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100 Best Restaurants in Portland |
Feeding Frenzy Unlike the performance of the stock market in the last few months, Portland's restaurant scene continues to be bullish. The community of creative chefs is constantly widening, the quality and availability of ingredients have been steadily on the rise, and many types of cuisine--Italian is the shining example--are plentiful where once they were scarce. Whatever the ups and downs of the rest of the city's cultural life, we've invested in the people who feed us, and the returns have been handsome. Irrational exuberance? Whatever. Let's eat. There are some significant changes to our annual report. In addition to designating a restaurant of the year, we have named a waiter of the year and have brought back the restaurant of the region. To give you a sense of what's behind the scenes, we've taken a look at some of the people who get the food to the kitchen in the first place. Each year we publish two restaurant guides: this one and another, in the spring, called Blue Plate, which covers low-budget dining. In the past there has been some overlap between the two, but this year we've decided to eliminate it. The 100 Best Restaurants in Portland comes, then, with a tacit footnote: The cheapest are not included. It's impossible to determine what cheap means. Our scale breaks down the price points like this: inexpensive (dinner under $10), moderate ($10-$20), expensive ($20-$35) and very expensive (over $35). It's also impossible to be exact about what constitutes the best. After years of sampling what Portland has to offer and conferring with contributors, we have a pretty good idea, but things change rapidly in the restaurant business; some places go through slumps, and others shine only briefly. The downward slide of the stock market since July 17 has served as a reminder of the uncertainties of finance. We have far more confidence in Portland's growth and what that means: increasing traffic, escalating rents and hasty, ill-conceived development. But in the silver-lining department, we look forward to the day when choosing the top 100 restaurants is even more difficult, when--as in New York or San Francisco--even a restaurant critic can stumble on a place that's been operating for ages in obscurity and find buried treasure.
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PHOTO IS A POLAROID EMULSION TRANSFER BY VINCE RADOSTITZ.
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