LA PIzza Maven, if you come up, I'll happily show you around to all the best pizzas in town and Scholls will be on me. Just contact me through extramsg.com's contact page or through PortlandFood.org.
Glad you finally tried it. What's amazing to me as a Portlander is that while Apizza Scholls is my personal favorite in town, there are three other pizzerias making damn good pizza in town, too, arguably as good: Ken's Artisan Pizza, Nostrana, and Tastebud. All three of these use wood-only ovens. All three of these are very bread-oriented, making doughs that have real flavor. There's also a fantastic pizzeria just an hour away in the tiny little town of Stayton, Oregon, just outside of Salem, called Apizza. The owners are from New Haven. We even have a place doing wood oven pizza that is mediocre and trying to be like these others (I'll leave them nameless) just to remind us that it's about the person making the pizza as much as the ingredients and equipment.
btw, you think that bacon bianca looks good, you should try the clams casino (bacon bianca with in-shell littlenecks) that used to be on the normal menu, but now is just a special occasion pie:
btw, where else did you eat while you were in town?
So I just ate at A16 for the first time the other day. We had two pizzas and both tasted very good. However, I was not impressed with the crust. It had a nice char and blistering and looked like it would be excellent. But I felt it was too soft. Even the charred and blistered spots had no real crispness to them. There was no crunch to the dough at all, though it was clearly cooked through. We're lucky here in Portland to have four terrific hot oven pizzerias that are as good as any I've had in the US, and all get at least some crispness to the edge of their crusts. I've never been to Italy or Naples, however. My guess was the oven was too hot. Talking with the guys on the line, it sounded like, though, that the pizza station was the low-man on the totem pole, the spot to move up from on the line, which seems odd to me.
I like to drink an occasional real soda and have periods where I am a heavy diet soda drinker, primarily Fresca (especially peach), A&W, and Boylan's diet cane. Diet IBC is a great diet root beer, too, when I can find it.
However, I buy into the glucose thing only because when I'm drinking diet soda I tend to have the sugar lows that I experience after drinking normal soda. It's like my body wants sugar but can't find it. It's caused me to go back to my drink of choice: water. I feel much more even throughout the day on water.
Still, though, if I'm looking for a caffeine buzz, my first choice is a Diet Mt Dew or Diet Coke.
My suggestion is that people treat sodas like fine chocolates and look for places that sell quality glass-bottled sodas, like Boylan, Sioux City, Mexican Coke, IBC, etc, and just them occasionally.
I think that reviewers should take comped meals. But I think it should be done semi-anonymously. Specifically, I think that newspapers should accept gift certificates from restaurants to encourage reviewers to come in, but they shouldn't announce who they are and there should be an explicit expectation that the gift certificate will just ensure that the reviewers comes in the door, but that they're going to be honest from there. No quid pro quo. I'd also suggest that it may be worthwhile to have a layer between the reviewer and the restaurants so that restaurants send GCs to the paper not to the journalist.
Newspapers are short on funds and so often I see reviews based on one meal. Or they only go to the big name places because they want to make sure the article has a large audience and they aren't wasting their money exploring restaurants.
I've found that the "boiled then baked" requirement is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a great bagel. I've seen waaaaaaay too many places that claim they boil and bake their bagels that still can't put a good crunch on them.
Also, texture is only half the battle and I think it gets over emphasized because it's easier to discern for most people than flavor. Even in NYC the bagels can be rather flat, even among the oft-recommended luminaries like Ess A Bagel, H&H, and Kossar's.
We hooked up with a amateur Jewish bread baker here in Portland who had been making bagels, rye, challah, and pumperknickel and selling them at the Portland Farmer's Market. He uses a starter and a lot of malt in his recipe which gives it this great aroma and a nice tangy-sweet balance. They're smaller, denser, and crunchier than most of what you get in NY. And honestly, I think their texture is best after a rest of a few hours. They don't lose their crunch even after a day's rest in a paper bag. Oh, and they're all hand-rolled, boiled in malted water, and baked.
We've now got our down-stairs baking and prep kitchen done, so now it's just a matter of seeing if we can translate his old school, artisan technique into a 100 dozen a day.
Ed, email me in a couple weeks and I'll FedEx you a dozen.
btw, I don't know why I said they were blended bars. They're all single origin. I was thinking that they were blended from others chocolate and I was impressed to learn only a couple weeks ago that they were actual chocolate makers, conching their own stuff.
