Portland Restaurant Guide 2012

By Willamette Week

A guide to the best restaurants in Portland, Oregon, from award-winning newsweekly Willamette Week.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willamette Week
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301704149

Willamette Week

Willamette Week is Portland, Oregon's, award-winning alternative media outlet.

Book preview

Portland Restaurant Guide 2012

Willamette Week

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Willamette Week

----

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

----

Table of Contents

Introduction

Restaurant of the Year: Aviary

Runner-up: Smallwares

Listings:

A-C

D-F

G-I

J-L

M-O

P-R

S-U

V-Z

Contributors

Introduction: Wait, are you sure you want the burger?

Here we are at Portland’s hottest new restaurant, Allegory. It’s a busy Friday night, but somehow we landed a booth below the taxidermied cast of Bambi. The menu—individually typed on a vintage Smith Corona by our server—is huge and everything looks great. And you want the burger? Yes, it has house-cured bacon and cheese from a local creamery. The bun comes from the best bakery in town. But it’s a burger. Are you going to douse it with ketchup, too?

Portland does a wonderful job fancying up comfort food—the New York Post recently called our city a 12-year-old’s dream. Farm-to-table tuber salad, Kobe burgers topped with matsutake mushrooms, ice-cream sundaes flavored with lavender from the Gorge—we’ve ridden this shtick through glossy pages and on to international fame. And we do it better than anyone, which is why this guide includes at least 30 restaurants serving such fare. But the problem with inspiring a theme restaurant in Canada—yes, there is a place in Vancouver, B.C., called Portland Craft that sells beet-topped burgers, cheddar grits and braised pork belly—is that it means our act has become predictable. Imitable is forgettable. Mighty though our city may be at the moment, let’s not spend too much time resting our pork chop on a bed of bay laurels.

The crowd always wants to hear the hits—which is why so many of this town’s best restaurants offer bistro burgers—but failing to create something new charts a path from arenas to county fairs. Madonna reinvented herself; Martika didn’t.

Please, pause to marvel at how far Portland has come in a decade. Enjoy last year’s Restaurant of the Year, Podnah’s Pit, a prime-cut barbecue joint owned by a restaurateur who clawed his way up from a humble food cart to a chic space serving the city’s best comfort food. But let’s push things forward, too.

This year’s Restaurant of the Year, Aviary, and the runner-up, Smallwares, do just that. They have much in common, namely bold, Asia-influenced flavors in sampler-size portions from chefs trained in alpha cities. Both Aviary and Smallwares are totally out of step with Portland’s most Portlandy restaurants—and we like that. Both restaurants are selling new flavors and experiences instead of soft and familiar comforts. Give one or both a try. And, please, let us know what you think. We had a lively internal debate about which restaurant is better, and welcome your feedback on our decision.

If those menus don’t appeal to you, that’s fine. This city has 99 wonderful restaurants, which you’ll find included in this guide. All restaurants are listed alphabetically, with indexes also by cuisine and neighborhood. If you’re looking for more information on our city’s bars and carts or how to eat on the cheap, wait for those guides—each gets its very own. Hours and prices are accurate as of Oct. 5, 2012, but please consider double-checking before you drive across town. Wherever you end up, please consider ordering something other than the burger.

—Martin Cizmar

Restaurant of the Year: Aviary

By Ruth Brown

The July 6, 2011, issue of Willamette Week hit the streets with a glowing review of a new Northeast Alberta Street restaurant. The food was cerebral and playful. It surprises and delights and sets taste buds—and imaginations—aflutter.

Just one problem: The restaurant was a pile of ashes, having burned down after our press deadline.

Less than a year-and-a-half later—and only 10 months after it reopened for business—Aviary is our 2012 Restaurant of the Year. This guide went to print nearly three weeks before publication, so this time we’re keeping our fingers crossed and a fire extinguisher handy.

But Aviary’s impressive phoenixlike rise from the ashes is not the reason we love it. We love Aviary for the way it would take that phoenix, pan-fry it in soy sauce, and serve it over pureed bok choy, pickled lime and creme fraiche. And because it would be delicious.

Portland has built its newfound gastronomic fame on a very dependable brand of comforting, uncomplicated farm-to-table food. The accolades are absolutely warranted, and the restaurants and chefs that have put this city on the map—resulting in newspaper and magazine articles from across the country—deserve their due. Meanwhile, despite being overwhelmingly Anglo, the city has come a long way in embracing and seeking out authentic cuisines from places like Thailand, Vietnam and Mexico.

But if the city’s restaurant scene is to evolve, it’s time to push the conversation forward—to encourage restaurants that excite and innovate rather than just satisfy and replicate. There are a handful of places doing this in Portland, but we feel Aviary is turning out some of the most interesting and delicious dishes in the city, while delivering a product and price point that are accessible to a broad strata of eaters.

Aviary stands out from much of the city’s dining scene in more ways than one. A minimalist, white-walled, concrete-heavy space, it exists in stark contrast to neighboring Barista, where serious young men in waistcoats brew pour-over single-origin coffees in what looks like a 19th-century hunting den, or the bike co-op and paint-your-own-pottery studio across Alberta Street.

But it’s the food that really sets Aviary apart. Roughly built around the idea of pairing Asian flavors with European techniques, the restaurant’s signature dish is a wok of coconut rice mixed with Chinese sausage and crispy chips of pig ear. A salad mingles crackly pieces of fried chicken skin and cubes of watermelon with greens and a smear of baba ghanoush. A silky chilled zucchini soup is punctuated by green grapes and delicate orbs of almond milk that dissolve in the mouth. Strip steak, one of the more conservative items on the menu, is glazed with caramel and matched with kimchee and pureed duck fat potatoes.

It’s ambitious, creative, challenging and fun. It’s also not for everybody. We think it is exactly what Portland’s dining scene needs.

But convincing Portland of that hasn’t been easy for the restaurant’s three owners: chefs Sarah Pliner, Jasper Shen and Kat Whitehead.

People would come and look at our menu and just walk away, like, ‘I don’t know what any of that shit is, I’m not ordering it,’ Pliner says. We used to joke that we would put a menu in the window with five different burgers and three charcuterie plates and just have our real menu inside and see how many people got up and walked out.

It was an unlikely setup to begin with: For a start, it was three chefs, all cooking together. The trio has an impressive résumé of New York kitchens to their names—Aquavit, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Jean Georges, Tabla and Aldea, to name a few—but Shen and Whitehead had never even visited Portland before moving here to open Aviary in 2011, and Pliner—who had attended Reed College and cooked in local restaurants—had been away for a decade.

While you can get away with just a name and a decent Manhattan address in New York, they soon learned that Portlanders like their restaurants to come with a neat, one-line concept (Nuevo Alpine, Neopolitan wood-fired pizza, Korean tacos).

When we opened, everyone would ask, ‘What’s your food?’ Shen says. We have no idea what our food is. We don’t have a six-word bite that describes what our food is.

The early elevator pitch for Aviary became "Asian-influenced small