bite of sex in your mouth that delivered a serious foodgasm, so rich and wonderful that I almost licked the bowl clear.  Two of us shared it, a decision that saved me some calories but that I regretted more than a few times.

If you're ever in this area, do not miss Le Pigeon.  If you're here now, rush over there, ask for this pasta, and hope it's still on the menu.

Another great salad

This one came from the fine folks at Le Pigeon, one of my favorite restaurants.

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Butter lettuce, chives, and radish slices form the healthy part of this appetizer.  The bleu cheese and dressing make it incredibly delicious but definitely diminish its healthiness.  This salad has been on the menu here for years, but I'd never ordered it.  I'm glad I finally did.

The entire meal was excellent, as always.

I recommend Le Pigeon without reservation to anyone who's close enough to visit it.

It's not always sunny in Portland

but today the sun shined all day, the skies stayed clear, and the weather proved to be fabulous.  One could not have asked for a nicer winter day.  I enjoyed all of the few moments I was outside.

Dinner tonight took me to one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  The menu was as inventive--and fattening--as always.

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If you know me well, you can already be sure what I ordered.  I started with the foie gras and uni.

This dish proved to be a riff on bacon, eggs, and pancakes, with the uni sitting atop the sour cream filling the role of the egg, the foie gras acting as the bacon, and the amazing pancake and soy maple syrup supporting it all.  Foie and uni together are so good and so bad--for health--that they should be an illegal and yet widely available couple.

My main course was an equally obvious choice:  the Kobe salisbury steak--with foie--with mushroom gravy.

In some ways, this plate of food was simply an interpretation of the Stouffer's frozen-foods classic--until I took a bite of it.  Then it proved to be so sinfully rich and good that it, like the previous course, should be illegal and highly coveted.

Out came the dessert menu.

I'd like to be able to tell you that I resisted, that I considered all I had eaten, pushed away the single sheet, and told the dessert temptation to get behind me.

I didn't, though, do any of that.

Instead, I ordered the truffled chocolate chip ice cream sandwich, because truffles!  Chocolate!  Ice cream sandwich!

Oh, my, was it delicious!  Rich and wonderful, the blending of truffles and chocolate was more grand than I would have believed.

If you live anywhere near Le Pigeon, hurry over and try these dishes before they leave the menu.

Then, plan to walk a lot.  A whole damn lot.  You won't want to stop until you've burned off a great may of these calories, because if you do stop, you might fall, and if you fall, you won't easily get up.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

Today ran insanely long, from very, very early until very late, and almost all of it was work.

The fun high point of the day was dinner at Le Pigeon, one of my all-time favorite restaurants.  We ordered the seven-course tasting menu with non-alcoholic beverage pairings, and every course was absolutely delicious.  I believe this was the best meal I've had at Le Pigeon, and that's saying something.

I would write more about the meal--and may do so later--but I am so exhausted that I simply must crash.

On the road again: Portland, day 4

Today's non-work highlights:

I had hoped to sleep a decent amount, but I woke up every 45 minutes or so with bad sinus drainage.  Thus, I got out of bed exhausted.

I started the day with either a very bad cold or a very bad sinus attack.  I can't tell which.  In either case, my nose and the skin around it are draining red wrecks--a lovely image, I know.

I had a fabulous dinner at Le Pigeon:  the seven-course tasting menu with non-alcoholic drink pairings.  Every single dish was awesome, but the foie with crab wonton (stuffed with Dungeness crab and cream cheese), a concoction that sounds wrong in many ways, was instead in classic Gabe Rucker style fantastic and easily one of the best dishes he's ever made. 

I have to crash and hope I can sleep at least a bit.  Sinus drainage is not my friend tonight, and I expect my sinuses to be bundles of pain on tomorrow's flights.  Oh, boy!

On the road again: Portland, day 4

Today the weather said, "You will work from your hotel room."  It backed up its decree with freezing rain, rain, snow flurries, and ice.  So, I worked from my hotel room, as we lost all our client meetings.  Nonetheless, the day was busy from very early until quite late.

The one break was a delicious dinner at Le Pigeon, where Chef Gabriel Rucker and his team always create incredibly tasty dishes.  I hope to do a full review of this meal later, but trust me when I say that if you are eating in Portland, you need to eat at Le Pigeon.

Tomorrow morning, I must get up way in advance of the sun to head to the airport, so I am outta here.

