What I Ate on My Summer Vacation

Bobcat Bites to Morning Glory

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Wednesday, Sep 3 2008

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5. During the week, American Flatbread bakes the organic, sustainable pizzas you might have seen in freezer cases at Whole Foods. On Fridays, the assembly line converts into a restaurant where almost everything passes into and out of the enormous, igloo-shaped wood oven, and the whisper-thin flatbread, the “Porkfolio” charcuterie plate and the soupe au pistou made with fresh shell beans are wonders to behold. As everybody around here will remind you, this is Sideways country, and the wine list is stuffed with ultra-allocated small-producer bottles from the surrounding hills.

6. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, you can spend most of a day grooving with the pulsating jellyfish or staring into the million-gallon tank that houses sharks, tuna and silvery schools of sardines. Then you can go downstairs to Portola, a white-tablecloth dining room, and plow through an impeccably prepared dinner of squid, sardines and abalone from the very bay that the dining room overlooks: not bad for a museum restaurant. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is the source of those Seafood Watch wallet cards that rate fish as Best Choices, Good Alternatives or Avoid, depending on the strength and ecological soundness of the fishery, and this is probably the one restaurant in California where you don’t have to interrogate the waiters on the provenance of the cod. Unfortunately, the restaurant serves dinner only in the summer; sorry about that.

Anne Fishbein

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7. Strong organic coffee, omelets made with local Gorgonzola, eggs scrambled with smoked salmon, a blackberry compote that might tempt you to abandon California for Ashland, Oregon, without leaving a forwarding address — Morning Glory is one of the essential breakfast spots in the Pacific Northwest. It is usually sprinkled with enough cast members from the town’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival to let theatergoers eavesdrop on gossip about the production of Othello they may have seen the night before. The lemon-ricotta French toast is legendary; so are the oatmeal pancakes. But what draws me to Ashland whenever I find myself passing through the great State of Jefferson is the possibility of devouring a bacon waffle with a side of applewood-smoked bacon. If there were a way to get bacon into the coffee, I’d probably do that too.

8. Pok Pok is one of those fanatic’s restaurants, an old Portland house converted into a shrine to Thai street food, a temple of sticky fish-sauce glazes, grilled things on skewers and immoderate chile heat, roast game hens and fish-sauce chicken wings and grilled boar collar with iced mustard greens, mostly prepared with local organic meat and vegetables. The ice water is flavored with whole pandan leaves that curl around the inside of the pitcher, and the beverage list is in large part made up of whiskies and flavored fruit vinegars. Karen Brooks of the Oregonian named the place the restaurant of the year in 2007, but you get the feeling that Andy Ricker, the mastermind, would be just as happy cooking for himself — it’s what Zuni Café would be like if Judy Rodgers had spent her junior year of high school in Chiang Mai instead of Burgundy.

American Flatbread, 225 W. Bell St., Los Alamos, CA, (805) 344-4400.

Bobcat Bite, 420 Old Las Vegas Hwy., Santa Fe, NM, (505) 983-5319.

Lotus of Siam, 953 E. Sahara Rd., Las Vegas, NV, (702) 735-3033.

Mom’s Café, 10 E. Main St., Salina, UT, (435) 529-3921.

Morning Glory, 1149 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR, (541) 488-8636.

Pok Pok, 3227 S.E. Division St., Portland, OR, (503) 232-1387.

Portola Restaurant at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, 886 Cannery Row, Monterey, CA, (831) 648-4870.

Z Cuisine, 2239 W. 30th Ave., Denver, CO, (303) 477-1111.