Glad you highlighted this little chocolate maker. I've been lucky enough to be able to try all their stuff here in Portland, OR, at Cacao and think it's pretty darn good. It doesn't sell as well as it should, from what I've seen, but their blended bars are some of the better blended bars I've tried. They're very well-balanced. I think it's comparable to Valrhona, Cluizel, Pralus, Amedei, and other top makers. Definitely a step up from Dagoba, Scharffenberger, El Rey, etc.
Funny thing, I was on a philosophy email list with Goble many years ago and still remember him as being very inquisitive. I'm sure that's helped in their venture. I hope they do well. They're putting out a very praiseworthy product and Utah can use something tasty besides Crown Burger's pastrami burger.
Wanna see what's wrong with the Food Nework? Read the comments on that ABC story:
I also have to agree with everyone that is on the Giada bandwagon - if I looked like her, I'd be out there in front of everyone too. She's beautiful with a personality to match.
I hate Rachel's new kitchen. I liked the old cabinets not the sliding orange cabinet. Her makeup seems a little overdone and her "freshness" is gone. I like her but for some reason I'm beginning to get bored with her.
Just love Giatta, Rachael, and Sandra Lee. They are the hottest babes on TV. They can cook also.
'Nuff said, I think....
One of the problems here is the confusion over the term "healthy". Look at Kerri's comment that something processed is unhealthy crap. The truth is, the real health issue for most people is calories, not whether something has sodium benzoate.
@jimcowling
They do take reservations, but only for groups of 8-12 and only one a night.
Apizza Scholls is the place the boyfriend and I most drool about, but we only go to once every other month or so. If you go on a Wednesday or Thursday earlyish (5.30-6), you can usually get in after 30 or 45 minutes. It is currently the best pizza I've ever had, and it's fun to sit in the room attached to the kitchen to get a good view back there. After reading this post, I talked the boyfriend into going next week. I'm excited already!
@PerkyMac: If Ed would have taken an upskirt shot, we could have seen just how charred the crust is.
@suburbangourmet and @robyn: Sorry 'bout the greenish cast to the pix. I helped Ed with this post, edited his photos for balance. But the thing is, I'm colorblind, so I tend to overgreen pix while balancing for whites. Go figure.
@extramsg: WTF. All these great pizzerias open in Portland and the Willamette Valley after I move away? Had they been a few years sooner, maybe I would have stayed!
After having seen this place on Bourdain's show, I knew that I had to go there on my next trip to Portland. So, last Labour Day, I and three friends drove from Vancouver (BC) and braved the queue. I don't know if it's still the case, but they didn't take reservations. We went on a Saturday night and it took two and a half hours for us to get seated. We had time to go to this hole-in-the-wall bar up the street and have a couple of beers and some really good hot dogs.
Anyhow. We ordered five pies (for four people, with the intent of having some leftovers). One bacon bianca, one sausage, one white, one capicollo and one margherita. The only pizza I've had that was better was from a place in Victoria, BC that closed down a decade ago.
It's all about the crust and the purity of the toppings. Not quite as sparse as a true Napolitano, with a local edge.
Looks like they've been bending their rules some: used to be that you couldn't order a pie with more than one meat on it, but now it's no more than two. Still no more than three toppings per pie.
Going back again this Labour Day.
Little bit of char has always been delicious on pizzas. I loved charred bubbles going back to the '60s and going to Salerno's Pizza on Union Turnpike. Char was "in" then and it is in now.
The way I eat two or three slices--->>
I eat the bubbling hot parts of each up until where there is no tomato or cheese. Just crust.
Only after this to I attack all the remaining crusts which will be charred compared to what I just ate
Oh my God, that looks outstanding. I'm salivating all over the place. I don't have a pizza handy, so I'm reaching for the next best thing............chocolate
The only restaurant I have ever been to where people stand outside and beg for your leftovers!
This is the best pizza I've ever had. The anchovy and pepperoni was one of the best things ever to enter my mouth.
LA PIzza Maven, if you come up, I'll happily show you around to all the best pizzas in town and Scholls will be on me. Just contact me through extramsg.com's contact page or through PortlandFood.org.
And the winner is ... peekpoke!
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