On the road again: Portland, day 4

Work filled most of today, as usual.  An unusual treat was the time to walk to the nearby food trucks for lunch.  I chose a sandwich from The Grilled Cheese Grill. 

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This place offers exactly what its name implies:  grilled cheese sandwiches. 

I was eating my first meal of the day, so I opted for the breakfast/lunch sandwich, The Hunter.  Wow, was it delicious, exactly what I wanted given the cool, gray skies. 

I have to confess to completely enjoying the cooler days here.  A break from summer is always nice.

Dinner was at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  Though Chef Gabriel Rucker was not on duty--he was doing a charity event--this meal was probably the best I've ever had at this restaurant.  Every single bite was amazingly good. 

The menu reflected both the place's personality and many of the great flavors available in summer ingredients. 

I started with the butter lettuce salad, which tasted even better than it looked--and it was lovely.

I couldn't resist the Hawai'i - Foie - O appetizer, so I moved to it next. 

Though the dish featured a lot of ingredients, they blended beautifully, so that every bite was a taste treat.

I probably should have stopped there, but of course I did not.  For my main, I chose the foie gras chorizo stuffed quail. 

Talk about a lot of flavors going on!  This one had three sauces, chicken chorizo stuffing laced with foie, and so many wonderful tastes that I spent a bit of time just trying to understand them all.  Once again, each mouthful of food was delicious, and the more different ingredients I tried at once, the better the bite tasted. 

I should have walked away right then, but this appeared in front of me. 

The pie of the day has become a bit of a thing at Le Pigeon, so of course I had to try the apricot boysenberry cream pie with vanilla bean ice cream.

Once again, every bite was amazing.

Well done, Le Pigeon!

If you live here or visit here, you're cheating yourself if you don't stop by this great restaurant. 

How a piece of art came to be mine

After eating a bit more than we should have at Le Pigeon last Thursday night, we decided walking a bit was a good plan.  Our path led us by some local shops, so we stopped into one, Redux, that offered a wide variety of strange goodies.  Redux turned out to be hosting a small showing by two local artists.  One of them, Adam Burke, was displaying primarily paintings of strange insects in settings that were at once both natural and otherworldly.

That's where it started.

I wandered the shop, looking at this and that, but I kept coming back to one of Burke's pieces, The Tower.  You can see it by going here and clicking through the samples until you come to one with a large blue tower in its center.  The piece struck me as decidedly alien, yet barely so.

The last thing I need is more art.  I have about five dozen framed pieces sitting on the floor, awaiting wall space for display and time from me to hang them.

Yet back to this one I came, time and again.

I almost exited the store, but then I came back again for a last look.

At which point, of course, I decided that though I most definitely did not need more art, I was going to buy this one.

It's not with me yet, because the show is still going on, but in June it should appear.

This sort of orbiting process is typically how I acquire art:  For reasons I rarely know, a piece speaks to me, I orbit it for a bit, and then I find myself opening my wallet.  I never worry whether I know the artist, or whether I like her/his body of work, or whether the piece will prove to be a good investment.  It talks to me, and then if it speaks clearly and loudly enough, I bring it home.

Wondering what to give your friend who likes to cook?

Wonder no more:  Try this cookbook from Chef Gabriel Rucker and the fine folks at Le Pigeon, one of my all-time favorite restaurants.

Yes, I already own a copy.

No, I don't make any money from you buying this, nor did Gabe ask me to plug it.

I just think it's awesome and wanted to recommend it to you all.

On the road again: Portland, day 4

The meetings ended early enough today that I was able to head downtown for an afternoon snack of amazing ice cream at Salt and Straw.  I don't love every flavor these fine folks make, but I love the vast majority of them, and I applaud their inventiveness.  For example, today I tried the pumpkin and chevre ice cream, which was the happy child of an insanely rich cheesecake and perfect pumpkin ice cream. 

I'm so glad this ice cream place is nowhere near me.

After a lot of work, dinner provided a welcome break.  Tonight's meal was at Le Pigeon, which frequent readers will recall is one of my favorite places in the whole world.  I was able to sit at the bar beside the tiny kitchen, so I had the chance to chat occasionally with gifted chef and great guy Gabriel Rucker.  Gabe is one of the folks who noticed in my novel Slanted Jack that the title character bears a great resemblance to Harry Harrison's wonderful Stainless Steel Rat.  As I've explained, that was an intentional homage to a set of books that I greatly enjoyed many years ago--as did Gabe.

