WHO'S ON THIRD? WE ARE

Holy smokes, summer is almost over, and that means two crucial things: I will soon not have children tugging on the legs of my jeans and whining, “What are we going to DO today?” (short answer will soon be, “GO TO SCHOOL!”). And Who’s on Third?, our annual festival, is happening next weekend. What is Who’s on Third?, you ask. Screenings and panel discussions, maybe, of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein? Lou Costello look-alike contests? (our mayor would win). Random pies in the face?

No, none of the above. Who’s on Third? is actually a retail festival on Third Street -- (did we mention that this is “Oregon’s Favorite Main Street?” We copyrighted that slogan, so we mention it often) – with lots of fun events happening downtown next Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 4 & 5, from noon to four p.m. each day. More than two dozen shops will be open and offering discounts and promotions; nearly as many restaurants, wine bars and tasting rooms will be serving up their delicacies and libations; and there will be live music throughout each afternoon.

And such live music. Both days feature several acts but the one I’ll be rushing back to see is Michael “Shoehorn” Conley, a Portland musician who manages the rare daily-double of playing a mean blues saxophone AND tap-dancing like Gregory Hines. The guy is equally adept at both, and his show is a great deal of fun to watch and hear, as he trades bluesy riffs and heel-cracking combinations. I dare you to find another tap-dancing sax player performing anywhere in the entire state of Oregon on those days.

Another unique quality of this year’s Who’s on Third? fest will be the presence of hundreds of lean, fit people who will be in serious need of major carbo-loading and re-hydration, thanks to the first-ever Oregon Half-Marathon that is being run on Sunday morning in the neighboring town of Carlton. To get the runners off their feet and downtown where they belong, there will be a free trolley service running on both days. On Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., the Trolley will drive a circuit from the Allison Inn in Newberg to the old fire station in Carlton to Third Street and our adjacent Granary District. On Sunday, a runner’s bus will depart from several McMinnville hotels beginning at 5:15 a.m. to transport race participants to the starting line at Stoller Vineyards, returning to Mac at 11:15 from the finish line in Carlton. The bus will then do loops from Carlton to McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon on Third Street until 4 p.m.

Put together, it sounds like a great weekend to be in wine country and enjoy our vibrant community. You can save your Abbott & Costello movie fest for another time.

IF THIS IS WEDNESDAY WINES, WE MUST BE IN MCMINNVILLE

Okay, I admit it. I’m guilty. You’ve got me. I went into Wednesday Wines…ON A TUESDAY!...and I’m very glad that I did. Because Wednesday wines aren’t just for Wednesdays anymore. I can explain…

This all starts with Kathy Campbell, a transplanted Californian (“I like heavy reds,” she confessed under duress) who opened Wednesday Wines on Third Street almost exactly two years ago. As Kathy explains, “We’re not an Oregon Pinot shop. We want people to experience a wide range of wines.” And furthermore, Kathy added, she wanted to carry wines that people could enjoy during the week, and were priced accordingly. Wednesday Wines, then, refers to a wonderful little find of a wine, typically priced at under twenty bucks, that you’d pop open mid-week before traipsing down to your wine cellar on the weekend to uncork the hundred-dollar Chateau de Blah Blah.

To that end, Kathy carries some wonderful wines, all tasted by her before she sells them, that include Sauvignon Blancs from South Africa, Cabernets from Chile and lots of intriguing things from all parts in-between. Including Oregon: The delightful Three Wives wines made by McMinnville’s own Remy Drabkin are big sellers at Wednesday Wines (and in fact, a case of Remy’s hard-to-find Pinot Gris arrived as we were talking to Kathy), and Maysara is represented with a number of bottles and varietals. Kathy breaks her under-twenty dollar rule for wines from the McMinnville AVA, which allows her to carry gems like Youngberg Hill’s delicious Jordan Block Pinot Noir. And as of a month or so ago, Kathy became the only wine shop in the world to carry the private-label Third Street Flats Pinot Noir, which is made for the eponymous lodging (located directly above Wednesday Wines) by Solena Estates’ Laurent Montalieu and is an absolute steal at $20.

