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A group of beloved but sometimes forgotten middle-aged chefs, all James Beard medalists, might not be the sexy beasts they were a decade ago when they put Portland on the mighty-munchies map, but they're changing up menus every day or week, pitching in for charity, supporting local agriculture. Their food, savvy and attentiveness add up to Portland's best dining values. After you eat at their tables, the check won't induce cardiac arrest, even if the bottom line tops some of Portland's hip new spots. These folks—Greg Higgins, Philippe Boulot, Cory Schreiber, Caprial Pence and Vitaly Paley—own Portland's best restaurant track records.
Sure, you'll pay 30 bucks for Higgins' wild Chinook filet draped over creamy-smooth cheddar polenta with fresh-out-of-the-ground baby carrots, but you won't regret a cent you spent.
After 12 years of holding forth at Southwest Broadway and Jefferson Street, Higgins remains a top value in Portland. Add up service, food and ambience—or divide your dollars into ingredients—and you a get bodacious bang for your buck. Sit in the bar and your money goes further if you settle for a heavenly soup or bowl of Totten Inlet mussels, though don't hesitate to order a perfectly pitched pork dish off the main menu, as Morgan Freeman did repeatedly in August while filming the upcoming romantic drama The Feast of Love.
And, speaking of feasts, for all chef-owner Greg Higgins' devotion to the Pacific Northwest's pristine ingredients and local wines (a Leonetti cabernet is not cheap, but you can find it here), his cooking remains consistently sound and his ideas as fresh as his plates' baby mizuna. It's a rare bumble that his stable of aging white-tablecloth servers makes on a slammed night. Except at shoulder times like 5:30 pm or 11:30 am, every one of the 150 seats is booked, bar included.
Higgins is among a club of restaurateurs who do it right whether the style is bistro or fine-dining.
Four more restaurants that consistently do it right:
Chef Cory Schreiber runs a near-impeccable show at Northwest standby Wildwood, where you can dine on a squash-blossom risotto for $18 or a coal-roasted eggplant and lamb-sausage pizza for $13. At the Heathman Restaurant Philippe Boulot presents a $9 finale of apple desserts inspired by his Normandy homeland, as well as fastidiously prepared French-Northwest entrees. If you opt for bistro-style over white-tablecloth dining, a Kobe beef burger and cup of Belgium fries at Paley's Place will set you back $19. In Southeast Portland, Caprial's Bistro (headed up by namesake chef Caprial Pence) serves one of the best Asian-influenced Pacific Northwest lunch menus around. Try the sesame-encrusted ahi for $12. The prices aren't Subway's, but neither are the preparations.
—Angela Allen
Taste
Everyone has different ideas about which elements make a restaurant great. Some don't care if their steak is slightly overcooked, as long as the waiter makes them feel like royalty. Others dine out to absorb the ambience of a well-designed space. Then there are those who focus on taste. These individuals seek the alchemy of a chef who can thrill their palate without overwhelming it.
Chef Josh Blythe of Roux is one the best in Portland when it comes to managing the delicate balance of flavors and flair. Take his crayfish pie—a creamy crayfish sauce spilling from a crisp, toasty-tasting pie crust, a dish that manages to be comforting yet unconventional. The same symmetry can be found in all Blythe's cooking, from a fiery spice-crusted salmon paired with rich hollandaise to soothe the palate to a flatiron steak whose beefiness is underscored by a divine twice-baked potato with smoky tasso ham and a horseradish kick.
Though the menu is Creole-inspired, a majority of the ingredients are purchased from local growers like Dancing Roots Farm and Sauvie Island Organics. "My challenge [is to] think outside the box, and it's fun," Blythe says blithely (pardon the pun). "Initially, I'll think I can't use mussels because they don't have them in New Orleans...but we can, we've allowed ourselves that room. We just put mussels on the menu, but we chose ingredients that are typical of New Orleans...sausage, sherry, tomatoes and fresh cayenne to complement the mussels' flavor."
