We rented our bikes first thing sunday morning, and rode off to begin our day at Doug Fir Lounge, one of Portland’s best brunches according to ChowHound. We were not disappointed. I had a delicious scramble with sharp cheddar, onions, delicious potatoes and more ham than you could shake a stick at, and Dan had a vegetable hash, with spinach, zucchini, tomatoes and perfectly poached eggs on top, and of course, bottomless coffee. Convenienly, Doug Fir lounge is located in the Hawthorne neighborhood, which is a lovely area to wander in while you’re trying to digest brunch enough so that you can get back on your bike and ride without cramping up. While wandering, we found a myriad of cool second hand stores, including Next Adventure, which has a basement full of affordable, if pre-loved, sporting gear (we found a helmet for Dan and biking shoes for me).

We rode about exploring various neighborhoods for the better part of the afternoon, and having missed lunch (brunch was fashionably late, since most brunch joints in Portland serve brunch until 3pm or later on weekends), decided an afternoon pint was in order. I did not realize until now how much I missed bike-friendly cities (Portland is supposedly second only to Montreal in terms of bikeable North American cities). At any rate, what caused me to remember was the sight of rows and rows of bike racks (mostly full) outside of New Old Lompoc microbrewpub. Somehow it just seemed much more inviting than the expanses of parking lot that tend to surround everything in Seattle. We found an open rack and headed in. Since it was late afternoon and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, we went easy on the beer, ordering only a sampler to share. While all of Lompoc’s beers were quite nice (their light beers had that lovely refreshing “cottage” taste to them), the winners were definitely the hoppier options. Both the Imperial Pale Ale C-note, and its lighter cousin Centenial, the India Pale Ale had a lovely full hoppiness about them that stood up fine on its own, but worked well with food too. Perhaps their most interesting (and judging by surrounding tables) most popular beer, was LSD (Lompoc Strong Draft), which, in their own words, is:

A Portland Classic! This strong ale has a deep mahogany color and is crafted with seven different specialty malts. A touch of smoked malt gives it a complex aroma and incredible flavor. LSD is also generously hopped with six hop varieties to help create an awesome beer. 6.9% abv. 58 IBU

Somehow, the smokiness of the LSD gave it a tinge of esspresso flavor, which made it all the much more interesting.

Onward to dinner. Dinner was the second time in my life that I’ve been able to eat at a restaurant reviewed by Food and Wine Magazine (the first was a gourmet pizza place in Vancouver BC). Pok Pok is a low-key little place on Division St. (also around Hawthorne), supposedly started by a guy grilling in his backyard. The kitchen looks like it might once have been a foodcart, and the restaurant itself is a hodge-podge which blurs the line between inside and outside. At one point in the evening, a sudden cloudburst spang itself on us, and we watched as customers and waitstaff alike made a mad dash between the “indoor” part and the “covered outdoor part” through a narrow passagway whose eavestroughs had been hopelessly overwhelmed.

Anyways, on to the food. We started with G&T’s and fried papaya fritters across the street at Whiskey Soda Lounge, where we waited the supposed hour (actually much less) until our table was prepared. Then, we wandered over to Pok Pok. As soon as we sat down, the smells of the dishes passing by us told us this was a *can’t go wrong* sort of place. We could probably have just told the waitress “you pick for us!” and it all would have worked out. Alas, the almost tropical weather convinced us to forgo the curries (which smelled awesome). Instead, we went with the grilled game hen, the La Vong fish (Dan’s all-time favorite: pan-fried fish with tons of dill, and a bit of spice, served over noodles), an eggplant salad, and some sticky rice to sop it all up. It was all delicious. The game hen was juicy and moist, the eggplant salad (packed with herbs of all sorts) was bright and refreshing, and the fish was wonderful. Everything came with at least one, sometimes 2 sauces, which could be slathered over the sticky rice to make the flavors last even longer. We ended the meal with a totally decadent plate of sweet sticky rice, mango and condensed milk–which is a killer combo. Overall, a wonderful meal (and very reasonably priced). If you don’t mind the wait (or if you have 5+ people so you can make a reservation in advance), I strongly recommend it. We had big plans to end the evening with one more Portland pint somewhere, but alas, it being Sunday night on the west coast, the two bars we tried had both already called last call by the time we wandered it at 11:30 pm (there are some parts of living out here that I will never get used to. Early bar closures on holiday weekends is one of them).