Besides the selection of wines, Kathy stocks a nice line of food and gift products like flavored olive oils and vinegars, mustards and beers from local brewers Heater-Allen and Fire Mt. Brewery. And a room in the back of her shop houses Abbie & Oliver's artisan cheese shop, with a fine selection of exotic cheeses that come from nearly as far away as the wines.

You can see why it’s hardly fair to punish me for not waiting until Wednesday rolls around to sneak into her place. Tuesdays, Thursdays…even the odd Sunday afternoon is okay for Wednesday Wines now.

UP ON THE ROOF

My nephew Christopher was in town; he had just turned twenty-one, so naturally I took him to the highest spot in town and began to educate him on some subtle points of fine living. This peculiar rite of passage came courtesy of McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon, whose building has been a fixture on Third Street since practically before there even was a Third Street. Thanks to some clever design and remodeling, the Hotel Oregon’s Rooftop Bar is just about the perfect place to watch a summer sunset and dine al fresco, particularly with pints of the housemade Hammerhead and Terminator beers in hand, the better for which to make points about how craft beer is all about quality, not quantity.

The outdoor patios on the roof have tables with umbrellas and chairs, and a series of steps lead upwards to several more platforms, until you’re at the very top of the building, with a 360-degree view of town, rolling hills and the Coast Range mountains to the west. Sculptures of spaceships serve as reminders that the hotel is the official headquarters of our annual Alien Daze parade and UFO Fest. Christopher was impressed, but then, when you’ve just turned twenty-one, pretty much anything that involves good beer is impressive.

The rooftop is but one of many great surprises inside the four-story Hotel Oregon, which dates back to 1905 and has done time as a Greyhound bus depot, Western Union station, beauty parlor and soda fountain. The Portland-based McMenamins brothers specialize in snapping up old buildings (their Kennedy School in northeast Portland, built from a decommissioned grade school, has long been a favorite of mine), sprucing them up, filling them with art and opening their doors again to serve as gathering places for visitors and the community.

To that end, the Hotel Oregon offers forty-two guestrooms, each named after a famous personage, with hand-painted quotes and notes about the person written on the walls. The hallways are a riot of murals, artifacts and photos of old-time McMinnville; even the elevator is painted from floor to ceiling. The Cellar Bar is a dark, low-ceilinged place with live music; the first-floor pub has a gorgeous, wooden back bar and a menu of good salads, pastas and burgers; and the Paragon Room has two full-sized billiards tables.

Like McMinnville itself, it’s a fine place to explore. But on sunny days, that Rooftop Bar is in a class of its own. I’m going to grab what’s left of summer from a table at the top.

SPRUCING UP HOUSE, HOME AND CHILD

My wife and kids were out of town, and looking around my home, I noticed a distinct lack of anything that could remotely be considered classy. Or charming. Or having the quality of, say, a cottage in Provence or a farmhouse in Tuscany. The puppet that my son made in the second grade was cute, of course, what with the toothpicks stuck into the shrunken apple head, but it wouldn’t quite carry the day at, say, the Museum of Modern Art. Ditto the Wile E. Coyote-shaped mug that is frequently the only receptacle left in the house from which to drink fine, red wine.

Clearly, we needed to get to La Bella Casa, which has more taste exuding from its little finger than most of us have in our whole torso. They, after all, did the décor of the ultra-classy pied-a-terre apartment at Third Street Flats, which is what a McMinnville flat would look like if the Louvre were down the street (rather than the Spruce Goose, an entirely different story). Bella owners Andrea, Rhonda and Jennifer Feero delight in finding pretty, elegant things, displaying them artfully on their shelves and nudging us towards them in hopes of sprucing up our own domestic goose, so to speak. And that’s the last allusion I’ll make to being goosed by the Feeros.

They have lovely, rustic Italian dinnerware from Vietri that would make my wienies and beans look like risotto Milanese. The softest pajamas displayed near fragrant products from Crabtree & Evelyn. Soaps, Italian linens, handbags, shoes, lamps and even the hard to find Petunia Pickle Bottom Diaper Bag. And my personal favorite, a very large glass jar full of kumquats floating in some lucky liquid, the grown-up equivalent of having your own gumball machine at home.