The meal tonight was, as usual, exceptional.  Rucker's complex combinations frequently leave you shaking your head in wonder at all the ingredients he manages to get to play together in incredible, delicious harmony.  I cannot recommend this restaurant too highly.

Tomorrow morning, I must arise way before the butt-crack of dawn to check out and head to the airport.  Oh, boy!

On the road again: Portland, day 4

Today's culinary highlight was the seven-course tasting menu at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, two-time Beard-winning Chef Gabriel Rucker's Le Pigeon.  Sitting at the bar, getting to watch Gabe and his team work, and then eating the resulting lovely and delicious dishes is one of those treats worth flying to Portland for.  Dishes like "Foie gras ants on a log" may sound strange, but in his hands they become amazingly wonderful creations.  I loved every single course, and I'm already looking forward to my next visit here. 

I'd write more, but I have to get up at five a.m., which is more a bedtime to me than a wake-up time, so I'm calling it an early (for me) night. 

On the road again: Portland, day 3

Work meetings filled a lot of today, and work at my computer consumed almost all of the rest.  The only exception was a delicious meal at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  Chef and owner Gabe Rucker was working tonight, so I had the chance to say hi to him after consuming his seven-course tasting menu.  Highlights included the hamachi with pineapple, foie gras, and coconut, a dish that sounds downright odd but that was light and refreshing, fish with a rich citrus edge; the grilled venison, which was flavorful and not at all tough; and a riff on Thanksgiving, a sous vide turkey with prosciutto, matzo balls, mushrooms, and sage. 

Work starts very early in the morning, and despite the timestamp on this post, it's actually quite late, so I'm going to finish work and hope to grab a few hours of sleep.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

After a very, very late night working, morning today arrived entirely too early.  The vast majority of the daylight hours went to work meetings, which were interesting but which I cannot, of course, discuss.

Feeling draggy and exhausted, I turned for a pick-me-up to the small Cacao store located in the corner of the hotel.  A small glass of sipping dark chocolate beverage later, I was wired for sound and rolling on work.  I've never had a beverage that affected me as much as this one, which never fails to buzz me.

Dinner took me to one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon.  Owner and star chef Gabriel Rucker was working tonight, so I was able to sit at the bar in front of him and chat off and on as he cooked and I ate.  The meal was, as always, delicious.  It included my first taste of pork tongue, which was in Rucker's hands rich and flavorful and entirely delicious.  As I've said many times before, if I lived here, I'd eat in this place weekly.

Tomorrow morning, I head home for a few days before my travels take me to Chicago and the World Science Fiction Convention!

On the road again: Seattle, day 3 / Portland, day 1

Another day in a work trip, another day of which I can say little.

We spent the morning and lunch in the Seattle area, and then we drove to Portland.  The three-or-so-hour trip is lovely, though the traffic is almost always what would pass for rush hour back home.

Knowing that dinner would be quite late, and indulging me, we dropped by Salt & Straw, a Portland ice cream shop that has been making a lot of noise.

Boy, am I glad we did.

Salt & Straw may be my new favorite ice cream shop.  It is certainly among my top five anywhere.  Set in a corner of a corner building in a funky Portland residential-and-commercial area, it greeted us with open walls along most of one side and most of the front.  One of the breed of locally sourced ice cream makers, it proclaimed its mission loudly.

As always, click on an image to see a larger version.

Intentions are all well and good, of course, but for any type of food, the proof is in the taste.  The range of ice creams available certainly suggested both a familiarity with modern classics and a quirky eye for new flavors.

If you blow up this image and look carefully at the admittedly blurry (sorry second line after the flavor list, you'll see that the shop offers a tasting flight of four ice creams.

Yes, I did it for you, dear readers:  I ordered a flight so that I could report with some authority on the ice creams here.

In my defense, I didn't eat it all--but I must confess to having eaten most of it.  From left to right, we have here sea salt with caramel ribbons, strawberry honey balsamic with black pepper, pear with blue cheese, and chocolate with gooey brownies.  All the flavors were delicious.  The weakest, somewhat to my surprise, was the chocolate.  The sea salt with caramel flavor blended those tastes perfectly, as did the strawberry, in which the balsamic and the pepper and the citrus all merged into a whole that was vastly better than any of its parts.  The best of the bunch, though, was the pear with blue cheese.  I was skeptical, but it was amazing, managing to somehow remove all of the rough edge of the cheese and merge it perfectly with the pear.