Out of the centuries-old traditions of classic Creole cooking and the Pacific Northwestern obsession with local ingredients, a flavor combination that is truly new is likely to be born at Roux on any given night. That's taste with a twist.
Other restaurants that make our tastebuds dance a tango:
Simpatica Catering Hall offers up savory meaty goodness, even at brunch. Just try to find biscuits and gravy with such a copious amount of housemade sausage anywhere else. Ken's Pizzeria might be new, but the smoky charred goodness of its wood-fired oven pizzas tastes like a century-old recipe for perfection. Autentica's cuisine, based on exotic dried chilies and family recipes, tastes so much like Mexico, it has us reaching for our Spanish phrase book. Alba Osteria wins hands down for olfactory ecstasy, a big part of our sense of taste. The aromas of truffle, grilled lamb, rosemary and Barolo smell so good, we'd pay to eat the air at this Piedmont-inspired favorite.
—Ivy Manning
Service
It's not uncommon to shell out shekel, franc and rupee for dynamite food in Portland and walk away feeling like you've been shanghaied, flambéed and cheated by abysmal service. To avoid an evening of haughty cuisine in favor of the haute, I'd suggest a trip to Peter Bro and Joe Holm's Savoy Tavern and Grill.
Combining a love for midcentury modernism, a smirking Wisconsinite stoicism, and a love for humble comfort foods (think hotdish—usually baked in CorningWare and served with a Waldorf salad or creamed corn maybe), the Savoy, in the hands of chef Alton Garcia, formerly of Navarre and Genoa, has elevated the Midwestern experience to an art form—at once welcoming, warm and satisfying on all levels.
But it's the service that really stands out here.
Under the benevolent leadership of Bro and Holm (who seem to be there day or night), Savoy offers direct and sincere service that artfully frames your experience of very well-crafted, simple fare (pan-fried trout, fried cheese curds, glazed carrots, rich meatballs, chicken croquettes and the crowning Midwestern echo: the chopped salad), food that could easily have been given the kitsch treatment. Instead, Friday-night fish-fry or Sunday-evening fried chicken is given the respect you'd accord a visit to an aunt, uncle or lumber scion.
Plainly put, in a town that nearly genuflects in the presence of great innovative, seasonal, fresh cuisine, it's a wonder more isn't made of service. Notions of "you get you what you pay for" aside, service, like "dressing up" can sometimes seem like a relativistic, undervalued commodity. At Savoy, there's no gettin' above remembering where you come from; instead, service and cuisine emanate from the same well of simplistic Americana. It's where you bring a date or your parents—and not to impress, but to make them feel taken care of and, dare I say, at home.
Four more who give great service:
From dinner to denouement, servers at Vindalho are Jenny-on-the-spot knowledgeable. Despite the hustle-and-andale-bustle, Taqueria Nueve servers took extra time to help my son through his "where's the burrito?" trauma. At Abou Karim, owner Gus Haddad manifests ever-present warmth and attentiveness. The old school servers at Genoa rattle off the restaurant's seven-course menu tableside by memory and still have enough brainspace left over to refill your water glass like clockwork and respectfully flirt with your grandmother.
—Tim DuRoche
Ambience
Aside from the actual food, the ambience of a restaurant—from Morton's to Pambiche—plays a huge part in shaping the experience a diner will have at the table. Eating out is, after all, an adventure for all five senses. Bad fluorescent lighting, wobbly banquettes and sticky tables detract from the restaurant's fare. Take, for example, Nostrana: Yes, it's in a strip mall. But Marc Accuardi, co-owner and designer, transformed a space that could have been Game Crazy into a rustic Italian farmhouse. "The reason I took the space is because of the vaulted ceilings. I could have gone into a more intimate and less open setting, but I liked the barnlike setting," he explains. "The wine rack evokes a chicken-coop feeling. The wood bin is inside." The bins absorb the sound, but in their high-end form, they also provide a high dose of charm. The atmosphere created by perfectly stacked piles of oak and cherry wood, the bar back with a library of red wine and the enormous iron chandelier all support the genuine authenticity of the wood-fired Piedmont cuisine served within.
