Ultimate Date Night at Feast
Date Night. Oh, how I love date night. The sad thing is that when you have young kids at home, date nights are hard to come by. Exhaustion rules all down time, and organizing a babysitter for some childfree time can seem daunting. Recently, my husband and I made time for each other, and went on the ultimate date night to the Portland food and drink festival Feast.
I have lived in Portland for a long time. When I first moved here the height of cuisine were places like The Spaghetti Factory. Not exactly what you would classify as foodie bait. Watching the culinary scene take off in the last ten-fifteen years has been an exciting and fascinating process to witness.
The culmination of all the farm-to-table freshness is Feast, four days of gut splitting wonderfulness that brings together Portland and out-of-town chefs to create fanciful and experimental concoctions in a gastronomic carnival atmosphere.
Feast is made up of intimate dinners with a limited number of guests and a handful of chefs. There are big marquee events where hundreds of people sample small plates from local and far flung chefs, plus lots of wine, beer and cocktails to help you power through all that food. There are also hands-on Master classes to hone your home cooking cred.
We attended one of the Main Events, “Smoked!” where chefs crafted all kinds of tasty bites playing on the themes of fire and smoke. As we walked under the balloon archway into Fields Park in the Pearl District, we were handed wine glasses and the smoke from at least a dozen barbecue pits wafted through the rainy evening air.
As we wandered through the squishy field, we nabbed tastes from some of our favorite Portland restaurants. We finally had a chance to talk to each other without being interrupted by our four-year-old son, but we were both delightfully distracted by the food, the drinks and the crowds. It had been raining all day and the grassy park had transformed into a manicured sort of mud bath. I joked to my husband that it was easy to tell who the tourists were by their poorly chosen footwear.
College friends of mine, Patrick Flemming and Brandon Riceci opened Boke Bowl back in 2011. I love seeing what Chef Pat comes up with and his Smoked! entry was a hearty pork cheek over Szechuan eggplant and a sweet bean bao. After tasting this well-balanced savory-sweet dish, I was reminded that we should have a date night to Boke Bowl sometime soon.
Another restaurant we love is the Russian-by-way-of-Pacific Northwest, Kachka. Chef Bonnie Morales’s mini-sandwich treat was a beef tongue “Big Mac” with pickled green almonds and lettuce. These hand held morsels of loveliness came toward the end of our evening and I was delighted that there was still a tiny bit of room for Morales’ original take on a fast food classic.
My husband and I celebrated our eleventh anniversary at the sweet little Mt. Tabor spot, Coquine this past summer. By the time we found chef Katy Millard’s stack of smoked almond, salted caramel, and chocolate chip cookies at Feast, I really couldn’t eat another bite. The servers thoughtfully put the cookies in a bag for us to taste later. When we did finally bite into the cookie the following evening, we both declared it was best cookie either of us had ever had.
Date nights are supposed to bring partners together to help reconnect when work and parenting take up too much space in our daily lives. We went for a long rainy walk through the Pearl District when Smoked! ended. We were full, slightly inebriated and happy to have finally spent a few hours together. Feast is the ultimate date night, adult fun in the most Portland of ways. Maybe next year we will buy the whole package, four nights in a row of Feast events for a complete date long weekend. Now that will be something to be savored.