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Eric Bechard's wild-game restaurant, Kingdom of Roosevelt, will be moving from its location on 2055 SE Cesar Chavez Ave. The restaurant's name harks to the terrain of the local Roosevelt Elk, and focuses heavily on wild game and locally foraged ingredients, served on the menu with poetic names such as "fallow deer heart tartare with his marrow" and "wood pigeon liver custard with elderflower and pickled huckleberries."
Still, the cuisine is far from the Portland wheelhouse of mid-priced comfort fare, and the restaurant has seemed to struggle to fill its small dining room at its current off-the-track location. Our reviewer mostly enjoyed the Kingdom in March, but recent visits have found the restaurant half-empty even on a weekend night.
Bechard was once chef at Alberta Street Oyster Bar, and at Thistle Restaurant in McMinnville, Oregon, which was the Oregonian's top restaurant in 2011. Bechard is perhaps best known, however for his arrest outside a strip bar for a fistfight with Cochon 555 cooking competition organizer Brady Lowe; the fight was about the allegedly non-local provenance of a prize-winning pig.
"We're not commenting on it, but we are moving," Bechard said by phone.
The deal is still pending. There's no timeframe set, but if the deal goes through the space will be taken over by Gina Helvie, a friend of Bechard who works at the Kingdom of Roosevelt, along with Robert Thomas of Swift Lounge and Andrew Hanson. They plan to open a breakfast and lunch nook called Trinket that will be "more accessible than what's happening now—something cool for people in the neighborhood."
WWeek 2015