I’ve seriously had this song stuck in my head all weekend, so I felt the need to spread the glorious disease that is the infectious love of it.

We first heard “Unbound”, by San Francisco-based duo, Cathedrals, via MS MR‘s most recent Track Addict compilation, which we wrote up in May (as of writing, you can still download that entire track listing, so, if you haven’t already, we strongly suggest you head over and do so). The band’s made up of Brodie Jenkins + Johnny Hwin and their sound can most succinctly be described as addictively smooth, vocal-forward, electronic-based pop.

Maybe that wasn’t succinct, but I’d say it’s pretty accurate. See what you think—give “Unbound” a listen and, if you like it, check out some of their more recent and similarly excellent songs on their SoundCloud page.

Fair warning though—a side of effect of getting this song stuck in your head is the potentiality of getting the chorus of the Lumineers’ “Hey Ho” stuck in your head (the first five notes of their respective hooks are the same).

Ending this week of odes to the Pacific northwest with an ode to the majestic mountains of that state and Washington.

I have no idea which one this is, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere over middle Oregon.

Have a great weekend, all.

If you follow us on any of the social media we put to use—the big three (for us) Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—we’d like to go ahead and make a public apology for last week. We’ll readily admit, we used and abused our social media outlets—especially the latter  photo-sharing service—posting shots of the massive, massive amounts of food we ate at all of the great, vegan-friendly establishments we found along the way as we made our way up the Pacific northwest coast. It’s a problem, one that we hope to address in a healthy, sustainable manner, with the help of our friends and family.

Seriously—one of our friends back in New York has even created a #TakeThatTroyAndKatie hashtag on Instagram in competitive retaliation of our somewhat embarrassedly non-stop stream of amazing west coast vegan food.

It’s an issue. We’re working on it.

…but in the meantime we thought we recap our week in food last week as we traveled with friends up from Portland, Oregon, making our way to the quiet little town of Chehalis, Washington just south of Olympia for our friend, Patricks’s wedding.

Clearly a hipster capital like Portland’s got you covered with the vegan thing, but we thought we’d share some other, less known finds along with our favorites in PDX. We’ve obviously got a lot more exploring to do, but here’s what we’ve got so far.

Click on the map below to skip down to each of the four sections.

Portland, OR

Though Portland shares a lot of the meat fetishization with its spiritual sister city and our former home, Brooklyn, it’s also largely populated by a densely packed, forward-thinking, young demographic, which is usually a green light for some good vegan hotspots. We didn’t even come close to scratching the surface of what this lovely city has to offer the kinder eaters out there (there’s evidently a great Pan-Asian place with a stellar vegan menu that’s housed on the top floor of a high-rise and looks like very clean spaceship…but that seemed less than baby friendly and we wanted to hang with our tiniest traveling companion, Winston), but here’s what we did get to:

Really superb, really enormous vegan pizzas downtown at Sizzle Pie, a very NYC-feeling joint offering freshly made full vegan pies and pre-made vegan slices that are regularly available (there were three out when we arrived). Below, our cilantro pesto, ‘not-feta’ cheese pizza with jalapeños, red onion, and roasted garlic; the Vegan Angel of Doom, with pineapple and shaved almonds; and the Green Reaper, a vegan breakfast pizza (genius!).

Next up, Deschutes Brewery, a locally minded craft brewery founded in 1988 in Bend, Oregon, with a gigantic brew pub in the Pear District. The brewery’s totally vegan-freindly in the beer department—as they state via Barnivore, “We stay away from any animal bi-products and all of our ingredients are natural. We primarily use water, hops, yeast & malted barley in our brews.” We were actually introduced to them at this past Vegan Beer Fest earlier this year. Besides the stellar beer, they’ve also got some nice vegan snacks on their menu, like the brown sugar beer roasted nuts and fire-roasted fava beans with black truffle salt, both pictured below. Beer-wise, I’d recommend any IPA lovers try the Inversion IPA (6.7% ABV), a piney American Northwest-style India pale ale, also pictured below.

Then, the first hotel we stayed at in Portland, the very awesome Kennedy School—an old 1915 elementary school and community center that was converted into a super-quirky hotel by the McMenamins empire—was walking distance to the highly recommended Vita Cafe, where we enjoyed breakfast two days in a row. The place has a nice, laid-back hippie vibe that reminded us of our favorite college diner, The Little Grill. We got Country Comfort (a gigantic plate of biscuits, gravy, spiced potatoes, tofu, and tempeh bacon); Huevos Rancheros (tofu, corn tortillas, spiced beans, salsa, guacamole, and vegan sour cream); and then corn cakes done two different ways—one day Thai-style, with sliced bananas, ginger, cilantro, and coconut syrup, one day Mexican-style with corn, roasted peppers, salsa, guar, and vegan sour cream. We were then promptly rolled back to the hotel after eating.

