I’ve previously mentioned that Aldo and I visited Portland in midsummer, but it’s only now as the East Coast leaves begin to yellow that I have the chance to write about our remarkable dinner at Beast.

Let me start by saying that earlier in the afternoon of that day—a beautiful day—we were driving our rental car along the Columbia River Gorge when a feral cat darted across in front of us, practically sacrificing its life beneath our wheels, and for what? To pounce on and sink its teeth into the thin meat of of a hapless squirrel that sat in the sunshine in a clearing on the far side of the road.

Anyone who has dined at Beast will pounce instinctively, like that feral cat, at a chance to eat there again. Even if it means dodging traffic. And the meat is plentiful.

It says as much in the name, Beast, which suggests strictly carnivorous fare from the stockyards of Chicago. Or perhaps a refectory for Notre Dame linemen the night before the big game. Or, more in keeping with our own lifestyle, a sex club modeled on the labyrinth of the minotaur. Doesn’t that sound like a delight? It is no place for the vegan. It is, however, a destination for anyone who wants to savor a carefully constructed piece of culinary performance art, exquisite and yet also robust.

The restaurant is located in a nondescript neighborhood, off an intersection containing other plain-wrapped restaurants. A few houses away we passed a lawn where a broken stove had been plunked down without ceremony, like an old relative, with a sign saying it could be had for fifty bucks. Beast itself had a look just one step up from a garage, with a front door protected by metal bars. In New York, it would suggest a perfect Mafia front. Or an Italian restaurant for a Mafia front.

Inside, the restaurant was a dark open room with a slate-black-tiled open kitchen. The back wall also had the look of slate, and was scribbled all over with catchphrases in chalk. I should have written the catchphrases down, because now I can’t recall them except to say they were somewhere between MFK Fisher and Bob Dylan. There were but two tables, arranged perpendicularly, and the staff took a few minutes to manage the somewhat tricky business of optimizing the seating plan.

Aldo said it all reminded him of a) the workhouse dining-hall scene in “Oliver Twist” and b) the restaurant in that scary Peter Greenaway movie “The Cook, the Thief, the Wife & Her Lover.” Neither of those, frankly, are the happiest associations one might have before embarking on a five- or six-course prix-fix meal with wines, but he had a point: The air of being part of an “experience” created a sense of heightened anticipation and hunger—with, besides, the shadow fear of a coming letdown.

And then what should be the amuse bouche but a small bowl of steaming gruel topped with crème fraiche and diced chives?

Kidding! On the contrary, the meal built superbly, happily, from one course to the next. A lobster bisque with sweet yellow corn and—wonderful touch of texture and sweetness—cantaloupe; a charcuterie plate that contained a small, absolutely perfect “bonbon” of foie gras with sauternes gelee, no bigger than a thimble, sitting on a demure little cracker; a sizeable lamb-loin chop that, if served in a Manhattan tasting menu, would have been carved up to serve eight portions; a seared scallop with heirloom tomatoes—the one course, I have to say, that has left no lasting impression on me, except that it was served with a nasturtium remoulade, which is a pretty-sounding phrase; and an exceptionally fine, exceptionally balanced plate of artisan cheeses.

We didn’t have dessert. We’re gays.

A note on the wines. They were thoughtfully chosen to complement the courses, and perfectly suited to midsummer dining. This is not a restaurant showcasing the prevalent taste for the native Willamette grape. The wines were Old World and mostly French, especially from Marsannay. This appellation, known mostly for its roses, produces no sought-after grand crus; mostly light, medium-bodied and agreeable wines. All the bottles, save for the sweet Bordeaux for dessert, were from the 2005 vintage. The Dom. Roy Marsannay blanc “Les Champs Perdrix,” a wine from a significant parcel (or lieu-dit) west of the Route de Grand Cru that runs along the village of Marsannay, presented a racy, Chablis-like counterpoint to the creamy lobster bisque. The Dom. Fougeray du Beauclair rose matched perfectly with the charcuterie plate. Even the foie gras bonbon contrasted nicely with the rose’s fruitiness. This same domain’s St Jacques blanc did not overwhelm the scallop; if anything, they joined together to sing a mellow low-key note. Best of all, the polished Fred Loimer Langenlois Terrassen Pinot Noir made an elegant Austrian match with the lamb loin-chop. For dessert, the guest was offered a Loupiac or Maury, depending on his preference for cheese or chocolate.

