 About Vino Paradiso Vino Paradiso Wine Bar & Bistro is downtown Portland's only bonafide wine bar, located in the Pearl District. It was opened June of 2005, as a warm, inviting, hip, yet casual place for friends to hang out for fabulous food and a wine list that is at once easy to read and eclectic, with choices for the meek as well as the wild. Our goal is to shake the notion that one must know a lot about wine or have a lot of money to enjoy wine at a restaurant. Free from downtown, on the Streetcar, in "Fairless Square." Get off at the Glisan Stop. See the Google Map Below. CHEF PAUL LOSCH Chef Paul Losch received his formal training at Vong in London under Jean Georges Vongerichten, and the Culinary Institute of America in upstate New York, where he graduated with honors and amongst the youngest graduates the school had seen to that time. However, his first introduction to the culinary arts came at the age of 13, when he learned how to make pasta from scratch from a library book. I rolled the dough by hand and cut it with a Pam spray can lid, he remembers. In the 17 years since then, Losch has worked as a pastry chef, appetizer chef and executive chef, and proven himself to be creative and versatile in the kitchen. He has worked as a butcher at an artisan grocery in Brooklyn, as a poissonier at Rene Pujol's iconic French restaurant in the Theater District and ran the kitchen at Frederick's Downtown in the West Village before moving to Portland. Now he brings his varied breadth of experience to Vino Paradiso, where he was sous chef for a year before taking over as head chef in January of 2010. Losch's dinner menu at Vino Paradiso is modern American with a focus on Northern Mediterranean flavors, featuring flatbreads, salads, cheeses and at least two or three house-made pastas. Expanding upon solid past menus, Losch includes more sharable small plates, as well as entrees, seafood and fresh, local ingredients. Seafood, one of his passions and specialties is often prominent. The key to making the best-tasting food is to highlight the ingredients, he says. And being in the Northwest, you can get the best quality for basically everything you need within 100 miles of where you stand. Timothy Nishimoto was born in Florida and grew up in Long Beach, California, the second of three children. He credits his Japanese grandmother with teaching him that food and drink are so much more than nourishment. From her, even a plate of peanuts was well-presented, he recalls. Timothy graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1990 and moved to Portland, Oregon in1991, where he has held a variety of restaurant jobs ( Bima, Papa Haydn, Santa Fe ) both on the floor and in management. In 1999, he began work as a wine steward for what was then Nature's Northwest Fresh in Laurelhurst district. When cornered into naming a 'favorite' wine, Timothy will allow that it would probably be a Pinot Noir. Place he's most enjoyed drinking wine? In Paris, on the steps of Sacre Coeur, he says, without missing a beat, After the opera, Fall 2000.
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