restaurants of central Oregon and vicinity

[calimac]

(scarfed from my Yelp reviews)

Bingen, Washington (pronounced Binjen, and right across the Columbia from Hood River, Oregon)
Solstice Wood Fire Cafe: About the most intensely flavorful food I have ever tasted. Just really the bomb as flavor goes. So good in that department that it totally overcame my initially unenthusiastic reaction to the menu. The thin crust, crunchy chicken pizza was so well made it overcame my mixed reaction to the choice of toppings. (You can make your own choice, but the pizza becomes quickly more expensive that way.)
Also, Moroccan beef stew, a sauce made entirely of a vast array of tastily blended spices, with big chunks of juicy beef, beans, and carrots. Served over potato, but they gave me a full sized bowl of the stew even after I asked for it without the potato.
Less enthused about the apple crisp: apple too wet, crisp too dry.

Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Oregon
Kah-Nee-Ta Resort: I stopped over here for lunch because tour books suggested it was the best food between Hood River and Redmond, not a thickly inhabited region.
Getting here tried my patience. You turn off the highway at a junction, drive ten miles through deserted sagebrush landscapes to another junction, drive another ten miles to a third junction, three miles to the entrance to the complex, two miles to the road to the lodge, then up a winding hill to the parking lot, which fortunately is right by the lodge's front door. This better be worth it. Well, it wasn't not worth it.
Lunch turns out to be served at the "Warm Springs Grill", a cavernous space behind a bar. Looked deserted, but the service turned out to be fairly attentive and the food from the basic pub grub menu well made. I got the most Indian thing on the menu - this is after all a tribe-owned and operated resort on a reservation - a bison burger on fry bread. Thick, juicy, not overcooked burger, and the fry bread, which was a lot lighter in texture than it looked, was addictively tasty.

Madras, Oregon (named for a bolt of cloth in the general store, the founders having had to cast around for another name in a hurry when the Post Office turned down their first choice because of duplication)
Rio Distinctive Mexican Cuisine: What do you know, road warriors, a really decent yuppieish Mexican place in a hopeless-looking ranching town. It's a small house made up as a restaurant, with a menu focusing on enchiladas. I got a mixed enchilada plate with assorted mole sauces on top, all tasty if not great, and the plate presentation is beautiful. It is expensive for what you get, but what you get is good.
Service was kind of pressed at a busy dinner hour, but boy did the staff ever hustle. I have never been asked so often if I wanted more chips, and I never finished the ones I had! Those chips had paprika sprinkled on them, by the way, a unique and greatly enhancing touch.

Bend, Oregon (named for a bend in the river, which makes me wonder why there aren't more towns called Bend)
Barrio: Walking down the street downtown, looking for a place for lunch among the many big-city urban offerings here, I spotted a menu in a window listing paella. This is something you don't often see, so in I went. Yes, one-person servings of paella for $10. Order at the counter, find a table or barstool in the tiny space.
The house paella, with an odd taste I could get used to, has shaved chorizo, hunks of almost-undercooked chicken, and, unfortunately but inevitably, peas. You can add (additional) veggies or seafood; if you ask for seafood, it includes one large shrimp, one large mussel, and a couple large hunks of salmon and white fish. But it's better than this sounds; the fish is moist and embedded in the mix, so you can cut it up easily with a fork and have bites with the rice.
Zydeco: Austere dark wooden furniture like a Japanese restaurant, but it serves yuppie-Southern. Jambalaya pretty good; enough big hunks of sausage and shrimp, but it tasted like it was made with brown rice.
But the bread and olive oil that comes before the meal! Oh, heavenly! Moist bread with thick crunchy crust, and the olive oil on a plate is infused with salt, garlic, and parsley, and it is just so addictive. If I dared, I'd go back and have just four or five plates of that.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

You say "made with brown rice" as if it were a bad thing. I used to make my version of dirty rice with brown rice in preference to white, until Whole Foods started carrying red rice, which is even further from white rice on that same spectrum; chorale and I both prefer the stronger flavor.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the reviews! And now we know never to divert off to Kah-Nee-Ta despite the signage on the highway.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh now, it may not have been quite worth the trouble, but it was certainly not bad once I got there. Better to go there for dinner, though, when they have two restaurants, both much less sketchy than this bar, open. And I didn't have to drive back the same way; it was much closer to the highway at the other end.

The tribes have recently moved the casino from the resort to the highway in town, in hopes of making more money from passersby, but I heard no word about what the food in there is like.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I'm a great fan of Moroccan cuisine to the extent of owning a traditional Moroccan cookpot- a Tagine. I have to say that the Moroccan beef stew you describe is decidely un-Moroccan! For carnivores it'll almost always be mutton or goat. Potatoes? Unlikely- more likely rice and even more likely couscous. There's also a distinct lack o' dried fruits in there- dried apricots and raisins and slivered almonds in savoury dishes are pretty much the basis of things along with tomatoes, onions, garlic and sweet peppers, not to mention the delectable spice mix known as ras-el-hanout.

Forgive me, but we had a Moroccan neighbour for some time and I learned a lot from her! :o)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was hardly expecting authentic Moroccan food at a Columbia RIver-side pizza pub. All I cared for was that it tasted good, which it did. Extremely vivid spices, so thick that the sauce was more spice than liquid, whether the mixture was authentic or not.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I was browsing through a Zane Grey novel that my dad was reading, and it mentioned a town called Bend in the River that was on the Columbia somewhere. I haven't yet looked into whether that was a real town. My dad wasn't sure either. The novel was set around the time of World War I.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Looks as though the Columbia has a stretch called the Big Bend around Wenatchee.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I didn't eat in either of the places you visited when I was in Bend. But I did roughly the same thing -- walk down the street downtown -- and wound up in an all-you-can-eat Indian place, which was good. Semi-randomly picking places that look interesting has far more hits than misses.

Aside: Bend isn't named for the bend in the river, it's a shortening of "Goodbye, Bend", said when river travelers left the part of the river that wasn't volcanic stone. Nearby is the Crooked River, which is probably a common river name. Lots of bends. Fewer straights ("detroit").

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If you're saying, "Goodbye, Bend" when leaving a part of a river that isn't volcanic stone, then either "bend" is a technical term meaning "a part of a river that isn't volcanic stone", which is not a definition of the word that I've come across, or else you're using the word "bend" because it has a bend in it. In which case a town there is called "Bend" because that part of the river has a bend in it.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Your question was "why there aren't more towns called Bend" and I was attempting to explain why this one happened to be called that. Because it wasn't. They shortened the name when DeSchuttes County became a legal entity, or somesuch. (As in, 'the chutes of the rapids'.) More about paperwork and maps then about wriggles in a river.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But your explanation doesn't explain anything. If you say "Goodbye, Bend," when you're leaving a part of a river, then you're saying goodbye to a part of the river called Bend. And why should it be called Bend unless there's a bend? In which case, that's what it's named after.

If, instead, you mean that the name Bend is a shortened form of Goodbye Bend, then "Goodbye" is the adjective and "Bend" is the noun, and again, it refers to a bend in the river.

The book on Oregon place names, which is where I got my information from, says there was a bend, and I think that's explanation enough.