Beast probably would be a bust in Manhattan, where people wouldn’t be expected to seek out unusual culinary experiences in odd residential neighborhoods in unprepossessing little shacks. Nor would they line up outside before being seated, as we did, unless it were for a highly praised, hard-to-get off-off-Broadway show. And the economics of big-city dining would pose problems for a multi-course menu (no subsitutions) served in generous portions in a small room, two seatings per night. But in Portland it works, beautifully. This was practically the best meal we’d had all year.

We spent an afternoon wandering around Charleston in a sort of dazed
contentment: A strong spring gale raced through the tree-lined streets
like a child running ahead of its parent, and the lengthened hours of
light (now daylight savings time) gave us an opportunity to pause and
look at many of the town’s fine, quietly proud houses. Like all good New
Yorker, we speculated about how much property went for, and much Charleston
house could be bought with Manhattan co-op.

We left Charleston about 4 in the afternoon. We had plans for the evening — Dinner
and a sleepover at a top-rated hotel not too far off: Woodlands Resort and Inn,
in the town of Summerville.

Woodlands, built some two decades or so after the Gilded Age, is the former
winter home of a rich Pennsylvania railroad man, and it felt suitably deluxe and
relaxedly clubby. Our room was decorated with an eye to a certain type of detail:
comfortable, slightly more masculine than feminine, as if designed for a respected
middle-aged literary novelist with better than middling sales under his belt. And
the bed was enormous, rising up and up like the steps of an Aztec temple. Outside,
the property was leafy and for the most part deserted, which poetically speaking is
how a property should seem at sunset as the spring air chills. We walked to the
outdoor pool, and it all felt a bit like a small Southern Garden of the Finzi Continis.

But the chief draw to this place had been the hotel’s dining establishment, and we
arrived famished. There was a small bowl of M&Ms in the room, and Aldo wolfed them
down like Patty Duke swallowing pills in Valley of the Dolls. Meanwhile,
I reviewed the large wine list on-line to move the dinner along. The list was varied
with wines reasonably priced and not so. Within a half-hour, I settled on a couple of
interesting whites and reds.

The restaurant is presided over by a young chef named Tarver King, a name that
sounds like a character out of a Robert Penn Warren novel. He has a very impressive
resume that included a stint at the Inn at Little Washington. (We ate there many
years ago, by the way. It was scrumptious and only slightly more expensive than the
budget to build the Chicago World Exposition of 1893.) Chef Tarver’s food was of the
“dazzling” sort that’s probably necessary to get your name on the map outside a
big city. It was probably also unavoidable that the woman who waited on us, while
friendly and pleasurable, would smilingly, insistently ask us how we liked the food.
(The implied answer: Bowled over, toots!) We were given an amuse bouche on a
spoon that produced a flavor and texture approximating blueberry soda, which is not
really all that much of an amusement, but the food that came after was very, very
good—if a bit too thought out. An endive salad, for instance, was a painstaking
construction, its leaves carefully planked end to end almost like a galley ship. We
looked closely to see if tiny slaves were rowing it.

That, actually, was the only objection either of us had to the food: The composition
and colors weren’t very attractive, and the light of the day in pretty Charleston
had made us receptive to pretty food on a pretty plate. I don’t say it wasn’t
delicious – loved the foie gras — only that it didn’t seduce the eye.

With this we were drank a bottle of the 2004 Ostertag Pinot Blanc. Not among
my immediate choices, despite the prep work down in our room: the on-line wine
list was out of date. Why does destiny toy with us this way?

Ah, but now came Aldo’s entrée, scallops. One side of the plate was coated with
something that looked unappetizingly like the loden-green algae that typically
grows in the spring on a garden’s steps. Aldo almost ignored it, the stuff, until
he scraped a little onto a scallop and ate them together. The puree was deeply
satisfying: a robust flavor of herbs and garlic that was, in fact, a superb
complement to the scallops. It was like a pesto from the stratosphere.

