Gallery hopping in the Pearl and a great tip

Hopped the streetcar and spent a pleasant morning looking into the fine art galleries in Portland’s Pearl District. It was a fun day to visit the galleries, because they are all hanging their new shows for the First Thursday Gallery Walk. So the art was new, the galleries uncrowded and the people hanging the shows were friendly enough to let us poke around as they worked. At the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, I was admiring a big landscape by Stephen Hayes when the Assistant Manager of the gallery, Nathan, stopped his work lighting the new show and came over to talk to us about the artist. When we told him about the locavore food theme of The Big Graze, he suggested we visit the Park Kitchen, which was only a few blocks away.

^ Val and our great Park Kitchen lunch

And, are we indebted to Nathan! After we roamed around the neighborhood a bit more, visiting galleries and the Museum of Contemporary Craft and taking pictures of the cool Portland architecture, we headed for Park Kitchen and were treated to a lunch of delights, delightfully served. Val had a Sazerac. We split a bowl of Green Pepper and Hazelnut Soup, garnished with Wedding Salami. Complex. Soothing. Special. I had the house-made hot dog, a delicious and mild sausage sandwich served with PK’s own ketchup. Val’s entree: the terrine of the day, a pork terrine, with pickled beets and coarse mustard. Subtle. Savory. Beet pickle vinegar balancing perfectly with the richness of the terrine. For dessert, we split a Fennel Cake with Blackberry Ice Cream and Candied Fennel Slices. This was great: a coarse, delicately fennel-flavored cake topped with tangy and not-too-sweet berry ice cream. The candied fennel — sliced see-through thin — delivered a nice punch of licorice and sweetness that married perfectly with everything else on the plate.

Each dish was beautifully thought out. Gracefully balanced. Intriguing and still simple. the portions were perfect. So our lunch was a highlight meal of the trip. Now, we’ve changed our plans to eat at Le Pigeon tonight and are returning to the Park Kitchen for dinner. We are still definitely interested in visiting Le Pigeon — but we’ve become very wary of overeating, of literally biting off more than we can chew — and we just decided that the Park Kitchen’s menu offered more light-dining options. On the menu tonight at Le Pigeon: rabbit, lamb, fois gras, beef bourguignon, more. Very, very tempting, but a little dangerous too. Also, we’d need to be at Le Pigeon at 5 p.m. to sit at the chef’s counter at the popular five-table restaurant — and, it just ended up feeling too early to eat. So it’s Park Kitchen at eight. Many thanks, Nathan!

PS: Portland’s public transit is very nice. Riding the streetcar in the cool gray morning, I might have been in Amsterdam. Plus, our hotel gave us free train tix, so the transport was on them. (I really like this place.)