Why hello there. Welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we make the world of food a little easier to digest. I’m your literary momma bird Jon O’Guin, and I immediately apologize for that mental image. Anywho, today’s post is going to be something a little different. I honestly don’t know how quite yet, but we’re going to take some time to explore it. Specifically, I want to communicate to you the…terroir of my home town, in as much as I can. And, because I’ve been feeling frustratingly technical of late, I wanted to try and push myself to be a little more…artistic. So, let’s take a shot at this. But first, let’s be a LITTLE technical, before the alcohol really kicks in. Because before I took a shot at this, I took a couple shots.

A Drink, A Definition, and A Delineation

Terrior, to handle the definition first, since sometimes the beginning isn’t the best place to start, is a term first reserved for wine, and it refers to “the environmental factors imposed on a food product or crop, and the character inherited by the crop as a result of those factors”. Grapes grown in one type of soil taste slightly different than those grown in another. The amount of rain a region gets affects how its crops grow. The term is mostly used in reference to products that require fermentation: wine yes, but also brandies, cheeses, misos...there are specific caves in Korea where they allow their kimchi to ferment, just as certain cheeses ripen in specific caves.

I went with the cheese cave, since at least the cheeses are visible, rather than kimchi, which is stored in a jar.

Thus, terroir is something close to “the land’s touch”. However, it’s a complicated and nuanced thing. More of, to use the modern vernacular, a “vibe” than a rigid set of rules. Some years it rains more. Some years the soil is not quite the same. But there is a through-line. This, hopefully, helps explain the drinks: how better to really feel the vibe than to cut a little loose? I used to write about half of these posts at least partially buzzed, back in the FB days. If my goal is to put a couple cracks in my technical shell, and give myself some air vents, why not get a little wiggly?

Lastly, the delineation: Man is a complicated animal, who reflects himself onto the world, and his world onto himself. There is a terroir of the soul, as it were. And, in reflex, the people shape the terroir to themselves. People can groove to the same vibe in their own separate way. And some vibes aren’t for everyone. All of which is to say: This post is going on up Nate’s Birthday, and was originally written around Stephen’s, so this conversation is meant not just to impart the feel of our town to you, but in part to be somewhat nostalgic/connective for them: so hopefully MY experiences of our home town are intelligible and ring true for them. Maybe they won’t for every one. But that’s what we’re aiming for.

The Arteries, and the Heart

There is no restaurant closer to my family than Uncle Dave’s Café. Literally, it is the physically closest restaurant to our home. It is a small place, with…maybe 40 seats total in the whole place. It serves Biscuits and Gravy, and in its menu, it is almost apologetic about this fact: the original intention had been to serve “S.O.S” (shit on a shingle), a US military staple consisting of chipped beef in cream sauce on toast, but the original owner had been convinced that he might do better business if he focused on the similar but less provocatively named biscuits and gravy.

The two dishes are, visibly, sometimes nigh-indistinguishable.

There are many fun metaphors and parallels you can draw from the place: ever since we grew to men, the booths at the restaurant haven’t been large enough to hold all of us together, with someone needing to grab an extra chair for the end. It is a place we don’t fit any more. It is one of the few restaurants where I don’t swap around my order frequently: It is a rock of stability in the shifting sea of my culinary choices.

From there, it’s important to discuss the road situation of my home town for a second. Because Just past Uncle Dave’s (and a 7-11) is the crossroads that determines which part of Port Orchard you’re heading for. A left turn takes you out to Sedgwick, where you can get Blue Agave tacos, or Kim’s Teriyaki next to Fred Meyers. Or, if Mom is craving a Peanut Buster parfait, you can drive all the way out to the highway and grab some Dairy Queen. But, more likely if you’re going that way, you’re heading out of town, down and across to Tacoma, Seattle, or somewhere.

Tacoma does have a lot of tempting options…

Straight ahead at the crossroads will take you down Lund to where it meets Bethel. There you can get Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican restaurant built on something of a grand scale, mimicking a Mexican church. The flour tortillas are freshly pressed in a machine in the middle of the tiled floor, and there’s an atrium that I can remember beaming with sunlight on the rare Sunday brunch we went there. A little closer to home from there is the old Wok and Teriyaki, where Kim used to work before she opened the location next to Fred Meyer.

The stretch of Bethel between Sedgwick and Lund is a stretch of road that holds a frustrating sense of void to me, in a culinary sense: The year I graduated college was the second year of a new skating rink in the area, which attracted a restaurant that my family grew to quite enjoy. A restaurant that was shut down 7 months before I came back from my 8 years in Pullman. To most of my family, there is a wistful sense of loss of Tommy C’s, and Sk8town. But…I didn’t get those. The more relevant connection I have is to China Sun Buffet, a restaurant I quite enjoyed as a child, and have no idea if I like as an adult, because I haven’t been there in 12+ years: Nate, following some event, beat out his friends in a competitive eating contest there, at the cost of sickening himself, and putting him off the restaurant for a couple years. He has since recovered, but now any time it comes up, one of the first things any of us think of is it making Nate sick.

I also think of donuts, to be fair.

