Come For the View: Taking it in at Brasada Ranch’s Blue Olive

Posted inFood & Drink

Come For the View: Taking it in at Brasada Ranch’s Blue Olive

Intern

It’s all about atmosphere at Blue olive. In a place like Brasada Ranch every thing is rustic luxury: The views, the big timbered lodge, the perfectly manicured golf course. The dining room is no exception. Deliberately distressed wood floors and high ceilings complement huge picture windows that overlook rolling hills of native fescue and a faux train bridge. The atmosphere conjures images of the Old West, only here it’s the Old West without the dust and smelly work animals.

The menu at the ranch’s signature restaurant, The Blue Olive, is an ode to the “cattlemen of Oregon who helped shape and tame the wild ranges of Central Oregon” and offers beef from local rancher Matt Borlen. Chef John Nelson has filled the menu with beef dishes as well as a fair amount of seafood, pork and pasta.
Rather than making multiple trips to Brasada, I brought lots of dining companions in order to truly sample the menu. The six of us sat down at a large table flanked with windows showcasing a colorful twilight sky.

Posted inFood & Drink

Come For the View: Taking it in at Brasada Ranch’s Blue Olive

Intern

It’s all about atmosphere at Blue olive. In a place like Brasada Ranch every thing is rustic luxury: The views, the big timbered lodge, the perfectly manicured golf course. The dining room is no exception. Deliberately distressed wood floors and high ceilings complement huge picture windows that overlook rolling hills of native fescue and a faux train bridge. The atmosphere conjures images of the Old West, only here it's the Old West without the dust and smelly work animals.
 
The menu at the ranch's signature restaurant, The Blue Olive, is an ode to the "cattlemen of Oregon who helped shape and tame the wild ranges of Central Oregon" and offers beef from local rancher Matt Borlen. Chef John Nelson has filled the menu with beef dishes as well as a fair amount of seafood, pork and pasta.
Rather than making multiple trips to Brasada, I brought lots of dining companions in order to truly sample the menu. The six of us sat down at a large table flanked with windows showcasing a colorful twilight sky.

Posted inMusic

The Summer of Furtado: A new record in the making, Tony Furtado returns to Bend

Mike Bookey

Bluegrass is only skin deep. Tony Furtado very well might seem like a perfectionist upon first inspection. But that might not be completely accurate. First he's not a jerk. Invariably, perfectionists are jerks, mostly by necessity. Striving for perfection just has that effect on people. Perhaps it's more accurate to just say that Furtado really cares about his music.
 
Furtado is packing his bags for a trip to Boston when I catch up with him on a Friday afternoon and he's telling me about the plans for his new record, which is the reason he's heading across the country from his home in Portland. About a year and a half ago, Furtado released Thirteen, his 13th record featuring 13 songs (not a coincidence) and while the CD enjoyed a favorable response, he nonetheless had some reservations about the product. And this is where the hints of perfectionism come through - only to be quickly and casually quelled by an air of realism that seems to have been shaped by Furtado's lengthy recording career.
"In the end you just have to let it go. Everyone around me is like 'this is great!' so you have to kind of be like, 'cool,' and let it go," Furtado says.

Posted inMusic

Austin’s Latest Drama Show

Intern

Shearwater
Rook
Matador
Upon the first few listens of Shearwater's Rook, I wanted to synch up the tracks to the cartoon version of Watership Down or The Last Unicorn, ala Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz. Rook is an album worth immersing yourself in, front to back.
The Austin-based indie band (which began as a side project of the equally dramatic Okkervil River) has created a vast lyrical narrative that is darkly beautiful and visually apocalyptical. Opening with the lines "From the wreck of the ark to the fading day of our star," lead singer Jonathan Meiburg's voice oscillates between choirboy delicate and forceful, while complex arrangements consisting of strings, harp, piano and bugle tell the story of a world gone wrong. The rockin' title track describes scenes more ominous than a Hitchcock film. The song "Century Eyes" warns: "You are not the last of this house, or the first to go over the side." And "I Was A Cloud" holds no empathy for the naivety of our sad hero with lines like, "Your frantic waving did not provoke feeling/But this little one/Steady your wings now sparrow."

