The Blackfish Café • Lincoln City
‘A good meal, without a lot of fuss’
The wine, the food ... the Blackfish Café
Story & photos by Niki Price • Oregon Coast TODAY
Lori Bean is the wine steward at the Blackfish Café, Rob and Mary Pounding’s restaurant in Lincoln City. A nine-year veteran at the café, Bean creates the wine list and offers pairing recommendations, in addition to carrying her share of tables. In one of the great ironies of the business, she doesn’t get much chance to sit down for a four-course meal.
But if she did, this is what she would order. Yaquina Bay oysters with a glass of Bodegas Sumarocca sparkling wine, from Spain, followed by a Blackfish Caesar salad and a glass of Dom. De Rieux, Cotes de Gascogne.
“If I was going to come in and have dinner, from beginning to end, with my wine list and our food, I would start with oysters on the half shell and glass of sparkling wine, because I think those go very well together,” Bean said, her eyes looking a bit wistful. “Then with my salad course I’d have a white, a French country white that really pairs well with vegetables, and salads. It’s hard to find a wine that goes really well with salad.”
Whatever she had for her entrée — here, we could not force her to choose her favorite from Chef Pounding’s “robust, seasonal American” menu — she’d have a Willamette Valley pinot noir like Raptor Ridge 2007 Reserve (“because pinots are my favorite”). The meal would finish with dessert, a dish of ice cream or a slice of peanut butter pie, and one of Bean’s selective list of port wines.
She’s quick to emphasize, however, that’s just what she would order. When she discusses wine with her customers at the Blackfish, the most important question is “What do you like?” The answer allows her to extrapolate between the flavors of the dish and the preferences of the diner’s palate, to find the perfect match.
“Because if you don’t like pinot noir, and you prefer cabernet, that makes a difference. They’re both reds, but they are very different from one another,” Bean said. “It depends on how open you are to changing your perception. Sometimes I can tell that the customer just wants me to recommend a chardonnay. So I offer my opinions on which chardonnay. Because if that’s what you like, that’s what you should have.”
Bean’s wine list is short, compared to other top-drawer restaurants. She keeps it to about 50 choices by the bottle, and 10 choices by the glass, and changes the menu about four times a year.
“My number-one goal with our list is always to match the food with the wine, and to feature as much local wine as I can. We have lots of Oregon wine, especially the things we specialize in like pinot noir and pinot gris, along with some great chardonnay and some Southern Oregon reds that are really interesting and fun,” she said.
The Poundings believe that less, done very well, is always more. The dining room of their 11-year-old restaurant has a calming décor, with plain walls, subtle lighting and honey-colored wooden booths and tables. Over this, there’s a changing gallery of contemporary art (right now, it’s the gyotaku fish prints of Bruce Koike) and a whole host of bold flavors. It’s like a neutral palette for your palate.
The wine, the food ... the Blackfish Café
Story & photos by Niki Price • Oregon Coast TODAY
Lori Bean is the wine steward at the Blackfish Café, Rob and Mary Pounding’s restaurant in Lincoln City. A nine-year veteran at the café, Bean creates the wine list and offers pairing recommendations, in addition to carrying her share of tables. In one of the great ironies of the business, she doesn’t get much chance to sit down for a four-course meal.
But if she did, this is what she would order. Yaquina Bay oysters with a glass of Bodegas Sumarocca sparkling wine, from Spain, followed by a Blackfish Caesar salad and a glass of Dom. De Rieux, Cotes de Gascogne.
“If I was going to come in and have dinner, from beginning to end, with my wine list and our food, I would start with oysters on the half shell and glass of sparkling wine, because I think those go very well together,” Bean said, her eyes looking a bit wistful. “Then with my salad course I’d have a white, a French country white that really pairs well with vegetables, and salads. It’s hard to find a wine that goes really well with salad.”
Whatever she had for her entrée — here, we could not force her to choose her favorite from Chef Pounding’s “robust, seasonal American” menu — she’d have a Willamette Valley pinot noir like Raptor Ridge 2007 Reserve (“because pinots are my favorite”). The meal would finish with dessert, a dish of ice cream or a slice of peanut butter pie, and one of Bean’s selective list of port wines.
She’s quick to emphasize, however, that’s just what she would order. When she discusses wine with her customers at the Blackfish, the most important question is “What do you like?” The answer allows her to extrapolate between the flavors of the dish and the preferences of the diner’s palate, to find the perfect match.
