The restaurant-rich zone between Hawthorne and Burnside now has Peruvian street food and Vietnamese drinking food.
Farmhouse
La Leña
3354 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-432-8115, farmhousepdx.com. Lunch and dinner Wednesday-Monday. $$$.
1864 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-946-1157, lalenapdx.com. Lunch and dinner TuesdayFriday, dinner weekends. $$.
This new Thai spot comes from San Francisco, where $10 vegan salad rolls are “inexpensive” and Hat Yai-style fried chicken (page 37) isn’t a competitive category. The breakout star is a Flintstones-style beef short rib dressed with a punchy orange panang curry served over a bed of bright blue jasmine rice.
Peruvian fast-casual spot La Leña opened on Hawthorne this July with a focus on simple rustic foods. It’s worth a visit for beef-heart anticuchos, fried yucca and especially the chupe de camarones seafood chowder.
Tarboush 3257 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503235-3277, tarboushbistro. com. Lunch and dinner daily. $$.
Rue
PHOTO: Thomas Teal
1005 SE Ankeny St., 503-231-3748, ruepdx.com. Dinner Tuesday-Saturday. $$-$$$. With windows looking out on the Ankeny bicyclists, Rue is bathed in light and devoted to fresh garden brightness. In the best plates meat is an accent to vegetables and not vice versa. Get the $7 pork-pattied “Jersey burger” at happy hour.
If you want soundly solid Middle Eastern fare, you want to be inside this old house on Hawthorne. Tarboush stands out in a crowded field by doing almost everything right—puffy pitas fresh out of the oven, smooth hummus, crisp and salady tabouli, juicy kufta. The only thing to avoid is the dry chicken.
Cafe Castagna
Maruti
1758 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-231-9959, castagnarestaurant.com. Dinner TuesdaySunday. $-$$$.
1925 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-236-0714, maruti-restaurant.com. Dinner Wednesday-Monday. $$.
The casual cafe adjunct to one of the city’s top prix-fixe meals (see page 31), serves elegant fare like roasted halfchicken, panzanella and grilled pork chops. Their brioche-bun burger has been famous for a decade.
Vegan Indian spot Maruti is devoted to ayurveda, the ancient Indian health practice that believes every meal should be sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astringent, and pungent. Well, apparently we do too: The garbanzo-bean chole here is the best we’ve had in town.
Short Round 3962 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-384-2564, shortroundpdx.com. Lunch to late night daily. $$. Anyone remember Wafu? Trent Pierce brought pubby, clubby loosely Japanese drinking food to the whitebread Richmond neighborhood. Short Round finally brings back oil, heat and tunes at this new Vietnamese street food pub. Mark up the sushi-style menu to order fish jerky, pan-fried sticky rice cakes and lemongrass-heavy chicken banh mi then grab cocktails from their wide list.
Roost 1403 SE Belmont St., 971-544-7136, roostpdx.com. Dinner Tuesday-Sunday, brunch weekends. $$-$$$.
Roost offers perhaps Portland’s most slept-on brunch, with stunningly toothsome rye pancakes, near-perfect home fries and some of the finest steak and eggs in town, with precisely cooked bites doused in creamy mushroom sauce.
29. Olympia Provisions 1632 NW Thurman St. and 107 SE Washington St., 503-894-8136, olympiaprovisions.com. 11 am-10 pm daily, 9 am-10 pm Friday-Saturday. $-$$$.
You could be forgiven if the only thing you think of at Olympia Provisions is the meat. At Oregon’s first and best certified dry-cure salami house, Elias Cairo’s meat wizardry makes for a nonstop holiday celebration for your taste buds, earning fans all over the world: His sausages and pâtés are sold as far away as Japan.
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And if you appreciate charcuterie, you should always start with the French, Spanish or Italian board, which respectively brings that mighty salami into relief against rillettes, the city’s best house chorizo, or lovely mortadella and capicola. Pair that board with the wonderful cheese from top makers from both Europe and the States, whether a fruity raw cheese from Oregon’s Ancient Heritage washed in merlot wine, or a milky and nutty majorero from Spain. If Olympia excelled only at meat and cheese, that would be more than okay. But the menu at the Northwest Portland location goes far beyond that world-class baseline. Chef Eric Joppie’s root-vegetable soups make the winter bearable, and the summertime fruit gazpachos (plum was recently replaced by watermelon) are the stuff of which dreams are made. Meanwhile, the beer and wine menus are eccentric and wide-ranging, from a world-beating Bordelet perry to Belgian krieks and acidic, earthy Plavina wine from Croatia. It’s hard to believe a restaurant this good is hiding underneath the Fremont Bridge. N I G E L J A Q U I S S .
Pro Tip: Though the large meat entrées are good here, they aren’t the reason this is one of the best places in Portland to get a meal. Treat the restaurant as an elegant picnic. Those $19 charcuterie plates are the main event, garnished with that beautiful cheese ($15 for three, $25 for five), pickles, great vegetable plates and grilled sausages from andouille to luscious käsekrainer.
In our top 50: Castagna (page 31), Coquine (page 30), Poke Mon (page 39), Nostana (page 78), Nodoguro (page 47), Ken’s Artisan Pizza (page 70), Chicken and Guns (page 71) and Langbaan (page 28).
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Will amette Week