Wine Enthusiast magazine is enthused about Portland

The staff of Vinland, a new restaurant opening this week in Portland that plans on only serving locally sourced food, ponder a dish at the edge of the kitchen Monday. From left are owner chef David Levi and sous chefs Ryan Quigley and Kate Whittemore. (BDN photo by Troy R. Bennett)

The staff of Vinland, a restaurant in Portland that serves only locally sourced food, ponder a dish at the edge of the kitchen in this file photo. From left are owner chef David Levi and sous chefs Ryan Quigley and Kate Whittemore. (BDN photo by Troy R. Bennett)

In case you missed it, Wine Enthusiast magazine named Portland to its list of “America’s 5 New Foodie Cities.” If you read my blog regularly, you know that Portland has been regularly lauded by nationwide publications for a while now for a range of things, but perhaps more than anything else, its food.

This goes back to 2009 — five years ago — when Bon Appetit called Portland “America’s Foodiest Small Town.”

So either Wine Enthusiast is late to the game in calling Portland a “new” foodie city, or the publication just doesn’t consider five years all that long ago. It is a magazine, after all, that writes extensively about a beverage that sometimes sits around for decades before anyone drinks it.

Here’s what Wine Enthusiast writes about Portland:

Portland (Maine) is the new Portland (Oregon). Here, a spate of new restaurants join burgeoning coffee and distillation scenes. Don’t miss Eventide Oyster Co.’s remarkable array of oysters and a great reserve wine list shared with Hugo’s next door, or Maine’s first “restaurant-within-a-restaurant,” David’s Opus Ten. At hyper-local, all-organic Vinland, try the turnip soup with yogurt, fermented carrot and micro cilantro.

Not to get too picky here, but Portland, Oregon, is actually named after Portland, Maine, so by a strict historical perspective, Wine Enthusiast has its opening sentence backward.

But I get it, they’re talking about trendiness.

The other four cities on the list are Salt Lake City, Utah; San Antonio, Texas; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and Charlottesville, Virginia. Click here to read more about the list and the other cities on it.

Oysters stay cold on the 1200-pound Maine granite slab at Eventide Oyster Company in Portland.  (BDN file photo by Emily Burnham)

Oysters stay cold on the 1200-pound Maine granite slab at Eventide Oyster Company in Portland. (BDN file photo by Emily Burnham)

Seth Koenig

About Seth Koenig

Seth has nearly a decade of professional journalism experience and writes about the greater Portland region.