Typhoon, Portland, OR

Remember Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas? Gourmet Magazine had heaped hyperbolic praise on it, and called it the USA's best Thai restaurant. We had a good, but not shockingly good meal there in December, but I left unconvinced that the continent lacked any Thai places better than this. What do you know - it's barely two months later, and I've found somewhere that beats it hollow.

We visited Typhoon's glossy, vampy Broadway branch at the Lucia hotel in Portland (tel. 503 224 8285). The Lucia is a very stylish boutique joint - all modern murals on the toilet doors, architectural flower arrangements, frosted glass, leather, lacquer and velvet. Typhoon's styling sits well here, and the restaurant was busy both nights we visited (be sure to book).

Service is tight and charming. We'd asked for a booth when booking our first meal at Typhoon, but arrived to find that the booth that had been earmarked for us was still full (writhingly so) of a couple who were maybe enjoying their meal a little too much. No problem for the hostess - she put us at what she and the waitress referred to as 'the Mafia table', a great big booth meant to seat about six, on a platform commanding one end of the restaurant, with a great people-watching view. Thoughtfully, both places were set so that we were next to each other on the side of the giant table with the view.

If it's your first visit, it's absolutely essential that you choose something interesting from the extensive tea list (there's a link to a pdf of the full list at the bottom of the linked page) and that you order the Miang Kum for your starter. It's the house special, and a rare dish that I've not found in any other Thai restaurant. Miang Kum is a peasant-style dish consisting of freshly roast peanuts (not a hint of bitterness here - the peanuts had been roasted that evening); tiny preserved shrimp; little cubes of ginger; slivers of bird's eye chilli; miniature dice of lime, flesh, skin and all; shallot pieces; and freshly toasted, shredded coconut. You take a pinch of each ingredient and wrap it in a fresh spinach leaf, daubed with some of chef Bo Kline's sweet signature sauce, and pop the little parcel in your mouth. An astonishing burst of flavours results - bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and deeply savoury all at once. I roared through the shrimp rather faster than the other ingredients, but our attentive waitress went straight to the kitchen to find some more - and when we came back later in the week and ordered the Miang Kum again, she recognised us and brought out an extra bowl of the shrimp. There's service.

This dish sets the quality for the rest of the meal. Ingredients are fresh and bright, and sourcing is impeccable - the prawns at Typhoon are wild, not farmed, and only cuts like tenderloin and sirloin are served. "How," asked Dr W, "are they making things taste this much without MSG?" I can only guess that there was magic in the fish sauce.

Almost everything we ate on both visits was a standout. Papaya salad was clean, fresh and full of zip. The house fried rice arrived looking unexceptional - but once in the mouth was nearly good enough to make me give up cooking. Pineapple rice, full of curry spices and the fresh fruit, could have made a generous meal on its own. Eggplant Lover made the most of this vegetable's ability to soak up flavours (black bean in this case) and of its gorgeously velvety texture, contrasting beautifully with chunks of tofu. The larb, lip-numbingly hot, was much better than the Lotus of Siam version. Dr W ordered half a five-spice roast duck with buns from a specials list and hasn't stopped talking about it since. The beef with grapes was inspired. And neither meal left us with room for pudding.

Sometimes I look around myself in Cambridge and wonder what the hell we're doing. Perhaps our problem is high property prices making restaurant pitches unaffordable to everybody but the mega-chains like Wagamama, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Pret a Manger and Subway. This doesn't excuse the downright lousy quality of some of our independent restaurants, though - we're particularly weak on good Asian places. We don't have any good, well-priced food of the sort that Portland seems to offer several times on every city block. Don't the English care about what they're eating? If you're lucky enough to be in Portland, grab the opportunity to visit Typhoon and congratulate yourself on being in a city where identikit cardboard meals aren't standard.

Andina, Portland, OR

Andina (1314 NW Glisan, Portland 97209, tel. 503 228 9535) is the only Peruvian restaurant I've ever come across. It is, at the time of writing, one of Portland's most popular and fashionable restaurants. I should have paid attention to this fact and booked rather than just rolling up on a Thursday night in the hope of finding a free table.

There wasn't one, so Dr W and I ended up in the bar area, sitting hip-to-hip on a window bench at a very small table. Surprisingly, this seating arrangement turned out to be absolutely delightful; a man in a Panama hat played the guitar and sang so close to our seats it felt like he was serenading us; we tiled our table with two rounds of tapas; we were able to squish up against one another very pleasantly; and we came home filled with proximity- and music-engendered lust (and oysters). All the same, I don't recommend the bench if you're dining with anybody whose thighs and manly ribs you do not feel comfortable being pressed against.

