Hash and My Brother’s Crawfish
October 14, 2008
- Hash Restaurant
- Location: Sellwood district
- Price to fill up two for breakfast: $9
- My Brother’s Crawfish
- Location: Sellwood district
- Price to fill up two for dinner: $??
The last time I checked, this blog was up to about 750 regular readers, which is kinda surprising for a private blog that doesn’t advertise. About a dozen are regular commenters but, interestingly, many, many more send private email about stuff I write. Even more interestingly, much of the private stuff is about restaurants–places to try, funky, not-so-great experiences, etc.
In a spirit of generosity (or maybe sheer laziness), figured I oughta let them speak a bit. So when Oregon Glass Guild members Ed and Donna LaPlante sent a little note about two new restaurants, well… take it away, guys:
#1 …. Hash, in Sellwood
I had a 2 egg, 4 item omelet w/smoked tomatoes, bacon, cheddar and chanterelle mushrooms for $9, yumm! Included bread and a fruit bowl, good coffee too.
#2 …. My Brothers Crawfish , SE 82nd.
This was listed in the Oregonian food insert this past Friday.
We ate there a few weeks ago and had gumbo and etoufee. Both very good, filling and spicy. We also had catfish bites appetizer, very good. This place is in a circular strip mall arrangement you can see from 82nd but only enter from the side street.
There are two Vietnamese brothers from Houston running the kitchen and an attentive wait staff. The inside is dark and comfortable with contemporary art on the walls. They do a lot of take out with bags of spicy crawfish flying out the door, that is what we will try next time.
Thanks, Ed. I wanna give both of them a shot.
Evoe/Pastaworks
October 12, 2008
- Restaurant website
- Location: Hawthorne District
- Price to fill up two people: $20 or less
One of my favorite pasttimes in Provence (besides glassmaking) was strolling through the village on market day then stopping at the local cafe for a leisurely sandwich or charcuterie plate with citron pressé. Small, intensely flavorful and absolutely unpretentious, this was fingerfood made in heaven, about as far from what you get at the mall Subway as a good croissant is from Rainbow Bread.
Well, lordee lordee, there’s a Provençal-style cafe in Portland, and it is exquisite.
Evoe is attached to Pastaworks, a little wine-and-gourmet shop on Hawthorne between the two Powells bookstores. It’s not very big, just a few tables, and whatever’s on the menu is chalked up on giant boards behind the cooking area. “It changes,” said my waitress, “daily. Or maybe more if something great comes in.”
Typetested (typechart.com)
October 12, 2008
Websmiths of the world, check this one out. Typechart is apparently the brainchild of Patternmade’s Panduka Senaka, and it’s a way to choose a typeface for online text, then download the CSS (cascading style sheet, a glorious godsend of a way to manage site appearance).
Fonts are fairly limited but then so far Web fonts to begin with. And whoever’s writing the test grafs deserves an award.
Viva Vivaldi
October 10, 2008
Boy. Them folks sure swing a mean bow.
(Photo courtesy of Gigi the iPhone)
Just got back from the Portland Baroque Orchestra’s version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons concertos. As promised, it was really well-done. But wanna know the best part? They had fun with it.
Really. They had fun.
iPhflake
October 7, 2008
There are times when I wish Gigi had a neck. That way I’d have something to wring.
The only two things Gigi-the-iPhone DOESN’T do well are the two things that any other bloody mobile phone in the world does as a matter of course: call and text. Gigi, probably not wishing to join the peasants, chooses to make both difficult.
Hello rain!
October 7, 2008
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Mmmmmmmm. It’s raining again. No more crummy blue skies and lawn sprinklers and dry, dry flowerbeds I forgot to water.
The rain is back, and I’m listening to the patter of raindrops on skylights, seeing the mists rise eerily across the hills and driving my mother nuts (she has this thing about umbrellas and requires that I be under one; I prefer getting wet).
