Last month, Chris and I celebrated our anniversary. We’ve been together basically forever, so we deserved a nice celebration. We decided to take a long weekend in Portland! Read on for some of our adventures and recommendations.
Friday
We both took the day off of work and drove down at around 10am, late enough to avoid rush hour but early enough that the Southbound express lanes were still open. We arrived in Portland at 2pm, and check-in wasn’t until 4. What to do?
We decided to go visit Cargo and Guardian Games. Parking proved problematic, and in our circling around the neighborhood, we stumbled upon Steven Smith Teamaker’s Tasting Room just as someone else was pulling out of their parking spot. Clearly, it was time for a fortifying spot of tea.
We enjoyed a couple of delicious lattes and picked up some loose-leaf tea for our collection at home.
After that we finally found parking close to Cargo and did some shopping there. They had a display of cactus and succulents, so we bought a tiny cactus that Chris dubbed Sven. Sven got to spend the weekend in our swanky hotel room guarding our things.
At Guardian Games we got our geek on and picked up a few things and sent my brother photos to make him jealous (he always tells me to go there any time I’m heading down to Portland).
It was finally time to go check in, so we went over to Hotel Deluxe. This was a great choice for our weekend because it was just across I-405 from the south end of the Pearl District. It was within walking distance of most of the things we wanted to do, but far enough away from the bars and clubs that it was still quiet (important, because we were there on St Patrick’s Day weekend!). Our hotel had a lot of vintage charm, with an Old Hollywood theme. The room was small but incredibly comfortable, and the employees were all nice. We’d definitely go back.
After freshening up, we were off for dinner! In preparing for this trip I discovered that March is Portland Restaurant Month. HOW CONVENIENT! An entire month of 3 Courses for $33 at a long list of Portland’s best restaurants. We consulted an article on some of the best bets and settled on Departure because the menu looked good and we could walk there from our hotel (though it turns out our hotel’s restaurant had a deal, too). We were not disappointed.
Chris ordered the most complicated cocktail I’ve ever seen, pictured above. It’s a whiskey highball, made with hibiscus infused soda and served with three spray bottles of essences. You spritz an essence into your cocktail and it temporarily changes the flavor and scent of the drink. Fancy! It came with that entire carafe of soda water so I enjoyed some of that after finishing my much more modest cocktail (I say modest, but it was pitch-black from coconut ash).
Many of the Restaurant Month deals only had one option for each course, but Departure offered two choices for each. We got one of everything (except for the dessert, we both wanted the chocolate option!). Because they were served to be shared, each course came out separately which turned it into more of a 5 or 6 course meal (because we ordered a sushi roll too). This resulted in a really enjoyable leisurely meal.
The meal was pan-Asian fusion food, one of our favorite styles of cuisine (is it a problematic white person thing? Probably. My tastes developed before my social consciousness did).
We needed to walk our dinner off, so we did the only acceptable thing for two geeks in Portland: we spent the rest of the night in Powell’s City of Books. Many books were purchased. My oversized canvas tote bag strained under the weight of our book buying binge. Many more books were sadly left behind for another day.
Saturday
It was a nice day so we took to our feet again. After sleeping in, we walked over to Blue Star Doughnuts. I’d heard they were better than Voodoo, and I have to agree. But then again, they’re two different classes of doughnuts. Voodoo is over the top and in your face. Blue Star has more of a gourmet approach.
Fueled up on sugar, we walked all the way down to the Portland Saturday Market. Chris found a really cool t-shirt and we picked up a bottle of cider. Mindful of the amount I had spent on books the night before, I exercised self control and did not purchase any handmade jewelry or tea mugs, as much as I wanted to.
Lunch was Bamboo Sushi, a restaurant known for their sustainable sushi. They had geoduck on the menu. Chris wanted to try it. Our waitress described it as a maritime flavor. I tried it but did not like it. Apparently “maritime” translates to “tastes like a fish market smells.” Very briny, kelpy, fishy. At least the rest of our meal was delicious.
One of the reasons why we had chosen Portland for our weekend (besides the fact that it’s an easy drive from Seattle) is that I wanted to take a cooking class with my friend who runs Apples and Ambrosia. I’ll tell you all about that next week, but we did a private lesson with her and it was so much fun! Afterwards we walked down to Salt & Straw and waited in line forever to get ice cream.
Sunday
We had to checkout on Sunday but we weren’t ready to be done with Portland! We walked over to Blue Star for more doughnuts, then hit a couple of handmade shops in search for gifts for a couple of friends.
We wanted lunch before our long drive home. Our plan was to go to the Rogue Public House, but we found that they were under construction… Actively under construction on a Sunday afternoon. It was noisy and the menu looked limited so we noped on out of there and made our way to Deschutes instead.
Much better choice. The food was great, and Chris ordered a Thai-influenced sour beer that was so delicious we had to get a growler to take home with us.
There was one more important thing we had to do before we left Oregon: we needed to do a booze run. You see, Washington has the highest liquor tax in the nation. Oregon has no sales tax. We were determined to add a few things to our home bar and not get gouged in the process. We went to Pearl Specialty Mart, where we found a dizzying array of distilled spirits to tempt our palates. We exercised restraint, limiting ourselves to two bottles of rum, a Townshend’s tea spirit, and a bottle of sour passionfruit beer (did I mention I love sour beers?).
We paid a .10 deposit for the beer bottle and no tax. At all. Portland, I love you.
We’ll Be Back
There’s so much more I want to do in Portland. We had a big laugh about how we basically spent the whole weekend eating and didn’t really do anything. I’d like to check out OMSI, or get out of the city and go see Multnomah Falls or other natural attractions. And honestly, there’s a lot more food I want to eat! We walked past a lot of restaurants we wanted to try, and that was just in the Pearl District. I know there’s some great stuff over in Laurelhurst, too, and we didn’t even make it over there.
Portland is a great place to spend a romantic weekend!
