Skip to main contentIf you were a patron of Atwater's, the restaurant that occupied the 30th floor of Big Pink for most of the past two decades, you'll be shocked when you turn the corner from the long corridor into the refurbished dining room at Portland City Grill. It takes a moment to get your bearings, despite the fact that the stunning vistas of the city outside the wrap-around windows remain the same.
Part of the shock is that the view seems considerably diminished: With claustrophobically lowered ceilings, black curtains and a generally darkened atmosphere, you feel you've entered a bunker. As the sun goes down and city lights come on, though, the effect becomes more inviting and the room transforms into something that looks like a night club. But tables are crowded together (the dining room seats more than 200), and, strangely enough, you're likely to see large families with baby carriages and strollers. This place will be Prom Heaven. If Atwater's was hushed like a convention of Republican bank presidents, Portland City Grill is noisy like a suburban mall.
It's curious in a way, because the prices are not at all modest, as early notices seemed to imply. True, the expanded yet eternally jammed bar offers happy-hour small plates under $4 (see "Passing the Bar," page 58), but the dinner menu boasts eight steaks in the $26-to-$33 range, eight or nine other entrees over $20, and what must be Portland's priciest item: surf and turf for EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS.
Nevertheless, expectations cannot be stratospheric for a company that owns the Newport Bay restaurants and Stanford's: Portland City Grill offers a cuisine that can only be termed "haute corporate." It's a perfect match for the dreadful kitsch paintings of the city that rim the walls.
The food here generally looks beautiful, but it often appears far better than it tastes. The menu is huge (almost 30 entrees), and with well over 700 diners a night (I'm sure it hits 1,000 on weekends), it would be difficult to have anything like a highly personal vision. Still, the restaurant has tried hard to be up-to-date; its specialty is seafood, its tendency is Asian or Asian-Mediterranean fusion. But the problem is not just quantity over quality in the sheer number of dishes. Individual dishes, where multiple ingredients compete for attention and multiple items confuse tastes, result in muddy and indistinct flavors, and collapsed pileups on the plate. It is the opposite of Castagna, a benchmark kitchen that produces clean, elegant tastes and shows enormous respect for the distinctiveness of ingredients.
Appearance does matter, to be sure. I liked the black napkins and simple, elegant sushi plates. (Sushi may be the single best bet on the menu.) The blackened tuna appetizer ($10.95) is nicely rare, and includes several appealing touches like raw ginger wrapped around baby watercress and hot mustard swirls on the plate. But the pan-fried potstickers ($8.50) are pretty mundane. Mussels in a curried lemongrass broth ($8.95) needed a more bracing flavor, and the seafood risotto ($14.95) we ordered as a first course was mushy, though the shellfish was tasty enough. The Caesar salad ($4.95)--definitely not made for the table--is dreadful, lacking any anchovy bite, mostly a creamy mess worthy of a cafeteria.
A couple of the fish dishes are worthy. Swordfish ($19.95) is rubbed with cilantro oil and sake, glazed with a reduction of shiitakes, nicely undercooked, and surrounded by sweet Asian vegetables. Similarly intriguing is a serving of "moon fish" (so called because of its rounded, bloated shape), better known as opah ($18.95). It's a thick, fleshy fish, in appearance a bit like monkfish, in taste almost like veal.
But the pleasure ended there. Another Hawaiian fish called opakapaka ($21.95), sitting on a fried rice cake, is vastly oversalted and oversauced, robbing the delicate white fish of its subtle flavor. And the oven-roasted duck breast ($16.50) was so laced with salt that all I got was texture, which admittedly was tender and juicy.
One dessert cheered me a little after the meal: a pretty and moist apple-and-pear bread pudding ($5.25), intensely sweet with lots of jammy fruit and a pool of bourbon caramel sauce for a luscious taste. But it was largely downhill from there. A toasted coconut-and-rum cake ($3.95) yields not a hint of rum; though an attractive concoction, with ginger, pineapple, and a coulis of mango, it was utterly bland, as if all flavor had been leached out in the cooking. For regressors who can manage the 20-minute wait, there's an order of fresh-baked chocolate-and-white-chocolate crinkle cookies ($8.95), terribly sweet though admittedly seductive; but why does the restaurant serve Häagen-Dazs vanilla and chocolate instead of making its own ice creams?
There's no apple pie on the menu, but if there were, it would be like the promises of Portland City Grill itself: just pie in the sky.
111 SW 5th Ave. (U.S. Bancorp Tower), 30th floor 450-0030
Open 11 am- midnight Monday- Thursday, 11 am-1 am Friday, 4 pm-1 am Saturday, 4-10 pm Sunday. Credit cards accepted. Children welcome. $$-$$$ Moderate- expensive.
Sushi, blackened tuna, lemongrass-infused swordfish, apple- and- pear bread pudding.
The sparkling view.
Happy hour: 4:30-6:30 pm Monday- Saturday, 10 pm-close Monday- Thursday, 4 pm-close Sunday.
WWeek 2015