Posted inMusic

Truckers Kept A Rollin’: The South rises again as Drive-by Truckers rolls through Bend

Intern

DBT is coming to ouR house. Can I get a hell, yeah!When your Alabama/Georgia-based band features a three-guitar attack and you have two albums with the word "South" in the title and a third with the word Alabama in it, it's sort of hard to escape the Southern Rock label.
 
In the case of the Drive-by Truckers, it may be well earned. But it's a little unfortunate because the band, which makes an unexpected stop in Bend next week, has pretty much transcended the Southern Rock genre, bearing little resemblance to previous torch bearers like Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You won't find any cliché two-guitar harmonies on Truckers albums or in its shows. There are no cowboy hats and giant belt buckles; no Stars and Bars on the band's tee shirts.
While the band often wears its Southern pride on its sleeve, it's an aching pride. At their best, the band's songwriters - at least five different writers have contributed songs to band's studio albums over the years - explore themes that resonate well beyond the South. The band's songs, which are defined by their storybook narratives, tend to focus on ordinary people whose lives fall apart by violence, drug abuse, sickness, death and poverty.

Posted inCulture

Our Picks for the Week of 6/18-6/27

The Source Staff

Anastacia
wednesday 18
Formerly of the band Threes, Anastacia has a new project going and this free McMenamins performance is her first appearance in a while. Rumor has it that, along with her all-star band of local musicians, she'll be dishing out a brand new bag. 7pm, McMenamins Old St. Francis School, 700 NW Bond St. 382-5174.

Posted inNews

History Be Damned: Wild west bounties won’t save the Snake River runs

Intern

For centuries, killing predators was to fish and wildlife management what leeches were to medicine. By the mid-20th century, even the dullest minds in government had figured this out. But duller minds were yet to come.
Enter the administration of George W. Bush. In 2008, it is hawking control of salmon-eating birds, fish and mammals as if this were Dr. Kickapoo's Elixir for Rheum, Ague, Blindness and Insanity.
Virtually the entire scientific community agrees that if the four nearly useless Snake River dams remain in place, Columbia and Snake river salmon stocks will go extinct. Even Bush's National Marine Fisheries Service has admitted this. Mostly because of these dams, the system's cohos are already extinct, sockeyes are functionally extinct and 13 stocks in 78 populations are threatened or endangered. Yet last October, the Fisheries Service released its draft Columbia-Snake salmon plan that calls for a surge in the war on predators. The surge, together with barging young salmon, increasing hatchery production and all the other bells, whistles and tweaks that have failed so spectacularly in the past, will cost $800 million every year. By comparison, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates the cost of breaching the dams at $1 billion.

Posted inNews

Full Power: KPOV soon might not be the small community station it once was

Mike Bookey

Mike Ficher keeping it together at KPOV.At noon on Thursday, June 26 KPOV, Bend's low power FM community radio station will have been on the air for three years. Operating out of the back of the historic Boys and Girls club building that extends nearly the entirety of the block between Bond and Wall streets, the station now features a well-polished combination of news, commentary and music that's found near the end of the FM dial at 106.7.
 
As has also been the case with KPOV since its inception, the station has a knack for organizing events as they'll do once again by throwing a party the following Saturday. Actually they're not calling it a party, but rather a "hootenanny," celebrating on the surface the station's birthday, but to station insiders the festivities could very well mark a new phase for the community radio station. It's quite likely that by late June, or soon afterward, KPOV will have received the OK from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to transform the station into a full powered FM outlet.

Posted inNews

BBR Story Causes Mt. Bachelor Eruption

H. Bruce Miller

Headlined "Hanging in the Balance," the story by BBR Editor Kevin Max quotes former lift maintenance manager as saying she quit in disgust in January because management wouldn't let her do her job right and "she didn't want the responsibility of the potential disaster unfolding at Mt. Bachelor." "I can't work for a company that […]

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