Portland’s original hipster neighborhood continues to expand and evolve with new-wave Korean ‘cue a few blocks from the city’s first slice.
Kim Jong Smokehouse
Gastro Mania
413 NW 21st Ave., 503-477-9364, kimjongsmokehouse.com. Lunch and dinner daily. $.
986 NW Pettygrove St., 503-689-3794, gastromaniapx.com. Lunch and early dinner Monday-Saturday. $.
Smokehouse Tavern’s barbecue and Kim Jong Grillin’s casual Korean merge at this fast-casual spot. Honey-gochujang spareribs and scorched-rice bibimbap bowls served with a rainbow of kimchi in steaming cast-iron pans, with smoky brisket or pulled pork.
For deli prices, Gastro Mania’s Alex Nenchev makes swooningly tender octopus salad, the city’s best gyros and a stunningly rich foie gras burger. In a tiny shoebox of a space, Gastro Mania puts restaurants with brigade service to shame.
Please Louise
PHOTO: Thomas Teal
1505 NW 21st Ave., 503946-1853, please-louise. com. Lunch and dinner MondayFriday, dinner weekends. $$. This bright little neighborhood spot uses its wood-fired Hobart oven to crank out thin, lowtang pies that deny any specific geographic lineage. The rest of the menu is simple (arugula salad, blistered padron peppers, charcuterie place) and wellexecuted.
Kung POW 500 NW 21st Ave., 503-208-2173, kungpowpdx.com. Lunch and dinner daily. $. Inside a large corner restaurant, the owners of Shandong have made a world of lemon chicken, Mongolian beef and searing Sichuan chicken, that’re all way better than you’d expect.
Bamboo Sushi 836 NW 23rd Ave., 971-229-1925, bamboosushi.com. Dinner daily. $$$. More than any other Bamboo location, this one’s the heart of its ‘hood: a neutral-toned palace of refined protein that splits its menu between sustainably caught sushi and extravagant meat plates like an XO-spiced flank steak.
Kell’s Irish 210 NW 21st Ave, kellsbrewpub.com. Lunch and dinner daily. $. At night it’s a meat market, but Kell’s is a sleeper pick for some of the best comfort lunch in the hood, with excellent fish and chips and shepherd’s pie.
Escape from New York Pizza 622 NW 23rd Ave., 503227-5423, efnypizza.net. Lunch and dinner daily. $. Old school owner Phil Geffner is a legend—the inventor, he says, of the Portland unisex bathroom and the first to sell pizza by the slice. When we stop in for a quick slice and some gossip, we look for something with the terrific house-made sausage.
Ringside Steakhouse 2165 W Burnside St., 503-223-1513, ringsidesteakhouse.com. Dinner nightly. $-$$$$. Ringside’s dry-aging room is one of the marvels of the city, backed up by an infinite wine room filled with bottles. This 73-year-old steakhouse is the city's most hallowed hall of highend meat, but while filet mignon can climb to $74, happy hour-steak bites are a mere $4.75.
In our top 50: St. Jack (page 38), Paley’s Place (page 48), and AtaUla (page 74).
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19. Ox 2225 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd., 503-284-3366, oxpdx.com. 5-10 pm Sunday-Thursday, 5-11 pm FridaySaturday. $$$$. [ M E AT A N D TAT E R S ] At a steakhouse, you expect the big chunk of meat to be the star of the show. At Greg and Gabrielle Quiñónez Denton’s Argentine-inspired Ox, steak is only a player in a meal whose gargantuan flavors present with admirable balance.
In the spacious, exposed-brick and wood-table dining room on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, almost everyone orders the chowder. The soup is a masterpiece: rich from milk, cream and the smoked marrow bone that sits atop a pile of fat clams, and heated gently with slivers of jalapeño. Cocktails are dark-liquor heavy and there’s a preponderance of fernet and other bitter liqueurs, thanks to the fact that Argentina is the fernet-sippingest country in the world. And on the asado Argentino cast-iron grill plate, an $82 feast made to feed two generously, the sausage and sweetbreads are the stars. The chorizo is airy and rounded with warm spice, and the sweetbreads are like umami gumdrops. The morcilla blood sausage is striking, potently savory and rich with cumin. The taters, even, are terrific. Each one is topped with aiolispiked horseradish, a development in mayo so brilliant it ought to be mandatory. And even if the flat-iron is a little blandly beefy, the skirt steak is set off with a masterful chimichurri. Though the ox at Ox feels like it takes a back seat to everything else, the Dentons remain two of the few chefs in Portland who can make a 1,200-pound cow dance. WA L K E R M A C M U R D O .
Pro tip: Ox doesn’t take reservations, and so even with the large dining room, expect a wait either at Ox’s own oysterand-cocktail bar, Whey—ingeniously created to soak up cocktail dollars from customers waiting for seats—or much more economically on the down-home back patio of Billy Ray’s Dive Bar across the street.
"Almost Everyone Orders the Chowder. The Soup is a Masterpiece." Will amette Week