Park Kitchen, February 8th 2008

We finally had occasion to stop into Portland's Park Kitchen restaurant the other night. My husband and I were out at First Thursday gallery openings in the Pearl district and decided it was time for a refreshing beverage and some refueling. Having never been to Park Kitchen yet having also heard lots about it, this seemed like the right time to stop in for a nibble.

The restaurant is surprisingly small. The bar area is narrow and was particularly tight given the number of people packed into the somewhat severe-looking space that night. There are a few tables in the bar area, some bar seating and what appeared to be no more than 10 or so fairly small tables in the back of the restaurant near the open kitchen. While I appreciate that rents in the Pearl are high and trying to run a high quality restaurant is more manageable with fewer tables, I still think it’s nice for people to feel they are having a dining experience and not suffering through a communal performance when they eating at a better restaurant. We were lucky to snag seats at a bar packed tight with people both at the bar and in the narrow aisleway leading to the dining room. This narrow, crowded space gave me the slight sense of unease the entire meal. There’s what looks like a really nice-sized private dining room or banquet facility right across the hall from the bar area. Why not change the configuration of the rooms overall and use that space to open up the facility generally?

We decided on wine and appetizers given that it was later in the evening and we didn’t want a big meal. We both went for wines by the glass from what was a fairly short, but interesting, list of local and foreign wines. Our seat at the bar was directly across from a rack of about 8-10 amazing bottles of French wine standing upright along the wall. This rack immediately gives one the impression these wines just might be available by the glass and are waiting for a pour. Unfortunately they are not available by the glass and we were confined to a far less impressive list of wines that were still quite good all the same. It’s too bad more high-end restaurants aren’t able to sell premium wines by the glass but given the way most restaurants mark up wine, they’ve really only limited this potential for themselves.

We ordered Ken’s bread and housemade crackers as our getting started dish while we perused the menu. Unfortunately, several minutes later a staff person arrived and told us they were out of bread but would bring the crackers. He said they just didn’t buy enough bread for how busy they were that night. We ended up having a few minutes of chatter along the lines of, "How can a restaurant run out of bread before 9 PM given that it's First Thursday, a day you’re likely to be busy?" Leftover bread is part of the reason most restaurants make croutons, bread pudding or stuffing. In any event, the housemade crackers were crispy, airy, and light with just the right amount of coarse salt on top.

Given the lack of bread we decided to order three appetizers and chose the salt cod fritters with housemade malt vinegar, chickpea fries with squash ketchup, and a flank steak salad with bleu cheese and pickled onions.

The chickpea fries came first and remarkably, really were a lot like fries. I have to hand it to the chef for making a fry from chickpeas. It was not chickpea “fries” like some precious little version of chickpeas that were not remotely fry-like. No, these were beautifully fried, dark brown batons the size of good like fish-n-chip fries made from chickpeas. The presentation: a tall glass spilling over with beautiful fry goodness and a side of squash ketchup. The squash ketchup was a slightly spicy, almost curried puree of winter squash with the consistency and slight tang of ketchup yet rich with roasted squash flavors and curry notes in the finish. The fries, paired with the squash ketchup and my tempranillo were superb. The fries came before the other dishes and whether planned or not, it was a great decision by the kitchen. Digging into crispy, salty fries and the silky squash ketchup before being distracted by the other dishes proved to be very enjoyable.

The salt cod fritters came next and they were exactly how a salt cod dish should be but so seldom is. The four golf-ball sized golden brown fritters actually tasted like salty, briny fish. So many times when you order a salt cod dish in America, it tastes like mashed potatoes with a slightly more savory note. Not here. These were pretty strong on the cod flavor which the malt vinegar tempered nicely albeit with a little more bite than you might be used to in commercial malt vinegar. Go lightly on the vinegar at first.

The flank steak salad was one of the best salads I’ve had in years. The thin slices of flank steak were no more than medium rare, so tender you could cut them with a fork, and layered throughout the salad. The nuggets of bleu cheese were assertive like nice Maytag, and tossed with subtly pickled julienne strips of onion and wintery greens in a lightly creamy dressing. The overall effect highlighted the flavors of the steak, cheese, and pickled onions superbly and unlike many restaurants the salad was not a pile of lettuce slightly garnished with steak, cheese, and onions.

All the dishes (the absence of bread an exception) really hit on all cylinders. Service at the bar was friendly and fairly brisk for the most part. Unfortunately, not knowing what we wanted to drink as soon as we sat down relegated us to waiting quite some time before anyone could get back to us to check again. Shortly after we arrived, at about 9 PM, a man approached the standing-room only bar and almost full restaurant and was told the kitchen was closed. To us it seemed very early to be closing the kitchen given how busy the restaurant was at the time. I have to hand it to the server though; he was very helpful and went out of his way to make some solid recommendations of restaurants within a few blocks that keep late kitchen hours.

Overall, I’m looking forward to exploring some of the other dishes Park Kitchen has to offer and giving a seat at a table a try – one that’s hopefully not too close to everyone else in the place, however unlikely that might be.