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This is a like-minded post, relating to a series we (Hot Knives) are doing on our blog about the best beer stores on our drunken radar. While we certainly won’t be biking to P-town on our upcoming Great L.A. Beer Run, you should hop on two wheels and book it to Southeast Portland to revel in the glory of your region, and our favorite drink…

Portland is known the world over to be a haven for beer and its drinkers. From pub-cinemas to epic brewers’ festivals, PDX is all about our favorite elixir. We have a bit of a “love/hate” feeling about the insanely available and affordable wealth of ale that extends from outside Beaverton to Troutdale, mostly from our city’s lack of love for beer on the mass-movement scale that Portlanders share. In L.A., the beer lover is separated from her lifeblood and her brethren by an endless city of cities, most of which have no definitive beer store, and no bars with brews of higher caliber than Stella Artois (now property of England). In Portland, every convenience store has a beautiful bomber for a bargain; every grocery store’s refrigerated section leaves us breathless.

On our recent foray in your city the need for a beer store visit was unquestionable. After seeing Yacht on a Yacht, getting drunk with said maritime namesake after disembarking from his namesake, and knocking out a super radical brunch for 20 plus hung-over compatriots, we only had one destination in mind.

Our trip to Belmont Station reinvigorated our conception of Portland as Mecca. It is a quaint shop, filled to the proverbial brim with exceptional beers both known and new. What’s more, we arrived at the beginning of a seven course beer tasting and lecture by the head importer for Shelton Brothers, a specialty distributor of very special beers. At first our throbbing heads kept us anchored to pub stools, drooling over lambics and golden ales brewed at night by dudes with day jobs. After seven rounds of the rare and expensive at no charge, and some cold air from an older beer hack, we shook ourselves out of the hangover and mustered the guts to shop.

The selection at Belmont is outstanding. It took us a good twenty minutes to take in the three walls of reachin fridges and even longer to decide what the hell we were going to cram into our suitcases. The inventory was completely refrigerated, save a few aisles of six-pack overflow in the center of the store. Each reachin was organized according to country of origin: 2 domestic-micro, 2 Belgian, 1 German, 1 Bavarian, 1 English and one more (which housed the seemingly inconsequential). We heard whispering at the bar that most of the regular stock was kept in a low light basement lock up, to protect the integrity of the brews. Shit, these people advertise using special UV filtered lights in the show room to deter early oxidation.

Two sentences ago, we noted something that heretofore had been unknown and impossible for our squeaky little brains to conceive: the über beer store has a bar attached. Not only can you waltz into this place and find the best beers available in our giant unappreciative-of-anything-more-than-piss-colored-fizz country, but you can drink them…in…the…store. Every one of 700 beers advertised has a listed sales price for both takeout and sit-down. So, you’d rather not commit to a draft pint of Stone’s Imperial Russian Stout on that has been aging in quiet darkness under the watchful eye of the Belmont crew for a full year? How about a 750 of De Ranke’s XX bitter? Or a 12oz of dry hopped St. Rouge’s Red, or a goddamn Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA (20% alc. by volume)? Whatever you want: pull it from the fridge and sidle up to the bar. Proper glassware will be provided by the barkeep.

This store should be your new destination for party fuel, your shopping center for liquid accompaniments to great food, and your pre-dusk haunt for after work unwinding. The closest thing to a flaw that we found at Belmont was empty spaces where wonderful beers (Pizza Port, Great Divide, Lagunitas etc.) would have been. Lack of such solid stock in a place like this can mean only one thing: that beer freaks abound in Portland and they know where to go for drink.

Go to Belmont Station, grab a cold Hair of the Dog, think of us.

Staff: Notably siked enthusiasts who look and feel dearly familiar.
Refrigeration: Nearly everything, except the over-stock shelves, and the seceret underworld, ostensibly cooled by moist North Western soil.
Split Six Packs: Absolutley.
Belgians: Strong focus on micro-belgians like De Ranke.
Micro-Brews: Fantastic selection, all major states and breweries accounted for.
Special Powers: Did we mention the bar?
Achillies Heel: We live in L.A. (you do not).
Location: Here.

I recently returned from a trip to Spain and Switzerland. While I was in Zuerich, I went to a restaurant called Der Blindekuh. (The name is a pun, since "blinde Kuh" is the name for the game we call Blind Man's Bluff.) It is run completely by blind and sight-impaired people, and it's completely dark. The idea is to give sighted people a sense of what it's like to be blind.

It was a completely fascinating experience. I thought I knew what to expect, but when you enter the dining room and all of a sudden you can't see anything at all, it's pretty shocking. The waitress (who was blind) leads you to a table with you holding on to her shoulders in a train. She then drops you off, tells you where everything is (we were at the bar) and tells you what the bartender's name is. This is very important, because you of course can't meet someone's eyes to get their attention, so if you need anything you say the waiter or bartender's name out loud, and they appear to help you.