“Because if you don’t like pinot noir, and you prefer cabernet, that makes a difference. They’re both reds, but they are very different from one another,” Bean said. “It depends on how open you are to changing your perception. Sometimes I can tell that the customer just wants me to recommend a chardonnay. So I offer my opinions on which chardonnay. Because if that’s what you like, that’s what you should have.”
Bean’s wine list is short, compared to other top-drawer restaurants. She keeps it to about 50 choices by the bottle, and 10 choices by the glass, and changes the menu about four times a year.
“My number-one goal with our list is always to match the food with the wine, and to feature as much local wine as I can. We have lots of Oregon wine, especially the things we specialize in like pinot noir and pinot gris, along with some great chardonnay and some Southern Oregon reds that are really interesting and fun,” she said.
The Poundings believe that less, done very well, is always more. The dining room of their 11-year-old restaurant has a calming décor, with plain walls, subtle lighting and honey-colored wooden booths and tables. Over this, there’s a changing gallery of contemporary art (right now, it’s the gyotaku fish prints of Bruce Koike) and a whole host of bold flavors. It’s like a neutral palette for your palate.
Lori Bean
You may need it, as Chef Pounding has a penchant for assertive, highly-flavored foods, in hearty portions. You won’t find fussy dishes with excessive sauces, which chef de cuisine Joshua Anderson dubs “squirt bottle food.” It’s not that Pounding and Anderson aren’t capable of creating plates of amazingly complex bite-sized dishes. Pounding is a Pacific Northwest legend who is the former executive chef as Salishan Spa & Golf Resort, has served as an Oregon culinary ambassador and has been featured in many a magazine. Anderson started his culinary career at The Bay House, and has worked at Canyon Way Restaurant & Café and Salishan, among others. When he first started at the Blackfish six years ago, Anderson tried to impress his customers with flashy techniques and fish shipped in from around the world.
“I’ve learned that the people here don’t want sweetbreads, and they don’t want escargot or fancy ‘squirt bottle food,’ I introduced it, and it just didn’t sell very well,” Anderson said. “We do robust, hearty portions, and we use quality products. If you want a good meal without a lot of fuss, and without having to dissect it mentally, that’s what we do. I can’t think of any place that does it better.”
“In other high-end kitchens, you may not write your menus around what is local and available, but what you can buy from Iowa, or Hawaii, or wherever. Here, we try to keep it all in our region, making Pacific Northwest food.”
“I’ve learned that the people here don’t want sweetbreads, and they don’t want escargot or fancy ‘squirt bottle food,’ I introduced it, and it just didn’t sell very well,” Anderson said. “We do robust, hearty portions, and we use quality products. If you want a good meal without a lot of fuss, and without having to dissect it mentally, that’s what we do. I can’t think of any place that does it better.”
“In other high-end kitchens, you may not write your menus around what is local and available, but what you can buy from Iowa, or Hawaii, or wherever. Here, we try to keep it all in our region, making Pacific Northwest food.”
It’s Anderson’s job to manage the kitchen staff, and execute Chef Pounding’s menu with “insane consistency.” But Anderson’s culinary voice is expressed on the menu, in specials that have become standbys, like the Cioppino of Northwest Seafood. It’s a bowl full of fresh scallops, salmon, prawns, mussels, Dungeness crab and other fish, braised in a red wine, tomato and herb broth. The Iron Pan-Seared Jumbo Pacific Scallops, served with chanterelles and white cheddar-bacon risotto, are another of Anderson’s more recent scores.
“Full-flavored, yet simple – that’s what we’re about,” Anderson said.
As they say on the late-night infomercials, act now. The Blackfish Café goes into its annual hiatus on Jan. 1. They’ll reopen for dinner and lunch on Jan. 26.
The Blackfish Café, 2733 NW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City, is open for lunch and dinner five days a week. To make a reservation, call 541-996-1007. You’ll find additional menus and reviews online at blackfishcafe.com.
“Full-flavored, yet simple – that’s what we’re about,” Anderson said.
As they say on the late-night infomercials, act now. The Blackfish Café goes into its annual hiatus on Jan. 1. They’ll reopen for dinner and lunch on Jan. 26.
The Blackfish Café, 2733 NW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City, is open for lunch and dinner five days a week. To make a reservation, call 541-996-1007. You’ll find additional menus and reviews online at blackfishcafe.com.
Blackfish Café • Lincoln City
Playing favorites, at the Blackfish
Story & photos by NIKI PRICE • Oregon Coast Today
When I was young and knew very little, I considered myself a qualified critic of food and theatre, and I wrote as such. When I discovered how little experience I had compared to how much there was to know, I stopped reviewing. And my karma is healthier for it, I’m sure.