Peruvian food is completely new to me. Almost all the South American food I'd tasted to date had been based around corn - Mexican tamales, nachos and a million meaty, tomato-y things wrapped in tortillas. There was the Chilean place in Madrid years ago, which I hope is non-typical, where we had rice cooked with some tomato puree, some mince, and a fried egg. Here at Andina the starches are quite different, and the emphasis switches from meat to seafood. Peruvian (or what this restaurant is calling Novoandean) food has some distinct Japanese influences as well, alongside some really interesting pre-Colombian flavours. It makes for a mixture of flavours you'll be hard-pushed to find anywhere else. There are also some extremely handsome waiters. I like this place.

Your meal opens with a moist quinoa bread served with three ajíes, or Peruvian spicy salsas. The passion fruit and habañero one in particular is to die for - and these have enough kick to prompt you to explore the exhaustive drinks list.

Around the bar, bottles of rum lie on their sides, infusing with fruits to the accompaniment of salsa music. There are some superb cocktails on offer here (Portland seems to be a great town for cocktails), and we particularly enjoyed a frozen something called Guanabana...do doo...do doo do, which was made with banana-infused rum, guanabana puree, nutmeg and gloriously creamy almond milk. If you're not on the booze, you'll find yourself well catered for, with some fresh juices and concoctions like chica morada, made from purple corn, lime, pinapple and sugar syrup.

Potatoes, of course, make up a goodly proportion of Andean carbs. I wasn't expecting them to provide colour as well, though, so the lurid violet of the Causa Morada, a cake of mashed purple potato sandwiched with smoked trout and flavoured with key lime juice, came as a real surprise. This is a visual treat, and tasted absolutely great. (Portland Food and Drink, a website I found immensely helpful in making restaurant choices in the city, has a great photo of the octopus version here.) I found the tortilla (a thick potato and onion omelette) a bit stodgy and certainly less exciting, but Dr W disagreed with me and wolfed the whole thing.

There were several oyster varieties on offer, most from the nearby Pacific coast, alongside a few Atlantic ones. We went for the local Kumamoto oysters. These are one of my favourite oysters; small, but with a deeply fluted shell, they're juicy but not large enough to be snotty. Zingy ingredients like mangos, radish, shitake mushrooms, ginger, cucumber and more of those chillies made up the pisco rocoto, chalaquita, mango-radish and nikkei salsas served alongside, all a great foil for the richness of the little oysters.

Ají de huacatay pops up in several places on the menu, and the allergy-aware waiters will warn you that this is a peanut-based sauce. It makes for a spicy dip for deliciously fresh prawns coated with smashed quinoa and deep fried. (This is an unbelievably toothsome, crispy way to 'breadcrumb' food, and has inspired me to ignore my deep-seated dislike of pretend-doctor Gillian McKeith, the awful poo lady, and buy a pack of quinoa to experiment with.) The
ají de huacatay also serves as a dip for the very savoury beef-heart kabobs - slim strips of the flavourful, chewy muscle of the heart, marinated and grilled on sticks.

Chorizo was good, but I kind of wished I'd ordered something else - I love the stuff, but it wasn't very new or exciting compared to some of the other things on the menu. Musciame de Atun (which I think was meant to come with some kind of sauce, but which arrived naked) was something I actively disliked: a cured tuna, dried and almost gamey, presented in slices. This is more likely to be my problem than the restaurant's, though; I've never found a cured tuna I have enjoyed - and Dr Weasel loved it.

Everybody's favourite South American ingredient, chocolate, stars on the dessert menu and in some great after-dinner drinks. The Torta de Chocolate was what I've always imagined the River Cafe cookbook's infamous Chocolate Nemesis (a mysteriously non-working recipe which has ruined many dinner parties) should have tasted like. This made me giddy. Dense, not too sweet, unbelievably creamy, moist and rich, it's worth a flight to Portland just to sample it. I rounded off the meal with a boozy hot chocolate drink.

Andina deserves its wall-full of awards. If you're visiting for the first time, I'd recommend doing what we did and going for the tapas rather than the large plates, so you can get a good sampling of the unusual flavours on offer. There are vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free menus on offer as well, so you can take your picky friends.

Radio silence

I hope you've all been missing me. Dr W and I are away for a few weeks' work and (mostly) skiing on the West Coast of America. Normal service will resume in mid-February, but in the meantime I encourage anyone who happens to be in Portland, Oregon, to run as fast as they can to Typhoon at the Lucia Hotel on Broadway, where the Thai food is even better than it was at Lotus of Siam in Vegas. (LoS is the restaurant that Gourmet Magazine called the best Thai in the USA. Perhaps I caught them on a bad night and Typhoon on a very good one, but although LoS gave us a great meal, Typhoon gave us one that's making me consider a bigamous marriage so I can get a green card and come and live in Portland so that I can eat there every night.)