Sunday, August 16, 2009

Beast

August 7th was Jeff's birthday, so to celebrate he wanted to go to a restaurant called Beast. The chef, Naomi Pomeroy, is from Jeff's hometown Corvallis, and she is one of the best new chefs in the country. She is also featured in this month's Food and Wine magazine.

The food was absolutely amazing. It was a six course meal and there were two different seatings, one at 6:00pm and the other at 8:45pm. The menu is a set menu that changes weekly and there are no substitutions. We made reservations for the 6:00pm seating. We started out with cream of summer corn soup with herb salsa verde and fried shallots. The soup was outstanding and the salsa verde gave a touch of brightness to the soulful soup. The second course was a sampler plate of house made pate's, steak tartare and foie-gras. The third course was a duck confit with a bean cassoulet with pork sausage and lamb shoulder with braised greens and cherry tomatoes. The duck was the star of the dish, but the cassoulet was exceptionally simple and tasty. The fourth course was a baby lettuce salad with apricot and brown butter vinaigrette with sheep's cheese and croutons. The dressing had a nice sweetness as a counterpoint to the earthy flavor of the sheep's cheese. The fifth course was a cheese plate with figs and candied hazelnuts. Finally, the dessert was a peach and amaretto mousse with blackberry sauce and pistachio praline whipped cream.

Not only was the food amazing, but the ambiance was equally impressive. While we were there, they were filming a pilot TV show for Food Network. It was fun to see all that went on to film the pilot, I don't think we were on TV, but we can't wait to watch it when it airs.

Beast has community seating and we met some very nice people at our table. We shared our table with the manager of Broder and his parents. They shared some great ideas for future food adventures here in Portland. That being said, we're looking forward to coming back to Beast many more times and making more great memories.

Here are some pictures from our fun night.






Jeff waiting for the door to open

5 comments:

Jen said...

Wow! More awesome eating adventures. Sounds really yummy.

Kaylynn said...

Happy Birthday Jeff! Your food adventures sound so fun!

Courtney said...

So, I can't even pronounce half of what you guys ate - but it sounds impressive!!

holmesfam.blogspot.com said...

Okay so I totally have been slacking on adding you to my blog list...but now I can keep up on you and your hubby. I wish we had cool places like that to eat around here...we probably do, but I just don't know about them!

Dr. Todd said...

Jealous. Julie and I have been talking about heading over to Beast for over a year now. We don't live far from it and drive by it all the time heading down to the Alberta district.

Someday... yes.. someday we shall meet up with you guys for a food adventure.

Your blog makes us hungry.