Lastly, we hit up ‘vegan row’ in Buckman—home to Food Fight! Vegan Grocery, cruelty-free clothing house Herbivore, and Sweetpea Baking Company, a 100% vegan bakery, where we enjoyed our first bagels since leaving New York (everything with plain spread for Katie; onion with chipotle spread for me), devoured a peanut butter + chocolate Charlie Brown, and  admired a vegan cinnamon roll from afar, all pictured below.

So, give us a few months to recover and burn all of that off and we’ll check out the rest of what Portland has to offer.

Astoria, OR

A couple hours north and west of Portland is the impossibly charming port town of Astoria, OR, which we wrote up in detail yesterday.

The town definitely has some nice, vegan-friendly coffee shops (like über-cute Street 14 Coffee) and likely more to offer vegans, but we immediately zeroed in on, yes, another brewery. What can I say? They like their coffee + beer up there. When in Rome….

Fort George Brewery is another pretty vegan-friendly (they do a milk stout and their Nut Red Ale evidently isn’t vegan) and they serve a really amazing house-made veggie burger that’s vegan if you get it on the focaccia (made at the bakery right next door), pictured below topped with a roasted Anaheim pepper and served with their veggie chili and superb Cavatica Stout (8.8% ABV). The chips and salsa are actually really nice too.

Again, we highly recommend visiting Astoria. Were it not for the lack of sun and supposedly constant rain, we’d have packed the car and dog and cat and been headed north already.

Long Beach, WA

Just over the Colombia River and up the shore from Astoria, Oregon stands Long Beach, Washington. We didn’t explore the town that much, but we did really enjoy the restaurant atop our hotel, Adrift, The Pickled Fish. They did a great job with ultra-local fare, serving some great salads, like the already vegan Kale Salad with fresh strawberries, shaved fennel, radishes, sunflowers, and a dijon-cider dressing and a Roasted Beet salad that’s great and vegan sans the cheese (both below).  One of their wood-fired pizzas, the mushroom, can be down without the dairy too and is absolutely loaded with local mushrooms, including some of the best chanterelles I’ve ever had (picture below, with a pizza-loving Winston). They also did a really great flour-less vegan chocolate cake  topped with cashew cheese when we were there served in a ‘lil Mason jar and it was totally ta die fah, as they say.

Centralia, WA

Finally, Centralia—a cute small town just north of the farm where our friends held their wedding totally surprised us with some of the best-tasting, most authentic Thai food any of us had had in a long time. We stopped in at aptly named Thai Dish for what we expected to be a quick, mediocre meal just before the wedding; unfortunately/fortunately, it was neither quick nor mediocre.

When we lunched there, the staff topped out at one very kind, very overworked server/chef who prepared each dish one at a time, but the authenticity and delectability of each dish was jaw-dropping. We’re seriously still talking about the food after getting back to LA. What’s more, they’re really vegan-freindly, asking if you want egg in dishes that normally come with and knowing not to include fish sauce or shrimp paste in dishes made vegan (that can get tricky sometimes with Thai food). Final tip besides giving yourself plenty of time for the meal—they’re not kidding when they say ‘spicy’, man. Something to keep in mind.

Below, a massive plate of their vegan pad thai.

We also heard that the tiny noodle shop, South Pacific Bistro, in nearby Chehalis and the little taqueria up the street from the park to the west are both good and vegan-friendly. So, if you ever find yourself in Chehalis….

Again, we’ve clearly got a ton more exploring to do in the Pacific northwest, but, after last week’s finds, we welcome the challenge.

Another new find for Katie, myself, and our dear Pacific northwest traveling companions, Cheryl, Justin, and tiny Winston last week was Astoria, Oregon, a seminal, now sleepy port town at the mouth of the Colombia River that boasts a rich history and thriving current-day downtown scene.

Astoria sits near the northern-most tip of Oregon, staring up at the piney southern shore of Washington state across a massively wide expanse of river, serving not only as its county’s seat but also as the site of the first permanent US settlement on the Pacific coast, settled in 1810.

