It's the middle of the night,

I'm in Portland, I ate an amazing dinner at Castagna, and I am falling asleep.

That's all I got.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

I feel bad about writing all of these short entries, but at the end of these incredibly long work days, they're all I have the energy to do.  Today was entirely work except for a lovely dinner at Castagna, one of the best restaurants in Portland.  Executive Chef Justin Woodward creates exciting, modernist dishes that evoke the area and rely heavily on local ingredients.  If you live here or are visiting here, do not miss the chance to eat a world-class meal from Woodward and his team. 

I hope to do a longer review of the meal later, but now I must finish work and finally crash.

On the road again: Portland, day 3

Today, the rains came, and I ended up walking in them on multiple occasions, so I was soaked many times.  So it goes. 

Dinner, the only part of the day I can discuss, was a lovely meal at Castagna, a Portland restaurant that mixes modernist techniques with great local ingredients.  Executive Chef Justin Woodward draws on his experiences at WD-50, Noma, and Mugaritz to create dishes that are highly evocative of the Northwest, absolutely delicious, and always delightful and surprising.  I recommend it highly.

On the road again: Portland, day 2

Another day of meetings, another day I can't discuss much.  I can say that I love working in the tech industry, because new, exciting developments occur all the time!

Dinner was at another of my favorite Portland restaurants, Castagna.  Executive Chef Justin Woodward routinely creates one of the area's most adventurous and exciting menus. Tonight's was no exception, with five (or so, I lost count) little dishes as the "snacks" course delighting our palates even before the main eight courses started. 

As always, click on a picture to see a larger version.

To give you just one bit of food porn, here's the penultimate course, a dessert exploring grapefruit in different ways. 

It was wonderful, evocative of all the aspects of grapefruit and tasty in every bite. 

As I've said before, if you're in this area, you need to eat at Castagna. 

On the road again: Portland, day 2

Most of today went to work, as you would expect from one of these trips. 

At lunchtime, however, I took a longish break and wandered among the vendors at the mid-week farmers' market near the hotel, cut through a lovely craft shop, and wound my way to the food trucks.  After walking the one-block-square circuit of trucks, I settled on a delicious three-cheese grilled-cheese sandwich to which I opted to have them add a fried egg and some thick-cut bacon.  Damn, it was good.

A rare lunch-time dessert was a Ruby Jewel ice cream sandwich back on the edge of the farmers' market, a new flavor--dark chocolate cookie with salty caramel ice cream--that was obviously too good to resist. 

I ate the cookie while sitting on a bench staring through the slowly rustling leaves of the huge trees at the perfect pale blue sky beyond, an image I captured with my iPhone and will share later, time and bandwidth permitting.

I could have sat there all day.

Dinner was a delicious, as always, meal at Castagna, where Executive Chef Justin Woodward beautifully merges modernist cuisine techniques with local ingredients.  If you live here or visit here, you owe it to yourself to give this place a try. 

I'd post more, but it's the middle of the night (despite what the timestamp says), and more work awaits, so I'm outta here. 

On the road again: Portland, day 2

You know I won't tell you about my work meetings on these trips, so don't even ask. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

What I will tell you about is dinner, which was an oh-my-God, how-did-I-not-eat-here-earlier extraordinary meal at Castagna.

Let's start with your action item: If you live anywhere near Portland or will be coming here, make your reservations now. Go for the tasting menu, as we did. Yeah, the $95 per person cost isn't cheap, but if you need to sell a little plasma to pay for it, you'll be glad you did.

Every single dish we tasted--the ten on the tasting menu, plus five small warm-ups evocative of bar snacks that have gone through a magic machine and come out heavenly--was delicious and beautiful and playful and told a story. Every one involved your taste, your smell, your vision, your heart, and your head.

Woodward combines the most modern food chemistry techniques with local ingredients and a strong focus on the season. Evocative of the way Adria never let his love of cooking and science techniques overshadow his love of the food of his region, Woodward's dishes always told stories even as they appeared in unexpected designs with amazing flavors.

For example, a dish innocently named on the menu as

Chanterelles with young pine, leaves and watercress

appeared almost as a bit of forest undergrowth, brown and rich and fertile--and also amazingly delicious.

Many restaurants that focus on modern techniques are all about subtle tastes, but not Castagna. Woodward embraces strong flavors, so that each dish delivered a powerful set of tastes, all of them complementary.

I've also found that many of those same restaurants fall down in the dessert department. Again, not Castagna. When we talked with him, Woodward mentioned having spent time making pastries at WD50, and that experience showed in the extremely strong three desserts on the menu.

For example, the dish called

Huckleberries with walnuts and fig milk

was like a cobbler that had grown up, gone to New York, gotten a three-piece-suit job on Wall Street, and then returned years later wiser and ready to embrace the virtues of its home town. A delicious sprawl of all those ingredients and more, every bite of this deconstructed dessert was a treat.

I could go on and on, but you get the point: Go to Castagna and let Woodward and his team work their culinary magic on you.