Food & Drink

Bend beer aficionados now have yet another place to call home. This place, however, is like no other. The Bend Brew Shop has moved their Division Street store to that stubbornly antiquated former church building on the 3rd Street strip, affording them enough space to have a pub.
The Brew Shop is upstairs, meeting all your home brewing equipment and supplies needs in addition to offering over 500 bottled beers organized by state and country of origin. A side entrance with an awning leads you down a set of stairs into the Platypus Pub where you will find a carefully chosen selection of 15 beers on tap along with standard pub fare.
A group of friends and I eagerly visited the Platypus on their opening day last Monday. The pub is nice and cavernous, but with a somewhat stale feel; maybe it's the antiseptic green color of the walls, bare, with sparsely placed framed beer posters. The bar itself is slight, but the room offers ample seating for groups and pairs, a couple of dart boards at one end and the seemingly mandatory flat screen TV with a black leather couch at the other end. At this pub, the selection of beer trumps atmosphere.

Joe Devenchenzi had a simple idea. After years in the restaurant business he wanted to make and serve fresh products while avoiding the late hours.
After visiting Bend for most of his life and owning a home in town for the past eight years, the Grants Pass native decided to open up a place of his own. And where better to open a local food joint then downtown Bend? Although to the dismay of many thin-pancake-loving locals, Devenchenzi entered the former Crepe Place location and opened Planker Sandwiches. Named for the term snowboarders use to describe skiers, Planker has become a local favorite despite the slight change in menu offerings from the previous occupant.
“People have been pretty supportive,” said Devenchenzi, “We still offer crepes. We just went from a build-your-own-crepe menu to a set menu. But anything you want inside we can still do our best to accommodate.”

The restaurant world preaches location, but what's often forgotten is equally important – execution, variety and customer service. Pono Farms & Fine Meats is a butcher shop/deli offering fresh cuts and preparations of ranch raised beef and pork direct from their Central Oregon farm. This is farm-to-fork like you've never seen. Fresh ground beef, shaved meats, sausages and Wagyu beef to take home or enjoy on site. The Hunnell Road location was devised to serve the public directly, adding lunch and dinner plates to the meat counter and charcuterie options.

As dusk approached on the day that the front page of The Bulletin featured an article about the financial woes of the Common Table, a line of people formed out the door of the downtown nonprofit restaurant. The room was full, booming with conversation, exclamations, and introductions.
“Apparently people in this town actually read the newspaper,” commented one volunteer.
While the urgency of the article might have played a role, the crowd that Friday evening was lured in by the monthly Meet Your Farmer Dinner, an event that has become increasingly popular since its inception almost a year ago. The event is a dinning and educational experience; a four course meal prepared by Common Table chef Bethlynn Rider using products from one local farm, the farmers of which give a presentation after the meal. The farm featured this month is Bend's landmark organic produce grower Fields Farm, located just two miles east of downtown.

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The last time I dined at Scanlon's, the Athletic Club of Bend's fine dining venue, I left feeling the paradox many of us feel when we dine out. One side left me feeling rich with big flavors, heavy sauces and decadent desserts while certainly lightening my wallet more than I hoped or expected. But following a brief closure of the restaurant, Scanlon's made some other fundamental changes in the kitchen and across the entire menu. Now, Scanlon's is no longer that paradox, but a promise of light, health-conscious, flavorful food at fair prices.
“We just realized that most of our customers are members of the club and want healthier choices,” our server explained as we discussed the recent change in direction with the menu. With a menu “designed to fit a healthy lifestyle,” the menu offers calories, fat, fiber, carbs and protein counts for every dish. While this reminded me of the episode of Seinfeld in which the cast gets fat from “nonfat yogurt,” I immediately got wrapped up in learning the exact calorie counts of every item on the menu. As we scanned the menu, I was impressed by the variety of healthy options with nods to Mediterranean and Asian fare. Locally sourced pears, greens and meats made up for the absence of avocado on the menu.