That Time We Tried to Eat All the Sweets in Portland, Oregon
Our recent trip out to Feast Portland had many goals: reunite with the Hot 10 chefs, maximize sandwich consumption, try as many restaurants as possible, and mayyyyyybe go to one of those strip clubs with the really good food. This was an ambitious agenda, but food editor Carla Lalli Music and I had yet one more objective: eat all the sweets. This is that story.
instagram.com/juliakramer1/8Bakeshop
We meet in the Ace Hotel lobby at <del>9am</del>. <del>9:30</del>. <del>9:40</del>. 9:45am and hail a cab to our farthest-flung destination, Bakeshop, where alternative-flour genius Kim Boyce (the author of Good to the Grain) creates figgy buckwheat scones, maple scones with rye and barley flour, boysenberry scones, croissants, raspberry coffee-cake muffins, and more. The sun is shining hard, and we are sweating as we eat the pastries, but they are so outrageously good we just sit there and sweat and eat and sweat.
2/8Peach Hand Pie at Bakeshop
Portland is a tropical paradise where it's always sunny and never rains and you can wake up every morning to an incredibly flaky peach hand pie with deeply caramelized edges. (Well, at least one of those things is true.)
instagram.com/juliakramer3/8Tabor Bread
After a long, strange cab ride in which the driver corrects our pronunciation of "Tabor" (it's supposed to rhyme with "saber"), we end up at Tissa Stein's bakery, where grains like Red Fife wheat, spelt, and hard white spring wheat are milled on site then transformed into flavorful, crusty breads. We pair our toast plate with butter and housemade beet-rhubarb jam.
instagram.com/juliakramer4/8Roman Candle Baking Co.
Weirded out by our cab ride, we decide to walk 20 blocks to our next stop, Roman Candle Baking Co., the sister restaurant to Ava Gene's (one of Bon Appétit's Hot 10 Restaurants last year), where the first thing we see is pizza. We need pizza. But we can't resist a few sweets as well, like the peach-cornmeal cake and a date scone, and a loaf of the sesame bread "for later."
5/8Portland Farmers' Market
Carla has to split to do actual work, so this sweets crawl goes on hiatus. I pick it up the next morning at the Portland farmers' market at Portland State University, which is overflowing with long-stemmed artichokes, heirloom tomatoes, peaches, and things I have never even seen before. For fuel, I grab a petite sandwich cookie from Two Tarts Bakery, a mini salted chocolate bar from Alma Chocolate, and a shockingly delicious cranberry juice.
instagram.com/juliakramer6/8Maurice
Finally, I arrive at Kristen Murray's pastry luncheonette Maurice, which we recently named the number-nine best new restaurant in America. Bon Appétit's public relations gal Lilli Sherman joins me for a lunch of creamy quiche, a delicate smoked-fish tartine, and crunchy radishes, but we save plenty of room for the dreamy plated desserts, like this black-pepper cheesecake and a real-life version of the lemon-soufflé pudding cake that I'd stared at on proofs for months. ____
instagram.com/juliakramer7/8Quin Candy
Fortunately, there is absolutely no limit to the amount of sweets I can eat, because when I show up to a candy-making class led by Jami Curl, the founder of Quin Candy, the table is covered with handmade, wrapped treats, like these Dreams Come True—which taste, true to their name, like Starbursts whose dreams have came true.
instagram.com/lillisherman8/8Salt & Straw
Once the candy class wraps, I head to the Bon Appétit tent at the Oregon Bounty Grand Tasting, where many of my favorite local foodstuffs (Olympic Provisions sausages, Jacobsen salt) are concentrated under one tented roof. I'm rewarded with one final treat: a scoop of Salt & Straw's summer-sweet-corn buttermilk ice cream, then a taste of the apricot-and-citra-hops flavor (pictured). Is this real life??
