Little Bites

Sunday night, April 1, a landmark event took place that I believe will set the bar for culinary events in the future in Bend. With 12 chefs at 11 locations, offering 16 different dishes, The Foodie Crawl was a spectacular success.
The event's participants wound their way through the westside, Old Mill and downtown and quickly developed a camaraderie marked by a common love of food.
As a former chef at Tart, I enjoyed seeing the dishes developed by chefs from some of the town's best restaurants. Trattoria Sbandati hit on all cylinders with their perfectly textured “Polpette” and paired Tuscan Sangiovese. Victorian Café wowed with Mini Sage Duck Benedicts and a blood orange mimosa. Jen's Garden, which set up shop at Ginger's Kitchen, offered a wonderful “Yucatanwich” paired with a Prosecco mimosa.

Kirsten Fletcher and Monte Wornath are geniuses.
Maybe they'd score off the charts on an IQ test, then again maybe not, but the two friends conceived one of the best ideas for a local business that we've heard of. The pair, recognizing that intense hunger always follows winter recreating, got permits for and parked a small trailer at Virginia Meissner Sno-Park to feed and nourish the tired and hungry, or just hungry, who frequent the surrounding trails.
Skinny Skis Café serves up an impressive spread of food and drink with baked treats from Sparrow Bakery (including Ocean Rolls), soups from The Village Baker and coffee and espresso from Strictly Organic. The winter food cart also serves up hot chocolates (the fancy kind, made with Dagoba Organic Chocolate for $2.25 as well as good ole Swiss Miss for you low-brow heathens at $1.50), mochas, chai, tea and bottled water. They have a number of grilled sandos available, ranging from the stoner's delight, a Nutella, peanut butter and banana sandwich ($3.75) to the more traditional and wholesome grilled tuna and Swiss sandwich($6.75). Catering to the swelling number of food sensitivities, Skinny Skis allows diners to opt for soy milk and gluten free bread.

Acting on an anonymous tip that the Bond Street location had reopened, MicroCosmos made our way down to the Deschutes for a late lunch this week and discovered a bigger bolder pub in place of our longtime watering hole. The brewery has yet to formally announce its grand reopening, look for that later this week, so the crowd was light, allowing MicroCosmos to survey the new digs and snap a few photos before diving into a Reuben sandwich.

Bacon is the new black.
These days, it seems like you can find bacon on most everything. And for good reason. The underbelly of swine imparts an almost unmatched textural and flavorful punch to whatever it's paired with, whether that something is a cheeseburger or a doughnut.
Which is exactly why Kirk Heppler, owner of The Dough Nut, puts a hearty slice of crisp bacon on his fresh and fluffy maple bars, one of his favorite yeast-raised doughnuts and one of his most popular.
The gourmet and exotic offerings of Voodoo Doughnut in Portland helped pave the way for a new breed of this treat; one that is made fresh daily and sports nontraditional toppings and combinations, such as Fruity Pebbles, marshmallows and peanut butter, for instance. Heppler was not hip to Voodoo when he started making doughnuts in 2005, surprising, given that he graduated from the Portland Culinary Institute and has been working in the restaurant business for the last 12 years.

On the last business day of 2011, three men smashed through a wall of an old transmission shop with golden-painted sledgehammers, much to the delight of the gathered crowd.
“Come on, Sidor!” shouted one bystander, encouraging the craft beer maestro to swing his hammer with gusto.
The wall-breaking ceremony was meant to celebrate the start of a new brewing venture in Bend that is captained by one of the biggest names in the business, Larry Sidor, who for years has been the mastermind behind many of Deschutes' most popular beers.
Sidor is teaming up with Dave Wilson of San Francisco-based 21st Amendment brewery and Paul Evers of tbd Advertising, a local creative agency with a rich history in beer marketing. The local firm has worked with Deschutes in the past and counts 21st Amendment among its current clientele. Together, the three friends of the yet-to-be-named artisanal brewery will focus on richer, bolder beers and will include sours and other such niche brews.

If, like most folks, you love to meet friends at Brother Jon's where you can share a beer, tasty food and some laughs, come January you'll have a new spot to do just that.
Since the summer of 2009, the owners of the popular westside public house have been creating a loyal fan base thanks to the spot's comfy, at-home feel and expansive menu of sandwiches and comfort food favorites. The new downtown location, dubbed The Alehouse, should offer all the fun and good times of the westside location, but in a larger venue on Bond Street that was once home to the Decoy Bar and Grill and, more recently, the Bond Street Grill. And like the original location, there will be plenty of beer on tap. Actually, there will be more beer choices.

If you're going to name your food cart Crazy Delicious, you better be ready to live up to that seemingly hyperbolic moniker. But it was that name – and the accompanying “$5 Breakfast sign” – that convinced me pull over on a recent Saturday morning and peruse the menu at the vibrant blue-and-green cart parked in the Aspect Board Shop parking lot on Galveston Avenue. Yes, I am in fact that easily distracted.
And after I inhaled a breakfast sandwich consisting of hash browns, cheese, bacon and sour cream (I skipped the egg), between sliced halves of a crispy, sugary creation from The Dough Nut, I decided that maybe this business name wasn't so hyperbolic after all. My wife agreed, as she took the last few bites of her savory crème brulee brioche French toast. You read that correctly. There is a place in town that will give you brioche French toast for a mere $5. And it exists in real life.
“Yeah, the French toast is a bit of a labor of love,” says Luke Maxwell-Muir, the owner and operator of Crazy Delicious, which resembles a surf shack from some early '60s beach-babe movie on the outside, yet houses a slick and fully functioning kitchen within its surprisingly spacious confines.

Players Gets an Overhaul
Players Bar and Grill has new owners and they've spruced up the place while maintaining the general dive-bar appeal. Josh Maquet, owner of the Astro Lounge, is one of the new owners, so we have good reason to expect some righteous upgrades.
Production manager Jim Bull says his goal is to make sure the sound and lighting is on the “higher end,” for every show at the revamped venue. Speaking of bands, Bull expects the music at the SW Century Drive bar to be “less metal and more accessible.”
“We're not going to let every band come in here and murder the patrons' ears,” says Bull.

It's officially fall my friends.
We've balanced our eggs during the autumnal equinox. We've awkwardly celebrated Columbus Day – pretending not to be happy to have a day off (on account of all that smallpox and pillaging stuff) even though we secretly are. We've allowed children to collect insane amounts of candy – of which we will eat about 70 percent, late at night after they're in bed.
And, we all got to see something else very special take place… Ben Burkel was finally right. It is cooling off here in the high desert, Nina.
I'm even starting to work on my cold-weather coat (which, oddly, is made of 10 pounds of my own body fat), and I officially turned on the heater in my house for the first time last week. And that's when I thought of soup.