Besides running a few errands (returning bikes, buying beer etc.) We didn’t do too much on Monday, as we wanted to get out in time to beat the traffic (or some of it at least). We did find time to wait the 1/2 hour for a famous Voodoo Doughnut. Dan tried cinnamon and I tried the classic old-fashioned. We decided we must not be doughnut-connaiseurs, because to us, both doughnuts tasted only marginally better, and a tad fresher, than the infamous Timbits we knew so well. Finally, on the way out of town, we hit the FoodCarts and loaded up on cheap Banh Mi (2 for $6) for the trip home, and lunch the next day. The Banh Mi, while not Montreal quality, were head and shoulders above Seattle Banh Mi in that their BBQ Pork was actually sliced thin, like cold cuts, and did require the gnawing and gnashing of teeth involved in eating a Seattle Banh Mi–oh and they had a magic sauce of some sort, and peppers, and pickled veggies.

A whirlwind tour of Portland, and I have no doubts we missed several gems, but at least we got there, and it certainly wouldn’t take much convincing to get me to go back again.

While the closest I could come with the beer was a bottle of St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout (a Quebec microbrewery imported from Vancouver), I did manage to assemble a darn fine cheese tray, if I do say so myself.

This one consisted of organic apples from the produce box, the remains of a baguette from the night before, crackers, salami (from the amazing Italian deli on Commercial ave. in Vancouver), the last of a chunk of Cambizola (Camembert+Gorgonzola) that had been idling in the fridge and was more *Gorgonzola* than Camembert at this point, a nice sharp cheddar, an amazing goat cheese gouda that the grocery store was sampling and I couldn’t pass up, and a spot of chutney from London. Its quite remarkable what you can find idling in the fridge sometimes.

The wine was not idling in the fridge. The wine was a long-awaited visit to Purple, a tres posh wine bar in downtown Seattle. What keeps me coming back there despite the poshness and the prices is their samplers: 4 2.5 oz. glasses of wine for $17 (which wouldn’t be that exciting, except that allows you to try 4 different wines at once and compare and contrast them–which is my favorite part). Anyways here’s what we tried:

I tried “The Farm” (these ones were supposed to be earthy, flowery etc.):
-Domaine Roc de Chateauvieux (France)
-Planeta (Italy)
-Alcance Carminiere (Chile) — I love Carminieres. They taste like dark chocolate
-Chateau la Coustarelle (France)–This one, I kid you not, tasted like flowers, it was a little odd at first, but it grew on me

Dan tried “Vive Le France” :
-Jean-paul brun “terres-dorees” (Beaujolais)
-Domaines sarrail (vin de pays de la cite de carcassonne)
-Chateau Franc grand-dieu (st. emillion grand cru)
-Les Moirets (cotes du Rhone)

Then we shared “The Bullfighter” (Spanish reds):
-gotin “del risc” mencia–This one, IIRC, was pretty light, but it may just have been that it followed the flowery one
-san isidro cepas del zorro “dos ano” monastrell
-comcerc ‘old vines’ garnacha (carinena) — delicious
-atalaya

My favorites were without a doubt the first batch. The earthy, pungent, floralness of them was delicious, and different from the type of wines I usually drink (rich Cabs or full fruity Shiraz). Had we not already stuffed ourselves with cheese at lunch, I would have definitely ordered a good creamy soft-ripened French cheese to go with it–but there’s only so much cheese one can eat in a day (even when one has lived in Montreal).

