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Best of Eugene Restaurants The restaurant world is a quick-moving, fickle place, relying on changing tastes, trends and appetites. In Eugene, some places are consistent and unanimous winners: Shiki for its wonderful sushi, Newman's for its famous fish and chips, and Beppe & Gianni's for high quality and creative Italian food. But just because a place won kudos from Eugene Weekly readers in years past, doesn't guarantee it winning again. Pizza has always been a restaurant category where everyone has an opinion, and for years the opinions settled on Pegasus. In a major upset this year, Bene Gourmet Pizza took first place. The local chain has three locations — downtown, Oakway Center and in a strip mall on Willamette Street — and has achieved the status of a household name. The pizza itself is consistently good, with quality toppings that range from the extreme gourmet (duck sausage, exotic mushrooms and rare cheeses) to the plain and perfectly simple cheese. Another major draw is the economics: for a very reasonable price, you'll get enough pizza to eat for dinner, and for lunch the following day. Interestingly enough, Bene has become this popular without having to deliver, and when you try the pizza it hasn't been sitting in a cardboard box for the past half hour. That really does make a difference, in both taste and texture.
Another upset was KoHo Bistro winning best Northwest, a category belonging traditionally to Marché. KoHo Bistro did well in lots of categories this year, placing for its salads, soups, and seafood as well as for Upscale Menu (third place), Best American (second place), and Best Overall (second place). The Best Chef award (second place) this year went to Kevin Hyland, owner and head chef at KoHo. The place is now well and truly "discovered." West Brothers' new location didn't slow it down in any category. This summer the two restaurants, West Brothers' Barbecue and River Ranch Steakhouse, fused into one at the River Ranch Location. Fans figured it out quick enough, and this year the steakhouse won Best Barbecue (as usual), Best Steak, Best American (second place), and placed third for Brewpub, Beer, and Overall Best Restaurant. The beer is still brewed downtown, and most of the staff followed to the new location. The menu remains eclectic; you can still order all the Hazelnut Crusted Chicken your heart desires, and it also includes more steak and prime rib meals. Burrito Boy swept the Cheap Eats and Best Burrito categories this year, proving that these categories go hand in hand. Of course, there are others who have figured this out, too, but Burrito Boy is still the best of the best, local, fresh, tasty and quick.
Best Overall Restaurant: Café Soriah
Café Soriah is a benchmark against which other restaurants in town are measured. Every year it wins a heap of awards, this year including Best Overall Restaurant, Best Chef for Ib Hamide, Best Service, Best Soup, Best Romantic Dinner and second place in appetizers, Middle Eastern, and upscale menu. The surprise this year is the soup award, which is a category that normally goes to French Horn or Glenwood. French Horn closed this year, but Café Soriah has been building its reputation for delicious, fairly priced soup for a while now. For a mere $3.95 you get a bowl of wonderful, rich and delicious soup and a handful of Soriah's fresh homemade bread. It's one of the best lunch deals around. The soups tend to be thick, stew-like and complete meals unto themselves, and usually there's a choice between cream- and vegetable-based: for example, a cream of artichoke and a hearty, complex split pea, or an exotic lentil and a rich, creamy chowder. Café Soriah is also the physical expression of one person, Ibrahim Hamide. He won the award for Best Peacemaker, as well as Best Chef, and in his restaurant you can sense his touch in the quiet jazz music, the warm peachy-pink walls and the fresh nosegays in vibrant fall colors at each table. — Marina Taylor
Best New Restaurant:
Not only did this little Thai diner win Best New Restaurant, it also swept the categories for Best Take-Out and Best Southeast Asian. It's not every new business that can make all that happen in one year, and mainly by word of mouth. There's just something about the place that appeals: perhaps the friendly staff (mostly the family of chef Bangon Kaokept and her husband Vivat) who explain the dishes so kindly and serve the food so quickly. Perhaps the clean feel to the place, with its cool colors and fresh roses at every table. Could it be the easy location, or the reasonable prices? Perhaps, but mainly it's just the great food. The menu is full of surprises: a rainbow of curries, fresh flavorful fish, traditional dishes and creative innovations. The flavors are subtle and surprising, a dash of sweet or sour, an herb that is wonderful and totally unfamiliar, a little spice (or a lot, be careful of the heat level you ask for: "medium" at Chao Pra Ya is spicier than you'd find in another restaurant's hottest dish.) Every vegetable is cooked to tender and colorful perfection, nothing mushy, nothing raw. The portions aren't huge; this is not a place that confuses quantity with quality. Apparently, it's everything Eugene is looking for in a great Thai restaurant. — MT
Best Place to Take the Kids: BabyCakes
Eugene is a kid-friendly town: There are plenty of parks, good schools, kind people. Of course, if your kids are screaming their hearts out in a public place (say a restaurant for example) it's important to be in a really kid-friendly place. Many Eugene restaurants go out of their way to welcome families, but this year's winners are restaurants designed especially with children in mind (yes, even McDonald's I suppose). BabyCakes, the first place winner, just opened this summer. The space in the restaurant, which used to be the very kid-friendly Bagel Bakery, is open and welcoming to little ones. The wall along one side is painted with chalkboard paint and decorated with an ever-changing blur of children's names, self-portraits and doodles. Baskets of toys, a wooden castle and doll house and a tall stack of books make it a little like visiting a friend's house, except you can order whatever you want to eat. BabyCakes hosts story times, puppet shows, themed birthday parties and playgroups, as well as impromptu ice cream or hot cocoa stops with friends. The menu is split between adult and child-oriented food, and includes nice selections of coffees from Café Mam and Prince Pückler's ice cream. The kids' snacks include peanut butter sandwiches that come with your choice of jelly, bananas, chocolate chips or honey, little bagel pizzas, rice and veggies, and more. Fresh fruit and veggies come with each kids' meal. It's a comfortable, creative and very Eugene place for your babies. — MT
Best Appetizers: Anatolia
Poppi's Anatolia has been a favorite in Eugene for decades, and this year it wins both Best Mediterranean and Best Appetizers. Many have sat at one of the wonderful window booths, drunk a glass of retsina and sampled the variety of offerings at the top of the menu. A great start is the Mezedakia, which combines bowls of three separate appetizers surrounded by pita and fennel seed bread on a single platter: dolmadakia, taramaosalata and melitzanosalta. The bowl of dolmadakia, grape leaves stuffed with pine nuts, raisins and rice, comes topped with a lemon wedge. Delicately tangy on the outside, the taste is faintly sweet from the raisins inside. Pine nuts give a wonderful texture to the stuffing, balancing the soft rice with their firmer give. The tightly wrapped leaves hold together well when speared with a fork. The taramaosalata is smoked fish roe whipped with potatoes and onions into a creamy texture, and the melitzanosalta is a chunky paste of eggplant, whole cilantro leaves, garlic and tahini. It has a bright, fresh taste with a strong garlicky undertone. A perennial favorite is also the saganaki, aged sheep's milk cheese deep fried in olive oil and served in a sizzling, blackened pan, with a squirt of fresh lemon juice. Crispy and golden on the outside, and stretching to elastic proportions on the fork, the cheese is delicious with fennel seed bread. — Kaukab Jhumra Smith
Click here for the Best of Eugene winners!
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