Skip to main contentIt's Last Thursday on Alberta, the scruffy, slightly anarchic response to the Pearl District's moneyed First Thursday art walk. Bars like The Know and Binks are doing land-office business selling cheap PBR, the fire-eaters and belly dancers perform in the street, and Portland's low-budget creative class mingles with the hipster entrepreneurs and Alberta's longtime Latino merchants. The street—a sprawling stretch of asphalt lined with still-dilapidated storefronts and plucky galleries and boutiques—is so crowded it's hard to move, much less get more than a jostled glance at the offerings of the artists and vendors squeezed along the sidewalk. While many would be loath to admit it, Last Thursday epitomizes the free market at work.
Vito DiLullo watches it all from the open kitchen of Ciao Vito, his upscale Italian joint at the corner of Northeast 22nd Avenue and Alberta Street, and smiles. He lives just a few blocks away, and he's watched this neighborhood's transformation take shape since 1996—back when the area was better known for crack houses than chic scenery. "I always wanted to work where I live," he says, and on a night like this, work is what he does. The same market forces driving the action outside are bringing in hungry patrons, and on some Last Thursdays they're still waiting for a table in his comfortably elegant, 18-month-old dining room at 10 pm. Three blocks west, the scene is the same at Lagniappe (see review, page 36), the beloved Cajun house that outgrew its Northeast Broadway slot and immigrated to Northeast Alberta this past summer. In the other direction, at Vita Cafe, the crowds are just as big, only they're gorging themselves on golden-hot chicken-fried steak made with tempeh and almond gravy instead of moist pulled-pork sandwiches.
But here's the odd thing: Ciao Vito, as well as many of the other newish restaurants on Alberta are busy most nights, art walk or no. Regulars from the surrounding neighborhood wait for tables elbow-to-elbow with suburbanites who haven't ventured into this part of town for years—if ever. BMWs vie for curb space with artfully reconstructed bicycles. More than 25 new businesses have opened on the street in the past two years—and half of them are restaurants.
The word is out: The food is good.
In a time in Portland's chow culture when scrappy collections of neighborhood restaurants—from Midwestern and Mexican eats in the Southeast Division/Clinton 'hood to the Italian cafes and old-timey bistros on North Mississippi Avenue—consistently outshine their gussied-up corporate-chophouse brethren, we decided this was the year to celebrate a whole damn Portland street. And the restaurant row that surprised WW the most this year was a place we already thought we had all figured out. A street that already had an identity: gritty Northeast Alberta.
In the course of the past year and a half, this indie art walk has taken a sharp left turn to become Northeast Portland's street of food dreams. From Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to 33rd Avenue, it's a 30-odd-block-long story of transition and excitement, a stretch of storied pavement that lures both foodies and everyday eaters equally. And that's what makes it our Restaurant Guide Street of the Year. With a foodscape that ranges from cheap carnitas burritos to pork sugo, vegan meatloaf to pad kee mao served on white china, diners roaming Northeast Alberta are certainly in good company (for more on our selection process, see page 6).
It wasn't supposed to happen this way, mind you. Sixty percent of the street's buildings, from MLK out to 33rd Avenue, were boarded up a little over a decade ago. Gangs prowled, guns popped, drugs changed hands—Alberta was a "bad" neighborhood. When the city's culture denizens "discovered" (or "gentrified" if you prefer) Alberta 10 years ago, boosters predicted the street's future as a frenetic, freewheeling Northeast gallery cluster. Today, many of those art galleries have come and gone. And, quite organically, the Alberta Arts District has become a place to eat as much as to ogle. Last Thursday has turned into Last Supper.
Credit for jumpstarting the feeding frenzy often goes to Kellie Courtney's upscale Southern-fried anomaly Bernie's Southern Bistro (see page 21), which opened in 1998. And to Jim Defeo, who opened the homespun Vita Cafe in 1999 because his patrons and employees at Paradox Cafe on Southeast Belmont Street were moving to Northeast Portland. Upon learning that New Seasons Market—the Starbucks of Portland's indie and foodie populations—was opening an outlet in the Concordia neighborhood, Defeo planted his restaurant on Alberta as a culinary anchor for the crowd of home buyers he knew would follow (now there's forethought for you). These days Defeo, who was vegan for 14 years and describes himself as "hardcore right down to my sneakers," packs a mixed crowd of veg-heads and carnivores into his plywood booths, all hungry for his sustainable ethos and his delectable, mostly meat-free comfort food.
Indeed, the real genius behind the street's rebirth belongs to property hawks who figured out what worked on this formerly industrial stretch of street. Roslyn Hill opened Roslyn's Coffee at 14th and Alberta in 1993 and has bought up several blocks' worth of property since then. And she makes an effort to anchor each block with a restaurant. "People eat in Portland before they buy art," she affirms. Ciao Vito's DiLullo agrees: "The neighborhood has a lot of people who are first-time home buyers in the last five years," says the Portland restaurant-scene vet, who served time as Caffe Mingo's head chef and cooked in kitchens from Higgins to Bluehour before mortgaging his house and begging family members to let him borrow the rest of the money to open Ciao Vito in April 2004. "Now those people have some liquid dollars to go out. Now they are able to eat more on the street." In fact, a majority of the Alberta's restaurant owners also live in the 'hood, from DiLullo and the seafood joint Halibut's bartender-turned-fish fry zealot David Mackay to Bella Faccia Pizzeria's Linda Zumoff and Jennifer Lyons.
Hill says she thinks Alberta is simply returning to its roots. She rambles off the names of long-gone barbecue joints: Boss's, Simons, the Love Train. The only bastions of that earlier renaissance are taquerias like La Bonita and La Sirenita, constantly vying for local tortilla supremacy.
