Quirky Portland one of America’s best food cities

Imagine a city where no one honks their horn and drivers pause midblock to assure pedestrians safe passage from one sidewalk to another.

Picture an urban landscape painted in rivers, forests and mountains — Frontierland as if created by Alice Waters.

Envision a part of the world where waiters write “Albion” before “strawberries” on a chalkboard menu to flag a local treat, taxi drivers tag the restaurant you’re going to when you simply say the address (“Pok Pok!”), breakfast and brunch are practically civic duties, an entire bookstore is devoted to matters of home and garden, and some of the Thai cooking rivals Chiang Mai’s raciest.

Welcome to Portland, as in Oregon, the land of milk and honey — also coffee, tea, beer, wine, game, berries, crab, salmon, ice cream in flavors lifted from food trucks and olive oil that chefs compare favorably to Italy’s liquid gold.

Dubbed Stumptown, a nickname acquired in the mid-19th century when logging outpaced the full clearing of trees, Portland is the fourth stop on my exploration of America’s best food cities, which has taken me to Charleston, S.C., San Francisco and Chicago and will continue to six more markets. In December, I’ll rank my destinations based on such factors as creativity, tradition and community.

Setting the stage for five days of eating my way around Portland in June, a friend and resident forecast a satirical sketch comedy: “Everything you see on ‘Portlandia’? It’s kind of true.”

He was right.

Second to Paris

Describing the bounty of his native Oregon in his 1964 memoir “Delights & Prejudices,” James Beard, the dean of American cooking, wrote, “No place on earth, with the exception of Paris, has done so much to influence my professional life.” Although the land and water made for an exceptional pantry for cooks — cue Hood strawberries so juicy and fragile they rarely leave the state fresh, and more than 300 types of truffles — the restaurant scene before the early 1990s was “quiet,” says a diplomatic Janie Hibler, the author of five cookbooks about the region. Gourmet magazine almost turned her down when she pitched a restaurant find more than two decades ago; her editor didn’t think Portland worthy of ink.

Karen Brooks, the influential food editor and critic of Portland Monthly, sums up the period this way: “We didn’t have the menus, but we had this treasure chest open and waiting for us.”

To understand the food scene that was, and the food capital Portland has become, it helps to be familiar with Zefiro, the restaurant introduced 24 years ago by a trio of talents with ties to San Francisco: chef Chris Israel, maitre d’ Bruce Carey and food scout Monique Siu. Radicals and rich alike thronged to the amber-lit venue for cooking that looked to Italy for inspiration, but also to the great outdoors. “Everything about its mood and menu signifies a turning point in local culinary aesthetics,” raved the Oregonian in 1991.

Soon, other artists followed, eager to return to their roots or plant themselves in a more relaxed environment. Chef Cory Schreiber, a veteran of the restaurant scenes in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, returned to his native Oregon, where his family owned an oyster bar dating to 1907, in part to reacquaint himself with the prime ingredients of his youth. “I had amnesia for 12 years!” he says now of his work before Wildwood, the proudly Pacific Northwestern restaurant he opened in 1994 with two wood-fired ovens. (The establishment closed last year after a 20-year run.)

In France, onetime New York chef Vitaly Paley was cooking at the two-star Michelin restaurant Au Moulin de la Gorce near Limoges when he noticed the origin of the sumptuous morels his employer was using: Oregon. So impressed was Paley by the promise of such edible gems that when he returned to the States, he ended up settling in Portland instead of Manhattan, where he had cooked at such hits as Union Square Cafe, Remi and Chanterelle. Paley’s Place opened to wide acclaim in 1995. Ten years later, its headliner received a James Beard award for Best Chef Northwest. (A Portland chef has won that honor over one from Washington state in three of the past five years.)

Along with Greg Higgins of Higgins restaurant, Schreiber and Paley “set the table” for the area by establishing a grower-connected network and forming strong relationships with farmers, foragers and fishermen, says Brooks, also the author of the captivating “The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland.”

The bench deepened a decade or so ago, when another wave of talent emerged, including Naomi Pomeroy — best known for her supper-clubby Beast and later appearance on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef Masters” — and a slew of proteges who went on to open restaurants that lured food critics onto planes to taste them. Witness Tommy Habetz (Bunk Sandwiches), Troy MacLarty (Bollywood Theater), Gabriel Rucker (the nose-to-tail Le Pigeon, followed by Little Bird).

World-class ingredients draw chefs to the area and keep them there. So do low rents, cheap liquor licenses and loose regulations, says Marc Hinton, author of “A History of Pacific Northwest Cuisine: Mastodons to Molecular Gastronomy.” The Portland-based blogger says, “You can be really small and make a whole lot of noise across the country.”

Or simply across the dining room, as at Pok Pok, where my cab driver at PDX dropped me off for a reunion with smoky, succulent game hen and funky, fiery ground duck liver — Thai food by enthusiast Andy Ricker that’s every bit as exciting as I remember it from my first meal at the outsize shack five years ago.

Jose Chesa, the Barcelona native behind 2-year-old Ataula, one of the best Spanish kitchens on the West Coast, says he was drawn to Portland from Puerto Rico by a “small-town feeling” where “everyone takes care of everyone” and his profession is “all about the farmers, the ingredients.” Greg Denton met his wife and co-chef, Gabrielle, while the two were cooking at the destination Terra in Napa Valley. The couple moved on to Hawaii but traded island life for the Pacific Northwest, where they opened the Argentine-inspired Ox in 2012. “We’ve never felt as settled as we do in Portland,” Denton says. Unlike their previous locales, says the chef, Portland seemed like a blank canvas: “There are no real restrictions, no cuisine you need to stick by.”

“We’re the Wild West of food,” says Brooks. “People here channel the traditions they love, often European or Asian, and make them their own.” Enter Bollywood Theater, a celebration of Indian street food; Langbaan, a speak-easy of a restaurant whose tasting menu transports diners to Thailand; and Nodoguru, a pop-up turned permanent Japanese feast — in a grocery store. “The pioneering spirit is still alive and well,” says Paley, whose empire has grown to three places to eat plus a once-a-month Russian pop-up.

Every chef I spoke with credited an open and appreciative audience, diners with a keen interest in knowing where their food comes from, for spurring them on. “When you can look out your window and see Mount Hood and the Columbia River, people feel connected to the land,” says Schreiber, now a cooking instructor with the International Culinary School at the Art Institute of Portland. While Pomeroy laments all the “pork-bellying” she sees in her backyard, she, too, applauds a “willing and excited” clientele.

Pride of place is part of many food transactions. “Nobody just serves things,” says Brooks. “Everybody proudly serves” — whatever. At Burgerville, the fast-food feeder based in nearby Vancouver, summer specials feature fresh raspberry milkshakes and Walla Walla onion rings.