Turning right at the Crossroads, snapping back toward home, takes you down to Mile Hill, passing by Spiro’s, where we’ve eaten at or from once a week almost every week for the last 2 or so years. A place with dozens of fond and not-so-fond memories for us: for a two year span in my teens, it seemed we couldn’t go to Spiro’s without being vastly inappropriate in some way: talking too loudly about vasectomies, or the infamous “butter facial” incident, where Dad flung a pat of butter into Stephen’s face.  Spiro’s expanded a couple years ago, taking the space that was, DECADES ago, Smiley’s Subs, the first place I ever got to use an order slip to build the sandwich just the way I wanted it.

It’s like a Subway, but you don’t have to talk. I can’t believe these things haven’t made a comeback with Millennials.

Going up Mile Hill, there was El Sombrero, our go-to sit-down Mexican dinner spot, where Dad would have his Crown Royal, and everyone who wasn’t me would split some mojo de ajo. MIle Hill also was and is the fast-food heart of town, with McDonald’s above the movie theatre, Jack in the Box right below it, Taco Bell next to that, and Burger King just across the street in the Albertson’s parking lot. There was the A&W where I’d play D&D after school, the Bowling Alley maybe 500 feet away, but somehow vastly more complicated to get to.

The Periphery, and the Pearl

If you followed Mile Hill down, you’d come to the waterfront, where you could get KFC right at the first juncture. Down the road was the Golden Grill, the Chinese restaurant with the amazing view of the sound. Further down, and you’d hit the real downtown, a place we didn’t go to much as kids, though we’re more frequent guests now, given the high ratio of bars to other businesses.

The crown jewel, in my memory’s eye, of the culinary scene of Port Orchard is, I think, obvious. It’s the only place I was forced to dress up to go to that was still in town, and if I were better trained in drawing, I could replicate the main floor of the restaurant from memory: Tweten’s Lighthouse. Down past the down-town, on its own little jutting edge of land just before the marina, Tweten’s has framed in my mind the basic needs of a high-end restaurant: the dark wood paneling, the great view of the waterfront, a place where a chef would make a crepe to our specifications right in front of us during Sunday brunch. It was a place of clinking crystal, steak knives, and, to my young mind, something special and opulent. Which, as an adult, knowing that adjusted for inflation it was a $25 all-you-can eat buffet, is…certainly something. That’s like, a single entrée now. Half of an impressive whiskey. But such is the mind of a child: it seemed so much grander when I was only 4 feet tall.

This isn’t Tweten’s, but it’s the closest pic I could find to the feel of their crepe station.

And that’s…the vibe, man. Can you see kind of the mish-mash I was referring to in the Furikake Salmon post? The intermingling of Asian and Hispanic cuisines as normal companions to the broader tapestry of white American food choices? And that is growing, as more diverse options manifest over time. There was one big Italian place in town, now there are two. There were 2-3 Mexican restaurants in town , now there’s probably 6, or 7 if you count the food trucks. The 4 or 5 restaurants of various Asian backgrounds are probably an even dozen or more. A Hawaiian place opened, as did a Filipino restaurant: no longer just the food of co-worker get-togethers or friend’s moms, but openly served and celebrated.  It’s a mish-mash of working people cooking a lot of starches, proteins, and sauces, with relatively few airs of pretention: while the breadth of our seafood choices might strike some as indulgent, probably the most expensive thing on any menu in town is a $38, 12 oz steak.

I don’t really have a planned ending for this, or a conclusion. Like I said, it’s a vibe. And vibes typically just…wear out, you know? Before we call it, though, I do want to highlight one last one: there’s a restaurant that I’ve tried to talk about with my family a couple times about, and there’s some contention/confusion on where or what it is. It MIGHT be John’s Kitsap Café, but like I said: there have been arguments. I just want to highlight it because it feels like my first memory of eating out in Port Orchard: a small place, I think with booths. All I really remember is ordering dinosaur chicken nuggets, and watching with a mix of horror and fascination the ceiling fan, which was spinning. Not just the blades, mind you: the force of the blades was propelling the ENTIRE FAN in a (fairly tight) swinging pendulum arc. People assured me we weren’t in danger, that it was just an old fan, but I was transfixed.

There’s something delightfully earnest about the fan situation, that I think is emblematic of our food scene as a whole: It’s people making do. We’re not a rich town, we’re an odd mish-mash of cultures, but we’re all doing our best. And maybe our buildings aren’t the newest, maybe our dishes aren’t the most ‘authentic’, but we’re getting up, we’re trying to make it work, and we’re not precious about the details. “It’s just like that, it’s an old fan.” Uncle Dave’s didn’t take credit cards until COVID hit, because why should they? Cash register works just fine, why pay for a card reader? At the end of the day, you fix what’s gotta be fixed, and if it doesn’t, it can wait awhile.

MONDAY: WHO KNOWS, MAN? PROBABLY SOME QUICK VEGGIES, TO ROUND OUT A WEIRDLY PESCATARIAN MONTH FOR US. OR MAYBE A WEIRD LITTLE FRENCH-ADJACENT DISH I KIND OF SCREWED UP A FEW WEEKS AGO.

THURSDAY: MAYBE I NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT I WANT HERE, AND USE THAT TO FIGURE OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING MONDAY. I DID A HALF-TASTING OF WEIRD ALCOHOLS RECENTLY, MAYBE THAT WOULD BE RELEVANT?