restaurants – Riveted

Sooke Harbour House

Laura Domela — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 12:32:13 +0000

Last night we had a second chance to have dinner at the Sooke Harbour House in Sooke BC, after our reservation spaceout last week. The above photo is the view from our dinner table (!!!) looking across the Strait of Juan de Fuca over at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. (Our table came with binoculars…nice touch!)

This is the dining room looking back from the window view:

We ordered the four course tasting menu with wine pairings, and ordered two different things from each section, so we got to try quite a few dishes. The presentation of each dish was beautiful, and the light from the window on my left made for some pretty nice photos.

First courses

Black Pearl Oysters (on the half shell with begonia, radish, and verjus):

Morel Mushroom and Kombu Broth (morels, heirloom cherry tomatoes, radish and english peas):

Second courses

Steamed Smoked Sablefish (green beans, potato, candied hazelnut, pickled beets and beet gel, potato & sorrel vinaigrette) — this may have been my favorite dish:

Duck Leg & Smoked Breast (plums, walnuts, watercress, wild rice & popcorn, honey mustard and fig leaf ice cream):

Main courses

Seared Sockeye Salmon (beans, summer squash, tomato, Vernena roseti, lomon thyme soubise, basil emulsion, pursalane):

Grilled Lamb Sirloin (farro and blue cheese, kale, pink turnip, beets, hay oil, savory lamb jus and peas):

We opted for a local cheese plate as one of our desserts…

…and a chocolate something or other for our second dessert (that's an Earl Gray truffle there in the middle). The great light was starting to decline for these last couple images:

The bonus dessert (this was a cakey bit with a custard-like thing on top, with maybe bergamot, then some chocolate):

I didn't get a copy of the dessert menu so I'm less clear on what all these were (some of the servers that were not our main server didn't explain things too well). The desserts were good, but I'm not a huge dessert fan, so I thought the cheese plate was the best. Also, it was paired with a local dessert wine from Venturi Schulze vineyards, called Brandenburg No. 3 that was delicious. (I think all of the wine pairings were from the Okanagan area/local.)

The meal was good and the view was lovely. We're glad we got to do this!

Swank & Swine

Laura Domela — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 13:25:18 +0000

There's a new restaurant in Portland (Swank) next door to a new whiskey bar in Portland (Swine) and together they're Swank & Swine, at the Paramount Hotel downtown on Taylor between Park and Broadway. They opened a couple days ago and we've been looking forward to this place! The chef (Daniel Mondok) is a longtime favorite of ours (since the days of Sel Gris over on Hawthorne) so of course our hopes were high. (Spoiler: we were not disappointed.)

We got an early reservation for Saturday night and decided to check out Swine for a cocktail and a snack first before heading over to dinner. The cocktails were great, and the salt & pepper calamari was gone in less than a minute. Delicious!

I took no photos next door during dinner at all and that's because it was too good. The service was fantastic (Joseph!), the food was creative and delicious, and the wine pairings recommended were spot on.

We ordered (from the "One" category) a lamb tartare with smoked feta, a quail egg yolk (fabulous), and a sunflower "risotto" with some hearty glazed mushrooms — no arborio, only sunflowers — the texture was great.

From "Two" we had the Salad Lyonnaise (with a perfectly braised pork belly, frisee, and a sous vide duck egg), and the crispy sweetbreads, accompanied by an aebleskiver with an egg yolk inside and bacon-maple syrup. Seriously good.

From "Three" we had the hamachi with squid ink noodle and pho, and the beef bavette with smoked potatos and duck liver-roquefort butter. Holy crap. I think this might have been our favorite dish (closely followed by the crispy sweetbreads).

We're total fans of this place and hope you get a chance to try it. Swine, the whiskey bar, has a smaller menu with some of the same items (and they do a good happy hour from 3-6:30 if you want an early light dinner.

