This is my second post as food & ag blogger at Oregon Business Magazine.
Recently, I joined a friend for appetizers at Ava Gene’s, Stumptown Coffee founder Duane Sorenson’s celebrated new Italian restaurant on Division Street. One of Bon Appetit’s ten best new restaurants of 2013, Ava Gene’s was also Portland Monthly’s pick for top restaurant of 2013. (“With Ava Gene’s,” food critic Karen Brooks said, “Portland grows up. But rock and roll never dies.”) So I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it packed on a Sunday at 5 p.m.
But packed it was.
A few weeks later, I went to an industry wine tasting at Cathy Whim’s Pearl District boîte Oven & Shaker on a Thursday evening. It was fairly early — around 6PM — but the room was already buzzing with families, couples, and boisterous groups sharing wood-fired pizzas, insalata Nostrana, and bottles of chianti. After that, my husband and I went for dinner at Veritable Quandary, a Portland institution that’s been around since 1971. There wasn’t an empty table in the spot.
What’s going on here? Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled that Portland’s restaurants are thriving — and that a new place seems to open every week. About 500 restaurants and brewpubs opened in Oregon last year, the majority in Portland, according to OLCC records. As everybody knows, we have an incredibly vibrant culinary scene—with outstanding chef talent and unsurpassed locally sourced ingredients.
It just makes me wonder—who are these people who can afford to dine out several nights a week? They can’t all work for Adidas, Intel, or Nike — or some new tech start-up or innovation consultancy firm. Could it be, as Le Pigeon chef Gabe Rucker suggested recently in this San Francisco Chronicle interview, that dining has become our chosen form of entertainment? “People used to go out to dinner and a movie,” Rucker was quoted as saying. “Now, it’s like going out to dinner is the movie.”
Continue reading at Oregon Business Magazine.
Comments