In the total dark, against logic, you find yourself straining to see, as if willpower could help you. You don't know where anyone else is, how many people are around you, what the layout of the room is, or anything. It makes you feel vulnerable and much more dependent on the staff. When the bartender came first he touched my hand gently, and I felt so relieved to know where someone was.

I noticed in general that if I wasn't touching anything, I had a weird kind of vertigo feeling, or at least I felt detached. I felt much better with my hands on the bar, or with my shoulder touching my friend's. We also both noticed that we smelled things much more strongly. We knew when someone's fish dish had come out because we could smell it go by, and both of us actively noticed and enjoyed our coffee more than usual. We also had a dessert of chocolate flan, and I found myself much more aware of the texture and temperature of it. It's also extremely difficult to eat when you don't know how much is left, how big the plate is, where on the plate it is...about half the bites I brought to my mouth were empty.

It was really an extraordinary experience, and very affecting. When we came out everything seemed so bright and loud. And after hearing the people around you talking, you start to develop a mental picture of what they look like, but then when you see them they're usually radically different than you thought.

My friend Cyrille told me a funny story about one time he was there, and the Italian woman next to him put her hand on his knee and asked her husband, "is that you?" Cyrille answered in Italian, "no, it's me," and she almost jumped out of her skin.

That doesn't generally happen in a normal restaurant.

Some of you may remember a review I did a while back on Digest, about a restaurant called Steamers. My review was, well, not so enthusiastic, and the discussion in the comments was lively. To my great surprise, one of the commenters was the co-owner of Steamers, Nilesh Dayal. He disagreed with my review, politely but emphatically, and what's more, he wanted a chance to meet with me and win me over.

I was surprised - very surprised - that the owner of a restaurant would find my review, on a small website with readership in the dozens, at most. I was also slightly embarrassed. I'm no authority on anything. No one pays for my opinion. I only wrote the review because Mike asked me to. And, you know, it's a little awkward to be "caught" in the act of harshing on someone's work.

I was nervous to meet with Nilesh, but I knew that you, loyal readers, would expect me not to wimp out on you. So, on a sunny summer afternoon, I sat down with Nilesh to talk about his interest in entrepreneurship, his ambitions for Steamers, and, of course, his love of dumplings.

Nilesh's background is in business strategy, a career he describes as exciting but exhausting - he knew he was headed for burnout when, in one year, he traveled 215,000 miles and spent 140 nights in hotel rooms. Beyond that, he feels there's a "difference between coaching and doing," and he always knew that his calling was for doing. His traveling years also introduced him to another passion, one that became pivotal as he decided what entrepreneurial venture he would choose: the love of dumplings.

He had already realized that Americans are, slowly but surely, turning their backs on fast food. The days when an executive might dash out for, say, a burger and fries for lunch are on the decline. The fast food market, and a large part of its former customers, are ready to grow up: customers are looking for food that's healthier, more interesting, presented better...but they still want the quick service they've come to expect from fast food.

There's an industry name for this market niche: Fast Casual. It's the fastest-growing restaurant niche, and often they have a low-profile fast food parent company: Baja Fresh (owned by Wendy's), Chipotle (from Mcdonald's), Au Bon Pain, and even our home-grown Noodlin' (owned by the same parent company as Burgerville). Food is served quickly, is healthier than most burger chains (or at least makes you think so), the restaurant looks nicer, and customers are willing to pay more for this upgraded experience: the average ticket comes to $6-8 per person. (Snarkier commentators have called this industry "adult fast food.")

Furthermore, these national chains have not entered Portland at nearly the same rate of other cities, mainly because of Oregon's labor laws. In Oregon, employers must pay food service workers minimum wage, raising labor costs significantly over other markets. Here's where Nilesh and his friend and colleage, Steamers co-owner Eddie Cheng, saw their opportunity to "take dim sum to the next level."

Nilesh also realized that while Asian and Mexican food used to be exotic culinary outings, they've now transcended the "ethnic" market sector and become part of what everyday Americans eat. Dumplings and tea don't fall into that category, or at least not yet. Yet what Nilesh saw in Taiwan was that they're a staple food for lunch and snacks: easy to eat, quick, inexpensive and tasty, and thanks to high demand, they're available in countless varieties on any street corner. If Steamers achieves its vision, dumplings and tea will join burritos and bento as food Americans eat all the time.

Portland is an ideal place for Steamers to start, explains Nilesh, for several reasons, not least of which is that both founders live here. Most importantly, because Portland is behind the national curve in this kind of restaurant, they can take more risks and spend some time experimenting. In Nilesh's words, if they were trying to launch in a saturated market like San Francisco, "if we screwed up, someone would beat us at the game." They also feel that, compared to other west coast cities, Portland offers them a demographic that's more like the average American city in terms of income level, education, and, of course, "ethnicity."

You don't have to talk to Nilesh very long to figure out that he's ambitious; he'll tell you right away that "we hope to be big someday." Big means competing with the fast casual heavy hitters, which means that their current downtown location is just the first of many. That's going to mean more resources, and Nilesh is already on the look-out for investors or other business partners to join him in going big time.

