Don't Like - The Eater Essential List
If you like food and going to restaurants in America in 2024, there’s a good chance you are familiar with Eater’s Essential List for your city. If you’re not, the Essential List is essentially the Best Restaurants right now list—but essential ≠ best. At least, not to me. In my mind, the essential list should be made up of the restaurants that define the city’s culinary culture and history. For instance, The Goose Hollow isn’t on the Essential List despite being founded by former Mayor Bud Clark before he was elected. It also serves an incredible Reuben. Is it the best restaurant in the city? Not by most measures but it’s an establishment. By contrast, the list includes The Scotch Lodge, which is just annoying bar food with fancy-ish ingredients that do things like put granita on oysters because they think that’s elevated. Now, I understand that that might just be my opinion1 but shouldn’t the essential list represent the undeniable stalwarts of the city? Imagine someone telling you an essential New York restaurant was a new brick-and-mortar from a buzzy new chef who had a good pop-up last year. In the case of Portland, maybe Scotch Lodge is essential but The Goose Hollow Inn is too. That raises the biggest problem with these lists: they only have 38 spots. They can’t house all of the amazing restaurants and institutions that make our cities such great places. But these lists should. No, they need to. There have to be more than 38 essential restaurants in a modern American city. It’s a list that should have tenure as long as the places on it (mostly) uphold their end of the deal. That would be a much better way to make this list, which ultimately would do well to preserve and maintain all of our cities’ cultures.
The restaurant does have good reviews on Yelp, though it has not been great either time I went. It also has a very annoying bro vibe.