Futility Now

As huge fans of The Savoy, we’ve been sort of offhandedly considering going to Broder for a while now. In fact, we tried to go there Friday night, but they aren’t open for dinner any more. Hard times all around.

Instead, we went for brunch on Sunday. It was very nice.

As you can see, there’s a bit of a premium on presentation. You might also notice that compared to the somewhat ridiculous portions shoveled at you from any kitchen running before about 4 in the afternoon, there’s a reasonably edible quantity of food here.

The other good thing about the food is that it’s, well, good. Or “well good,” if I were some old limey. At any rate, things were definitely delicious, and having acorn squash instead of potatoes is a cool idea (not that I have anything against potatoes, but variety is the metaphor of cliches, or something.) The bloody mary there is also excellent, although it had a lot of straw-blocking stuff floating around in the bottom of it.

Also, we sat at a counter facing the tiny kitchen, and the one guy who they had doing all the grill work was a real titan. At any rate, we were deeply pleased. The end.

We had dinner at Rocket fairly recently and subsequently ducked back in for a beverage and some snacks. H felt some trepidation initially, as she had  heard mixed things from various food-eating personages. We suspect that maybe the place got off to a slow start, because both of our visits there were exceptional. On the first visit we were with 4 other people and had every entrée except the hamburger. Everyone shared everything, and we were all very pleased. I think the consensus is that the port shoulder was the number one offering, but I personally balanced my approbation a little more fairly. I will quell the urge to offer snobbish asides as to why this may have been.

The more recent visit involved only apps and drinks. H got some kind of meat-filled hush puppy, and I had a salad that was a bunch of slightly sweet and very tender pork under an immense pile of kimchi. The overall effect was extremely good, although I have to say that I think they wussed out a bit on the kimchi (i.e.: it wasn’t anywhere near as stanky as I was hoping that it would be.)

We have also become devotees of Apizza Scholls, although NOT of it’s patently offensive window decorations. Extremely poor taste aside, this place is a titan of tastiness. Our main problem is that we have not yet broken out of the one-caesar-and-one-white-pizza-to-share mould, and probably won’t for the foreseeable future. Apizza may have an amazing array of other delicious options available to us, but for us we’re remarkably incurious. In our defense, the white pizza is basically cheese, truffle oil and sea salt. What the fuck else would you want?

Couple of concluding observations:

1) I promise that the next time I write about restaurants there will be surreptitiously snapped photos.

2) I don’t know if the same company does web sites for 90% of Portland’s restaurants, or if there’s some kind of hive mind mentality surrounding restaurant web design, but it sucks. This template (Rocket’s site is an example, Scholl’s isn’t) is absolutely horrible, and people perpetrating it need to die in a fire. Thanks.