Skip to main contentWhen you serve 350 people, even on a slow night, it makes sense to stay with the basics. Manzana, the colossal new chow palace owned and run by the folks who bring you Newport Bay and Stanford's, is as formulaic as they come.
The garnish for roast chicken? Mashed potatoes. The garnish for grilled fish? Mashed potatoes. And for pork tenderloin, salmon, baby back ribs, filet mignon, prime rib? Mashed potatoes and mashed potatoes. A special contract with the Idaho agricultural board? Obsessive-compulsive behavior? Laziness? Or food by edict?
The restaurant's name, which means "apple" in Spanish, comes partly because it uses applewood in its ovens, but also because Manzana believes it's producing Southwest cooking. But aside from ranchero beans and a barbecue sauce on the ribs, it's as Southwest as a Grand Canyon-themed room in a Tokyo Love Hotel. The menu is as banal as a 10th-grader might invent, as predictable as a TV show with a canned soundtrack: pork tenderloin, steak, roast beef, roast chicken, salmon, vegetable platter (more mashed here). Some of the portions are so enormous (a single dessert could keep a gaggle of kids at a Chuck E. Cheese birthday bash happy for the entire day) it's as if management were showing the French how red-blooded Americans eat.
Manzana's scale is enormous--more appropriate for a Beaverton mall than for downtown Portland. It seems like a sports bar, with a ready-made decor from Anywhere, U.S.A. You can get lost navigating the vast room, with booths on the periphery raised up over the center well and rooms far behind the central bar that dominates the space. Manzana easily displays some of the most kitschy art of any restaurant in town: a series of soft-focus paintings--or are they photographs? The entire effect is to make the restaurant look like a Mobil Award TraveLodge.
But is it any good?
There's an OK appetizer of garlicky hummus ($5), with warm, soft pita bread that's plenty for two. And a relatively decent Caesar ($5), surprisingly vibrant with anchovies, though the dressing is a bit creamy for my taste. A tortilla soup ($4) is on the gluey side, the tortilla chips leaning against each other like a Pueblo Stonehenge; they soon fall into the soup. A large artichoke ($6) served at room temp has a nice char on the leaves, though the gloppy remoulade for dipping is of no aid whatsoever.
The dinner menu sports a number of burgers, sandwiches and tacos. But when you get down to the major items, you take your chances. The best items are beefy, such as a splendid filet mignon ($24), tender and flavorful. I asked for an alternative to the mashed potatoes and was informed there are French fries, something the menu gives no word about except with the lighter meals. They turned out to be excellent--thin, crisp, enticing and addictive. And the barbecue back ribs ($19), which would serve a team of lumberjacks, are beefy, though the honey-molasses sauce threatens to overpower the meat. The problem with piling these things on a mound of mashed potatoes is that your plate ends up a chaotic mess, with chunks of spuds drooling obscenely from the ribs. The half chicken ($8) is roasted to a turn, but unfortunately it lacks much taste: Your basic lowest-common-denominator generic bird, it looks pretty as a Norman Rockwell picture, but has almost no character.
The desserts are the gastronomical equivalents of SUVs. An apple crisp ($5) arrives in a 16-ounce goblet filled to the brim with baked Grannies, caramelized brown sugar, vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce, like the finale from the banquet in Satyricon in the guise of a gooey kids' delight. It is an almost-bottomless pit of pleasure. Less satisfying is a chocolate banana cream pie ($5), the chocolate so utterly tasteless that mountains of whipped cream can't even hide the insipidity.
The crowds pour into Manzana, so there's no gainsaying the restaurant's magnetic popularity. It's an easy place to be in, for nothing about it taxes your culinary brain--familiar as CNN, but driven by little else than assembly-line feeding. Somehow comfort food multiplied by the hundreds loses the ring of the authentically familial. It's not a bad place, or even a disappointing place; you feel from the moment you cross the threshold that nothing will excite or challenge one's expectations. Perhaps in these edgy times, the pedestrian will suffice. But unless you really enjoy mass-feed, there are many smaller places in town that are infinitely more inviting.
1211 NW Glisan St., 248-1690 Open 11 am-11 pm Monday- Thursday, 11 am-midnight Friday- Saturday, 11 am-10 pm Sunday. Credit cards accepted. Children rarely seen. Moderate- Expensive.
Filet mignon, French fries, ribs, apple crisp.
A big bar.
WWeek 2015