PORTLAND — It’s Rose Festival time in Oregon’s largest city. And what better time to talk about the changes visitors may see on their next visit to the state’s urban center?

A giant fireworks display Friday at Tom McCall Waterfront Park will kick off the renowned festival, now in its 108th year. The long park that separates downtown Portland from the Willamette River will host the Rose Festival CityFair beginning that night and continuing for three straight weekends. Concerts, carnival rides, food and crafts stalls and beer garden will keep the McCall Park action lively well into the nights.

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Through June 15, Portland will see a variety of parades, dances, fun runs, classic car cruises, auto and boat races, suburban fairs, stage productions and photo exhibits. And the annual Rose Festival Art Show will run from June 3 all the way through July 11.

But if you’re targeting just one window of time, make it June 4 to 8. That’s Fleet Week on the Portland waterfront, when a variety of naval ships, including submarines, welcome the public aboard for tours. For flower lovers, it’s the time of the 126th annual Spring Rose Show, where new hybrid varieties will be displayed beside esteemed classics, June 5-6 on the ice rink at the Lloyd Center shopping mall.

The big day is Saturday, June 7. Kicking off with Chinese-style Dragon Boat Races in the morning, festivities continue with the coronation of the Rose Festival Queen at the Memorial Coliseum, followed by the 4.2-mile Grand Floral Parade through downtown Portland.

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More than half a million spectators annually line the route, making it Oregon’s largest single-day event and the second largest floral parade in the United States (after California’s Pasadena Rose Parade each New Year’s Day).

Modern lodging

If you haven’t made hotel reservations for those dates, it may already be too late. But for now or later, put the renamed Sentinel on your P-town lodging radar.

Known for more than 80 years as the Governor Hotel, the Sentinel was reincarnated in mid-March as a cornerstone of downtown’s revitalized West End neighborhood. The National Register of Historic Places property was built in 1909 as the Seward Hotel. During a major renovation in the early 1990s, the hotel expanded into the former 1923 Elks Lodge on Southwest 11th Avenue, and the noted McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant group installed Jake’s Grill beside the 10th Avenue lobby.

Two years ago, the Provenance Hotels group — which also owns the Lucia and deLuxe hotels in Portland, as well as hotels in Seattle, Tacoma and Nashville — bought the Governor. In partnership with developers, they invested $6 million and reopened as the Sentinel on March 14, after injecting a touch of whimsy in the makeover of 100 boutique-style guest rooms, 13 elegant meeting rooms and grand ballrooms.

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The old Governor would never have been called “chic,” but that adjective is appropriate to the Sentinel, which takes its name from robotic stone sculptures on the historic building’s roofline. From corridors to guest rooms, photographs and paintings honor some of the visionary thinkers and doers who have changed the modern world: people like John Lennon and Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The quaint lobby retains its original gilt plaster relief work beneath a towering ceiling. Adjoining it is Jackknife, which may be the coolest lobby lounge I’ve ever seen. Open just a month, but already a go-to destination for hipsters and intellectuals alike, Jackknife winds through several adjoining rooms with reclaimed wood decor — echoing the hotel’s historical character and giving patrons a place for group gatherings or intimate tete-a-tetes.

A mile and a half north, at the top end of the Pearl District, the $49.5 million Residence Inn by Marriott opened on April 11. Built from the ground up, the six-story, 233-room hotel is a welcome addition to the Pearl, the one-time warehouse district that has become a popular dining and shopping neighborhood adjacent to downtown.

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Designed by SERA Architects, the colorful hotel offers extended-stay rooms with kitchens and business offices, along with a cafe and restaurant, meeting and conference space. It is Oregon’s first hotel to be funded by the unique EB-5 immigrant investor program, created by the U.S. Congress in 1990. In exchange for equity investment in a job-creating business, the federal government grants green cards to the investor and his or her family. In the case of Portland’s new hotel, about 90 Chinese citizens invested $500,000 each.

Behind closed doors

In the food-and-beverage industry, Portland continues to be a national trend setter on many levels. A pioneer in the farm-to-table movement that emphasizes local produce, the city also has arguably more gourmet food carts than any other of its size, along with a plethora of craft distillers and brewing companies.

The latest trend has taken fine dining into the back room. At such acclaimed new restaurants as Roe and Langbaan, the chefs serve prix-fixe, reservation-only dinners in intimate rooms that may seat fewer than two dozen diners, and no more than three nights a week.

Roe opened in late 2012, and its chef-owner, Trent Pierce, already has garnered a James Beard Foundation nomination as best chef in the Pacific Northwest. Served only Thursday through Saturday nights, the four-course menu ($70 without wine pairings) offers three creative seafood courses and a choice of dessert. Seven-course chef’s choice menus ($105) are also available, and like the four-course menu, they are 100 percent seafood.

There’s no street sign to direct you into Roe. If you make your way through Block + Tackle, a casual and often boisterous seafood eatery on South East Division Street, you’ll be directed through curtains at the rear of that restaurant, as if you might be walking into an old-time speakeasy.

Langbaan, which means “back room” in Thai, is just that: It’s the back room of Paadee, a Thai restaurant on the corner of East Burnside Avenue in the city’s Laurelhurst neighborhood; and it’s concealed behind a discreet sliding bookshelf. Chef-owner Akkapong (Earl) Ninsom dishes up prix-fixe tasting menus ($40 and $60) of regional Thai specialties — it’s northeastern Thai in May, but it was southern Thai in April — on Thursday through Saturday nights.

