Neighborhood:
Sellwood-Moreland and Brooklyn Portland’s southernmost neighborhoods, Sellwood-Moreland and Brooklyn were born of transportation. (read more) Originally built to support the Southern Pacific Railroad, Brooklyn is quietly residential today. (The train yard bisecting the neighborhood at Southeast Holgate Boulevard is a reminder of its bustling past and home to an original 1905 steam locomotive.) And the Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood was once the far-flung town of Sellwood before the nation’s first interurban railway brought it under Portland’s sway in the 1890s. Sellwood-Moreland retains a quaint, small-town feel left over from this early isolation. The neighborhood certainly promotes itself as a destination for nostalgia junkies: Its main drag, Southeast 13th Avenue, is lined with antique stores. The weirdest is the Raven (7927 SE 13th Ave., 233-8075), specializing in military relics.
Aside from its thriving business district, Sellwood-Moreland’s biggest attractions are the nearby Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and Oaks Amusement Park (7805 SE Oaks Park Way, 233-5777, oakspark.com). The former is a swampy birdwatching paradise, the latter a moderately cheesy amusement park from which the screams of children wafts into the neighborhood above every summer. Presiding over both is the massive, elaborately muraled Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial mausoleum and funeral home (6705 SE 14th Ave., 236-4141, wilhelmportlandmemorial.com), the lone creepy feature of what is otherwise one of Portland’s most wholesome neighborhoods. —Adrian Chen
Featured in Restaurant Guide 2008
This little Italian house had a rocky start when it replaced Sellwood’s Assaggio in late 2007—until chef Gabriel Gabreski took over the kitchen in May. Now the restaurant’s warm, soothing dining room and Gabreski’s beautiful but unpretentious dishes make A Cena a dining destination thanks to his devotion to ripe ingredients. On recent visits, we mostly found downright pyrotechnic dishes, exploding with the flavors of fresh meats and seafood, as well as vegetables that tasted like they had been plucked out of some sunshiny bower of ripeness (or, in some cases, A Cena owner Chris Custer’s own garden). A preparation of raw fish created a delectable tension between lemon, capers and long threads of chile, and we had no complaints about the house-cured olives. A dish of housemade tortelloni featured heavy mascarpone and sweet summer squash basking in an acidic, colorful pool of tomato jam. And a tender Sweet Briar Farms pork chop with soft, decadent mascarpone polenta proved an irresistible sweet-and-savory match.
IDEAL MEAL: Feeling flush? Gabreski’s six-course tasting meal is a steal at $70 per person.
Tiffany Lee Brown
