Skip to main contentLet's get this out of the way up front. Tabla is not an Indian restaurant. It's not a wine bar. It doesn't serve tapas.
The newest kid on the eastside 28th Avenue block--where every other eatery actually is a wine bar--bills itself as a "Mediterranean bistro." Tabla's menu fills the traditional structure of an Italian meal with contemporary, food-focused, less-is-more preparations. You pick and choose from the categorical equivalents of antipasti, primi, secondi and contorni, assembling a meal-in-course composed of big flavors in small portions.
The results range from really good to eye-popping.
Starters can be simple, like olives and tiny artichokes in olive oil ($5), or just seem simple. The first bite of pancetta-wrapped grilled apricots ($6) provides that great contrast of salty pork with sweet fruit, but then queso fresco, creamy and slightly molten, oozes out of hiding with a little explosion of mellow flavor.
Pay attention and you'll see a pattern emerge. Most offerings are made up of three or four ingredients, which might be arrayed separately around the plate, yet they're meant to be eaten together.
Sushi-grade yellowtail tuna, poached in extra-virgin olive oil, shares real estate with crispy flatbread, garlic aioli and pungent tapenade made from oil-cured black olives ($7). Each element has integrity, and you could eat them one at a time. But spread the aoili on the flatbread, add some tuna, a dollop of tapenade, and happiness takes on new meaning.
A hot, puffy blini ($7) exudes the scent of bay leaf mingled with earthy wild mushrooms. A spoonful of crème fraîche tempers the flavor while offering a tangy, unctuous mouth feel. If you've ordered a plate of Ken's baguette ($2), you'll have something handy to wipe up every last crumb of pancake, sliver of mushroom and drop of crème fraîche off the pretty little triangular plate.
The Tabla Caesar ($6) manages to avoid cliché and offer a refreshingly different version of this overworked favorite. The garlic, anchovy and egg, hard-boiled in this case, become aioli, which is spread on the plate instead of drowning the greens. They're romaine but tiny baby leaves, dusted with a subtle curry-and-fennel spice blend, then topped with shaved grana cheese and crushed croutons for background crunch.
The menu lists only a handful of pastas, including the egg pasta of northern Italy, which gets a shout-out from both tajarin (ta-ya-reen)--long, thin, fresh noodles tossed with truffle butter ($6) or sage butter ($5)--and agnolotti, tiny envelopes filled with an ephemeral potato fluff, topped with shredded Serrano ham and served in chicken broth ($5). In the south, dried semolina pasta rules, and Tabla's spaghetti with chili, garlic, olive oil, bread crumbs and the pressed, salted tuna roe called bottarga ($4) is what you'd find along the coast of Sicily, right down to the liberal use of hot red pepper.
There's a hint of southwestern France--that corner where it meets both Spain and sea--in the delicately thin slices of seared rare tuna arranged on a wafer of puff pastry with fennel and green beans in a sherry vinaigrette ($10). A smoky peperonata flavored with basil and black olives provides a nice counterpoint to sweet seared scallops ($10).
Tabla takes the traditional duck confit ($11) a step further by pan-searing the leg-and-thigh piece to a crackling finish, then pairing it with a slice of Port-poached orange that provides both acidity and sweet to balance the rich fowl. Squab ($12) gets a similar treatment with a Moroccan spice rub, but the tempering comes from fennel-seed mashed potatoes slightly sweetened with sherry. An egg baked with a little cream, some Parmesan, and a few pieces of asparagus, then topped with crispy puff pastry ($8), strikes another delicious blow for liberation from the hash-browns-and-bacon prison of breakfast.
With its more traditional dining room and full bar, Tabla feels a little more restaurantlike than its small-plate, wine-bar cousins down the street. Michael Rypkema, a former Serratto manager, keeps the front of the house running like a well-oiled machine. The service is friendly and unobtrusive, while subtle touches such as high-grade stemware and silver add a hint of formality. The view of the wide-open kitchen loosens things up.
Co-chefs Adam Berger and Matt Johnson first worked as a team at Serratto, and they pulled the food there up to par with Portland's best Italian ristoranti. At Tabla they're tweaking Italian dishes to deliver concentrated flavor.
The name Tabla comes from the Spanish word for board, plank or tablet. While Johnson and Berger like to think of their new restaurant as a blank slate, it's already a place where flavor is being writ large.
200 NE 28th Ave., 238-3777
4-10 pm Sunday, 5-11 pm Monday-Wednesday, 5 pm-1 am Thursday-Saturday.
Don't be lulled into thinking Tabla's inexpensive because the prices seem low. A full meal can consist of four to six small plates per person, so a couple can drop $100 pretty quickly if they drink wine, too.
Lemon-cream crêpes with lemon sorbétto and blueberry pots de crème make fine desserts, but chocolate lovers should go for the ménage à trois of truffles, even better with a shot of grappa.
WWeek 2015