And for some reason, even though we haven’t even gotten to Halloween yet, I found myself singing a favorite childhood Christmas carol. In my pre-reading days as a kid I couldn’t quite get most of the words and chose the nearest equivalents. I listened to myself this morning and, sure enough, I was singing my pre-school version:
12 dummy stomachs, ‘leven pies a buying, ten lorzas leaving, nine lazy pansies, eight mays a mildew, seven swamps for swimming, six geezers praying, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS. Four collie birds, three fringe ends, two dirty doves…and a bar bridge in a bare tree.
I suspect I’ll be singing this sotto voce all day, as I watch the rain.
Surprise!!!
October 5, 2008
Bear with me here. I’m redoing the blog, the website, the whole schmear, and figuring out where I want to go with this thing. And I’d love to know if you think this is the right direction.
The problem with straight blog templates is that they’re awfully linear; whatever you write about last is what’s on top. That’s great if you only write about one thing all the time, but my blogposts pretty neatly divide into five bins: glass, art/photography, technology, restaurants and other stuff.
So I’ve started messing around to make the site a little more useful for regular readers–about 600 of you at the moment–who are looking for different things. [Read more]
Colorfumbler
October 2, 2008
Quick! Read the following words out loud, fast as you can. (do NOT name the color of the text, just read the words)
Did you do it? Did you read the NAMES of the colors? Or did you start naming the color of the letters? If you’re not sure, go back and try again. Most people get bogged down in the contradiction of the word (red) and the color of the word (blue).
Difficulty in resolving conflicting perceptions this way is called the Stroop effect, and it’s an interesting phenomenon that can actually be used to good effect in Web marketing (or political marketing). There’s a nice explanation about it on Neuroscience for Kids. Kinda cool.
Reasonably fantastic contraption
October 1, 2008
Apropos of nothing, I happened on FantasticContraption, a little online physics game that could wind up wasting a LOT of time.
The object of the game is to move a coral-colored wheel (or square) into the goal box. You’re given a toolbox of connectors and wheels; use them to build a machine that propels the target wheel into the box. With each success the playing field gets a little more complicated, a few more obstacles. In the shot above, I’m driving a giant wheel to get to goal.
It’s one of those things that looks mindless until you get into construction, and then it gets like peanuts.
PDX Vivaldi
October 1, 2008
If you’re feeling charitable you’d call my musical tastes eclectic; my favorite iTunes playlist includes BB King, Rachmaninoff, Cheap Trick, Sapna Awasti, Uriah Heep, Debussy, the immortal Ella, FrouFrou and Mr. Chocolate Voice himself, Joao Gilberto.
But for just plain daggone gorgeously get-lost-in-it wonderful, I go for baroque (sorry, couldn’t resist). And one of the most beautiful pieces of baroque music in existence, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons violin concerto, will be performed by the Portland Baroque Orchestra next weekend. I talked about PBO awhile back, and the amazing concert they did with incredible contratenor Matthew White.
PBO is an odd mix: Good mastery of the baroque form, their use of period instrumentation is an education, and they make beautiful music. They’re also pure Portland, which is pretty eclectic itself, and so their concerts are held in a beautiful old church and refreshingly (or maybe disconcertingly) informal.
In concert they follow what I call “PDX Black Tie,” shorthand for “wear the GOOD jeans and put some socks on with those sandals.” There’s a lot more audience interaction than I’ve seen at most concerts, and the performers are liable to crack up at intermissions. Everybody seems to have showed up just to have a good time with music they love, which makes PBO concerts a lot of fun.
If you don’t know Four Seasons…well, you really do, parts of it, anyway. It’s excerpted all the time in commercials and movies when the director wants to set an atmosphere of wealth and culture (and snobbery). Head over to iTunes (or to the PBO site) and listen to a couple of fragments , and you’ll recognize it soon enough.
Or buy the PBO CD; they’re recording this concert and will be selling the CDs in March.