Yet for every rule there is an exception, and I’m making one for the Blackfish Café, in Lincoln City. Chef Rob and Mary Pounding are celebrating their 11th anniversary this week, and my family has been eating there from the beginning. Between the business lunches, the anniversary dinners and the reaching across to other people’s plates, I’ve tried everything on the menu, or darned close.
With this practical education, and a great deal of humility, that I submit this list. These are my all-time favorites from Chef Rob’s kitchen, the dishes I must wistfully forsake in order to try anything new or leap toward the special of the day. When someone asks me what’s good at the Blackfish, here’s what I recommend.
Local Fish Tacos
For me, the Blackfish take on this Baja favorite is an oblong plate full of hearty, spicy comfort food. The kitchen lightly breads and grills two thick pieces of fresh fish — when I visited last week, it was dory-caught rockfish — and arranges them over crispy shredded cabbage in soft, warm corn tortillas. They add a little house salsa and top them with an ample zig zag of Coriander Chili Aioli. Next to the tacos lies a Romaine lettuce leaf holding fresh pico de gallo, and helpings of Mexican-style rice and spiced black beans.
As each taco comes with two tortillas, the ambitious can actually make four tacos, each one with a slightly different mix of bean to fish, or pico de gallo to cabbage. A single tortilla isn’t really strong enough to hold these mixtures, and they tend to fall apart before you’re done. To solve that problem, I never put them back down on the plate.
I like this recipe because it doesn’t back down, from the chopped onions in the pico de gallo to the deliciously hot cilantro-chili sauce. Between the lentils, the fish and the tomatoes, it’s got several ingredients that nutritionists keep telling me to eat, so I feel really healthy when I’m done. At lunch, the Local Fish Tacos are $10.25.
Saigon Noodle Salad
This is a sentimental favorite, because it reminds me of Salishan Spa & Golf Resort. Or Salishan Lodge, as it was called when Rob Pounding was executive chef there, from 1985 until 1999. My tenure at the Lodge was brief, comparatively speaking, but it was long enough to develop an affinity for Rob’s Southeast Asian inspired salads. They were often served in the employee lunchroom, and I remember thinking that we were pretty lucky.
The Saigon Noodle Salad is a sinus-clearing mix of cilantro, scallions, basil, Vietnamese mint and toasted peanuts, tossed with Vietnamese Fish and Chili Sauce, and plenty of fresh noodles. At lunchtime, you can get it with sweet Oregon pink shrimp, for $13.75. On the dinner menu, it comes with jumbo prawns and Mung sprouts, for $17.50.
Cioppino of Northwest Seafood
The last time I ordered this, I was the envy of my table. My mother-in-law’s Skillet Roasted Chinook Salmon was good, and so was my husband’s Pan Seared Bacon Wrapped Pacific Albacore Tuna. But the cioppino was the alpha meal of the table, dominating every sense. It was a visually stunning pyramid of scallops, prawns, clams, mussels and Dungeness crab, towering above a red wine, tomato and herb broth. This broth is so deeply aromatic that its scent travels around the table, making other diners wish they had ordered it, too. It’s fun to dig through the shells and claws for meat, and delightful to hear the “clink” they make when you drop them into the discard bowl.
The Cioppino of Northwest Seafood also comes with a couple slices of rustic bread crostini. I advise that you save these for the end, to sop up the broth.
I’ve had other cioppinos, most of which suffered from a tomato broth that was bland or too sweet. The Blackfish version is nicely balanced, so full of flavor it makes your mouth water as the drippy bread chunk is coming up to your mouth.
Peanut Butter Pie
Chef Rob is rather famous for his gourmand snack cake, the house-made, extra large Ding Dongs with Raspberry Coulis and Whipped Cream. You would be a ding-a-ling to refuse an order of these Ding Dongs, as they are delicious. And once you’ve heard about them, it’s rather difficult to turn them down. So consider this your post-Ding Dongs dessert recommendation. Ask for the Peanut Butter Pie.
The slice is at least 6 inches high, with a chocolate cookie crust on the bottom and whipped cream on top. In between is a filling that tastes like peanut butter, but feels like mousse, airy and rich at the same time.
The Blackfish Café, 2733 NW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City, is open for lunch and dinner six days a week. To make a reservation, call 541-996-1007.
