Eastern Oregon – Setting Me Straight About Garlic and Life

In 1977, a good 25 percent of Oregon was part of the athletic conference in which my school, Redmond High, resided. This meant my varsity tennis matches entailed a bit more than a drive across town to the rival team’s courts. That year, we spent up to seven hours on a coughing yellow school bus making our way to matches in places like Burns, Pendleton, Hermiston, and Ontario. We never viewed the lack of seat belts as a travel risk; it made curling yourself up into a pretzel of stiff muscles that much easier.

I was an average tennis player, but a phenomenal air guitarist. Between shots I’d turn my wooden Wilson Stan Smith racket into a Fender Stratocaster with dual Marshall amps. I didn’t win many matches, but I could channel Duane Allman.

Those road trips—and family vacations to La Grande and the Wallowas earlier in childhood—were my introduction to the long stretches of Eastern Oregon highways where the scenery is so overwhelming that you almost fail to notice it after awhile. Outside of the Dairy Queens, local cafes, and a stray Chinese restaurant, there wasn’t much in the way of cuisine in these small towns. People went about doing what they did, which was mainly ranching, farming, and wood products, or a trade that supported those industries. Food was fuel, and that was that. Folks grew big gardens, eating what they could during summer, and canning the rest for winter. If you had the title of “chef”, it probably meant that you ran the kitchen at a hotel or hospital. Usually, if you prepared food for a living, you were a "cook," and most of what you cooked started out frozen.

Fast-forward 20 years, and Eastern Oregon tastes a lot different. One great example is Bev Calder, proprietor of Bella Main Street Market, a gourmet's paradise in Baker City. I met Bev in the early 90s, when she was wine director of a fancy restaurant in Portland. When I heard that she was packing her educated palate and heading east—into what was considered by most to be a culinary desert—I figured she was crazy, having a mid-life crisis, or both. Little did I know that she was part of a wave of urban expatriates looking to establish new culinary outposts in places that would never succumb to sprawl. Today, Bev taunts me by sending huge, fragrant heads of organic garlic grown on a local farm, and challenges me to find better beef or lamb than is grown just down the road from her market at Sexton Ranch. She's made her point.

Further north, at Foley Station in La Grande, Merlyn Baker's menus rival the seasonal-and-local mantra of many of the Portland chefs who'd never think of giving up their delivered-daily baby greens for a stint east of the Cascades.

And lodging in these parts has come a long way, too, bringing sleepover options beyond the drive-up motel at the south "Y" of town. At Baker City's Geiser Grand Hotel, the lodging and dining offerings are both great examples of Eastern Oregon's metamorphosis. The historic homes and hotels that once housed those on their way west are seeing new life as inns and bed & breakfasts, too. Many now highlight the goods of the region's ranchers, farmers, growers and producers who have tapped into the expansion of the "know where your food comes from" market.

Take a long drive east on one of the region's many scenic byways, and you're likely to meet some of these free spirits who are helping to make a visit here as delicious as the view outside your window.

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