Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [258]
Across the street from the original Mo’s is Mo’s Annex, with the same fine seafood menu, including a mighty bouillaibasse thick with clams, shrimp, oysters, crab, cod, halibut, and salmon in a light tomato sauce, plus a wonderful view of Yaquina Bay, where diners look out over the water and the commercial fleet berthed at its dock, and watch sport fishermen cleaning their day’s catch.
Nick’s Famous Coney Island
3746 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.
503–235–4024
Portland, OR
LD | $
Portland is a great sausage city; its highlights including Otto’s Sausage Kitchen and the Dog House. And then there is Nick’s. We cannot tell you that the hot dog served at Nick’s is a gourmet’s treat, but it would be a shame to come to town and not experience it. Unlike the fingerling Coneys of the East and Midwest, it is big—a foot long and as thick as a kielbasa, weighted into a bun by a spill of so much chili sauce (and if you know what’s good for you, chopped raw onions) that the dog and bun are eclipsed. It’s a piggy, fatty link, and the chili sauce is unctuously beefy. No doubt, the proper companion beverage is several long draughts of Nick’s on-tap beer.
One of these bad boys is a nice-size meal, but the repertoire also includes doubles and triples smothering a single bun as well as a “home run,” which is four dogs piled onto two buns. That last one costs $12, but cook/bartender Herbie, who has been the man at Nick’s for over thirty years, claims that it is so much food that “$12 is giving it away.” Herbie also recommends Nick’s chiliburger, which is the same idea but with the option of beans mixed into the Coney sauce. He told us that a lot of his customers are businessmen from Chicago and Cincinnati who tell him that what they get at Nick’s is just like home.
A 1930s-era neighborhood tavern in a neighborhood that has yuppified around it, Nick’s is a wonderful anachronism. For us, even a single Coney is daunting, but we love sitting at the counter and listening to Herbie regale customers about the history of hot dogs, chili, Portland, and the world.
Norma’s Ocean Diner
20 N. Columbia St.
503–738–4331
Seaside, OR
LD | $$
Seaside is a semi–honky tonk town in a divinely beautiful location along Oregon’s Pacific shore. You can buy all kinds of T-shirts, fudge, and salt water taffy; and at Norma’s, you can have a real Northwest meal.
We knew we were going to like this place the moment we walked in and saw the chalkboard near the pass-through window to the kitchen. It lists which fresh seafoods are available and where they are from: salmon from the Oregon coast, steamer clams and oysters from Willipa Bay, halibut from Alaska, and local petrale sole. Even the featured wine was Oregonian: Duck Pond Merlot.
The waitress congratulated us on our choice of petrale sole mid-April: “Oooo, it’s in season right now,” she said. And it was wonderful: delicately flavored, buttery-rich, ocean-sweet. Nor could we resist Dungeness crab, which is available here in all sorts of ways. We chose the Louis presentation, which turned out to be about a dozen big, pearly hunks of white meat arrayed atop a pile of lettuce with all the proper garnishes, plus garlic toast made from fresh-baked bread, and a ramekin of excellent house-made Thousand Island dressing.
People at a nearby table were all eating fish and chips. The menu lists cod, salmon, halibut, and even albacore available as the fish part of the equation. We asked our dining-room neighbors how they liked it. Between bites, they were able to exclaim that this was the best fish and chips they had eaten anywhere, any time.
The Oasis
85698 Hwy. 339
541–938–4776
Milton-Freewater, OR
BLD | $$
A short detour off the main road at the Washington State line leads to the Oasis, a sprawling roadhouse that seems to have expanded room by room over the last seven decades. It is ramshackle and rugged, a favorite destination for locals in search of meat and potatoes served with maximum cowboy atmosphere.
Sirloin steaks