They won't be ready for that step, though, until they perfect their formula; Nilesh says that, "in my mind, I don't think we've proven anything yet." Nilesh and Eddie are willing, even eager, to make improvements to Steamers. They've already changed their menu based on customer feedback (which they measure by comments, which they solicit at every turn, and also by observing what does and doesn't sell). As a result, they've expanded their menu significantly beyond dumplings to include salad rolls, Vietnamese sandwiches, noodle salads, and other pan-asian treats; they've also removed some items which weren't popular, like ground chicken filling, and changed their dumpling wrapper dough to keep it from tearing. Nilesh also feels like they did already "screw up on [the] initial branding" by not emphasizing the tea part of their business enough. Tea is a fast-growing beverage sector, can provide a reason to visit during off-peak hours, and appeals to women, who form two-thirds of Steamers' customers.

Though he specifically wants to be a player in "multiple markets and multiple demographic settings," the inevitable next step for Steamers is out from their current lunch-crowd downtown setting: "ultimately, I need to be in the suburbs." That's why they're considering a move that may raise eyebrows: next time you visit the food court in your local mall, you may see Steamers joining the competition. Nilesh explains, "it isn't the most glamorous setting, but the high volume would do a couple of things": raise the Steamers brand profile quickly, allow them to tweak the menu with quick turnaround, and, of course, improve cash flow.

In the end, the key factors determining the success of Steamers is whether or not the 'dumplings and tea' concept is sticky enough: Is it a broad enough concept? Are Americans ready to accept dumplings as an everyday food category? Does it bring people back for regular return visits? You can see the sparkle in Nilesh's eye when he says that he'd welcome a competitor to validate the category.

Steamers is, to my mind, the ultimate fast casual experience: their responsiveness, customer service standards, high-design interiors, and food variety and preparation are probably the highest you can get for the price and concept. Nilesh's aims are even higher, though; he says that he wants to compare favorably beyond just the fast casual sector. That is, he wants me to be a satisfied customer.

Is that possible? To my mind, the thing about fast casual food is that it's firmly rooted in the common denominator. In order to be a successful regional or national chain, you have to distinguish yourself from the competition, yet be as accessible as possible to, well, nearly everyone. It's pretty clear that I'll never be a candidate for the fast casual demographic. I belong to an organic farm cooperative. I love the experience of trying new foods and ingredients. My kitchen shelves are filled with plastic tubs of unpronounceable ethnic food ingredients. I love to cook and eat food outside of my culinary comfort zone.

Nevertheless, if there's anyone whose hard work and flexibility can win me over, it's Nilesh Dayal. In my review, I said I wouldn't be going back to Steamers, but I've changed my mind. See you over dumplings and tea, Nilesh. Oh, and over your delicious coconut and pandan humbao.

I recently went to the Vita Cafe on NE Alberta to have a "fancy goodbye dinner" with my boyfriend, who is in Chicago for five days. Now, I have been to the Vita any number of times during my 10 years in Portland, and I have always found it to be a pleasant atmosphere and delicious food. They also have tons of vegan desserts, such as cheesecake and this amazing apple/marionberry torte thing. The waiters and waitresses are all really attractive in that very particular blend of Hot Unwashed Portland Ambiguous Sexuality" that I find irresistible and am always seeking to emulate. They will sit down at the table with you and chat about their favorite menu items, which helps if you sometimes have a hard time deciding, like a certain Yours Truly.

On this visit, however, something was different. The menu had changed! Our waitress, who Andrew insisted looked like Katy Davidson, informed us that they are switching to a "rotating seasonal menu." I was very excited to hear this. Seasonal eating is much tastier and more healthy, and I am glad to see my favorite restaurant adopting this method! Eating seasonally means that you use vegetables and fruits when they are in season. I don't really have a handle on which are in season at which times, since in this day and age we can get almost all kinds of fruits and vegetables at the store any time we want. But for example, fruits like apples get really mealy and not as crisp and delicious during this part of the year, because apples are a fall fruit, and so in order to have them in May, they have to be shipped from a long way off, or grown in non-ideal situations.

The new menu we sampled from was the tail-end of their winter seasonal menu, and it features items like vegan eggplant parmesan (amazingly good), a spinach pasta with a white bean and sage sauce (also excellent), various types of polenta, and an amazing burrito stuffed with winter vegetables.

I am interested in eating seasonally. It's easy to do if you get one of those memberships to a place like Organics To You, where they deliver a crate of locally grown fruit and veggies to your door once a week. Then you only get what's in season. So all summer long you get blackberries and watermelons and corn, and in the winter you get potatoes and eggplants, and in the spring you finally get amazing, beautiful strawberries. The Vita cafe has inspired me to look more seriously into this lifestyle, and to learn the seasons for all my favorite foods, all of which come from our wonderful Planet Earth (except for soy bacon. I don't know WHERE that stuff comes from).