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| The
100 Best Restaurants in Portland |
Restaurant
of the Region >> BY JAMES McQUILLEN 600 FERRY ST., DAYTON, (503) 864-2995 DINNER TUESDAY-SATURDAY Plenty of people spent the 1960s single-mindedly indulging in mushrooms and wine, and they're as likely to have ended up in detox as anywhere else. Jack Czarnecki, however, ended up in heaven. At least that's what he calls Northwest Oregon, and after dinner at his restaurant, the Joel Palmer House, one is inclined to agree. Czarnecki's mushrooms aren't of the hallucinogenic kind, but they're no less transporting. For those who have never made it past the simple white button mushroom, the mycological equivalent of iceberg lettuce, his is a brave new world of matsutakes, morels, chanterelles, boletes, portobellos and suillis. All have unique flavors and textures, which Czarnecki explores in his cookbooks (the preeminent mushroom cook in the country, he's written three) and in his kitchen. Oregon is a mushroomer's paradise, but Czarnecki and his wife, Heidi, also an excellent cook, did not move here from Pennsylvania just for the fungi. "Nothing goes better with mushrooms than pinot noir," he says. "For that matter, nothing goes better with food than pinot noir." How strongly does he feel about about a place with great mushrooms as well as great pinot noir? "Dayton is the culinary epicenter of the universe," he states. "Here is the perfect marriage of mushrooms and wines. No one argues with that--not in Tuscany, not in the Moselle, nowhere." An affable man who would look as natural in a crowd of football fans as he does beside the 12-burner stove where he creates his inspired dishes, Czarnecki is self-deprecating when it comes to wine. He insists that he knows little about it, and of pinot noir specifically he says, "It's a wine that completely baffles me." The superb wine list at the Joel Palmer House indicates otherwise. Few things go together better than what comes out of his kitchen and what comes out of his cellar. One taste of his wild-mushroom soup, a powerful essence of suillis, reveals the characteristic meatiness that makes many mushrooms perfect companions for full red wines; you would swear it was made with beef stock. (Would-be vegetarians who think that giving up meat means giving up deep flavors haven't tried cooking with wild mushrooms.) Pinot is perfect, with sufficient body but less imposing tannin than the typical cabernet sauvignon or merlot. It's much more than just body, however, that makes this a good match. To describe the powerful fragrances of Czarnecki's soup, his sautéed matsutakes and Heidi's phenomenally delicious three-mushroom tart, I found myself reaching for the kind of words that make oenophiles drool but that most people would find less than appetizing when applied to food: earth, leaf mold, compost, manure. Mmm. Aging pinot takes on strangely alluring fusty elements and aromas of decay, like the smell of the woods in autumn. Not coincidentally, the home of these mushrooms is the rotting forest floor, and they carry its essence. Younger pinots also go well with this food, particularly dishes with a single focus and those, like the tomato soup with chanterelles, that can stand up to acid. In other dishes, Czarnecki sautées chanterelles with puréed rose hips and a bit of orange juice; the perfumey flavor, which verges on the sybaritic, goes nicely with a fresh and fruity wine. But most of the dishes, especially those with a wide array of flavors, are best with wines that have taken on complexity and earthier flavors with age. Another virtue of pinot noir that makes it especially appropriate for this restaurant is the wide range of styles in which it's made. Czarnecki's approach to food is uncommonly catholic, drawing ingredients and influences from Spain, Poland, China, Thailand and elsewhere; his menu is like a world tour, low to the ground. "It's not fusion," he says. "It's freestyle. The world is your grocery store." The same grape can provide a match for the Spanish steak (with a Catalan black-bean sauce), the portobello en croûte (with hoisin sauce and bleu cheese) and the Balkan rabbit (with cumin and hazelnut couscous). A friend to whom I described a meal at the Joel Palmer House asked, "Didn't it get boring with all those mushrooms?" It didn't, but why not? Czarnecki learned early on that the best wines have an elusive, ineffable quality, as do mushrooms. Trying to pin it down is an exercise in futility on the order of theologians' attempts at proving the existence of God--which may help to explain why Jack Czarnecki says he's in heaven.
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