Fast forward 204 or so years from the founding of Astoria, skipping over the preeminence of Portland + Seattle as northern Pacific ports, and you’ll find what we did—a charming, aggreably slow-paced water-side town with lovely terraced residential neighborhoods towering over what seems like a vibrant, inordinately large downtown. But unlike DUMBO or Red Hook back in Brooklyn, for instance, Astoria seems to be balancing actual current-day working port-based commerce with tourism and business that caters to the younger generations (read: craft breweries and quality coffee houses).

Plus Goonies was shot there, man.

We originally planned on stopping through the town on our way to what we assumed would be more exciting sites, but ended up staying the lion’s share of the day, enjoying locally made beer and excellent food, watching glass-blowers at work and the goings on at the port, talking to vendors as they set up for the farmers market, and meeting fellow visitors equally dumfounded by the charm the little town held over us.

I take some small comfort in the fact that I feel relatively few people read these pages regularly, otherwise I’d be slightly remiss in giving away what would otherwise be such a tightly held secret. So, instead, I’ll say to any of you that’ve read this far and have any desire to visit the Pacific northwest—make Astoria a must-see on your list.

But seriously, don’t move there and drive up the real estate market just incase we decide we can deal with the relative lack of sun/dryness long term.

Seriously.

Below, one of our new favorite breweries, Fort George; a somewhat crazily worded monument to Fort Astoria, the original settlement that became the town of Astoria; a panorama of the Washington shore across the river from Astoria (click on that to see it large-scale); two goats sheep about to make out, right in the middle of downtown; what seems to be the first ever JC Penny; blueberries growing in a community garden; yes, the Goonies house (MY BIKE MY BIKE); and nearby Cannon Beach, site of “They’ll be no more signing today or ever again!” (cue guy throwing way too much paper in the air).

Oh, those Goonies.

The cultural window between something being cool and something being a clichéd commodification of cool is very, very brief. And, of course, it’s all a matter of opinion.

In this age of über-quick, Internet-powered popular culture, the window’s only gotten smaller, to the point that trends hardly even matter any more in many senses and contexts. Remember how long cupcakes were the cool new culinary trend that no one could get enough of? The pie trend came after but couldn’t enjoy nearly as much time basking in the warm glow of near-universal, Hey-Ya-esque societal approval before being deemed too cool to be cool (ice cold?). The internet—admittedly a beacon of light in many ways for a world seeking to open up communication and, hopefully, through that opening, understanding—makes us all jaded bastards.

But it’s nice, every now and then, to open one’s self up to the merits of coolness, even when we all know full well we’re boarding a hipster boat that’s long been sinking. Who says we can’t strike up the band and enjoy the ride all the same? They did it on the Titanic!

Case in point, our recent stay at Ace Hotel Portland. Yes, it unabashedly hits all the primary hipster notes; yes, it’s leaning heavily on a bygone era for its visual cues; yes, it was directly parodied in a Portlandia sketch, during which ultra-hipster staff hands out complimentary turntables and antique typewriters to guests.

But I like old typewriters and turntables; I like fashionably dressed, friendly staff; I like a hotel that doesn’t lift its visual aesthetic from some faux-granite-covered version of ancient Greece or a cheaply made Victorian era England; I like harkening back to a time when things were built to last. If I just decided that I don’t like that stuff simply because the overall artisan hipster Gestalt is made fun of or just more pervasive than it used to be, wouldn’t that be disingenuous? Any trend or genre or…anything, really, can go over the top and some would argue that the whole creative culture has gone there and then some, but that doesn’t mean we like the things we like for bad reasons.

Also, I guarantee Fred Armisen + Carrie Brownstein have stayed at the Ace and I bet they totally liked it. We certainly did.

The Portland hotel was the second to open, after the inaugural Ace in Seattle, opened in old Salvation Army halfway house in 1999 by friends Alex Calderwood, Wade Weigel, and Doug Herrick. The Portland hotel—opened second in 2007 with the help of Jack Barron—now serves as headquarters for Ace, who has outposts in Palm Springs, New York, Panama, London, and LA, the latter of which opened at the start of this year.

I’d describe the overall aesthetic as WWII military-industrial-speakeasy. Which, correct, makes very little sense. But, if a post-humous idea board were made for the Ace Portland, it’d definitely include heavy wooden sliding doors and window guards; accents of industrial hardware; army blankets and army green upholstery; dog tags; colonial libraries with roller ladders; witty signage wrought in old world fanciful fonts; random nautical nods; and yes—turntables and typewriters.

Below, all that stuff.

We’re just coming off of a week-long trip in the Pacific northwest, capped off by the wedding of our good friend, Patrick, to the absolutely wonderful Amy, who’s we’ve only just met but are already huge fans of.

