The Willows Inn: The Main Event

I'll cut to the chase: this was one of the two or three best restaurant meals I have ever had in my life.

Which was all the more surprising, because when they handed out the menu an hour before dinner (there is only one seating, and most of the dinner guests are staying in the hotel, so they hand out the menus at happy hour), it looked disappointing. Five very plain courses.

But the chef, who trained at Copenhagen's Noma restaurant, seems to have picked up a taste for Nordic understatement.

We were served six amuses-bouche before even getting to the official first course. It went as follows:

• House-smoked salmon served in a box of still-smoking wood chips.
• Smoked black cod and homemade sauerkraut on a potato chip.
• Just-picked baby vegetables (turnip, radish, arugula) in "dirt" made from minced hazelnuts and dark beer, with an herb dip.
• Edible flowers on a piece of Melba toast.
• A local oyster topped with juice from the sauerkraut, sorrel and tapioca pearls.
• Sliced geoduck (a local type of clam) served with wild beach greens on a bed of squid ink, peas and wheat berries.

After that, it was time for the official menu:

• Butter clams (they look like quahogs, but are much sweeter and tenderer) with horseradish "snow" (water ice, it's called, where I grew up) and more beach greens. The horseradish overwhelmed the delicately flavored clams; this was the only wrong note in the meal.
  
• Spot prawns and cabbage in a mussel-flavored foam.
• Grilled local onions with rhubarb.
• King salmon with nasturtium leaves, turnips and kohlrabi (root vegetables in July? it really must be a lousy growing season) and a mustard-seed "caviar."
• Strawberries (still in season in July -- ditto) flavored with lavender and chamomile.

And finally, a flaxseed-caramel petit-four.

Wine by the glass is offered as a pairing; except for the dessert wine, it's all local (if you consider Oregon pinot noir, matched with the salmon, as local), and all terrific. Pairing of the night: a Sangiovese from Walla Walla, Wash., with the grilled onions. Who knew?

A friend asked me afterward if it was worth the two-hour flight from San Francisco. All I can say is that it was worth the six-hour flight from New York.