Gino's
8057
SE 13th Ave., 233-4613
Open 4-10 pm Monday-Thursday, 4-11 pm Friday, noon-11 pm Saturday,
4-9 pm Sunday. Children welcome. Moderate.
Picks: Clams and mussels, Caesar salad, most ravioli dishes,
marinated pork chop, Grandma Jean's pasta
Nice touches: Homey atmosphere with a spectacular early-20th-century
bar. Many choice half-bottles of wine.
Gino's Restaurant and Bar, in its previous incarnation, was
known as the Leipzig Tavern. A sign proclaiming "We have herring"
used to grace the window. I once stopped by, visions dancing
in my head of the small, salty fish sold on the street and
consumed whole in cities near the Baltic and North seas. Alas,
the tavern's herring turned out to be only for bait.
Bait and switch, from proletarian Leipzig's to late capitalist
Gino's, with its pinot grigio and sun-dried-tomato ravioli?
Not quite. Gino's has preserved an Old World feel; no other
restaurant in town has so perfectly reconciled its robust
workingman's origins with the comradely atmosphere of a
European neighborhood hangout. You can be sure something's
really cooking when restaurateurs from Genoa and Paley's
Place head to Gino's on their night off.
Gino's amber-lit entrance room features comfortable wooden
booths and a long, turn-of-the-century polished wood bar.
The high-ceilinged dining area beyond is filled with funky
vintage posters, a wooden meat locker and an antique post
office letter box holding dozens of half-bottles of wine.
With these elements, Gino's manages at once to be pure Portland
and the kind of trattoria that serves as a gathering place
in every Italian town. True, the Italian spirit is somewhat
muted by a crowd whose lumberjack shirts match the checkered
tablecloths of the large room. No high rollers in sleek
Armani suits, no characters with names like Johnny Cigars
or Nicky the Vest, no fancy dishes. Still, it's a treasure.
Run by Marc and Debby Accuardi, Gino's is the kind of haven
you search out for unassuming but solid Italian fare. If
there's any regional tilt, it's toward Sicily and the south.
But generally the cuisine represents la cucina della
nonna, grandmother's cooking, the hearty and honest
fare that seems the result of ancestral memory, not recipes.
You can imagine women stirring an iron, brass or copper
pot hung from a chain in the fireplace. Everything at Gino's
is homemade, and the "gravy" (that's tomato sauce, paisano)
is fresh and bright. The kitchen is alert to seasonal spontaneity:
For a couple of nights recently, Gino's served a vivid dish
of jade-hued fava beans and prosciutto tossed with papperdelle;
when the best part of the bean's spring run ended, the dish
was gone.
The starters don't change much. You can depend on a splendid
batch of mixed shells--clams and mussels steamed in white
wine, butter, parsley and fish broth; the best treatment
adds a few dollops of bracing puttanesca. You confront this
dish in three stages: first the shellfish, then the heaps
of hot, freshly baked and crusty bread to mop up chunks
of tomatoes, and finally the remaining rich mussel soup.
I thought the clams lacked a bracing sea flavor, but the
terrific sauce redeemed any lapses. Gino's Caesar, a worthy
starter, gives even Zefiro's Platonic form of the salad
an honest run for its money; since Gino's is a casual, friendly
sort of place, its salad is laden with far more garlic than
downtown politesse dictates.
A number of items do change frequently, but the restaurant's
signature dish never disappears--Grandma Jean's pasta, something
like a pot-au-feu but more peasantlike. An exemplar
of slow cooking, this homey offering combines stewed beef,
pork ribs and tomatoes ladled generously over a mountain
of penne. It will bring to mind the kind of culinary attention
that marked a quieter, more leisurely time. This is an old-fashioned
concoction whose ingredients have blended harmoniously,
and it will leave you staggeringly contented and full.
Gino's serves a pork chop that a food-savvy double-bass
player I know consumes with metronomic regularity. He's
right: The meat is tenderly underdone, enlivened with just
a touch of raspberry vinegar for tartness. The chop is garnished
with crunchy Brussels sprouts, a rare showing of grilled
fennel (a shamefully underused vegetable) and a mound of
smooth mashed potatoes.
The ravioli is dependable and more than credible. For vegetarians
Gino's stuffs the extruded pasta with sun-dried tomatoes
and ricotta along with a purée of roasted vegetables;
pine nuts add the right amount of crunch. A scattering of
other pastas appears, like last month's "pesto" concocted
from asparagus. When summer hits, watch for local basil
and farmers market produce. It's also nice to see Dungeness
crab mated with spaghetti (remember that word?). On a recent
visit the crab meat was a tad cool but managed, for a while,
to pick up heat from the pasta.
There's a handful of decent desserts. To satisfy sweet
teeth, a chocolate peanut butter terrine will suffice, but
I prefer the delicious frangipane, a flaky pastry intensely
flavored with ground almonds and topped with a bit of pear
cream. It's light and rich at the same time.
At Gino's you will hardly find cutting-edge, refined or
even highly imaginative dishes. It's a place of family ordinariness
and foods any self-respecting Italian family once upon a
time would have produced night after night--with no need
for recipes. This is food you don't so much notice as take
for granted--the ultimate complement to good, casual, unaffected
conversation with friends. The kitchen is small, so you'll
need some patience with the service (which is uniformly
friendly), but if all the other ingredients for a simpatico
experience are in place, you'll hardly give the slowness
a thought.
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Willamette Week | originally
published June 16, 1999
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