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It was flavored with white wine, saffron, orange, garlic, potatoes, and celery. Only serious kitchens would take the trouble to make such an elixir. Their Provencal Chowder was based on housemade fish stock.

It was topped with caramelized shallots, a scrumptious hallmark of the most authentic Thai cuisine. Plump with potatoes, leeks, peas, and yam, you paused between slurps to contemplate its ineffable depths. Even in Thailand you’ve rarely had curry scratch-made since curry pastes are available for purchase in most markets. The green curry paste in their green curry chowder (which you opted with squid) was, like everything else they serve, scratch-made. One door down, you were startled to discover that Buttercup Ice Creams & Chowders, which had the genial look of a salt-water taffy store, was actually a culinary mixed martial-arts master, kick-ass at multiple cuisines.

#Buttercup restaurant nehalem full

Your gentle wife, who’d never played pinball in her life, donned her Valkyrie helmet and went full berserker. You alternately played and sipped a brewski. The music of the machines is like the inside of your brain if only you could hear it: flippers flipping, bumpers popping, plungers springing, counters snapping, balls rolling, bouncing, boinging, electronic clicks, whoops, shrieks, gnomic words at strange intervals. Luridly aglow, their graphics are culled from the sediments of the human imagination: monsters, robots, dinosaurs, muscle-men, and women a la Jessica Rabbit. Within is an armada of pinball machines that might have been time-warped from a NYC 1960s Time’s Square arcade. The moment you saw it you wanted a slice.

Unlikely to be mistaken for a Christian Science Reading-Room, North Coast Pinball is the town’s rascal-pie. You were rattled by one whose salty tongue would have benefited from artisanal soap.

#Buttercup restaurant nehalem drivers

You only wish that all the drivers on Highway 101, bisecting Nehalem, were equally gentle. Judging from the shops selling herbal remedies, tea, incense, quirky ceramics, and artisanal soap, the town has drawn gentle souls.

Nehalem is a rosy-cheeked town that - flowers in bloom and ghosted in river mist - Monet would have loved painting. By The Ardent Gourmet, David & Susan Greenberg