Arranged In the right proximity, these things could even make a puppet with toothpicks sticking out of his head look like a carefully planned design objet. They don’t call it La Bella Casa for nothing.

ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN MCMINNVILLE

I’m always struck by how easily and naturally people come together in this town and by how convivial McMinnville is. There are nights when the whole downtown area feels like a party that is evolving before your eyes. It has something to do with the café society that is created by wine bars and restaurants and coffee shops in close proximity, but more than anything, it has to do with the people who live and work here, mixing easily with the visitors who pass through town.

Last Friday afternoon, I went downtown.

There had been a minor equipment failure that morning at Thistle that closed the restaurant for the night, and consequently, I found the whole crew – chef Eric Bechard, sous chef Fritz, hostess/server Emily Howard and bartender Katie Koenig – parked at the bar of the R. Stuart and Co. Wine Bar, where they had been patiently working their way through the entire wine menu since lunchtime. When I arrived they were lighting into glasses of Riesling, and I countered – cleverly, I think -- with a big glass of 2005 3 Clowns, a blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

Emily raised her index finger to her upper lip and showed off a handlebar moustache tattoo on the inside of the finger. Then Katie did the same, and so did Eric (Fritz left). They had all had their fingers tattooed with moustaches. So I bought their next round of Rieslings, figuring that new finger tattoos always call for a celebration.

At 3:45, local real estate whiz Gene Zinda arrived to convene the weekly meeting of the Safety Committee, a group of dedicated citizens who come to the Wine Bar to discuss current events and where they want to have dinner that night. Nicole poured him a glass of Pinot Gris and despite my not having a finger tattoo, Gene bought me a glass of the ’07 Autograph Pinot Noir that has found its way into my heart over several months of attending meetings of the Safety Committee. We toasted the real estate market and wished it would go up.

Emily and Katie went off to wash their moustaches, and Eric and I decided to hit the streets in search of absinthe, the green French liqueur that was once banned in the U.S. “You know, I love this town,” he said as we walked down Third Street. “It has such an amazing spirit of cooperation.” When we walked into La Rambla, Jerry Naylor – who years ago succeeded Buddy Holly as lead singer of The Crickets – was at a table with Stan Perkins, whose father Carl wrote the rockabilly classic, “Blue Suede Shoes,” and plays a mean slide guitar himself. At the bar were Patti Webb, longtime Manager of the McMinnville Downtown Association, and her friend Jule Gradek, pounding Cosmos.

The absinthe was green and fiery and tasted of licorice. We drank it with Spanish meatballs and skewers of tri-tip steak, and Eric talked about the recent article about Thistle in the New York Times, and how his vision of creating a local restaurant that serves locally sourced food is coming to fruition. I think we toasted his success, but my memory was getting hazy by that point.

When we arrived back at R. Stuart & Co. an hour or so later, the Safety Committee was just about to vote on where to have dinner. The place was filling up, and servers Nicole and Rose were dishing up crabcakes and glasses of Big Fire Dry Rosé. Nicole poured Eric and me a taste of Vin Tardive, a late harvest dessert wine made from pinot gris. Delicious, and a fine chaser to absinthe.

The night was young and fraught with possibilities.

UNDER THE THIRD STREET CRESCENT

Did anyone happen to hear a howl of despair echoing down the red-brick corridor of downtown Third Street at about 8:40 a.m. last Thursday? No, it wasn’t a part of the Twilight saga: It was just me, on my knees, head thrown back in anguish and fists raised to the heavens, because I went to the Crescent Café for breakfast and saw that they were closed for a week.

On vacation. Oh, the humanity!

The Crescent is surely one of the most unusual eateries, not only in McMinnville but in all of Oregon. They’re open for breakfast and lunch only, do both exceedingly well, and have an intriguing backstory. About four years ago, Michael McKenney and his partner, Danny Wilser, packed up their Sonoma County digs and bought a 131-acre farm in McMinnville; they did this after driving through Mac in December, seeing the Christmas lights on Third Street and thinking, “This is magic,” according to Michael.

