PDX1

So for those of you who don’t want to read through all that I did in Portland, here is the tl;dr version.

I flew to Southwest to Portland, somehow got free Wi-Fi.  Talked to the quickest rudest rental car agent ever and then navigated the most confusing streets of my life on the way to the hotel.  Got some pho from a food truck and spilled it pretty much everywhere.  Got +1 Tranquility points courtesy of the Japanese Garden.  Saw a dude pissing on the street in broad daylight.  Did some light window shopping where I scored some chopsticks.  Had an amazingly cheap beer at a really great 80’s arcade.  Went to my first clothing store/art gallery combo with live DJ.  Waited two and a half hours for dinner.  Got pretty tipsy at a few bars while waiting for dinner.  Found out it was actually worth the wait.  Had a waitress from a neighborhood nearby where I live now.

I’m not a huge fan of flying.  The exception to that rule is when I have to fly Virgin America.  I especially hate flying Southwest Airlines.  I much rather have assigned seating rather than go through the craziness of fighting over a seat once you’ve boarded.  It’s the worst airline to travel on if you’re flying with someone.  Solo it is pretty great though admittedly.  Still I settled into the fly pretty easily.  We scored the last two seats together on the plane and I sat back and listened to some music while reading a book.  Those Bose® QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones have saved the lives of countless children.

View of Portland from Hotel Room

We got off the plane pretty quickly.  PDX is the biggest oddly emptiest airport I’ve ever been in.  It seemed slightly somber for a Saturday afternoon.  It was a quick walk to pick up the bags before making our way to the rental car counter.  I booked the car in advance through hotwire.  It was a Toyota Corolla, so nothing fancy but it would surely get the job done.  I came across the rudest rental car agent I’ve ever dealt with.  What he lacked in tact he made up in efficiency however.  I was able to ignore his sly comment about how he couldn’t find my reservation because it was for ten (Flight landed at noon mind you).  What stuck with me is the fact that I would need to bring a receipt back for refueling from within 5 miles of the airport.  This outrageous request made me almost not want to rent from them at all.  In retrospect, the closet gas station to PDX is oddly two miles away as I would later find out.

You don’t really need a car at all in Portland, with the exception of the trails that I wanted to go on and such I could have gotten along just fine without a car.  I would go as far as to say that Portland is not only bike friendly, but car hostile.   When you finally figure out which lane you are supposed to be in, it makes navigating the downtown areas much more complex when you have to consider that you may not be able to turn in the direction that you want to turn because of a bus only lane.  It wasn’t too tough though I am exaggerating a bit but you really have to pay attention.

As I moved to check in to the Hilton when I tried to park valet, I found out that I was staying at the other tower.  This meant I had to make a huge circle back around in order to park.  I would end up doing self-parking at the other tower.  This made for a great annoyance for the rest of my stay as the other tower was easy to find by walking, I am easily confused when it comes to direction and use Google maps almost exclusively when I’m driving.  This meant that I would make that same huge circle whenever I went back to the hotel.  I wish Hilton would save the executive tower onto Google maps to make it easier to find.

That aside, we were checked in after a bit of a delay,  I can’t complain much as we were checking into the hotel a bit early, and there was a bit of a line.  Still, I ended up in a room that was on a pretty high floor with a decent view of the city of Portland.  The room was spacious enough and the TV selection at the hotel was large enough that you wouldn’t have room to complain about it.  The internet speed was just fast enough to not annoy you.  I had no problem streaming a few YouTube videos here and there, but you aren’t exactly getting HD quality there.

The main advantage is the location.  It’s pretty central in downtown and it isn’t too far from the food trucks on Alder street.  Food trucks are pretty huge in Portland.  The food at the ones I stopped at were of pretty good quality too making it relatively cheap in order to score a good bite to eat.  Many of them also have very unique bites to eat and there is a great deal of variety as well there.

For my first trip out to the food carts, I was looking for a cart called Mai Pho.  I kind of underestimated the number of Vietnamese carts that would be in the area and I ended up eating at some random other cart that I cannot name now.  I ended up getting the pho and a Bahn mi.  I took everything back to the hotel to eat.  The problem was that the noodles and beef were packaged separately from the noodles.   Me being not so bright at the moment decided to try to dump the noodles and everything into the pho.  Since they were stuck together a bit everything came out in a big thud that resulted in me getting pho splashed everywhere.  At least the food was tasty.

