It’s just this perfect mix of down-home American diner food, with touches of Korean flavor. Their crab and shrimp omelette is huge and so good. They call their bread “strong bread.” I have no clue what it is, but it’s delicious. Think of it like whole-grain bread on steroids. Everything’s made in-house, and it’s all phenomenal.

I’d go to Coquine for brunch any day; you can’t go wrong. The chef, Katy Millard, worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in San Francisco and France, and she’s one of the best chefs in the city. Her menu looks simple, but it’s very creative. Even something like a simple Little Gem salad gets a twist.

It’s influenced daily or weekly by whatever’s local and seasonal, so the menu’s always changing, but I’ve really liked brunch dishes like grits with roast vegetables and pork ribeye. She served that with house-made sriracha.

Honestly, anything you order off the menu is going to be great. It’s a small place, probably 30 seats or fewer. During the summer, she has a patio open, too, that adds maybe six or seven more tables. Outside is perfect, not too hot or sunny, and it’s right next to Mount Tabor Park. So you can walk up the mountain to enjoy some nature after the meal, or come to the restaurant after walking.

“Splurge” means different things to different people, but price tag aside, these four spots are all great choices for a celebratory meal.

Eem is also a great place to be able to go and get, like, a bomb nonalcoholic drink and still feel like you’re celebrating and having something fancy. The other drink of theirs that I’ve really been enjoying lately is one that’s called “Drugs”; it’s a combination of bitter pineapple, coffee, rum, coconut, and orange.

Tusk is a very stylish, modern restaurant that focuses on flavors of the Levant, but expressed through the Northwest’s most beautiful produce. Everything is so fresh. I think that it’s best enjoyed during the day, because of the abundance of natural light that floods into the modern dining room through large windows on two sides.

The brunch menu changes quite a bit, but I always get the LaMama breakfast, which is a breakfast board with a little bit of this and that—things like olives, feta, eggs, yogurt, toast, nuts, and fruit—or The Cypriot, which is sunny-side up eggs, halloumi, sausage, peppers, and roasted tomato, because I just can’t get enough halloumi in my life. Another really nice touch is that the creamer for coffee has cardamom in it, which makes a morning there that much more special.

HK Cafe is a Chinese restaurant that serves great dim sum. They’re open early, like 9:30 a.m. On the weekend, it’s really busy. The vibe is really loud and vibrant and fun. Portland isn’t known for its diversity, but when you go to HK Cafe, it’s all Asian people and Asian families.

When I go for dim sum, I usually order the siu mai, which is a wonton wrapper stuffed with ground pork and shrimp, and the har gow is also nice. I like the barbecue spareribs, and the chicken feet are really good. It’s a really authentic place, and everything is made super fresh.

I’m a huge, huge fan of a greasy-spoon, hole-in-the-wall-type diner. This place is actually near my house; I discovered it driving around one day when I was looking for breakfast/brunch. It’s like walking into Grandma’s house, if your grandma happens to be an older Korean lady. When you look at the menu, you’ll see the typical diner stuff, but then you’ll also see things like a galbi or kimchi omelette.

Portland isn’t like New York, where you have a lot of places open 24 hours. But Lúc Lác is open until midnight on weeknights, and until 4 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a very nice, cozy, modern family-run Vietnamese restaurant and bar with great recipes.

My favorite dish is the combination vermicelli bowl. Vermicelli bowls are called bún, and the combination bún comes with grilled shrimp, grilled chicken, barbecued pork, and fried rolls on top. My favorite part is the fried roll—I don’t know what’s in the stuffing, but it has a sweet and salty flavor and nice texture. I eat Vietnamese food a lot, and Lúc Lác makes the best bún, hands down. The food at Sardine Head is Mediterranean-inspired, with a really nice selection of cured fish that they serve with bread and French cultured butter and salt. There are pickle-y things, and snacks like deviled eggs and baby-corn elotes. The wine program is headed up by a guy named Simon Lowry, who I think is kind of a genius. His sense of hospitality is also really spot-on, and he curates a really nice, comfortable experience, without making anything feel stuffy or over the top. He’s really smart with flavors and with wine, and is just an encyclopedia.

Reel M Inn is basically a late-night dive bar that has awesome fried chicken. That’s all they do. They have corn dogs and things like that, too, but the fried chicken is what you go for. It’s one of the few places that are open super late in Portland and don’t offer the usual burgers and fries and stuff. For the longest time, they’ve been cranking out great food at an affordable price for us late-night cooks who have no place to go after work.

It’s dark, and there’s a lot of handwritten notes all over the entire place, from head to toe, basically. There’s only one bartender that works at a time, and that bartender also fries the food, buses tables, serves drinks—does everything. They’re pretty amazing. Honestly, they just know how to do it. The chicken is super simple. They don’t share their secrets, but it is one of the best. It’s just super juicy inside and crispy on the outside.

Best Drinks
In a city saturated with cool bars, you’ll almost have a hard time finding a bad drink. But these four spots offer something extra special.

But the menu’s really inventive: They also do a steamed pork bun called “Who the Fuck Is David Chang?” that’s pretty great (they’re friends with him, so it’s not an actual dis). There’s an awesome shrimp toast, and a tea leaf salad. And after 10 p.m., the thing to get is their Expatriate Nachos, which are wonton chips with Thai chili cheese sauce and lemongrass beef.

They keep it really dark in there, which I like, and all they play is records, so whoever’s bartending is basically curating the vibe for the space based on what type of music they’re picking. The cocktails change fairly often, but there’s always a really good mix of boozy options and ones that more or less taste like fruit punch, with some fun ingredients. They have a decent wine list as well. It’s mostly a bar, but the kitchen’s definitely legit. I like it because you can go and get a salad, but you can also just get a big plate of sloppy nachos if you’re feeling kind of gross. It’s a good mix.

Below, you’ll find their picks for late-night eats, which are shockingly hard to come by in Portland (and yet the dive-bar fried chicken couldn’t sound better); excellent cocktails, un-shockingly very easy to come by in Portland (we’re making a beeline to the sunken bar at tiki lounge Hale Pele…right after we check out the rare bottles at Scotch Lodge and natty wines at Sardine Head); splurge-worthy menus; and the dish you can’t leave town without trying. Spoiler alert: This last one was the hardest for everyone to answer, because, well, the options are just that good. I think Expatriate has the best cheeseburger in the city, or at least one of them. They call it the American Standard, and it’s really simple. You actually get two of them to an order—they’re a little bit bigger than sliders—with just ketchup, mustard, onion, and American cheese on these nice, tiny, soft buns.