Other scene stealers include:
Portland's first foray into high-end ambience, Bluehour is the epitome of drama: the long curtains, mirrored walls and precise modern accoutrements are a preview to chef Kenny Giambalvo's sophisticated, meticulously presented Italian food. On the ground floor of the Governor Hotel is the upscale steak-and-oyster hideout Jake's Grill, the more casual sibling of Jake's Famous Crawfish. It's old-school, film-noir Portland: Dark-wooded walls are decorated with stuffed elk heads, the ceiling is high and the restaurant is dark and loud. It's the type of place where upon entry, you just know the steak is gonna be huge—and good. At Farm Cafe local food and veggies are served up in a transformed Victorian—more gothic than the intended down-home quality the Farm Cafe is going for, but charmingly rustic all the same. The warm, autumnal colors combined with a stunning antique centerpiece seem to anchor Fife in an eternal harvest season—which is the point. As chef Marco Shaw will tell you, his restaurant is all about fresh, Oregon-grown food. Much like the plain white dish that will make the food the star, Alba Osteria and Enoteca's unadorned terra cotta walls are a testament to the delicious simplicity of the Italian cuisine.
—Laura Shinn
Innovation
Let's start with what innovative cooking is not. It's not rushing out to get CO2 cartridges that turn beets into foam, or shouting that your restaurant breaks rules only the enlightened know needed breaking, and everyone else, please stay home.
True innovation is not a goal but a result—of hard work, trust, playfulness and a fascination with ingredients, what they can do; what more they can do. While Portland restaurants make nearly a religion of local and seasonal, there are few that practice as devoutly as Park Kitchen.
"We get to play with all of that stuff, just to bring new seasonal combinations to the table," says David Padberg, whom Park Kitchen owner/chef Scott Dolich brought in 18 months ago as chef de cuisine. "The ideas we've had, even if we want to revisit them, we want to do something new to the same dish."
Padberg admits it can sometimes throw the diner. "That's one of the identity problems Park Kitchen often has, because people want to generalize what we do here; what kind of a restaurant are we?" he says. "Well, nobody knows. Hopefully, they've come because they trust you, and you're going to give them something that they didn't know they wanted."
Park Kitchen's workspace—all cooking is done on a six-burner stove, in an open kitchen the size of a walk-in closet—can be a conceptual hothouse. "Cross-pollinations happen all the time," Padberg says, mentioning that bartender Kevin Ludwig, fascinated by Padberg's use of Japanese yuzu, used it for his housemade tonic. And Tara Tully's desserts have lately incorporated some housemade lard, which was rendered from a 135-pound pig, which Padberg "broke down" with hacksaw, boning knives, a cleaver; he also dried some into pancetta, another method as ancient as cooking itself.
"I made this last summer," he says, turning over the air-dried meat. "Innovation doesn't necessarily come from inventing pancetta. But having pancetta available when you get inspired? That gives us a lot of options."
Four more creative mavens:
Siam Society does for Thai cuisine what the Impressionists did for art: makes us consider it in new ways, in an utterly splendid space that's equal parts Beaux Arts and Industrial Revolution. Le Pigeon, for helping us learn to love what's on the inside: beef cheeks, foie gras, pork belly and pig's head. For the bacon cornbread-and-maple ice-cream dessert alone, chef Gabriel Rucker deserves a key to the city How do you get diners to wait in line, in the rain, to sit in a shed? Be Andy Ricker and turn out Portland's most captivating and authentic northern Thai food at Pok Pok (3226 SE Division St, 232-1387), via only the will and a grill. Chef Chris Israel has gloriously reinvigorated the pan-Asian menu at Saucebox. Thankfully, he does not monkey with the cocktails, which are as dazzling and fun as ever.
—Nancy Rommelmann
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WWeek 2015