The street's newest culinary incarnation reflects a friendly slew of good and bad, high and low, a mix that mirrors the carnival cast of the street itself: Fold, a diminutive crêpe stand, has won little local attention but garnered the praise of Gourmet magazine earlier this year. The 4-year-old Tin Shed (where Roslyn's once stood) manages a legendarily committed crowd with weekend waits well over an hour, all there in anticipation of creative scrambles and famous potato pancakes. Nearby, a light-filled beauty of a cafe known for crumpet-and-egg sandwiches called Helser's draws its own regulars. Come nightfall on the same block, a black lab-Rhodesian ridgeback mutt named Porter joins Beth Boston at her chill-out oenophile spot, Every Day Wine, to welcome sippers inside for moderately priced wines by the glass from Oregon and points beyond. The avenue's buzz has been strong enough to attract more ambitious projects recently, like Baraka Bar, a bamboo-bedecked tiki room that looks straight out of Land of the Lost and is devoted to Southern Indian and Balinese dishes crafted with local produce. It's owned by Scott Sorenson, whose father, Loyal Sorenson, once ran the late Alberta Street rock club Medicine Hat. A brewery just opened. An oyster bar is on its way.
And in the middle of all this tumult of culture-crossing cafes and diners lies Ciao Vito (see page 23), the restaurant that proved that, culinarily, Alberta Street was more than just a gritty, pretty picture.
Like the rest of the street, Ciao Vito has been dressed up. It's hard to believe it's the same space that once housed the beloved gay-owned greasy-spoon Chez What. Dark beadboard wainscoting gives the dining room a slightly old-fashioned feel, and heavy crushed-velvet corduroy drapes both define smaller alcoves and keep the volume down.
The kitchen occupies the common ground between a dining room full of Lake Oswego thrill seekers and a bar packed with neighbors searching for a pasta fix, and diners can check out the plates coming off the line as they walk by. There's usually a savory tart or baked dessert sitting out on the counter to tempt the appetite, and it works. The big farm table right in front is a great place for watching the action, both behind the grill and in the street. All in all Ciao Vito exudes a warm, comfortable vibe—in space and dishes.
"The menu," DiLullo says, "is farm-driven." Like most Portland chefs, he relies on the region's growing network of provenders to bring him whatever's good that week. But though Ciao Vito's been open only a year and a half, a few items are already etched on the menu.
The platter of fried razor clams is one of them. No other bivalve provides quite the same sweet and salty clammy essence, but it's easy to overcook them. Ciao Vito's Olympic Peninsula razors are properly chewy without the rubbery toughness of the oceanside clam-on-a-stick. Slowly simmered pork shoulder falls apart in the sugo, another menu perennial. And the regulars protest if there's no ragu alla Bolognese. This rich sauce, flavored with aromatic vegetables, pancetta, ground pork and ground beef, is one reason Bologna got the nickname "Il Grasso," the fat one.
And to drink? The wine list combines Italian vintages and obscure regional labels with well-known local favorites like Cameron and J. Christopher. And the flat-rate $17 mark-up for most bottles lets you drink well without spending a fortune.
"It was a big leap to come here, but I never had a doubt that it was a good location," shrugs DiLullo, who doesn't think of himself as a neighborhood pioneer. "The problem is, there are 33 blocks of Alberta. The street is longer than Mississippi, it's longer than Southeast Hawthorne. It was too dang long to fill in all at once. So it didn't seem like 'Alberta,' it seemed like six or seven different neighborhoods—until now."
There is indeed the sense here that the neighborhood is still, slowly, figuring out what it wants to be. Indie-vs.-yuppie clashes are still common: A woman passing Thai Noon one recent evening noticed a table full of pregnant women and made a snide comment to her artist friend about the "birthing party."
But, for better or worse, the gastronomical surge forward has just begun. Whispers of new restaurants blaze down the street almost daily. John Maribona, the owner of Pambiche (WW's co-Restaurant of the Year 2002) and a longtime Alberta 'hood resident, recently revealed plans to renovate an "old cowboy building" here for his next restaurant project. "We'll have a little piece of Havana on Alberta someday," he told WW.
Someday is coming soon. Northeast Alberta Street and its upscale benchmark Ciao Vito are products of the move back to neighborhood life, not really a new trend here in Portland, but one that has picked up an amazing amount of momentum in the past few years. Those arguing about gentrification, developers looking for a quick buck—or just change in general—may never agree on how to do it right. But one truth stands out: A healthy neighborhood sure makes for great restaurants.
Additional reporting by Angela Valdez and AP Kryza.
Eat the Street
The Tin Shed & Garden Cafe, 1438 NE Alberta St., 288-6966. Every Day Wine, 1520 NE Alberta St., 331-7119. Helser's, 1538 NE Alberta St., 281-1477. Baraka, 1824 NE Alberta St., 331-1824. Lagniappe, 1934 NE Alberta St., 249-7675. Ciao Vito, 2203 NE Alberta St., 282-5522. Halibut's, 2525 NE Alberta St., 808-9601. La Sirenita, 2817 NE Alberta St., 335-8283. La Bonita, 2839 NE Alberta St., 281-3662. Bernie's Southern Bistro, 2904 NE Alberta St., 282-9864. Fold Creperie, 2921 NE Alberta St., 750-1415. Bella Faccia Pizzeria, 2934 NE Alberta St., 282-0600. Vita Cafe, 3024 NE Alberta St., 335-8233.
Introduction | WW's Street of the Year | Sommeliers Mouth Off | Hood River Food Fare | Gimme Pizza | Restaurant Listings (Food Finder)
WWeek 2015