Yesterday (Sunday) after a much needed and really hard spinning class in the morning at Revocycle, we headed up to my mom's with the Traeger and a cooler full of goodies and had a little backyard barbeque. We made some smoked burgers with chorizo, bacon, blue cheese, garlic aioli, tomatoes, lettuce, and pickles on brioche buns, and a caprese salad with bufala and heirloom tomatoes (and basil from her garden), along with some festive orange Aperol spritzes. It was a really nice afternoon!

Tomorrow we'll head down to Champoeg with some family for some more local camping, cooking, and bike riding!

Portland Foodie Stuff

Laura Domela — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 17:29:07 +0000

I wanted to share this pretty cool iPhone food photo with you guys, and tell you that if you're ever in Portland and want to splurge on a spectacular meal, go check out Justin Woodward's creations at Castagna over on Hawthorne. We ordered the chef's tasting menu and it was gorgeous, creative, and delicious…every single bit of it. This restaurant is now right up there with…I'm a little afraid to say it since it's been our longstanding favorite foodie spot…right up there with Manresa. I know. And it feels so weird that it's in Portland, too…since most of our favorite spots take some effort to get to. Anyway, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

We're doing something right now that we can't do in the Airstream: Kevin's cooking a 5-pound brisket in the sous vide (after brining it and then smoking it for a couple hours on the Traeger) for 48 hours (which basically means being cooked inside a vacuum-sealed bag immersed in a 10 liter polycarbonate tank full of water that is being circulated and kept at the same temperature — 147 degrees F — by this cool invention, the Anova immersion circulator. It'll be ready for dinner tomorrow night, so I've still got more than 24 hours to figure out the side dishes.

Food and Wine: Sauvage at Fausse Piste

Laura Domela — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 20:51:56 +0000

I figured we should occasionally give Portland the same treatment we give other cities we visit (that aren't our home town). I'm going to tell you about a place we stumbled upon last night called Sauvage.

We were on our way to the airport to pick up Kevin's mom. We thought we'd get out there early and grab some quick dinner at one of the restaurants in the shopping center nearby, but traffic was so bad that it took us about a half an hour just to get down our hill to the Burnside Bridge. I suggested we grab dinner locally and wait for traffic to die down so I found a sushi spot we hadn't tried on the East side of the river that had lots of good Yelp ratings. Perfect. We parked (a couple blocks away, in the pouring rain) and got out and headed for the restaurant. We'd taken about 10 steps when we saw a small sandwich board on the sidewalk, an open door, and a menu on the wall for a place called Sauvage. The menu sounded fabulous.

What about this place? Sounds good. Let's try it.

Sauvage is an intimate restaurant over in the SE industrial area that opened right before we left on our 4 month odyssey in July of this year. Fausse Piste is its craft winery sibling. The restaurant seats 33 and is open Tuesdays through Saturdays 4pm-11pm.

We sat at the bar and met and chatted with several of the owners/chefs/winemakers. There are four of them: Jesse, Jeff, Chris, and Nicolas. These guys between them have a ton of cool experience: Culinary Institute of America in NY, Herbfarm Restaurant in Woodinville, Owen Roe Winery in St. Paul, Oregon, 50 Plates, Bluehour, the wine bar Alu…the list goes on. They make wine. They make food. Really good wine and really good food.

They've got bar seating, a couple small tables, and one long family-style table that seats 16.

We had several small plates: a kobe beef tartare hand roll with a quail egg yolk, pheasant dumplings with Oregon truffles and sherry, a black garlic caesar salad with coddled egg and guanciale, and at the last minute we added the wild boar ribs with hazelnut and daikon and wow! Glad we did…those were amazing.

Sauvage also offers a Mystery Dinner: 3 or 5 seasonal courses (of their choice) with wines ($40 or $60). We'll be going back for that.

It's fun to read about somewhere new and hear what people say and decide you need to go try it, but it's sometimes more fun just to stumble onto something amazing that's brand new and only has 3 reviews on Yelp so far.