PORTLAND: DAY 2

Our second day in Portland was another rainy day. Luckily, it didn't rain as steadily as our previous day, and it did eventually let up. We started our day with a breakfast at Brail's a local favorite diner, run by a Korean family (funny that our favorite diner at home is also run by Koreans.)

This place has your pretty average breakfast foods, but some with a twist. For example, below my breakfast looks like a regular omlette, but it's actually filled with chicken teriyaki. And it was yummy (so were those hash browns, look how nice and golden they are). My friends ordered spicy pork omlettes (I don't remember what Tom got).

Breakfast also came with a biscuit on the side. Now normally, I love biscuits, but this one was just a bit too undercooked for my taste. Overall, I really liked this place. If I lived in Eugene, I'd totally be a regular.

After breakfast, we wandered around a park, and then my friend Jess insisted on taking me to Sweet Life - a dessert place in Eugene.

This place had cases full of pastries, and because it's Eugene, there were a lot of vegan, dairy free, egg free, flour free, etc etc type options.

I just got a slice of chocolate cake, which I shared with Tom.

It was fine. But more importantly, how can Eugene have a dessert bar, and there's still not one in the East Bay??

Afterwards, we headed back in to Portland and spent the afternoon walking around the Portland Zoo. After a few ours, we were finally hungry enough to head out to dinner and this time, we checked out the eastern part of Portland. At first I had wanted to visit a well regarded Thai restaurant, but when we went and figured out it was closed on Sunday, we headed to my backup restaurant called the Screen Door. Basically, they serve Southern cuisine using local, organic ingredients. Even though we showed up pretty early, the place was already packed when we arrived.

I really liked the setting, lots of light woods, and big windows. The menu itself is pretty small, but the portions are not. We started off with two appetizers. The first was okra:

Now, I'm not a huge fan of okra, (Tom ordered these) but doesn't frying make everything better? Plus, these had a born meal batter and came with a spicy mayo type sauce. They were pretty good.

More to my liking were the hushpuppies:

These were quite tasty, though kinda dense, and I knew I had a good amount of food coming, so I only had one. So for my dinner, I picked a meal composed of three sides. Here you see mac and cheese, coleslaw and a cauliflower gratin and it came with corn bread (hey, at least it was all vegetarian!)
Now, that mac and cheese was pretty amazing. Actually, I really enjoyed all my dishes. The only thing is that it was all so heavy. I barely made a dent in the mac and cheese before I was stuffed.

Meanwhile, Tom got Jess' fiancee both ordered brisket:

Tom said it was really good, since it just fell apart when he cut into it (just like good brisket is supposed to). At this point in the meal, we were all stuffed, but I just have to order dessert when I go to restaurants like this. So I got the peanut butter pie for us all to share:

As you can see, there's a chocolate cookie crust, peanut mousse stuff and unsweetened whipped cream. It was really rich and delicious. I just couldn't eat more than a few bites.

We really did have better meals on our second day in Oregon. I'm actually a big fan of the Swing Door and hope they open an outpost here in the East Bay.