Leah Nash for The New York Times
A bread course with three flavored sea salts at Roe.
In Portland, I've been totally transported by hand-pinched cappelletti in a slightly dingy cafe, by the almond cake in a shambolic bakery and by a steaming pita sandwich I ate once in a farmers' market while standing in the icy rain.
Of course, this isn't news. The food world has long been tipped off to Portland's food scene, in which delicious dining has been gleefully divorced from old-school notions of propriety, service and polish. Tattooed butcher-chefs man makeshift kitchens and food carts. Thai drinking food is as popular as artisanal charcuterie. On a trip there this March, I set out to see what influence all this attention has had on the city — to see if Portland dining has grown up.
"No one expected Portland to compete," said Karen Brooks, the food critic who recently published "The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland," a definitive guide to Portland's scrappy, endlessly inventive food culture. As she told me over charred octopus one night, the scene is in a gangly transition moment. "Restaurants have to deal with something that wasn't really a factor a few years ago," she said. "High expectations."
Indeed, on this trip, I found restaurants that are more self-consciously ambitious in scale, service style and hard-to-source ingredients (though not necessarily all three at once). And despite this maturation, the best of them still hold on to a scrap of that rules-be-damned style that made us all love Portland in the first place.
Ava Gene's
Amid Portland's D.I.Y. restaurants, where a ventilation system can double as décor, Ava Gene's is provocative precisely for its polish. As I wiggled into its long, double-sided banquette, the room fairly glimmered with soft, brass lamplight and shimmery teal tile. Even the servers, inclined toward beaded clothing and glossy hair, gleamed a bit, though with a certain punky slouch.
From the first coupe of prosecco to the last lingering glass of amaro, my dining companions and I felt a warm and winning showmanship that made the visit less a meal than an evening. The restaurant is the production of the Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson, who is using his coffee profits to help remake Division Street, a formerly gritty strip of southeast Portland, into a gourmand's wonderland of taverns, specialty markets, coffeehouses and Roman Candle, a bakery and pizzeria that opened this month.
Headed up by the chef Joshua McFadden, who comes to Portland by way of Brooklyn (where he was chef de cuisine at Franny's), the kitchen offers not-too-doctrinaire Italian fare. The prosciutto might be Parma, but winks to Portland's lively farmers' markets are evident in dishes like a deliciously playful ruffle of batter-fried sprouting broccoli and kale rapini, ready to be dunked in creamy tonnato sauce.
Pastas are surefire: we dug into paccheri — think Paul Bunyan-scale ziti — jacketed in a velvety lamb ragù, and earthy-delicate ravioli stuffed with beets and ricotta. Our shared secondi, wood-grilled lamb leg and sausage, was capable, but less distinctive. By then, however, we were well into the evening, drinking fresh country wines — like a slightly effervescent freisa from Piemonte — and thus untroubled. More than anything, we discovered, Ava Gene's is a place to linger, well cared for, and so we prolonged our evening with dessert, including a perfect gelato meditation on salted peanuts. We didn't clock out until just shy of midnight.
Ava Gene's, 3377 Southeast Division Street; (971) 229-0571; avagenes.com. A three-course meal for two, without drinks or tip, is about $120.
Roe
To get to Roe, you pass through a discreet door at the back of a larger restaurant. When I visited, that front restaurant was a brash izakaya (serving small plates of Japanese food) called Wafu, where a Miyazaki movie was projected on the wall of the lounge. In June, however, Wafu closed, and the space was transformed into a casual seafood restaurant called Block & Tackle. Now the décor runs more to brass and glass fishing floats. Through the transition, however, Roe hummed along uninterrupted. In a that quiet little back room, Trent Pierce, a third-generation seafood chef, turns out finely wrought seafood meals for just 30-odd people a night.
Unlike at Ava Gene's, the spectacle here isn't in the swirl of a busy room, but in an accumulation of fine-dining gestures, like a bread course served with three different flavored sea salts (during our visit: fennel pollen, beet and cocoa) or the flourish of a soup poured tableside into a waiting bowl. The high-touch service could seem a little fussy for Portland, but it fits Mr. Pierce's refined modernist sea fare. His dishes burst with flavor, right from the opening amuse-bouche: a shotglass of dashi, with a few enoki mushrooms floating like ghosts in the deeply savory broth.
Some dishes were thrillingly flashy, like raw marlin dressed with a smoky take on nuoc cham, the Vietnamese dipping sauce, and an emerald emulsion of Southeast Asian herbs. Others had a softer appeal: razor clams, a seasonal Northwest treasure, are usually sautéed fast and greasy in a cape of bread crumbs, but at Roe they were poached to tenderness and served in a limpid bacon bouillon swirling with a confetti of tiny celery, carrots and bacon dice. Sometimes seafood meals can lack a lusty finale, but at Roe there was marvelous butterfish seared like a steak and dusted with porcini powder.
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Choice Tables: In Portland, Ore., Dining Gets Fine Without Losing Flair
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