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No, this is not San Francisco.
Coava Roastery & Coffee Bar, Portland, OR.
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Why I love Portland, #6: The light that briefly jumps in before the rain kicks in again.
THE FREAKING LIGHT.
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Winter makes it easy to be caffeinated.
Coava Roastery & Coffee Bar. Coffeeland, PDX, OR.
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A neon and caffeine buzz, courtesy of Water Avenue Coffee in Portland.
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Rain and food carts.
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Why I love Portland, #5: Beer for dayz
Perhaps it’s the weather, but Portland does make it easy to duck into a warm brewery for a sampler. Or two. Or six.
Paddle consumed and shot at Deschutes.
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Why I love Portland, #4: Pastrami
Good pastrami, even. Actually, no — GREAT pastrami, right on the west coast.
Photo taken at Kenny and Zukes, an awesome Portland deli / diner.
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body by poutine. on Flickr.
This is definitely my kind of hot mess.
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Why I love Portland, #3 — Coffeeland!
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen sum it up pretty nicely, albeit Harajuku style, how we felt about coffee in Portland.
The proliferation of coffee is enough to want a second stomach: good, decent (but never bad) (or, at least, we never allowed ourselves that), hand poured, self-roasted, made-in-America stainless steel kone — everything that makes even the snobbiest of San Francisco coffee snobs sip and sigh.
Again, perhaps it’s thanks to the winter weather that encourages drinking, distilling, eating, and steaming your face and warming your hands with coffee.
The curse of buying whole beans is that you can’t buy a whole lot of it, unless you want to drink stale beans a month from now. Which makes Portlanders an instant envy.
But after numerous minutes waiting for pour-overs (and many trips to the bathroom later), I caved and came home with a single bag of Water Avenue oak aged Sumatra.
Which then brings me to the second curse of having to finish the whole bag within the week, instead of saving it for unhurried coffee appreciation. And that bums me out a lot.
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why i love portland, #2: CARTOPIA →
Image credit: Gourmet Fury (who didn’t seem to like Portland as much as I did.)
I thought San Francisco was the food truck / cart city to rule ‘em all and that the rest o’ yall were just bitin.
I was so, so wrong.
Not only does Portland have no sales tax and allows drinking off-premises, it also (presumably) has extremely food-cart-positive laws. Because those things are everywhere. (Hence an entire website dedicated to it. Look at the map. LOOK AT IT.)
Total win for Portlanders. Utter relief for my San Francisco-based love handles.
The carts seem to be mostly stationary, which helps take the guess work out of where a particular one is (although that doesn’t stop them from having Twitter feeds, of course). We only managed to explore two of the numerous “cartopias” in Portland, but the highlight was poutine from Potato Champion on SE Hawthorne. Gooey gravy with melting cheddar cheese curds over excellently seasoned fries. We thought we would need other condiments on the side. As it turns out, we never needed them.
(And yes, there is a vegan version.)
I can count the number of times I’ve had poutine on one hand. It’s just not that common (if anywhere to be found) in San Francisco, let alone any other city I’ve lived in. And the aforementioned love handles are happy about that.
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