1. Banh Mi: Everytime I try to explain Banh Mi to someone who’s never had it, the reaction is the same: “a sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich”. But banh mi is so much more than a sandwich. Its a delicious marriage of French and Vietnamese cuisine, a baguette dressed with homemade pâté, vietnamese cold cut meats, cilantro, pickled vegetables, and should you desire it (and you should–it makes all the difference!) hot peppers–and a magical mystery sauce. These seemingly simple flavors combine to make a sandwich so light, and so tasty, that once you’ve had a good one, you will never look at Subway the same again. In fact, some people take banh mi so seriously that they conduct formal experiments
   to find the best one. We made use of the research and visited the top ranked banh mi bakery: Tung Hing on our way into town, to replenish us after our long drive, and also on the way out of town, to stock up for lunch purposes.
2. Oysters! Oysters have been on my list of “things-I-should-really-be-taking-advantage-of-on-the-west-coast” for a while now. So when we happened upon a popular, reasonably priced oyster house in Yaletown, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. Rodney’s was buzzing when we came in, and packed by the time we left. We enjoyed an excellent plate of pan-fried oysters, and a small sampling of raw oysters (Kusshi and Kumamoto), all were very tasty. One of these days though, I’m going to get to an oyster-house with an oyster-afficionado, who can teach me all the secrets.
3. Quebec-ness: Yes, I know, you’re supposed to eat sushi and dim sum and so forth in Vancouver, not cheese, bols du café au lait, and chocolatines. But you have to realize that we’re talking about two deprived ex-pat Montrealers here. Anyways, after oysters, we headed to our favorite Vancouver pub, The Alibi Room, which, in addition to an excellent selection of beers on tap, and a lovely IPA on cask (I cannot pass up a cask ale–I blame London), had a Quebec cheese plate that evening–yum!

   The next day, the Quebecness continued when we found ourselves out in Kitsilano, for a lovely breakfast at Coco et Olive before making our way to the Canada v. Sweden Sledge-hockey match (Canada won, 10-1). But the highlight of the morning for me was not the game, but the coffee… Coco et Olive was positively Parisian, complete with paninis, buttery pastries, “bols” of câfé au lait with strong espresso and steamed milk, and toasted baguettes with cheese. Of course, such places are a dime-a-dozen in both Montreal and Paris, but we were pretty desperate for a fix, after suffering 6 months of Starbucks-saturation.

4. On to Italy: It had been raining off and on all weekend, and by Saturday night, between the rain and the hour and a half spent in the cold arena watching Curling, I was ready for something warm. We decided to take a cue from the experts at Food and Wine Magazine, and hit Nook, a small understated pizza joint on Robson street. Nook is not the place to go if you want the choice of 70 different pizza toppings. Instead, they have a selection of about 10 different pizza options, each with 3 or 4 well-paired toppings. Unable to make a decision, we ended up with 2 pizzas: the special, with pancetta, roasted onions and hot peppers (which was quite spicy but in a good, warm-you-from-the-inside-out sort of way) and a classic vegetarian pizza with olives, tomatoes, roast garlic and ricotta. We also enjoyed Nook’s Italian wine selection. So much so that as we were leaving, and the restaurant was closing (we dined fashionably late), we asked the staff for a recommendation for a good place to go for a glass of red. They pointed us to Uva, a cosy little hide-out where we finished the evening.
5. At last, Asian: We had big plans to go for dim sum before leaving town Sunday morning. We even had a place in mind, that had been recommended to us by two completely separate sources. (When this happens in a city with as many good restaurants as Vancouver has, its rarely a coincidence). However, when we showed up there, hungry after our morning jog and eager to give it a try, we found it closed for renovations =( Instead, we wandered aimlessly along Broadway, in search of a reasonable substitute, only to find Sha Lin Noodles. The reason Sha Lin caught my interest was that it was filling up, before noon on Sunday, which, seeing as it didn’t do dim sum, was pretty impressive. So we ventured in. We were still in dim sum mode, so we ordered a disproportionate number of dumplings for 2 people (we are still working our way through them). But the clear winner here was the noodles: 4 different types of homemade, hand-cut (or dragged, or shaved or rolled) noodles, available with a variety of meats, veggies and sauces. Since we had just ordered a metric ton of pork dumplings, we stuck with vegetable, shaved noodles (shaved meaning you shave chunks of noodle dough off a block with something resembling a vegetable peeler). The noodles were gingery, garlicy and delicious, but the best part of the meal was watching as the cooks made the noodles.

