Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [255]
The preferred beverage for many of the working clientele is coffee, which is served in a bottomless cup, but if you want a true local treat here at the edge of the Coachella Valley, order a date shake. It’s a milkshake supercharged with shreds of locally grown dates.
Oregon
Annie’s Donut Shop
3449 N.E. 72nd Ave.
503–284–2752
Portland, OR
B | $
There’s been a donut renaissance in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle and Portland are bonanza cities for sinker lovers, especially those who like their morning pastry with excellent coffee. For all the new, fashionable, retro, and Goth donuts available in both cities, we have a soft spot for traditional ones that go great with morning coffee (not latte!), especially for those you’ll find at Annie’s. They’re made here daily, and the variety is tremendous. Old-fashioned cake donuts have the concentric circle-within-a-circle shape so popular in the Northwest that provides nearly twice the crunchy exterior of a simple round one. Glazed and maple-frosted OFs are especially swell, and although the price is plebeian, the taste and mouth feel are aristocratic. Cream puffs are light and impeccably fresh, the only way a cream puff should be. The wickedest variety we sampled was a raspberry fritter—unctuous, super-sweet, slightly fruity, and monumentally filling.
Annie’s has none of the amenities of upscale coffee and donut shops: no art on the walls, no Wi-Fi, no couches or lounge chairs and, of course, no baristas. You sit in molded plastic booths that look out on the parking lot and are served by a staff with no attitude other than pride in the donuts they make and sell.
Dan and Louis Oyster Bar
208 S.W. Ankeny St.
503–227–5906
Portland, OR
LD | $$
Warm milk, melted butter, and lots of little oysters: This is Dan and Louis’s oyster stew, one of the unaffected seafood specialties of the Northwest. According to the menu, it was invented by Louis Wachsmuth long ago on a cold, winter day. Its oysters are Yaquinas from the restaurant’s own beds. On the half shell, they are ocean-sweet; in a stew, they are little pillows of oceany aplomb. While it is possible to get the stew with a double dose of oysters, we prefer having a half-dozen or a dozen on the half shell, then having the stew with its normal number.
If we’re really hungry, we’ll follow that with a plate of pan-fried oysters. Yaquinas fry up beautifully with a toasty golden crust. They are sent to the table with ramekins of tartar sauce and Thousand Island dressing, as well as a pile of lettuce shreds heaped with small shrimp and a length of chewy sourdough bread.
Beyond oysters, Dan and Louis sells Dungeness crab, Shrimp Louis, halibut fish and chips, even a hamburger for those who accidentally find themselves in this thoroughly nautical eat-place. Among the non-oysters items, we are especially fond of the dowdy creamed crab on toast, a dish that could have been served in a department store lunchroom seventy-five years ago.
The interior of Dan and Louis is mesmerizing, its handsome sailing-ship wood walls bedecked floor to ceiling with an inexhaustible accumulation of nautical memorabilia and historical pictures, notes, and maps that tell of Portland since Louis started serving food here.
Ecola Seafoods
208 N. Spruce St.
503–436–9130
Cannon Beach, OR
LD | $$
Cannon Beach is one of the most picturesque places on the Oregon coast, known for the awe-inspiring haystack-shaped rock a couple hundred yards out beyond the shoreline. It is a quiet hamlet and a grand