Little Bird, Portland
I love Portland. It’s a lovely city filled with plenty of great food and definitely plenty of great coffee. Almost every morning is spent at a different coffee shop. Matthew sent me a link to Le Pigeon. Sadly, it had no availability while I was in town. On the upside, there are two sister restaurants, one of which is Little Bird. It was not only open, it had availability. With Foie Gras ...
Majordomo
Likely the last restaurant adventure on this L.A trip was to Majordomo—a David Chang restaurant. With all the cooking shows I’ve watched, I was excited to go here and excited to be able to book a reservation a month ago. Earlier today, in trying to track down a dress code—there really isn’t one except maybe “don’t look slovenly” but they still let me in and anyways—I came a...
Mastro Steakhouse
Kitt, “the vegetarian”, was in the mood for meat. I’m certainly not going to pass up an opportunity like this. She looked up the best steakhouse in L.A. and Beverly Hills’ Mastro seemed to be the place. With A5 Wagyu listed on the menu, I was definitely in. Lucky for us, we were able to squeeze in a last minute reservation. The dress code required pants and collars, which meant gripes ...
Felix Trattoria
Both of my boys, when asked where they’d like to go for our summer trip, simultaneously and without consulting the other, answered: “Los Angeles.” We were staying at an Airbnb near Venice Beach, which is also very close to a strip of hip places on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I dubbed it Portland Avenue since it reminded me of the Oregonian city, including a Salt & Straw location. In r...
Alinea
The 50 Before 50 Challenge continues. This time, in Chicago for the fifth of fifty restaurants. I flew in just for this, arriving the morning of the reservation and leaving the next day. They were very specific about not arriving late, so as not to miss any of the show. We arrived a half hour early, rain beginning to come down. There’s no bar at the restaurant. We walked two doors down to a...
New York Food Adventures
After some rather ambitious efforts to go to five Michelin-starred restaurants in a week, a new—and possibly more ambitious—goal has begun: Go to 50 of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants before I turn 50. In San Francisco, we went to Saison, which just so happened to be on The List. That meant only 49 more to go. New York is a short hour-long flight from Ottawa and, thus, it made sense to...
Rating Restaurants
Having begun the quest of 50 before 50, I realized that it would be good to have a way to rate each of the restaurants that we go to. Between the dozen or so Michelin-starred restaurants and the now handful of restaurants on the World’s Best list, differing factors have revealed themselves. I’m finding a number of ways that these restaurants differ from each other: experience, valu...