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The LocoMotive 7 January 2007 4:16 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,eugene,people,restaurants,vegetarian , trackback

Ask me about my favorite restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, perhaps the entire world, and I just might get all nostalgic and tell you about The LocoMotive, which closed its doors on December 31, 2004. They’d been open nine years, and I was an ardent fan for their last year and a half of business. I originally wrote about The LocoMotive on Everything2.com only two days after our first visit there (Peter and I had dinner there with my parents on April 3, 2003, and it was absolutely wonderful) and much of what I have to write here is based on that original glowing writeup. Later meals there only confirmed my high opinion and adding too much more to my original rave review would first of all probably sound too much like exaggeration, too over-the-top, and secondly would only make me miss them more.

That said, eating at The LocoMotive Restaurant, just north of Eugene’s 5th Street Public Market, was a celebration and affirmation of good food — vegetarian if not vegan, organic if not locally grown whenever possible, internationally-inspired, creative, gourmet good food. Everything they served practically dripped with passionate love of good food (not to mention creativity, knowledge, and mad crazy cooking skill).

Our first visit there was a happy accident: on our way to a restaurant further up the block, my mother glanced at the menu posted at The LocoMotive’s entrance, and called us back to see it (I have to give credit where credit is due: she said it looked like Tracy food, and oh lady, was she ever right). Here’s a quick rundown of what we ate:

me: Four-onion tart with a sliced tomato and fresh basil salad on the side as my main course, mushroom-barley soup as my appetizer.

Mom: Roasted winter vegetables and chickpeas with mushroom-barley soup (she gave in and ordered an appetizer when she saw how good mine was)

Dad: Pasta alla vodka (i.e. with tomato-vodka-Asiago cheese sauce) and mixed baby greens with vinaigrette as an appetizer.

Peter: Pasta alla vodka and Caesar salad (vegetarian-style, without anchovies) as an appetizer.

My tart was light and fluffy and delicious, and the tomato and basil salad that accompanied it was a refreshing complement to its savory goodness. I can’t speak for anybody else’s food except to say that afterwards, we all argued over who’d gotten the best meal. For dessert, we ordered vanilla ice cream with butterscotch ripple, coconut-lime sorbet (one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, called Oregon Snow), a chocolate-cream roulade playfully named “La grand-mère du Ho-Ho” and an almond tart. Ostensibly these were mine, Mom’s, Dad’s, and Peter’s, respectively, but it devolved into a free-for-all pretty quickly. Yum. We had a carafe of the house Merlot with dinner, which was yummy, and espresso and cappucino with (ok, slightly after) dessert (there was no way all those delicious sweets could have lasted long enough for the coffee to make it to the table).

The LocoMotive Restaurant was located at 291 East 5th Street in Eugene, Oregon, just north of the 5th Street Public Market, just south of the railroad tracks, the noise from which gave the restaurant its name. The owners, Lee and Eitan Zucker, who call themselves Hubris, Inc. on their business card, opened their restaurant in Eugene, Oregon as a retirement project with one of their daughters, who dropped out after only a year. Youth and enthusiasm are still no match for old age and experience, and I have no words to describe my respect for the experience and skill expressed in The LocoMotive’s cookery, which reflects and expands upon recipes collected during Lee and Eitan’s years of traveling around the world. You can read their final menu on their website, as well as recipes for some of their food. Lee and Eitan also used to write “The Vegetarian Kitchen” food column for The Register-Guard, Eugene’s daily newspaper, but those articles are sadly no longer available online. The Zuckers hinted that their next retirement project might be a collection of recipes from The LocoMotive and their travels, and I almost immediately volunteered my recipe testing, proofreading, and general fangirl services for that cause, but as I haven’t heard back I hope they’re too busy enjoying retirement to work. Before The LocoMotive closed, Eitan was very generous about sharing recipes on request via email, which is how I learned the secrets of that amazing mushroom-barley soup.

The menu at the LocoMotive changed weekly, and I made a ritual of checking their website for new offerings every Monday, but their signature dish — portobello mushrooms in red wine sauce with garlic mashed potatoes — was always featured. Eitan joked that if they took it off the menu, there would be “a mini-revolution” among the restaurant’s regular customers. Although The LocoMotive was a little too pricey for us to patronize regularly, Peter and I made a point of eating there once a week after they announced their closing date in November 2004. To say it was money well-spent would be an understatement (I actually cried when I first found out that they were closing).

Finally, a little anecdote from Eitan about a wall hanging in the restaurant (which was decorated for the most part sparely, with wine bottles, photographs of good food and train-themed art). It’s a wool carpet/tapestry of white birds — storks, he told us, which migrate from Europe to southern Africa via Egypt. He bought the tapestry from a 9-year-old girl during a slow time at a market in Egypt. Her father was taking a nap, not really paying attention, but the little girl was really with it, eager to make a sale. You know how to test if a carpet is real wool, right? asked Eitan. Sure, I said — with fire. (Plastics, synthetics, they melt, shrivel up at the touch of a flame.) Right, he said, wool stops burning very quickly, only singes a little bit. So the little girl lit a match and showed Eitan that the rug he liked was real wool. He was impressed, but the fire got the father’s attention, and he started to come forward, only to be rebuffed by Eitan, who refused to let the man interfere. He finished the deal with his daughter, he said, “to show him a girl could sell.” The father probably forgot it two minutes later, he added somewhat ruefully, but he did the deal with the girl, and it makes a good story. I like to think that somewhere in Egypt, there’s a grown woman who’s still proud she made that sale. Anyway…

The LocoMotive Restaurant was classy without being stuffy, and their food was wonderful, magical, and just plain good. After I first ate there, I wrote: “I haven’t felt this inspired by a meal in a long, long time.” and it’s true. The LocoMotive played an important role in my decision to look for work cooking, and in turn find the best jobs I’ve ever had. For that, I can never thank them enough.