VIA Magazine

Oysters: A fine reason to visit Oregon. | FotoosVanRobin/Flickr

For all the bubble and holler and whoop and warble about Portland as Cool Foodie Capital of Cascadia (forget it, Seattle!), you can find absolutely superb culinuggets outside downtown, especially if you have a jones for pan-fried oysters.

One entertaining wander, for example (if you have a couple of days and a car), is to start at the Corbett Fish House, near the Willamette River in the city’s southwest corner, where owner Greg Boyce, a Green Bay native, is a seriously addled Packers fan who televises every game.

The Corbett is the only completely gluten-free restaurant in Portland, and the only restaurant on the West Coast where Wisconsin piscine staples lake perch and walleye are served daily. It also (along with its spinoff, the Hawthorne Fish House, in southeast Portland) serves unbelievably good fried oysters. Coated in rice paste and flash-fried, they’re not as heavy and, well, glutinous as most such bivalvian culinary permutations. They come in a “jumbo basket” along with fries as big as logs—far too much food for one human to eat in a single sitting. (If you ignore the fries, however, you might be able to finish off the oysters.)

Also, the Corbett has those little grape-juice wine glasses that make me feel like I am at a Mafia wedding, which is fun.

Then away! To the wine valley! Where some of the best pinot noir in the world is made! Which is shockingly expensive!

But o blessed palate, does pinot noir meld beautifully with the pan-fried oysters at Tina’s Restaurant in Dundee, right in the happy heart of the Red Hills wine district, with its distinctive earthy, muddy, dense, muscular pinot noirs. Tina Bergen and her husband Dave serve their oysters (from Washington’s Willapa Bay, just over the Columbia River from Oregon) with a lean sorrel mayonnaise, and twice I have eaten nothing at Tina’s but oysters, accompanied by a terrific pinot noir made a mile up the hill.

Tina’s usually has local duck, rabbit, and lamb on the menu, all of which are best savored with burly pinot noir. Boy, I love Oregon.

If, after all this, you’ve had enough oysters, you could go one town to the west, to Dayton, and slip into the Joel Palmer House. It’s a lovely odd restaurant in the sprawling home of the eponymous legendary Oregon pioneer who climbed Mount Hood barefoot. Wow.

Meals at his house all involve local mushrooms and truffles in a stunning number of combinations. Expensive? Yes. Unique? Oh my, yes. Delicious? Of course.

Brian Doyle took part in the Portland vs. San Francisco food debate at VIAmagazine.com in September, 2011.