Restuarants

• Tung Hing: 1196 Kingsway, Vancouver, BC V5V 3C8, Canada‎ – (604) 875-3394‎
• Rodney’s: 405-1228 Hamilton Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 6L2, Canada‎ – (604) 609-0080‎
• Alibi room: 157 Alexander Street, Vancouver, BC V6A 1B8, Canada‎ – (604) 623-3383‎
• Coco et olive: 3476 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V6R 2B3, Canada‎ (604) 736-7080‎
• Nook: 781 Denman Street, Vancouver, BC V6G 2L6, Canada – (604) 568-4554‎
• Uva: 900 Seymour Street Vancouver, BC V6B 3L9, Canada – (604) 632-9560‎
• Sha Lin noodle house: 548 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1E9, Canada‎ – (604) 873-1816‎o

Then there are the scales from 1 to 5. These suffer from the same problem except even worse with less granularity. No one wants to give a restaurant a 1 because unless you were poisoned it couldn’t have been that bad. But no one wants to give a score of 5 either unless it was the best restaurant ever. So you are left with 3 scores, plus maybe a couple half points. Don’t get me started on the “thumbs up/thumbs down” measurements. (How can you have “1 and a half” thumbs up? What if you put one thumb up and the other down?)

The “thumbs up/thumbs down” method, while having a granularity problem (not enough variety in the scale), does have one very interesting feature: symmetry. If the reviewer gives 0 thumbs up, we have a good idea of what the restaurant means: “eh” Not so bad that you’ll regret going, but not so good that you’ll just have to go back again. In other words, “average”

Based on this, I’m proposing a new way to rate restaurants (or for that matter movies, hotels, books, or almost anything else). We’ll judge on a scale from -10 to 10. This is more mathematically sound because of the symmetry and effectively is modeled like a “reward” function in machine learning. If a score is greater than 0, then it was worth going to, but if a score is less than 0, it was not worth going to. This score takes into account factors such as cost, distance to travel, etc. So if two restaurants serve the exact same food in the exact same place with the exact same setting, but one costs more than the other, the restaurant with the lower prices will have a better score.

Here is an outline of what scores could mean:

10 – This is one of the top 2 or 3 restaurants you have ever been to of this style food. (In Montreal, Halal 786 gets a 10 for Pakistani, Y Lan gets a 10 for Vietnamese, Olympico gets a 10 for coffee, and Dieu De Ciel for Micro-Brewery.) It is impossible to order something at a 10 restaurant that isn’t incredible. In fact, the best way to eat at these restaurants is by randomly choosing items from the menu as otherwise you’ll always get whatever you got the first time you came to this place. These are restaurants that you’ll go halfway across town (or the country) to get to.

8 or 9. Very, very good restaurant. Not quite worthy of a 10, but pretty darn good. You crave going to this restaurant and will go there whenever you get a chance.

6 or 7. Good restaurant, but a notch below the 8-10, which are really elite restaurants. You won’t necessarily go out of your way to go to these places, but if they are near where you are, you’ll have a fun time there. Examples in Montreal: Cafe Local, EM Cafe, the “up-stairs Chinese place,” the Vietnamese place across the street from Y Lan that I almost never went to because it was across the street from Y Lan. (How did that stay in business anyway?)

3 to 5. These restaurants are still worth going to. They have good food and if you are nearby you may go there. It is unlikely that you will go unless you are specifically feeling like going out that night. You mainly are going here for the atmosphere of going to a restaurant, the convenience of not having to cook, and the convenience of a lot of choices. Once in a while, they’ll surprise you with a really great dish, but for the most part, you can probably cook stuff this good yourself. I would generally say this is an “average” restaurant as an “average” restaurant is still a rewarding experience. Even though you could have cooked the food yourself, it would have taken a long time to put everything together.