And you know what it was made from? Aldo asked our server, and she of course
obligingly informed us: stinging nettles.

Isn’t there a Tanizaki story with that title? If there is, and anyone has read it, can
he please let us know if it’s wonderfully perverse and kinky?

The stinging nettle is a common plant with spiky little needles on the leaf,
used for centuries for medicinal purposes and soups and, I suspect, practical jokes
by peasants. This puree was one of its more sublimely civilized uses. The chef, when
he visited the dining room at the end of the evening, was disgustingly young – no,
that isn’t what I was going to say, not “disgustingly.” Audaciously young. Yes, let’s say
that. He also presented us with small glasses of a nonalcoholic stinging-nettle
beer he had been developing: It was a sweet, gingery tonic.

At any rate, it was nice to know that something as simple as a stinging
nettle could, with a little culinary ingenuity, be elevated into something that, for
the space of a meal and then in memory, created one additional moment of
happiness on a very good day.

There are two essential rules to ordering wine in a restaurant: 1. Never presume the waiter has brought the right bottle—read the label. 2. Always assume the waiter has made a mistake with the bottle—read the label.

A corollary is that, when the waiter has brought the wrong bottle, you can indulge in whatever fantasy of punishment and retribution you desire. Our waiter from Elizabeth on 37th , a very expensive Savannah restaurant that allowed us to indulge in possibly our worst high-end dining experience in some time, is currently being bricked up in an airless hole in the wall like that unfortunate gentleman in Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. Heed, reader, as I recount our tale.

We arrived at Elizabeth at 9 p.m. at the end of a brief visit to the city now so entwined in the public imagination with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. (Go out to Bonaventure Cemetery, as gently melancholy a scene of droopy Southern gothic as you could wish, and eavesdrop on the tour guides leading their groups to graves mentioned in the book.) We were led to a nice corner table in an old-fashioned Victorian-looking room that Aldo thought had a certain Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte ambiance—not a bad thing, in Aldo Land, not bad at all—and given a nice old-fashioned basket of biscuits.

Oh, you Southerners and your biscuits!

Our waiter, a brisk-speaking young man in thick black eyeframes, articulated a fairly detailed list of promising specials—notably a salad of lobster, crab and corn assembled on a shell of parmesan and resting on a tomato puree, or something. It was easy to get lost in the Escher-like intricacies of the recipe. I ordered it along with a bottle of the 1999 Clos des Perriers Savenniers. At restaurant prices, it was a wonderful bargain at $59.00. I nibbled contentedly on a biscuit, anticipating the wine. Aldo was rather quiet: He had been thoughtful since we had gone by Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home and been reminded of A Good Man Is Hard to Find: He had picked it up years ago under the mistaken thought that it was a “a saucy gay romp,” I believe was his phrase.

“This,” I said, “could be our best meal in Savannah.”

Which, by the way, it wouldn’t have been hard to be.

We had already had two perfectly competent, pleasant meals at a place called Bistro Savannah, but this town did not seem to be a culinary mecca. There were times, Aldo said as we drifted through the leafy gardens, we would have been better off as giraffes. Then we could have stretched up our necks to graze on the moss so lavishly draping the trees.

We each ordered the lobster-crab-on-parmesan to start, with my entrée being a red snapper on a cauliflower flan and Aldo choosing scallops accompanied by a finely diced ratatouille. The waiter seemed to place special emphasis on the miniature preciseness of the ratatouille.

First, though, came the wine. The waiter handed it to me without a word, expecting ready approval, I assumed. But because of my rigorous approach to tasting, and my unstinting adherence to the two rules, I first read the bottle’s label. And, because I am fully literate, I saw without struggle that what I was being offered was the 2003 Chateau des Epire—in other words, a completely different wine and vintage than I had ordered.

I pointed this out to the waiter. With an unchanging tone of authoritative cheer he told us, well, yes, but they hadn’t had the wine I had ordered in the restaurant’s cellar for some time (then why was it still printed in the list?), and so he had brought us one as “stylistically” close to the Clos des Perriers as possible. And that it couldn’t possibly cost more, anyway.

This was rather astounding.

More precisely, this was galling. And maybe even sneaky.

