Dining in Florence

and the great Clam Chowder quest

Our first evening in Florence, we went scouting in Old Town Florence for restaurants. The most promising-looking was the "International C-Food Market", where they tout their fresh-off-the-docks seafood. We think it's pretty gutsy of a restaurant to put a c-minus right in their name, and still expect patrons.

Roy had a salmon sandwich, and it was perfectly good. Shelly was less thrilled with her tuna salad ???

The restaurant was right on the dock of the river, with a nice view as the sun began to set.

Right across the street from the Firehouse restaurant is the Siuslaw River Bridge.

The next night, we had a little time to peruse restaurant reviews, and settled on the Firehouse restaurant, which (of course) advertised award-winning clam chowder, and also had a consistent stream of favorable reviews.

The walls were covered with fire station memorabilia — mostly t-shirts, but also posters, photos, hats, etc. Dinner was good.

It was here that it became clear that Shelly was on a quest for the perfect clam chowder. She had had a cup of it at the Our Daily Bread Restaurant in Vaneta (south of Junction City), which is a cute little restored church, and a nice place to eat, but their chowder would have been more aptly called bacon in paste. International C-Food Market's chowder was reminiscent of cream of mushroom soup. The clams were nice and tender, but the base was all wrong. The Firehouse chowder was the best so far, getting everything just about right: tender clams and potatoes, good base, not too salty.