Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: Review

  • Two for the price of one

    Just pointers to a couple of blog posts I enjoyed.

    First, Chris reviews Burger King in a fun sort of anti-Bend Restaurants way. Plus, you gotta love it when someone puts so much effort into writing a review like this…

    “Parked in lot?”, you ask, and yes I did because there are critical steps in eating your Whopper, and the first is, eat it when it’s hot and fresh. Yes, “Eat your Whopper while it’s hot and fresh,” is what momma always told me. Also the fact that the window view from the restaurant isn’t really much different helps too. The next tip I have to offer you is to put a few onion rings and some of the zesty onion ring sauce on your Whopper and then get ready for Whopper-Bliss.

    The other pointer is to Jake and to his post about the PHP easter egg. I wasn’t aware of this particular quirk, either, but apparently PHP will output an image of a dog if you append a string to the URL appropriately. I do know of the phpinfo() “easter egg” that only appears on April 1—the PHP logo image is replaced with something goofy. But this other one is new to me.

  • Bluefish Bistro

    We ate at Bluefish Bistro (no website that I see; instead here’s a link to The Source’s dining guide entry) in Downtown Bend last Saturday (my wife and I), and yes, I’m just now getting around to writing about it. Bluefish is one of the newest restaurants in the current trend of upscale, fine dining experiences in Bend (others being Merenda, Cork, Zydeco, Ariana, for instance), and it’s also one of the most expensive. More on that in a bit.

    Located downtown on Franklin, on the corner of Drake Park and Franklin basically, it’s kind of an unassuming place from the outside. I don’t know if that bodes well or not because that location has generally seen more turnover than other places downtown; I can think of two previous establishments there in recent memory. Inside is nice, more character; I particularly like the water fountain dividing the entry area from the dining room.

    One nice touch: the water had a fresh sprig of mint in it. My wife wasn’t sure how well she liked that, but I thought it was refreshing—we grew up with a lot of mint growing in the gardens, and there’s nothing quite like being able to pick and eat fresh mint leaves.

    The bread was very good, but it was the butter that stood out. There are three kinds: a sweet butter, a honey almond butter, and a tangerine butter. They were, frankly, amazing.

    A note to beer drinkers: they apparently don’t have any beer on tap, it’s all bottled, and at four dollars a bottle, you’d probably be better off going with a glass of wine (which is what I did).

    The food was good, but expensive: all the entrees were in the mid to upper twenties, the heirloom tomato salad was $12, glasses of wine tended to run seven dollars and up. The food was excellent—I had the halibut which was tender and moist and flaky, along with well-chosen root vegetables (beets and turnips, I want to say), and the vanilla cheesecake was stunning—but I think it’s the most expensive of restaurants we’ve been to lately. Sad to say, this will be the limiting factor as to how often we visit Bluefish, I imagine.

    Overall, a very good dining experience. If you can afford it, it’s worth a try at least once.