Did this whippersnapper—oh, I won’t hold back now—did this whippersnapper have any intention of telling us that he was going to let us drink the wrong wine? I repeat: This was astounding. Galling. Sneaky. And not what you expect from an establishment charging $30-plus for an entrée. I wouldn’t expect it from an establishment serving cold pizza.

I decided to let him go ahead and open it, even though it was a 2003 (not a great year for a Loire Chenin Blanc). At least the importer was the reputable and highly dependable Kermit Lynch. And the wine was—fine, I guess: full-bodied, apple-flavored, but lacking in the lean, clean minerality I wanted to go with our seafood.

Still the waiter made no apology, even though his slipup was a grave one. (And was he a rogue agent, or following management’s policy?) It was if I had gone to the library and asked for A Tale of Two Cities, and instead the librarian brought me back Les Miserables with the explanation that it was still a big novel about France. He left us to our appetizers.

I wish he had left them somewhere else. What his description had conjured as an impressive feat of presentation and flavors was in reality a mushy fish salad, a seafood glop, lying inert on a frail cheese taco. Both Aldo and I ate it, possibly hoping to find a miraculous bite of deliciousness by the end. We both concluded in despair that it was a disgusting dish.

And now the evening grew stranger.

I was wrong, you see, about the waiter’s cheerfulness. He had apparently felt the chill of my froideur, and now began to try to make amends for my disappointment. He did this by overcompensating madly (and maddeningly), inundating us with wine. He brought us a desperate parade of opened, nearly empty bottles—probably used for the by-the-glass crowd—and offered us tastings of each as “a consolation prize,” as he put it. A thin Oregon Gewurztraminer, a German Riesling Spatlese and Auslese. We were also given a sample of the evening’s soup and a complimentary salad. It felt like what they used to call regifting on Seinfeld. It felt obsequious and cheap. He did not offer us an apology, or even a full free glass. He did not offer to comp us the bottle of wine that we had not ordered. Instead he kept cluttering up our table coming with these “consolation prizes”—a phrase, by the way, that shifted the sense of error from him back to us. An overly extracted Oregon Pinot Noir, some New World Chardonnay. It wouldn’t stop. He hoped, I suppose, to watch us subside into a state of happy, forgiving inebriation.

Instead, we were jerked back to angry consciousness by the food: My snapper was a dead, dull thing resting on its flan like lichen on a stone. And Aldo’s scallops, while edible, gained nothing from that ratatouille. The rat in the Pixar cartoon would have laughed at this gummy pile of atom-sized vegetables.

We did not finish the entrees.

At least, by now, the waiter had called off the wine assault. In fact he finally disappeared, like a vapor on the summer air, leaving a female colleague to approach us about dessert . . . and the check. We rushed into the warm spring night and back to our hotel. But if we had happened to stumble on an actual garden, however good and/or evil, we would have uprooted the vegetables and eaten them raw. There’s something cleansing about a raw uprooted vegetable.

Aldo and I were staying with a friend in Chicago recently, roughly about the time that 2007 folded its arms across its chest and went off to heaven—late December, in other words—and decided to have dinner at the restaurant called Bin 36. The main draw for us was its corkscrew potential: It is a place that prides itself on its wine list and its skill in pairing those wines with food. Well, that sounded right up our bottle-lined alley. And so we went, my head as ever a sort of food-and-wine interpretation of the seasonal Nutcracker, with visions of vintages and viands dancing dancing with elegant merriment.

What we had in the end was a perfectly pleasant dinner with perfectly pleasant wines. But I felt I had paid for a commodity, then consumed it with a degree of satisfaction sufficient that I wouldn’t demand my money back—rather than achieving my true and constant goal of letting a few of the remaining hours of my life slip away in a fundamental pleasure. The restaurant was fairly upfront about the salesmanship of wine. There was a gift boutique in front and there small blackboard signs in the large dining area promoting wine classes and online merchandise. But no one seemed overly preoccupied with the ambiance. I mean the warm, intimate conviviality that blossoms when the right wine is served with good food. The room felt cold and large as a barn, and nothing in the course of our meal ever really distracted us from this atmosphere. You want the room to close in around you as your wine opens: It was the room that remained open.

