In Portland, a Golden Age of Dining and Drinking

THEY come but they don’t go.

In the way New York drew artists in the ’50s, this city at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers seems to exert a magnetic lure on talented chefs who come from almost anywhere else and decide to stay right here. About the hardest thing to find in Portland these days is a homegrown chef.

Portland may seem an unlikely place for such status, a city destined to play second string on the West Coast to San Francisco and Seattle. But in the last five years or so Portland has grown and evolved.

By ERIC ASIMOV

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/dining/26port.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin