Our day of exploration: Suchou gardens and Roe...and a bit more too

Friday, July 10, 2014

We complete our vacation in Oregon this morning.  Off to the airport and home.

We have loved our time in Portland.  Pam, the owner of the Heron Haus, with her husband, Carl, is a delight and very helpful with directions and assistance.   We think the BnB is a gem.

The breakfasts are good, the outside areas with lovely stone walls and plantings, and the inside, all very elegant and tasteful.   

Yesterday we decided to walk to downtown, which is about 30 minutes.  We sauntered along the old pre-World War 1 streets of the neighborhood, stopping to look in shop windows on a few of the streets, and view the architecture.  One particular building took our interest, the Temple Beth El, which dates from the 1920s I would guess.   It’s a round building with a huge dome.  One of its rabbis, Stephen Wise, was one of the founders of Reform Judaism and helped reduce the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon.

Suchow Garden

From there we went to the Lan Su Suchow Gardens downtown.   This Chinese garden was a gift from the citizens of Suchou  to their sister city of Portland about 14 years ago.  It’s an intricate series of urban gardens with a lake and pavilions.   We were fortunate to have as a guide one of the Chinese women of Portland who helped convince the city to establish the garden.   She had come to Portland in the 1950s with her parents and had been working to bring Chinese culture here.   Lots of stories and explanations about the value of urban gardens and the role of the Mandarinate in Chinese history.

Charles Rennie MacIntosh as lamp

From there we walked around the city’s Chinatown, lunched on small dim sum at the House of Louie, and then took a streetcar to NW 23rd Street and Ben’s coffee.  He found it at Barista, where the barista not only understood his need for art on his XXX-skim dry cappuccino  but also asked him what kind of art he wanted.  When told that abstract expressionism would be fine the barista asked:  “Jackson Pollock?”   And then he wondered if he should put the cup across the room and throw the second shot of espresso toward it. 

The barista knew!

Dinner was at Roe, a discreet little restaurant attached to Block and Tackle, on SE Division Street.    Here you enter the restaurant and you are seated at the bar until the room at the back of Block and Tackle, which is Roe, is ready.   Then you are ushered in for a fish and seafood tasting menu that’s very inventive and worth the time (and the expense).   We had such divergent sea food as white tuna sashimi, marlin and squid ceviche, lobster with chopped green beans and onion blossoms, poached NZ salmon that had the taste of magnificent lox, and a grilled sea bass.  There was a wine to go with each course.  We enjoyed them all, though Ben would have preferred not to have sparkling wine or champagne.  The high point were the wines from Annie Amie, a winery here in the Yamhill-Carlton area.  Of particular note from from Annie Amie was the Müller-Thurgau.  John had a cardamaro aperatif which had a mild artichoke flavor.  One of the palate cleanser after the first course was made of watermelon, tomato juice and onion blossom.