Story & photos by NIKI PRICE • Oregon Coast Today
When I was young and knew very little, I considered myself a qualified critic of food and theatre, and I wrote as such. When I discovered how little experience I had compared to how much there was to know, I stopped reviewing. And my karma is healthier for it, I’m sure.
Yet for every rule there is an exception, and I’m making one for the Blackfish Café, in Lincoln City. Chef Rob and Mary Pounding are celebrating their 11th anniversary this week, and my family has been eating there from the beginning. Between the business lunches, the anniversary dinners and the reaching across to other people’s plates, I’ve tried everything on the menu, or darned close.
With this practical education, and a great deal of humility, that I submit this list. These are my all-time favorites from Chef Rob’s kitchen, the dishes I must wistfully forsake in order to try anything new or leap toward the special of the day. When someone asks me what’s good at the Blackfish, here’s what I recommend.
Local Fish Tacos
For me, the Blackfish take on this Baja favorite is an oblong plate full of hearty, spicy comfort food. The kitchen lightly breads and grills two thick pieces of fresh fish — when I visited last week, it was dory-caught rockfish — and arranges them over crispy shredded cabbage in soft, warm corn tortillas. They add a little house salsa and top them with an ample zig zag of Coriander Chili Aioli. Next to the tacos lies a Romaine lettuce leaf holding fresh pico de gallo, and helpings of Mexican-style rice and spiced black beans.
As each taco comes with two tortillas, the ambitious can actually make four tacos, each one with a slightly different mix of bean to fish, or pico de gallo to cabbage. A single tortilla isn’t really strong enough to hold these mixtures, and they tend to fall apart before you’re done. To solve that problem, I never put them back down on the plate.
I like this recipe because it doesn’t back down, from the chopped onions in the pico de gallo to the deliciously hot cilantro-chili sauce. Between the lentils, the fish and the tomatoes, it’s got several ingredients that nutritionists keep telling me to eat, so I feel really healthy when I’m done. At lunch, the Local Fish Tacos are $10.25.
Saigon Noodle Salad
This is a sentimental favorite, because it reminds me of Salishan Spa & Golf Resort. Or Salishan Lodge, as it was called when Rob Pounding was executive chef there, from 1985 until 1999. My tenure at the Lodge was brief, comparatively speaking, but it was long enough to develop an affinity for Rob’s Southeast Asian inspired salads. They were often served in the employee lunchroom, and I remember thinking that we were pretty lucky.
The Saigon Noodle Salad is a sinus-clearing mix of cilantro, scallions, basil, Vietnamese mint and toasted peanuts, tossed with Vietnamese Fish and Chili Sauce, and plenty of fresh noodles. At lunchtime, you can get it with sweet Oregon pink shrimp, for $13.75. On the dinner menu, it comes with jumbo prawns and Mung sprouts, for $17.50.
Cioppino of Northwest Seafood
The last time I ordered this, I was the envy of my table. My mother-in-law’s Skillet Roasted Chinook Salmon was good, and so was my husband’s Pan Seared Bacon Wrapped Pacific Albacore Tuna. But the cioppino was the alpha meal of the table, dominating every sense. It was a visually stunning pyramid of scallops, prawns, clams, mussels and Dungeness crab, towering above a red wine, tomato and herb broth. This broth is so deeply aromatic that its scent travels around the table, making other diners wish they had ordered it, too. It’s fun to dig through the shells and claws for meat, and delightful to hear the “clink” they make when you drop them into the discard bowl.
The Cioppino of Northwest Seafood also comes with a couple slices of rustic bread crostini. I advise that you save these for the end, to sop up the broth.
I’ve had other cioppinos, most of which suffered from a tomato broth that was bland or too sweet. The Blackfish version is nicely balanced, so full of flavor it makes your mouth water as the drippy bread chunk is coming up to your mouth.
Peanut Butter Pie
Chef Rob is rather famous for his gourmand snack cake, the house-made, extra large Ding Dongs with Raspberry Coulis and Whipped Cream. You would be a ding-a-ling to refuse an order of these Ding Dongs, as they are delicious. And once you’ve heard about them, it’s rather difficult to turn them down. So consider this your post-Ding Dongs dessert recommendation. Ask for the Peanut Butter Pie.
The slice is at least 6 inches high, with a chocolate cookie crust on the bottom and whipped cream on top. In between is a filling that tastes like peanut butter, but feels like mousse, airy and rich at the same time.
The Blackfish Café, 2733 NW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City, is open for lunch and dinner six days a week. To make a reservation, call 541-996-1007.
