no. 112: scraggles
Vaughn is secretly a very good cook. Dinner tonight was a suite of leftovers, and the best meal of 2026 to date – and we’ve already been to one of my favorite restaurants on the planet this year.
The stew is scraggles of lamb, which he dusted in flour and browned. The smell when you do this is a fulsome, symphonic, satisfaction itself. He deglazed the pans with a brunoise of mirepoix, then tipped everything into a slow cooker for far longer than I’d have thought necessary. The chickpeas were cooked plain, then stirred through the stew at its first serving.
Another meal gave us broad spearheads of spinach, to which I’d applied salt and olive oil and not too much time, so the leaves stayed muscular. We packed it with the stew and warmed them up together. The dab of green is the last parsley before the frost, rescued from the garden and blitzed with olive oil and a bit of garlic and salt. It keeps for weeks in the fridge this way.
The polenta was the last entry on the page, steamed fresh in an instant pot then stirred up with butter. We ate it with a plainspoken red wine that danced in the glass, happy to be drunk, and talked about the kind of restaurant that cooks this kind of meal.
A thing I like about food like this is that there’s nothing to tell you whether you should like it. There are no stars to guide you, no internet reviews, no lines down the block. There aren’t even adjectives. Dinner was so simple it’s impossible to summarize. I can’t tell you it fell into a particular canon or tradition and have that mean something, I can only tell you what we ate.1 It looks totally undistinguished. On familiar crockery at home, it’s about as free of mimetic pressure as any product of human hands can be. You and your palate have to decide whether you like it. You’re on your own with the food. I was on my own with the food.
This can be terrifying.
One reason I like salads is that they’re like that too, they’re just salads. It’s hard to add meaningful descriptors on a menu. To call them anything but “green” – say “French,” or “modern,” or “bistro” – carries no real meaning.2
The salad has always been my bellwether for a restaurant, and by this standard, restaurants in the US are better than ever. A competent salad used to be the exception, but now, if you pick your restaurants with a little care, it’s really become the norm. This is my year in restaurant salads, 2025.
Four cities, two coasts, eight different visions of what a salad should be. not a wilted leaf nor a shortcut among them. A few were exuberantly overdressed, but a salad only lives once.
I recently heard this sudden improvement in salads attributed to the sub-prime predators of 2007. In this podcast Bart Hutchins, the chef-owner of Butterworth’s, offers a disquisition on the arc of American restaurants over the last 20 years (ellipses inserted because he’s both loquacious and sagacious). I suggest you listen with your steak knife handy and your napkin down.
“There’s this sort of arc that started in the foodie thing, it sort of starts in 2008 with the housing crisis and the real estate bubble, where all of a sudden, all of these young ambitious chefs could afford to go open a restaurant, and they hired cooks beneath them, and they trained those cooks, so we got a sort of a wealth of good cooks and good people that went on to be chefs…
And so now your competitive advantage isn’t just your food’s good, because good food is easier and easier to come by… You have to combine the best food with a comfortable place to hang out, or a specific social scene, or whatever it may be.”
In this telling, salads today are great because they’re being made by cooks trained by chefs trained by the chefs who found spaces for rent in 2008, the first ones to internalize “that foodie thing that we saw in the mid-00s.” I haven’t checked the genealogy, but I suspect Hutchins has a reasonable argument, that the restaurant landscape of the United States today is as much a monument to the unpunished greed of Wall Street as the displacements and evictions and heartbreak.
So in another sense the salads are gorgeous because they have to be, because dining out has become blood sport. They’re gorgeous for the same reason a restaurant needs to be “a comfortable place to hang out, or a specific social scene.” We expect more from restaurants now, quite plausibly too much. It’s not enough for the food to be good. It has to be original, photogenic, have a story, and be served in a place with the right color scheme by servers with the right kind of vibe while the right people sit at the next table over.
And so another result of the arc Hutchins describes is that meals like our dinner – simple food but deep – have become even harder to get. As long as I’ve been eating in the US, quotidian dishes exceptionally prepared have only been found in immigrant restaurants, where the food still matters more than what the banquettes are made of. Those restaurants don’t cook in quite this idiom, this kind of rootless, expedient cooking. Food you might not know whether you should like.
Imagine, for a moment, this dish in a restaurant today, which needs to combine the best food with whatever it may be. What would the servers say? Would anyone put this on instagram? Why cook like this at all, when there are more obvious glories?
If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in this profile/review that came out in the South China Morning Post this week.
This is on some level true of food in general, but that’s a different essay.
This obviously doesn’t go for salads that are specific dishes, like a Waldorf or an Olivier.
Beautiful. Your heart and taste are in the same place .
So nice to see Bellwether Bar here. Surely one of Portland’s most underrated (by outsiders, anyway) places to eat in this restaurant cornucopia of a city.