When we go to a new town, I like to approach strangers and ask them where to eat. Taking our cues from the locals rarely leads us astray — such as our recent trip to Newport, where we discovered the best crab melt I’ve had at a hole-in-the-wall diner.
There’s no central meeting place for strangers in Lincoln City, which is just half a dozen towns that have incorporated themselves under a common name. So we were getting kind of frustrated yesterday when we were driving down the Pacific Highway, trying to tell from the outside of a building where we might like to eat.
Why not just google it ahead of time or check the guidebook, you may ask?
That, my friends, would ruin the adventure. And since I’m a hyper-over-planner the rest of my life, sometimes I need to just head in some general direction and take it from there.
Here’s a true story. I walked up to an older guy near a phone booth at one of the public parking lots near the beach and just put it out there.
Me: Are you from around here?
Dude: Well, I know the area pretty well.
Me: Where do people eat around here?
Dude: I don’t know, people like Mexican, they like Chinese…
Me: No, like are there any little cafes or diners where the locals hang out?
Dude: There’s the Blackfish Cafe down the road, but it’s rather rich for my taste, and pretty expensive.
Me: And that’s where the locals eat?
Dude: Well, a lot of the locals eat at McDonald’s.
And that’s how we ended up eating two fist-sized gourmet Ding-dongs with berry coulis at the Blackfish Cafe in Lincoln City, one of the handful of James Beard-recognized restaurants in Oregon. Our poor server Michael says he has to offer the “homemade ding-dong” about two dozen times a day.
He stuffs it into the middle of his sentence as to draw less attention to it, but you can’t ignore a ding-dong, even if his voice does drop a little when he says it.
The response from diners is always the same. We look at him, we look at each other, we look back at him, and we order it.
“I’ll take your finest homemade ding-dong.”
Oh, we also had the best fried snapper sandwich of our lives there. But twenty years from now, it’s the ding-dong we’ll still be talking about.
We really like Blackfish too. Got really lucky and stumbled upon it since we were staying down the street.