1 to 2. You won’t regret coming to these restaurants, but you won’t get very good food. Generally, for a restaurant to end up in the 1-2 category, it will be cheap-otherwise you’d regret coming since the food isn’t all that special. Either that or it used ingredients that would have been difficult or annoying to find.

0. No gain, no loss

-1 to -3 : This restaurant was bad. You left and feel like you wasted your money. You could have cooked this yourself and it would have been cheaper and tasted better. You will never come back to this place again unless one of your friends drags you to it.

-4 to -6: The food was terrible, the service was incredibly slow, and the place was overpriced. (They ran out of baked potatoes! The ice cream was melted once they gave it to me! The waiter spilled salad on me and I was happy because I didn’t have to eat it!) You won’t come back to this place again unless your friend convinces you that the head chef was sick that night and the restaurant changed ownership.

-7 to -8 : One of the worst restaurants that you have ever been to. You still have nightmares about that weird mystery meat they served you.

-9: Gave you E Coli or some other stomach problem.

-10: After trying one taste of their specials, you immediately get up and leave because the food is that bad. Even that one spoonful, however, is enough to make you sick, and you spend the next week working up the nerve to go outside.

One other interesting thing about the scale is you may have to make it context-dependent (yes, this sounds like my work at school). For example, I’m not a big fan of Subway normally. I think their sandwiches cost more than they should since I can usually make them myself. I’d normally give Subway a score of 1 or 2. (I only give the points because it would have been wasteful for me to buy the many kinds of meat that they offer.) However, at a rest stop on a road trip, I’d give subway a higher score. Maybe 5 or 6. I know that it won’t make me sick, it will be pretty healthy, and I know what to expect. When I see a Subway sign on the highway around lunch, I generally will go there.

Well, that’s my food scale. I will be using this food scale from now on in rating restaurants.

About biking, ever since I discovered this awesome site bikely.com, biking has become way more fun. Bikely lets you map out routes on google maps, and search a database of routes as well. The end result is that you can reasonably estimate the distance you rode (or are planning on riding), and you can benefit from other people’s knowledge by looking at the routes they’ve posted. This is especially useful in Montreal, where conveniently placed highways and traintracks can really make life difficult for cyclists.

Anyways, this was the route we did today. Unfortunately, unless one feels like going all the way around the eastern tip of the island, there’s no direct route back…which is why the path gets a bit wobbly towards the end.

Upon returning home, it was unanimously decided that food was in order. We decided to try a nearby vegetarian place La Lumiere du Mile End. It’s amazing that you can live half a block from a place like this for two years and not eat there…of course, if you were to eat at every interesting restaurant you saw in this city, you’d be eating about six meals a day. La Lumiere du Mile End was really good though. I had a sandwich on dark rye bread with olive tampenade, cheddar, and roasted red pepper, and DP had a quinoa burger which he said, restored his faith in veggie burgers, after an unfortunate run-in with Provigo’s frozen ones. And they make killer cookies =)

I try to eat more vegetables than non-vegetables (hence the lunch choice), but every once in a while, especially when a 30km bike ride is involved, I just need meat. Tonight was one of those nights, well, that and the fact that the flank steak idling in the fridge needed to be dealt with. Anyways, a couple days ago, I had hauled it out of the freezer and marinated it in garlic, EVOO, balsamic, and herbs, with a dash of red wine vinegar for good measure. So the plan was to grill it up tonight and make wraps. Then I found this:

Fresh Herb Risotto from the New York Times.

Despite the fact that I didn’t actually have any of the herbs they suggested in my fridge, I decided to give it a try. Turns out, it’s a pretty flexible dish. I used arugula, sage, thyme, scallions, oregano, and some pesto that was in the freezer, in place of the recommended herbs (chives, basil, rosemary etc.), and it worked pretty well–and went great with the steak. The wraps will have to wait for tomorrow night.