We count ourselves lucky to have such good, life-loving friends and to have had the opportunity to explore eastern Oregon + Washington, a part of the country also mostly new to us but of which we’re huge fans now.

We thought we’d share a few finds from last week on the journal in the next few days—awesome food eaten, beautiful sights seen, and some of the more impressive places that played the part of our temporary homes along the way. Stay tuned.

Below, us, posing with far-flung friends, shot by one of our oldest + dearest mutual friends, Cheryl.

Happy birthday, America.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone.

Balanced Rock is a non-profit based in California’s Yosemite National Park that addresses physical and mental well-being through inner reflection and connection with nature. They’ve been in operation since 1999, offering classes + workshops, short- and long-form hikes, camping retreats, and other activities building from yoga, meditation, and the creative arts, all among the majestic surroundings of one of the country’s most famously beautiful places.

For an organization with such a progressive mission, though, its roots are in the very basic effort to help a local community heal.

After 26-year-old outdoor instructor, Joie Armstrong, was tragically killed in 1999, fellow instructors, Heather Sullivan + Tana Leach, created Wild Women Workshops in an effort to bring the community together and take back the park. The modest beginnings of peak summits, yoga, and journaling proved so effective for friends of Armstrong and other locals touched by her violent death and the lost sense of security that came with it that the programs swiftly expanded in return.

From Balanced Rock’s Web site:

“Quickly recognizing that more people could benefit from life-changing empowerment opportunities in the outdoors, the backpacking programs were opened to the general public. In 2007, Balanced Rock co-founders Eliza Kerr and Heather Sullivan made the decision to expand programs to a wider audience, formalize the non-profit structure, and change the name of the organization to Balanced Rock. The name came from the last conversation Heather ever had with Joie, when Joie promised to teach Heather to balance rocks.”

The organization has continued to serve the local community and visitors from far and wide, even expanding to offer programs in Nepal, Tibet, India, Alaska, Point Reyes National Seashore, Red Rocks National Conservation Area, and Joshua Tree National Park.

After undergoing a complete design overhaul with their Web site, Balanced Rock approached our studio about following through to their print materials, including posters, seasonal class schedules, and their informational brochure (above).  We’re honored to work with such an earnestly service-centered mission that’s brought so many people more in touch with themselves and the world around them over the past 14 years.

You can read more about our work with Balanced Rock and see more photographs of it in our print portfolio. Read more about the organization and the classes they offer over at their beautiful new Web site, designed + developed by Michelle Martello at Minima Designs.

We caught wind of this song on KCRW the other day and haven’t been able to get it out of our heads since. The track, “Safe Ground”, is a slow-burning, subtly hook-filled song from a British-born Dutch artist who simply goes by BEA (pronounced ‘bee-uh’, we think).

And  that is about the extent of our knowledge on young BEA. But the song speaks for itself. Give it a listen below and stay tuned for more from this enigmatic talent. …we assume.

You can head over to BEA’s SoundCloud page to hear one more track from her, last fall’s “Breadwinner”—another beautifully lumbering number, this one accompanied by a pretty crazy photo.

When we first came out to LA for our trial run last summer, we left our cold brew coffee toddy back in Brooklyn along with most of our other non-essential possessions. But a couple of weeks into our stay and many dollars poorer from our dependency on the store-bought stuff, we realized that was a pretty big mistake.

For anyone not familiar with a cold brew toddy, it’s essentially a plastic tub with a hole in the bottom of it, which you cork up while the coffee’s steeping, then uncork and filter when it’s done—usually 12 hours later.

So what were two poor, caffeine-adicted, Brooklyn transplants to do?

Luckily, the Internet rushed to drowsy-eyed aid in the form of New York-based writer Rebecca Orchant of the Huffington Post. She penned an article serendipitously not that long before our trip west outlining a simple, cheap method for making your own cold brew at home, sans big plastic tub. All you need is coffee beans, a grinder, water, and a french press.

Feel free to head over to HuffPo to read the full piece. For the less motivated, we’ve pasted Orchant’s instructions below:

Grind your coffee beans to a medium grind (you’ll want to use a little less than double the amount of beans you’d use for hot coffee) and put them in your French press.

Fill the press with water (we use filtered in our house because I like the way it tastes), and give everything a stir to incorporate. It doesn’t matter whether this water is cold or room temperature, it just shouldn’t be hot.

Cover your French press with either foil or the top of the press (just don’t plunge it yet), and leave it on the counter overnight.

In the morning, plunge your press to strain your coffee.

Pour over ice.

Enjoy. Feel awesome. Sit in the sun.

Below, more gratuitous coffee shots.