Similarly inconspicuous is the Multnomah Whiskey Library, on Alder Street just up the block from the Sentinel hotel. Behind a frosted, monogrammed door bearing the number “1124,” wedged between “1122” and “1126,” visitors climb a flight of stairs to find a handsome, spacious, wood-paneled room with plush couches that surround a fireplace. But their vision is drawn to 1,500 bottles, most of them scotches and bourbons, stacked like library books on 12-foot-tall shelves. The food menu is best described as comfort food to drink whiskey with.

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More restaurants

Also in the West End is a new trio of highly visible restaurants, standing side-by-side on Washington Street at 12th Avenue. Lardo is a gourmet sandwich-and-beer joint; Grassa serves hand-crafted pastas and fine wines; Ración is more eclectic, offering tapas with Spanish and Japanese influences to accompany designer cocktails. Across the street, Cheryl’s on 12th boasts a healthy lunch menu and the best beignets this side of New Orleans.

Down the block on Stark Street, the Clyde Common restaurant at the Ace Hotel has parlayed its bar program’s reputation into a tiny around-the-corner cocktail lounge, Pepe Le Moko. Similarly, minimalist Laurelhurst eatery Navarre has added a next-door lounge, Angel Face, which bucks tradition in not having a designer cocktail list. In the Killingsworth district, chef Naomi Pomeroy’s highly acclaimed Beast has added Expatriate as a lounge with its own distinctive menu.

The food cart scene continues to grow. My favorite of many new choices is the Grilled Cheese Grill, which offers seating in an old school bus on Alberta Street. (There’s a double-decker bus in another location that I haven’t visited.) The menu isn’t all grilled cheese; you can also get burgers, breakfasts and a couple of desserts. “A couple of bearded dudes in a food cart will be your mom,” the online menu promises.

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Bollywood Theater, a success story on Alberta where a team of white Americans have recreated a casual Indian street cafe, has opened a spacious new restaurant on Southeast Division. My sensibilities, however, directed me across the street and down a couple of blocks to Ava Gene’s, recently honored as Portland Magazine’s best new restaurant of 2013.

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Executive chef Josh McFadden offers a simple but thoroughly Italian menu that ranges from meat-and-cheese plates to a range of salads, pastas and entre plates. My dinner featured two salads — one asparagus with duck egg, the other red wheat with diced salami, provolone and pistachios — and a pasta plate with lamb ragout, accompanied by a Sicilian red wine. And I was fortunate to pull up a bar stool next to restaurant designer Andee Hess, who described her use of suspended lighting to pull attention away from a high industrial ceiling.

Summer exhibits

Eating and drinking are the subjects of exhibits — current or soon-to-begin — at two of Portland’s popular museums.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is presently offering a photography exhibit that “invites you to explore what the food we eat says about how we live and who we are,” according to the museum website. “What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets” it is based upon a popular book by Faith d’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, and depicts 20 people from around the world — a camel herder from Egypt, for instance, and a sumo wrestler from Japan — and shows the food they eat in the course of a day, right down to serving size and caloric value.

Slated to begin on June 7, and continue through Sept. 20, the Oregon Historical Society Museum is presenting another photo exhibit: “Clink! A Taste of Oregon Wine.” Offered by the Contemporary Landscape Photographers of Oregon in collaboration with Linfield College’s Oregon Wine History Archive, this exhibit promises an in-depth look at “those individuals and institutions who propelled the Oregon wine industry onto the national and international stage.”

One of Portland’s most intriguing summer exhibits opened last Friday (May 9) at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. “Fashioning Cascadia: The Social Life of the Garment” will run through Oct. 11. Presented by Pendleton Woolen Mills, the exhibit studies both the craft of clothing design and the cultural identity that fashion embodies. It asks such questions as: What is being made here and why? And how does the fashion industry shape the regional identity of the Pacific Northwest?

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On May 10, the Portland Art Museum opened two exhibitions — interactive, stacked-newspaper sculptures by Montana artist Kate Hunt (through Aug. 31) and “Two-Way Street,” featuring the work of New York street photographers Garry Winogrand and Jonathan Brand, through Aug. 24. An exhibit called “Cobalt Blue,” focusing on the use of cobalt ores in Chinese and other medieval Asian porcelains, continues through July 27.

More in keeping with the Rose Festival theme will be “The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden” (June 14 to Sept. 21). This major exhibition will present more than 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs and drawings of the 17th to 20th centuries, by European and American artists who were inspired by the famed Paris garden.

Washington Park

In wooded Washington Park, for the child in all of us, the World Forestry Center’s Discovery Museum will offer “The Art of Dr. Seuss,” beginning Saturday and continuing through Aug. 17. Chronicling the life and career of author-artist Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), it will offer original art from such books as “The Cat in the Hat,” “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Lorax,” along with unique Seussian taxidermy.

A stone’s throw away, the Portland Children’s Museum opened its newest permanent exhibit, “Outdoor Adventure,” on April 22. More than 1.3 acres adjoining the museum have been transformed into an education-based, outdoor play space, featuring original works of art and focusing on natural elements that promote a sense of place in the Pacific Northwest. And it’s designed to be experienced come rain or come shine.

And then there’s the International Rose Test Garden, also in Washington Park. The oldest public garden of its kind in the United States, it has more than 10,000 plantings of 500 different varieties, with more developed each year. Established in 1917, the 4.5-acre garden also offers a stunning view across the Portland metropolis toward perennially snow-capped Mount Hood.

There’s no better time to visit than right now, and most of the flowers are coming into full bloom for the Portland Rose Festival. It’s no coincidence that Portland is known around the world as the “City of Roses.”

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com