cuenca

(mid june. number 19.)

For this Secret Restaurant, we wanted to try something pretty far outside of our usual realm of experience. Inspired by a visit to famed ridiculous Peruvian restaurant in the Peal District, and tales from friends of eating experiences in South America, we ended up with what could only be described as a new genre! Ecuadorian Nouvelle Cuisine. The faux fusion restaurant this time would be named after Aria's former place of residence, Cuenca. O brother, where will we go next?

On the Table

Tortilla chips (store-bought, we can't make eeeverything!) and homemade spice slam habanero salsa. 

Skewers & Salad

Rock fish and prickly-pear cactus on skewers. The fish was rubbed with blackening spices, and the fruit touched up with a little sugar for extra caramelizing, then cooked on an outdoor grill. Drizzled with a deep, dark mole sauce.

The salad was a mexican-style coleslaw, with cabbage, red onion, spring turnip, pickled cactus, and underripe kiwi,  treated with lime juice and white wine vinegar. Served on top of fresh lettuces from our backyard garden.

Served with a slice of yellow hothouse heirloom tomato, touched up with pink himalayan salt and lemon pepper.

asiopé

(late may. number 18.)

In this phase of fusion dinners, we've been joking a lot about what silly, one-word, all-lowercase names we could have. 

This time, it was asiopé. 

The idea? Dishes inspired by Asian cuisines, but with a European flavor profile. 

A little silly, potentially? Yes. 

Did it work? We think so.

To Drink:

Earl Grey Booze On Earl Grey Rocks

We infused, sun-tea style, like last time, our "house basic booze" (Monopolawa Austrian potato vodka) with an extra citrus-style earl grey tea, as well as lemon twists, some lavender flowers, lavender oil, and a few douglas fir tips (for some local flavor). 

We made large batches of sweetened earl grey iced tea, and turned some of it (before the diluting stage) into ice cubes. Guests placed a cube or two in their cups, then poured their vodka through a teapot-shaped strainer, and mixed it with the straight ice tea. 

Scando

(late april. number 17.)

This Secret Restaurant was a continuation of the "o wow, spring might actually be happening" theme of our earlier April dinner, as well as a chance to try to some ideas for dishes and drinks that we'd had floating around for a while.  Then we packaged it all in vaguely Scandanavian manner.  

Signs Of Spring

(first week of april. number 16.)

This dinner was the beginning of a less theme-heavy, new phase for us.

secret restaurant portland: a fusion pescetarian restaurant. I think we might really be on to something here– we should open in the downstairs part of one of those ridiculous loft buildings so omnipresent in Portland right now.

But really, it was a celebration of Portland Farmer's Market opening again, the flavors and colors it could provide us, and the tastes we wanted to combine right here in the late-coming spring.

The Great Redwall Feast

(early march. number 15.)

"The famous kitchens of Redwall Abbey were abustle with activity that night. Friar Alder, the thin, lanky mouse in charge of it all, added wild plumjuice to an enormous hazlenut crumble he had just pulled from the oven..."

I (Andrew) am a preschool teacher, and in late January our librarian brought one of the classrooms a Redwall picture book called 'A Redwall Winter's Tale,' written by Brian Jacques and illustrated by Christopher Denise. It was written and released long after I "grew out" of reading this series popularized by nerdy 5th grade boys, so I'd never seen it. Neither had a coworker who was also excited by the books' appearance at school. This led me to discover the other two books made with the same illustrator– 'The Great Redwall Feast' and 'The Redwall Cookbook.'

I remember always being particularly enchanted by the descriptions of food in the books; flowery cordials and creamy cheeses and savory pies. I even made a Redwall cookbook around age 11, poorly laid out and haphazardly printed on my families' ink jet color printer in 1997. I'm not sure if I ever tried to make anything out of it. I probably just shoved it under my mother's nose and hoped for the best.

A few days after the wintry picture book had appeared, my coworker shared the news he'd learned of Jacques passing, from a heart attack at the age of 71, a few days earlier. I immediately became determined to pull off a Redwall themed Secret Restaurant, as an homage to Jacques and a celebration of the end of winter.

And yes, that first image is of a mouse hand sculpted out of marzipan by my roommate Kellen.

Southern Pacific

(valentine's weekend. number 14)

We had some guests in town for this one, which was very exciting. Faith Griffiths, who does this thing (The Jubilee Collective) and has this band (Dana & Faith), had been doing an internship down in Eugene. So she came up with the friends she's been living with and our old pal Russell, who has helped with sporadic Secret Restaurant events before. Faith made the cake and Russ made the biscuits & the cookies– they both helped enormously with prep work.

Magyar Vacsora

[mid january. number 13.]

This Hungarian-themed Secret Restaurant was, building upon our New Year's feast, another nostalgia trip, dating all the way back to the first dinner Lucas and I ever cooked together. We had both moved up to Portland, having been relatively out of touch for a while (but we've known each other since we were 11), and decided to cook dinner one night in November. At the grocery store we picked an exotic and inaccessible sounding cuisine to tackle: Hungarian.

I grew up stopping at Novak's Hungarian Restaurant (one of the only things to experience in Albany, OR) on the way to and from Portland and Eugene. Because of this tradition, I've known a lot of this food since I was a toddler. When I got into The Moosewood Cookbook, I noticed that a lot of the recipes were based on Hungarian dishes. I favored those recipes in cooking big dinners at my college co-op house, but had never made a concerted effort to make any all Hungarian dinners, until that night in November of '09. At that first dinner with Lucas something magical happened, which has sparked this entire project.