Leigh K. Lewis, ND
but i was never made to feel unwelcome or out of place when I came here to consult a naturopath. The decor is warm and inviting, unlike the sterile environments of most medical offices. I have one main complaint about the naturopathic care I recieved I'm ruined for "normal" doctors! My first consultation was an hour-and-a-half interview to document my entire physical and emotional health history. Compare this to the big-box hospital where the "doctor" (who quite likely is not even a doctor) can't even be bothered to look at your records to see if a given medicine has been prescribed in the past.
Portland State Univ
I don't know that I would call PSU a 4-star university, but I am having a 4-star experience. The student body is diverse not just in ethnicity but in age at many schools I would stick out like a sore thumb at age 33, but the students in my classes range from "traditional college age" recent high school grads to retired professionals.
Typhoon
My wife and I keep trying different Thai places on various people's recommendations, but we haven't found anything that comes close to the satisfaction we get from Typhoon. These other places aren't even that much cheaper.
Chez Jose' East
Warning: Chez Jose may be habit-forming. As long as you accept that most of the things on the menu are probably not actually available in Mexico, you can sit back and dig in and have a delightful meal. By the time we've torn through a couple bowls of chips with delicious fresh salsa, a combo platter is good for two dinners. Squash enchiladas with or without peanut sauce are a favorite, and even vegans can nosh away with the calabacitas, which is zucchini sauteed in jalapeo juice, which you then build into tacoss like fajitas.
Healthy Pets Northwest
We feed our dog Simply Natural dog food because, well, it's simply natural. Healthy Pets NW is the only place in Portland that we've found it. It's a small store but it has a variety of pet foods, toys, etc.
Mission Theater & Pub
This is a wonderful building and they offer some food choices here that they don't at every McMenamin's theater pub, but if you go I recommend you allow plenty of time to get a good seat. The theater was apparently designed for live (i.e. three-dimensional) entertainment, and there are many seats that have bad angles for watching a flat screen.
Beau Monde Auxiliary Classroom
I've had my hair cut at Beau Monde several times. It's very cheap but you tend to pay with time rather than money, since a relatively simple haircut can take a long time, between the tentativeness of the students and the time the instructors spend evaluating and making recommendations on their work. The atmosphere is a trip, and it's worth trusting them with your head at least once for the chance to take in the atmosphere and wonder how long it's been since some of the students have eaten anything.
Trident Booksellers & Cafe
It's been over a decade since I set foot in Trident, but I have the utmost faith that it would feel just as much like home if I went in tomorrow. My favorites were the vegetarian cashew chili and the sense that at any moment you could start a great conversation with the literate stranger at the next table.
Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat & Conference Center
If the garden of Eden had had flush toilets and an organic vegetarian buffet, it would have been Breitenbush. It's a two-hour drive from Portland, but offers the soul and body a much more distant escape from the quotidian quagmire. It's the perfect place to shed your stress along with your skivvies and enjoy a day of preslapsarian paradise. It's expensive to stay overnight, but day use is very affordable. The whole place is beautiful, but the Meadow Pool offers a truly magnificent view to behold as you soak your naked body and cleanse your psyche in the hot mineral water.
Safeway Stores
This Safeway has been greatly gentrified in the course of moving to the south side of Jefferson, but despite the expanded organic section, fresh sushi, and other upwardly mobile offerings, there's enough of the old "psycho Safeway" clientele to remind you that you're not in Hillsboro. The people in the pharmacy even tolerated my jokes about the Kafkaesque process one now has to go through to buy a box of gosh-darned pseudoephedrine.