They restored their farmhouse, but then retirement got to be too boring. Michael had spent 18 years selling exercise equipment to big corporations and Danny was a great chef who had owned and done the cooking at Ella's, the practically perfect breakfast place in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. “We like to stay busy,” Michael said. So three years ago they opened the Crescent Cafe in downtown Mac – named after their farm, which was originally the Crescent Dairy Farm -- and made it the most distinctive breakfast place in town, and maybe in the entire Portland metro area. Michael, who brings new meaning to the word “dapper,” runs the front, smoothly seating the people who patiently line up out the door, and overseeing a crack staff of servers; Danny does the cooking.

And oh, what cooking: He does sublime things that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on breakfast menus in all my years of morning foraging: creamed chicken on fresh buttermilk biscuits; a velvety Eggs Benedict that he only makes a few times a month; moist coffeecakes studded with walnuts or peaches; three kinds of fresh-baked bread (loaves of which you can take home); pancakes with caramelized bananas; and (a personal favorite of mine) a kind of bubble-and-squeak of shredded chicken in two kinds of mashed potato, fried into cakes, served with eggs and a side of chicken gravy.

You can maybe see why I weep bitter tears when they’re unexpectedly closed and I haven’t had my morning coffee yet. Not to mention my bubble and squeak. Or a chicken hash that I sometimes dream about.

For lunch they do great sandwiches and burgers made from the steers they're raising on their new farm. And then they’re outta there. "We know our niche and do it well," said Michael. Also, "We go home after lunch, change our clothes and shovel manure all afternoon."

Well, I guess we can excuse them the occasional week off. The Crescent re-opens this week, and save me some chicken. Or you’re gonna really hear some howling.

NEW DIGS ON THIRD STREET

How could it be that Erin Stephenson and her new Third Street Flats – which are four apartments, available for nightly or weekly rentals on the top floor of the 1885 McMinnville Bank Building – have anticipated my every lodging mood? Erin and her husband, Travis Easterday, have created the most original and eclectic lodging in McMinnville – if not in all of Oregon – by having four different local teams design four unique and utterly different units.

They obviously did it by reading my mind, and I wish they’d cut it out.

Example: I often like to pretend that I’m Ernest Hemingway, swanning around 1920’s Paris and enjoying a gay café society that revolves around a chic little pied-a-terre apartment of my very own. NOBODY KNOWS THIS! (until now). And yet, Flat Number One at Third Street is named the Pied-a-Terre, and is a gorgeous little boite of brown velour furniture, a kitchenette, watercolors on the walls from local artists and a chandelier hanging from an upholstered chain. Formidable!

“The girls from La Bella Casa knocked it out of the park [when they did the design],” says Erin. No, they merely read my mind. Like Hemingway himself, I could write some gripping prose from that unit, believe you me, but only after getting through a bottle or two of the Third Street Flats wine that is offered to guests alongside a plate of Honest Chocolates. And maybe a late visit to the bar at La Rambla, downstairs.

But wait, on other days I dream of having a big, Italian farmhouse, with a large kitchen and table from which to scarf great volumes of pasta with sundry friends and family. Which brings us to Flat #2, named Olio e Aceto (which either means Oil & Vinegar or is the full name of Popeye’s girlfriend, I’m not sure which). This Italianate gem has a full kitchen with a beautiful, farmhouse table and bench made from recycled wood, a cutting board reclaimed from a massive stump, Kim Hamblin’s paper art on the walls and shelves stocked with pasta, flour, sugar and bottles of the namesake olive oil and vinegar. And a colander, of course, for draining all of that pasta. When Sophia Loren comes to town, this is where she would stay.

But then, every couple of weeks I need to feel like a Portland hipster, so I’d stay at The Pearl (Flat #3), with its bright blue and green walls, low-rise king bed and Asian accents. I would do very cool and hip things there. How did Erin know this? I thought I kept it to myself.

And finally, The Retreat is a big, expansive urban apartment with red-brick walls, tall windows looking out onto Third Street and oversized photographs from Sandi Colvin (who also runs the Hidden Treasures gallery) of Farmer’s Market produce and Third Street scenes. When my options vest, when my personal Board needs to convene, when the tassels on my loafers need a break, I would retreat to The Retreat.

With such lodgings available, who needs therapy? I’ll leave that to you to decide.