Fortunately for me, because we were visiting Little Bird, a Portland favorite, dinner was many hours later.

That meal was as delicious as every other dinner I've eaten there.  Though my Portland favorite restaurant remains Gabriel Rucker's original place, Le Pigeon (where I will be Thursday night), Little Bird is a fine sibling and stands well on its own right.  Tonight's tasty treats included a creamy potato soup with a clam and bacon relish, and my first experience with the Le Pigeon burger.  Damn, that was a fine hamburger.

Now, work summons once again, so I will return to it.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

The day and the late night belonged to work, as usual.

The evening, though, was fun.

Dinner was at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon. Two of the guys working were relatively new to me, but the food displayed the characteristic Rucker inventiveness and great taste. My starter was a beef carpaccio but with a quail egg and caviar on it; wow, was it good. My main course, venison with foie and various herbs, was downright amazing, possibly the best venison I've ever had. I cannot recommend this small restaurant too highly.

The day we arrived in town, we noticed just up the road from the hotel a billboard for a Cirque du Soleil show, Ovo, that had started in town in early April. On the small chance that it was still here we called--and discovered to our joy that it was. A little keyboard time later, and we had front-row seats to this traveling show under the yellow-and-blue Cirque big top. Ovo focuses on insects, a theme that struck me as perfectly suited to Cirque's costumes and athletics.

It absolutely was. Ovo was a joy to watch from start to finish, with no dull moments and quite a few amazing segments. The finale, which involved trampolines and a climbing wall, was pure joy. If you get a chance to see this show, take it.

On the road again: Portland, day 2

Lunch today was at one of those Mongolian grill places in which you put a bunch of stuff in a bowl, ladle on some sauces and spices, and hand it to someone to grill on a huge round metal grill. I don't eat at these often, but I always have fun when I do, just because I like mixing a bunch of stuff and grilling it--or, in this case, watching someone else grill it. The result is always tasty, though never as cleverly delicious as I have tried to make it.

Dinner, on the other hand, was both clever and absolutely delicious, as I expected it to be because we ate at Le Pigeon. As long-time readers know, Chef/Owner Gabriel Rucker's original restaurant is one of my favorite places in the world. Small, funky, and dedicated to pursuing its own vision, Le Pigeon is one of the many culinary beacons that light the Portland night. I relax the moment I walk into it.

I normally don't post meal photos on these trips because the crappy hotel bandwidth makes the cost too high, but I decided to pay that cost tonight and show you a few things.

The main menu gives you a sense of the variety and sensibility of Le Pigeon.

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For my starter, I chose the foie on ramen.


It was an odd combination, of course; this is Le Pigeon. The slab of perfectly cooked foie gras sat atop a cake of ramen noodles that was topped with a seaweed salad and surrounded by a light broth with a very delicate taste of fish. I know, I know: it doesn't sound good. It was.

My main was the rich and tasty beef two ways.


The celery root puree provided a light, delicious starch counterpart to the strong, rich flavor of the short rib meat and the equally tasty but lighter steak slices. It was a great take on the classic steak-and-potatoes main.

The dessert options also reflected the Le Pigeon spirit.


I've already eaten all of the classic desserts, but even if I hadn't, I would have been drawn to the banana cream pie. I didn't expect it to look or taste anything like any BCP I've had before, and indeed it didn't.


Nonetheless, it was delicious, a light and sweet variation on the classic dessert that I love so much.

What a fine meal. Le Pigeon never disappoints. If you live here or ever visit here, eat there.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

Another day of all work and so not much to report on that front.

Lunch involved work but was at a nifty place, The Venetian, in Hillsboro. The Venetian is an old theater that the owners rehabbed into a combination theater and restaurant. The food is basic but tasty, and the theater is gorgeous. I wish we had something like this in Raleigh.

Dinner was at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, Le Pigeon. Chef Gabriel Rucker, who won this year's Beard for Best Rising Star in the U.S., whipped up a nine-course tasting menu for us, and every single dish in it was excellent, as always. Rucker's plates are complex, strongly flavored creations, and I enjoy them immensely.

I'd go on, but it's late and I'm exhausted, so I will say again what I have said many times before: If you're in this area or visiting it, you must eat at Le Pigeon.