The weather was to me at least, surprisingly warm.  Around fifty, which is for me having left the frozen tundra of Chicago, was hoodie weather.  Still I felt it chilly enough to make a stop at Java Man for a latte on my way over to the Chinese Garden.  It was all you could ask for in a small coffee shop, a very well made coffee that came to our table very quickly.  They also sell bubble tea there which would have been very tempting absent the cold weather.   Still, though this was certainly not my favorite coffee stop along the trip, at least they made that vanilla latte without so much sugar that I was unable to taste the coffee which is often a complaint of mine.  It was actually a very well balanced drink.

Continuing our walk, there was a bit of shock when we saw a guy pissing on the street in broad daylight.  This wasn’t your normal pissing in the street that is done somewhat discreetly up against a wall or something, this dude was just standing out in broad daylight pissing into an open patch of grass.  I seriously thought he was emptying a bottle out or something until I walked past him.  Who pisses on the street like that in broad daylight, there was a child coming from the opposite direction for goodness sakes.

Initially, I did not think that I would enjoy Lan Su Chinese Garden at all because from the outside, the garden seems very small, almost too small for me to justify the entrance fee of nearly ten bucks.  I was very wrong though.  Even with all the people walking around snapping pictures, self-included.  The garden is very peaceful and tranquil.  I got a chance to take a lot of good pictures inside of the garden it was very serene and calming.  I even had a really cool “look, a squirrel” moment. 

Here are some photos from Inside:

While we were in Chinatown, we decided to browse through a couple of the shops over there.  It seemed a little counterproductive considering we were headed to San Francisco, which has a much larger Chinatown, but I did end up snagging some chopsticks in the end.  There isn’t much room for so much Chinese themed items in my household, or to carry back in my luggage for that matter.

Voodoo Doughnuts

We figured by this time the line would have died down outside of Voodoo Doughnuts, but that place always has a super long line.  Anyway I made a stop for more coffee at Café Vita which is just across a pedestrian only street.  This little open window made some great coffee, but they win with the varieties of milk that they offer.  I actually got an espresso there that was pretty good.

The trek continued as we made our way to Ground Kontrol.  Think 90’s arcade with beer.  Astonishingly cheap beer at that.  I may be insulated from good prices on a beer from livening in the suburbs of Chicago, but when I ordered drinks, and the total came out to $8, I thought for sure the price was for one of the drinks, not both.  $3 for Deschutes is a hell of a deal.  Not to mention that evidently Portlanders have that whole crowding around the bar thing worked out and they just get in line to order a drink.

Who can argue with how great of a place this is?  It’s one of my favorites of my short stay in Portland simply because of bringing back so many childhood memories.  They are straightforward and don’t cheat you either as all of the games are very reasonably priced most at a quarter a round, and they use actual quarters as opposed to tokens.  Therefore, you aren’t locked in if you feel like cutting short your play time by a few minutes.

Next stop as we were walking was Compound.  It seemed like a pretty interesting clothing store and I wanted to head in and browse around a bit.  The store had a lot of unique items, and I thought it was pretty cool that they had a live DJ as well.  Then we walked upstairs and found out that there was an art gallery up there.  It was a crazy surprise but probably the only art gallery clothing store combo that I will ever visit that also happens to have a live DJ.  The clothing was s a bit pricey for my taste, so I didn’t make a purchase, but it is a good place to browse for some unique items.

Mole Tots at Bunk Bar

We went back to the hotel, before going out for dinner.  I knew that I wanted to have dinner at Ox, just after reading about the place online and looking at the menu.  When we got there and found out that there was a two and a half hour wait for a table, I almost didn’t want to stay.  Not to mention that their bar next door was beyond packed for standing room even.  This only kind of confirmed that this place was too good to pass up so I ended up agreeing to the wait, it’s not like I had somewhere to be in the morning and it just left us more time to drink, though now we would explore the neighborhood bars.

