Portland, Days One and Two

We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, after a long but mercifully trouble-free connection through Los Angeles. A much needed vacation. Our hotel, the deLuxe, though just outside the heart of downtown, was very nice, quite luxurious, with friendly and professional staff and one of the more comfortable beds I recall finding at a hotel. Our room - the most basic and least expensive - could have been a tad larger and could have benefited from an armchair, but on balance, it was a more than adequate base of operations.

Somewhat unpacked and marginally refreshed, we walked through the heat of late-afternoon downtown to Nel Centro, a hip Italian joint located in the Hotel Modera (a former Days Inn dressed up in imitation mid-century modern duds) for a happy hour-cum-early dinner. The patio, though attractive, was crowded and lacked any shade whatsoever, so we settled in at the bar for drinks and a couple of delicious small plates. The crowd was young and fashionable - a bit too much for us - but on balance we enjoyed it.

We had no plans for the rest of the evening, so we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel while admiring the downtown architecture and whiled some time away at the Driftwood Room, apparently legendary around Portland. When the hotel was thoroughly renovated a couple of years ago, the regulars fretted over the old bar's fate, but the new owners resurrected it in its original form - walls covered with planks of wood, pieces of namesake driftwood adorning the room, the organic curve of the bar and an almost total darkness, broken up only by a few votives on the small tables and a handful of obliquely placed colored footlights that spotlit the walls without really illuminating anything. My negroni was perfectly proportioned and delicious.

We started our Saturday morning with a breakfast at Mother's, a pilgrimage spot for locals and tourists alike. Arriving a few minutes after the 9:00 a.m. opening time, we found chaotic crowds but were seated almost right away, although not in the main velvet and brass room that contains the bar. The food - fresh berry pancakes for J. and wild salmon hash for me - was delicious, to say nothing of Portland's famous Stumptown coffee, served in an insulated French press and worth every penny of the $7.50 they charged for it.

We took our time finishing breakfast, then gradually made our way to the Saturday Market, a Portland institution, but not before making a detour into the legendary Second Avenue Records. The Market, though lively, proved to be a disappointment. I was hoping for serious local artists exhibiting and selling their work, but although we did see some impressive photography and even one artist who constructed her images out of long sequences of microscopic numbers, on balance we found too many cheesy t-shirts and flowing tie-dye dresses and not enough other things.

Tiring of the market (and probably spending more time there than it warranted), we strolled South along the Willamette River through the unseasonably hot and sunny day, admiring Portland's numerous bridges and eventually arriving at some impressive looking but very new and thus still isolated residential high-rises and, just beyond, one of the more outlandish examples of Portland's preoccupation with public transit -- the Aerial Tram terminal. The Tram took us to the OSHU campus at the top of the hill, where we got an excellent view of snow-covered Mt. Hood, about 45 miles to the South-East and took a few pictures in the small sculpture garden before heading back and catching the streetcar to the Pearl District.

The Pearl is probably the quintessence of pre-recession Portland - hyper-modern and undoubtedly very green condo blocks, boutiques selling hideous urban clothing, chic-looking restaurants. On the whole, though, the neighborhood did less for me than I expected. Some of the residential architecture, to be sure, was far more attractive and engaging than anything I have seen most other places - rooftop gardens, asymmetrically cantilevered balconies, matte exterior paint in muted but contrasting colors. But the neighborhood, while it had sterilized itself of the original grit so plentiful in the rest of the city, did not replace it with dense sidewalk life you might find in a city like San Francisco. On a Saturday afternoon, it felt empty and sterile. Sweaty and tired by this point, we escaped briefly into the Deschutes brewery for a pint of one of their delicious ales, then headed back to the hotel to clean up for dinner.

We had a reservation at Wildwood, located in the Nob Hill area of Portland, and having run out of time to walk or take the streetcar, we ended up experiencing our one cab ride in Portland. The driver, with whom we chatted amiably throughout the ten-minute drive to the restaurant, was a fellow in his mid-twenties, well-spoken and obviously educated. Not something you find in other large or even medium-sized American cities (and small ones have no need for cabs at all these days). He was only the latest example of what I had been observing since the moment we stepped off the airplane. All service jobs in Portland are done by - I have no slick euphemism to employ here - young white people. The city was eerily immigrant-free. I would have to wait another day to find out precisely why that was.

Our dinner at Wildwood proved to be delicious. I started with tiny house-made gnocchi served with fava beans, morel mushrooms and bits of bacon. J. opted for greens with feta, heirloom tomatoes and peas. Both were delicious, with mine decidedly more substantial. For the main course, this being our first proper dinner in the Northwest, J. chose Chinook salmon served over potatoes and green beans, sauced with just a drop of brown butter. Simple to the extreme but just about perfect. I took our server's recommendation and ordered the pork chop, which, though far too large even on a day when I had no lunch, was spectacular -the most tender and flavorful pork I've had in years served over potatoes and shockingly sweet braised leeks. Our wine was a local Pinot Noir from Apolloni - more Californian than Oregonian in style, but very satisfying.

Sated, we slowly walked through the beautiful summer evening back towards downtown and our hotel, admiring the lively bars and restaurants along 23rd Avenue intermingled with stately but still boutique pre-WWII apartment buildings. I must admit that more than once that evening, I caught myself imagining an alternate universe in which Portland was home rather than a destination.