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$$$ Expensive. Here's a restaurant with a specific demographic: large groups looking for a good time before or after a show. You couldn't ask for a better location than the Roosevelt Building, two blocks from a SmartPark and across the park from the Portland Center for Performing Arts. Playfully decorated (some say overdecorated) with a Pinocchio-nose-'n'-puppet theme, the ruddy room is ready for crowds, with seating for well over 100 customers and a full team of polo-shirted waiters. The lengthy menu is about what you'd expect from a joint serving New York-style Italian fare—lots of pasta in cream sauce, fried appetizers, four different steaks—with some entrails thrown in to show Portland foodies that chef Nelia Serapion, formerly of the Heathman, means business. It's all good (except for a flat-tasting red sauce on Nonna's ravioli), and a few dishes are as good as it gets. The Barolo-braised short ribs are remarkably flavorful, as is the tender-to-the-touch turkey osso buco. Be ready to dig deep, though—at around $2 per raviolo, that real estate doesn't come cheap. But a well-stocked and ready-to-nosh antipasti bar full of veggies, seafood and salumi can make for an inexpensive meal for those symphonygoers who need to fit a meal in between work and a show. (BW)
Signature dish: Pinocchio in Purgatory, a black-pepper-crusted sirloin strip in Chianti cream sauce.
Standouts: Towering platters of antipasti; nicely executed classic desserts.
Regrets: The dining room's theme looks like it was created from the combined efforts of Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí.
WWeek 2015