Mulligan and Cat's Meow at Secret Society

Our first stop was right across the street, in total opposition to the seemingly upscale bar we just checked out, Billy Ray’s Neighborhood Dive, was just that a dive bar.   The problem I had with it is that after paying $3 a beer at ground control, I felt a little ripped to be paying $6 for a well vodka tonic at a dive bar where the smell of urine assaults your nostrils.  It’s not that I’m too good for urine smells, and lime slices that have been cut so long ago that they are starting to turn brown around the edges, it’s just relative to all the places nearby, their drink prices in particular should have been a lot cheaper if that’s what they are offering.

La Yapa at Ox

Out of there and into Bunk Bar though.  I’m of two minds about this place, because I got suckered into buying a really bad drink here.  It just had a too good of a name that I read it without reading the ingredients, I kind of just briefly looked at them.  The name Typhoon Shandy was just too interesting.  IN hindsight a combination of Tequila, Lime, Grapefruit and Beer had no possibility of working.  On the other hand the place had a great atmosphere and the food was pretty good as well.  While we were there we decided to sample the mole tots, which turned out to be a great decision since they were probably the best tots that I ever had.  In hindsight the miscalculation was completely my fault, because there were other great drinks on the menu along with a good beer selection.

Bread ad soup at Ox

The next stop in the wait was The Secret Society.  They had some sort of live performance going on in one of the rooms up there, but we enjoyed a couple of drinks in the lounge area.  Having not quite enough time to enjoy one of the very elaborate absinthe drinks, we snacked on the spiced almonds, which were a steal at only $3.  The perfect pre-dinner snack to accompany our drinks.  The drinks by the way were phenomenal and coincided with the whole Victorian era theme that they had going on. 

We finally made it into Ox.  We got the text message and hurried over to be seated.  What I love about this place is despite the fact that it is an Argentinian themed steakhouse, it is vegetarian friendly and the aroma of the place isn’t dominated by that of cooked beef.  At the suggestion of our server, I decided to go with the La Yapa to drink, and let me tell you it was probably one of the best drinks I’ve had in quite sometime.  It is a well-balanced drink that catered to my love of whiskey, while being sweet and approachable.  You also have a nice bit of lemon to finish off your palate.

Duck Rillette Croquetas at Ox

First thing was a complimentary squash soup.  From there I knew this was bound to be an incredible meal.  It was a rich and creamy soup that wasn’t too heavy that it would weigh you down from the impending meal.  Combine that with the bread that they serve with a bit of a chimichuri sauce and it was fantastic.  I’ve made soups out of squash before and it still boggles my mind how they achieved a texture that smooth.

Mushrooms at Ox

For an appetizer I went with the croquetas of duck rillettes.  I felt a bit of trepidation about passing over the recommended Clam Chowder, but being that I was going to be in San Francisco soon and eating clam chowder out of a sourdough bread bowl, I decided to go for something different.  I must say I couldn’t have made a better choice.  It was the perfect balance of texture, perfectly tender meat that is so smooth that it melts in your mouth and a nice crisp exterior.  It was also well complemented by the celery root and pomegranate.  I swear that I could also live in the lemon aioli.

Potatoes with Horseradish at Ox

For the entrée, I couldn’t pass up on my favorite cut of steak, my beloved ribeye.  The steak was so tender and juicy and from a value standpoint it was one of the best I have ever tasted.  It was cooked to a perfect medium rare with just the right amount of carmelization.  Absolutely sublime.  As a side dish I went with the mushrooms and the potatoes.  The potatoes were the perfect counterpoint to the steak because they had a tasty horseradish aioli.  I still have a vivid and fond memory of taking a bit of steak and dragging it through the aioli to get the perfect bite of steak and potatoes.  Rich beef, alongside crisp potatoes and a bit of spice from the aioli.

The Main Event, Perfect Midrare Ribeye

At the suggestion of probably one of the best waitresses ever, I packed the remaining portion of food to go.  I was about to toss the bread until she suggested that the bread was the perfect size to make a steak sandwich with my leftover steak.  I didn’t plan it that way, but she was right as it did make for great leftovers. 

Dessert at Ox

I couldn’t come to a place this great and not try the dessert though.  Even though I was much too full, we had to go ahead and share the torte.  The honey chamomile ice cream was the perfect knockout punch.  Along with that crisp honeycomb candy that was a great topping for the soft rich and buttery cake.  On all levels, Ox didn’t just meet my expectations but blew them out of the water.  I still can’t believe a bill for two people was only $160 with tip, I expected it to be so much more.