the belly of the beast, pt. 1

A great painting by Evan B. Harris
Since we don't want any of you to forget just how much this blog is a joint effort between P & A (often necessitating awkward 3rd person grammatical ploys), we're going to be tag-teaming this one. We wrote all of our Montreal posts together and we always bounce ideas for posts off of one another; so just ignore those little "posted by" tag lines at the bottom. It is a funny experience to co-author writings - we see the differences in our voices while trying to make them blend into something coherent. If it was snarky, it was probably P; if it was punny, it was
probably A's doing. So for this one, we're going to try a little back-and-forth, which may just degrade into bickering.

P: Right after saying how infrequently we get to new restaurants, we're at it again. Just a little over a month ago, Naomi Pomeroy (formerly of Ripe and Supper fame) opened a new restaurant, BEAST, with an intriguing premise - one prix-fixe menu per night of her signature French by-way-of-Portland-farmer's market fare.

Apparently, it was so intriguing that it turned up in Willamette Week's 100 best restaurants in Portland after only a few weeks of service. The early accolades made me skeptical - not necessarily about the caliber of BEAST, but about WW's standards. Just skimming through this year's guide, A and I immediately came across a handful of such poor editorial calls. Too many of the reviews sounded like apologies for the poor quality of a restaurant (Nostrana, Red Star, and don't even get me started about how mediocre Pinocchio sounds) and one review was even of a place that had sadly closed prior to publication.

I love Portland, and I love Portland restaurants, but I'm sorry, there are not 100 superlatively good upscale restaurants in town. Don't scrape the barrel just to get a newsstand worthy number; including sub-par restaurants only makes Portland look like we have a poverty of worthwhile food, which is far from the truth.

A: The reason for Beast's immediate success requires back-story, because unlike other restaurants that might falter out of the gate, Beast is the product of the continual refinement and clarification of a culinary idea. We've had Naomi Pomeroy's food a few times before, but never in a restaurant setting. Naomi used to be half of Portland's epicurean dynamic duo, arguably a major impetus behind Portland's push into the food scene big leagues.

In addition to a handful of restaurants, Naomi and her ex-husband started Ripe, a family-style supper that began in their home as an invitation only event. In the very beginning, guests brought a chair to the table in exchange for their meal. Oh, how we longed to attend. We eventually got to a Ripe dinner when they were a part of TBA in 2005. The meal was amazing - I still can't get the cherry tomato, haricot verts, and shell bean salad with pounded basil and aoili out of my head - and sharing meals with strangers really does make one feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The next time we had the pleasure of tasting Naomi's food was much more recently, after her empire had a sucker-punch of a collapse. (This may sound like a lot of gossip, but this is Portland after all, and these are the closest we have to celebrities. -P) About a month after I started working at Ecotrust, the events staff re-introduced an event called the Unearth dinner. While the name was a little obtuse, the concept of the dinner was intriguing - a local and highly seasonal dinner made by a Portland chef. This time, the chef was Naomi Pomeroy. The cuisine was the essence of late spring with copper river salmon, early summer berries, chicories, spring lamb, braised baby fennel and cherries. Again, the food was served family style and we spent the evening eating our fill, drinking good wine (with the wine makers) and quickly becoming friends (or maybe just drunk) with everyone around us.

For us, these two meals captured two themes that make Beast what it is: a place that emphasizes both the seasonality of food and the conviviality of sharing it with others.

After P's rant and A's little history lesson, we've realized it is late and this post is running long - we'll devote our entire next post to the actual food....