Three Doors Down Cafe, A Fine Food and Drink Series, No. 5

Chicken liver pate with grilled foccacia, a pungent, smooth appetizer that matches perfectly the crispy foccacia.


Linguini with slowly simmered beef and pork sugo. Here's another truly wonderful comfort food that amazes me. Flavor, texture, taste--it's got it all going on. I immediately thought about how some children always want spaghetti, but if one were to come to 3DD, the parents could order this instead. I believe the child would be satisfied with the taste and enjoy trying to wrap the linguini around a fork.


Seems like I shared my appetizer with Kailey, and I had some of my sugo boxed up for the next day. That left room for dessert and wine. Here's the red wine--Notios, Peloponnisos Regional Wine, Red Dry Wine. Perfect accompaniment to my dessert.


Bocca Negra, my favorite chocolate dessert in Portland!

Three Doors Down Cafe, A Fine Food and Drink Series, No. 4

The secret's in the stromboli. It tasted just right, hot, peppery, flaky, molten. But as I understand it, the ingredients are not known to the back of the house, to the kitchen, because Kathy--front of the house maven and co-owner of 3DD with chef Dave, her significant other--makes it herself. It tasted so good that the other day as I walked from one place to another at work, I found myself thinking, "Stromboli. Oh, how good that was, wish I had another slice or two, stromboli." You get the picture.


Appetizer truffle potatoes brandade with crostini--I like brandade, a fact that surprises me since, as I understand it, brandade means salt cod has been added to the potatoes. It's creamy and warm and the fish doesn't overpower the potatoes. Spread on the crostini, it makes me wish I had some for lunch!


Matt almost always comes up with something new for me to try. This time, two sidecars which contain brandy and I'm not sure what else. I do know that I liked the yellow one best. Matt jokingly said he had yet to come up with a green one. If he does, he'll have a traffic signal! And by the way, I don't have those fond stromboli memories just because I drank two sidecars!

Three Doors Down Cafe, A Fine Food and Drink Series, No. 3

Poiré Authentique, pear cider from Eric Bordelet, a delightfully fresh cider. Matt told me that it's rare and unforgettable, both true descriptors. You can see SE 37th reflected in its golden self.


Here it is, right after being poured. I read this about it online "...a traditionally off-dry, sparkling style ... made from three hundred year-old pear trees. These sixty foot high trees have never seen one bit of chemical treatment during their long lives and produce absolutely marvelous fruit with which to work. Monsieur Bordelet makes from them a brilliant sparkling cider: one that has great complexity, refined bubbles, a deep underlying minerality, with excellent length and cut on the finish." I don't know what some of that means, but I did see bubbles coming up from the bottom center of the glass for quite some time, and it did taste good.


Bibb lettuce, chives, bacon in a creamy roasted garlic aioli dressing--this crispy, perfectly cold salad makes me happy. And it's not just because it's shape reminds me of a ruffled party dress. It tastes so good!


The special--house-made cavatelli, duck confit, delicata squash, and arugula. Lamont thinks it's so neat that I eat duck confit as often as possible at 3DD, and I never even knew what it was before! You see, I had never eaten duck until I moved to Portland. Now, if it's on the menu at Three Doors Down, I get an immediate memory of that earthy, meaty taste as soon as I read the word. So I order it and enjoy it, time after time.

Thursday, July 3, 2008 ... Salmon Springs Fountain, last night from the Buick

Mama and I were on our way home from Three Doors Down Cafe, and I couldn't resist driving around the block so that she could see how the fountain looks at night. I took several photos, not expecting anything to turn out since we were stopped at the traffic signal. I do like this one, though, and want you to notice the rich blue of the sky in addition to the fountain and the people around it. All I did was download and crop, no enhancements. Just beyond the fountain is the Willamette River, and just to its right is the Hawthorne Bridge, a ways to its left is the Morrison Bridge.

Sunday evening at Three Doors Down Cafe, SE 37th and Hawthorne

One of the many neat things about having a son for a sous chef (and, in the past, a second son in the same kitchen as a line/prep cook) is you never know what sort of goodie you just might get as a surprise when you go to the restaurant.

Sunday night when I watched our waiter bringing us a full-sized white dinner plate right after we'd ordered our appetizers and entrees, I wondered if Lamont had sent us a great big surprise--quenelles of wasabi, the bright green, extremely hot food he had me try years ago at Little Tokyo, a very popular Japanese restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi. I watched the plate come closer. I recognized a scallop beneath the quenelle. "Ah, scallops," I swooned, vividly remembering my first ever scallop, at Three Doors Down when we visited in the summer of 2005. Seconds later we knew what we had--from bottom to top--a slice of oven-roasted baby golden beet, a slice of oven-roasted cippolini onion, a pan-seared scallop, and a quenelle of green pea and truffle puree.

The four of us, Tony, Melissa, Danielle, and I, sat there, looking at the colorful, inviting dish for a moment. Then we each got one and took our first bites. Repeated "Ohs," and "Oohs," and "This is delicious," and "Wow," came from our mouths as we slowly devoured our first appetizer. Momentarily satiated, I completely forgot to photograph our second appetizer, dungeness crab cake, micro-greens salad and Mama Lil's Hungarian pepper tarter sauce. I don't eat crab, but the other three continued to repeat those same words as they made short work of it.


My turn to repeat those sounds and phrases came with our third shared appetizer, ricotta gnocchi with fava beans, shimeji mushrooms, paresan and black pepper. You can tell, though, that we all had a bite before I got the camera out for the photo. Three Doors Down is where I ate my first gnocchi.

Melissa's entree, from the risotto/pasta section of the menu, prawns, mussels, scallops in a traditional spicy fra diavolo sauce of plum tomatoes, chili flakes, kalamata olives, cherry peppers and fettuccine.


My entree, from the entree section of the menu, pan roasted sturgeon with smoked bacon, cippolini onions, fava beans, morel mushrooms and mashed potatoes.


Danielle and Tony's appetizer, from the risotta/pasta section of the menu, plum tomatoes, vodka, cream, chili flake and sweet Italian sausage with rigatoni. Three Doors Down's best-known dish.


All I can say is that every bite I ate was great and the three of them said the same about their food. I want you to understand, though, that I truly believe that even if my son, and at other times my two sons, didn't work there, I'd still have the same reaction to every bite I have ever enjoyed at Three Doors Down. Dave and Kathy, chef and owners, set high standards for food and drink and service and have held themselves and their staff to those standards since opening in 1994.

After a short wait to let our entrees settle a bit, we ordered dessert, four different ones. Tony grew up eating his mother's cannoli (description from the menu: a crisp pastry shell stuffed with creamy ricotta cheese, chocolate chips, citrus zest and crushed pistachios), so that's what he wanted. We three ladies shared a slice of banana cream pie (description from the menu: bananas layered with pastry cream in a graham cracker, brown sugar and banana crust topped with whipped cream, shaved chocolate and caramel sauce), a slice of bocca negra (description from the menu: chocolate bourbon torte with white chocolate bourbon cream), and a serving of creole bread pudding (description from the menu: white chocolate custard, cinnamon and raisins baked and served with a hard sauce). I confess, by the time the desserts arrived, my camera was the farthest thing from my mind.

Sunday evening at Three Doors Down Cafe, another wonderful memory made in Portland centered around family, friends and food.

UPDATED TO ADD: I remembered that I had a photo of the banana cream pie from 2004, taken with my Nikon CoolPix.