Skip to main contentLet's deconstruct a hamburger.
On the most obvious level, it's a ground beef patty on a bun, often topped with tomato and lettuce, with a pile of French fries on the side. When I ordered a dessert called "hamburger and fries" ($8) at Rocket, chef Leather Storrs' new restaurant, a similar-looking platter landed on the table. However—and please excuse the swarm of quotation marks, but I can't figure out how to write this without them—the "bun" was soft meringue, the "patty," bittersweet chocolate cake, the "tomato," thinly sliced strawberry, the "lettuce," a crisp-fried basil leaf, and the "fries," matchsticks of jicama.
Your opinion on whether such a dessert—which is currently off the menu—is a pointless joke or a delightful re-imagining of an American diner classic may be an indicator of how much you enjoy Rocket. The opening of the restaurant—on the fourth floor of a new building at the corner of East Burnside Street and Northeast 11th Avenue, an instant landmark with its bright-red paint job—has been a long time coming, postponed for more than a year by construction delays.
While he waited, Storrs, the co-founder of Portland wine bar Noble Rot (WW's 2003 Restaurant of the Year), found himself doing more talking than cooking. In a communiqué published this spring on wweek.com and several local blogs, Storrs gave his new approach a name: "American Sly." He wrote that Rocket was "about establishing American food as a serious discipline" and aiming for a "brand of American cooking at once rooted and playful." Announcing your plan to change the world is dangerous stuff, especially when anybody who can chew can weigh in on whether you've hit the mark.
The building that houses Rocket is a model of environmentally sustainable design, though its nasty entrance, a concrete-block stairwell, makes a SmartPark look charming (not to mention safer). But once you ascend to the penthouse, Rocket's breezy southwest-facing terrace and view of downtown will knock you out. No surprise that the cocktail crowd has wholeheartedly adopted this place since its opening in early May. With showcase booths, bold art and a handsome '60s vibe, it's a swanky melding of lounge and restaurant. The room comes alive after dark, when reflections of white plastic chandeliers glow in the windows, mixing with city lights into undiscovered constellations. (If you're there at sunset, bring your sunglasses, because even indoors you may be squinting into Rocket's red glare. And be aware that the noise level on a busy night can rival Cape Canaveral at liftoff.)
Rocket's menu traces a self-consciously ironic trail through middlebrow American cooking of the last 50 years or so, dotted with terms like "broasted" pork shoulder, carrot "crispy critters" and cherry "pop-tarts." The bar menu, served until the 2 am closing, offers a "real" hamburger ($10) and two riffs on Fun Zone favorites: a lamb corndog ($7) and a tongue hotdog ($7), which were not big enough improvements over the originals to justify their existence. The best reason to order either is to use them as carriers for the restaurant's distinctive sweet-hot mustard, which Storrs should be selling by the jar.
Storrs is planting his own garden and raising chickens on the building's "green" roof, taking the farm-to-table gospel to literal new heights. Yet he's trying so hard to avoid the so-called clichés of local-seasonal, 45th-parallel cuisine that the menu feels disjointed, inspiring as much head-scratching as salivating. Among the starters, one of the oddest inspirations is a plate of crisp-crusted potato pierogies on a lemony ragú of catfish, topped with bright red sticks of fried beet. Edible, yes, but what, for God's sake, is the point? (The $16 price tag is equally mystifying.) Shrimp coated with a too-sweet cocktail sauce is served with a spoonful of mashed avocado and a tiny stack of potato chips ($13). A dowdy-sounding cottage cheese tart ($7) proved to be a sexy, rich cheese filling in a buttery crust, though the tomato jam topping veered too close to the bitterness of canned tomato paste. Gnocchi-style dumplings ($14), billed as crisp, were anything but, drowning in a puddle of overdressed marinated mushrooms.
When the kitchen puts the cute concepts on hold, the food can be very good, even allowing for the inevitable inconsistency of a new restaurant. A yin-yang starter paired a puddle of earthy brown mushroom purée centered with sautéed warm asparagus, and a puddle of bright green asparagus purée centered with a spoonful of warm, browned mushrooms ($13). On one visit it was the essence of Oregon on a plate, reminding me of Storrs' best moments at Noble Rot; on another, a heavy hand with salt obliterated it. A seasonal salad of crunchy fresh pea shoots ($12) topped with translucent pink and white polka-dots of radish and beet hid bright pink slices of candied rhubarb—a spring inspiration that was original without being weird, and so good I ordered it twice. The Rocket roof salad, a tiny handful of roof-grown herbs and greens on a couple of tablespoons of fava-bean puree, would have been even tastier if I could have gotten over the $9 tab. Other strengths are snazzy cocktails (priced $7-$10) and an adroitly chosen wine list, featuring some hard-to-get small-producer bottlings.
The lemon-pepper chicken ($18), a main course that winks at Mrs. Dash, arrives in a witty and unexpected presentation, sticking straight up from the plate like a caveman's cudgel of meat and bone. Our waiter described how the kitchen painstakingly blanches the lemon zest and peppercorns to keep the flavors from being too bitter or strong. But why fear the bright, true flavors of lemon and pepper? Cooked sous-vide (the vacuum-sealed, low-temperature cooking method that many chefs are experimenting with these days), the chicken was tender, but the overall result was dull.
While grilled leg of lamb ($20) in a generous pool of flavorful, Indian-inflected yogurt sauce was both tender and moist, many dishes were simply dry, from sautéed trout ($21) to a generous braised beef rib ($22) begging for more of the promised red wine jus. Each main comes with a choice of two seasonal side vegetables. Standouts so far include grilled broccoli rabe, glazed baby turnips, terrific onion rings and something called Pea x 3, sweet snap peas on a purée of English peas, topped with pea foam (a trendy technique, involving an immersion blender and soy lecithin, that's finally hit Portland). Rocket rolls ($6 for four small pinwheels of dough) have nothing on the buttery cush of a tube of Pillsbury Dinner Rolls. Ask for the baguette and butter instead, served gratis.
"I want to make people reconsider combinations they think they know, maybe provoke a little discomfort," wrote Storrs. He's a smart guy, and Rocket is certainly a work in progress, yet he seems to have forgotten—at least for the moment—that people eat with their palates first and their brains (a distant) second. In a restaurant where a modest meal for two with a glass of wine can easily top $100, there is nothing wrong with being playful, but the customers should be having as much fun as the kitchen.
WWeek 2015