The food was good. My appetitizer salad was prepared without distracting fanciness and of proportions that seemed Rabelaisain compared to the neat little stacks of green matter served in Manhattan. We all three of us started with a glass apiece of a gewurtraminer: the 2006 Fitz-Ritter Gewurztraminer Spatlese, an off-dry, very enjoyable wine with lots of fruit and acidity that made for a nice aperitif. Aldo would have rated it higher than I did, I think, but his tastes that night were to be suspected since he had just watched the DVD of Flashdance and kept singing Maniac. With our entrees, a duck breast and a hanger steak, we had a bottle of the 2004 Domaine St. Martin Marsannay Les Champs Salomon. Aldo thought the nose was, at any rate, wonderfully suggestive: He saw himself rolling around a large vat of dried rose petals. The imagery, he said, was borrowed from the dream sequence in American Beauty. But the wine was not ideal with the fowl or the meat: It had a certain thinness, and retreated like a small wave before the immense beach of all that hearty carnivorous fare.

Needless to say I blame only myself. I ordered the wine. I was the decider, and Aldo and our friend did not object to that: I sometimes think Aldo ought to put up more of a fight in these matters, actually. I watch the endless back-and-forth on the political primary trail and wish wine could be debated along with immigration. Then again, Aldo did cite American Beauty as part of his wine critique, and what does that tell you? At any rate, in the end we all agreed to forgive me and we hugged and cried over our coffee and resolved to go on in the future letting me be the decider anyway. But it can be a tough, challenging road. I don’t envy presidents one bit.

Aldo and I, in town for a few days, rent bikes and cycle around all afternoon: quicksilver weather, hot, cool, breezes from the ocean and the trees and the hills. Aldo is unhappy trying to figure out the gears, and the boy does not like going uphill, and then downhill he’s afraid of losing control of the handlebars. We pause in front of the Biltmore in Montecito, and the ocean view could be a Manet: Everyone moving happily in the wind and light, the red and yellow and purple flowers bursting from the green hedges. Then a late lunch – a salad – and a walk out to the end of the Santa Barbara pier.

There’s a clam shack there where Julia Child used to eat – clams, I assume, not shacks — but no commemorative bust or statue of that Sequoia of cuisine. The sun goes in and out of clouds of fog, looking more like a moon than a sun.

By 8:30 we have worked up stupendous appetites worthy of Miss Child herself.

Dinner is at Bouchon on Victoria Street. A restaurant famous for its wine list, focused so intensely on Santa Barbara County vineyards that other West Coast State wines are relegated to a separate sheet of paper, like footnotes to a grand academic thesis. The wait staff talk very knowledgeably about the local wines, and pleasantly too. Our waitress has a Sigourney Weaver angularity and red eyeglass frames that I find mesmerizing. I wonder if what I think are her glittering blue eyes are actually irises painted on the back of her lenses. This is before anything has been drunk, by the way.

I order sauteed mushrooms followed by duck with a rich succotash, and to drink? The 2003 Palmina Nebbiolo. This is a wine so big (over 15 percent) that past the two-third mark on the bottle Aldo comments that he feels as if his head were about to fall off and slide into the Pacific Ocean.

We were told that the wine would benefit from a few minutes opening up, but this proves debatable. The more it opens, the more it becomes jammy, the more every sip competes with every bite of food for attention – fights, really. It’s like a stuffed sofa that has to be shoved out of the way, over and over.

Wine should have flavor, and a nose, and body, and alcohol, and all that, but if it is to be paired successfully with food doesn’t it require a certain transparency? You want to be able to taste “through” the wine to get at that duck, or sauteed mushroom, or Poptart, if you’re that perverse.

So although this Palmina is a conscientious act of construction, balanced and powerful, well… one could say the same thing of the Eiffel Tower.

On the walk back to our hotel along State Street, just a few blocks from Boucheron, a young man with strong tattooed forearms happens to park his bicycle on the corner as we pass. He dips his hand into front pockets filled with white powder – chalk, not cocaine – and proceeds to rappel up the ornate terra-cotta front of a building. Two and a half stories, I’d say. We’re astounded: It’s like a Cirque du Soleil audition.