In the great world of Portland dining few of the New Wave have achieved the stature of Back Bay Grill. For nearly 30 years running it has maintained the highest level of cuisine, service, ambiance and style, an astounding feat given the vagaries of Portland’s—or any city’s-dining culture.
Back Bay Grill
The kitchen staff at Isa works meticulously to produce some of the most carefully produced dishes among Portland restaurants. That it resides in Bayside, still one of the seediest neighborhoods in Portland, is inconsequential. After all, just a few doors away, its neighbor, the venerable Back Bay Grill, was trail blazer decades ago in a den-of-thieves neighborhood where the term rough and tumble was understatement.
While Back Bay is where you go for classic fine dining, Isa’s charms are more relaxed in a thoroughly bistro style setting with a menu that delivers quite well. Dishes such as the lobster taco or the eggplant lasagna are beautifully made and remain mainstays on the menu. And the classic grilled pork chop over lentils (not on the menu at the moment) is another great dish enjoyed on past occasions.
As the city of Portland grapples with the boom of new housing on the peninsula, one dividend is food and dining venues emerge as an outgrowth. The opening of Rosemont Market at West End Place, for example, serves the densely populated West End and its need to have food shops in the neighborhood. As for dining, there’s only a few restaurants beyond Longfellow Square in the heart of the West End except for Caiola’s—still a long-time favorite for area locals—and Bonobo, the corner restaurant serving artisanal pizza.
In adjacent Bayside, that a place like Isa caught on so fast gives credence to an emergent neighborhood even though the grandness of Back Bay Grill a few doors away didn’t stem the tide when it entered this fringe environment decades ago. Plenty of vagrants and druggies still roam the streets, but now they co-mingle with ever more Mercedes and Lexus SUVs looking to park and dine at Isa or Back Bay.
Isa and Back Bay are my neighborhood restaurants. Though I’ve yet to venture to Bubba’s Sulky Lounge or the notorious Ricky’s Tavern across the street. Now there’s a true dive bar whose patrons were once labeled euphemistically by a city official “…as subjects seeking social service assets and resources in that area.” Hipsters are not welcome.
What a display of Portland diners flocking to first night this past Tuesday at the newly opened Roustabout. To wit-it’s the latest darling in the mannered pleasures of our city’s boundlessly good restaurants. Located in the historic Nissen Bakery Building on Washington Avenue, it joins a diverse roster of establishments already on the strip, most notably the recently opened Terlingua.
Roustabout’s conceptual karma is the handiwork of Portland branding specialists, Might and Main who’ve helped fashion such high fliers as Central Provisions, Hugo’s, Honey Paw and more among the trendy watering holes and eateries that are defining the city.
You see the Might and Main touches right away in the blond wood, the prominent bar and the generally cool sleekness in design. While brand-building helps, ultimately it’s what co-owners Kit Paschal and Anders Tallberg have delivered in decor, ambiance and food. Paschal hails as bar and beverage personality from Boston and Tallberg has had some impressive chef credentials in that city too.
Together this duo is delivering in spades. After two dinners there I experienced superb food served by a first-rate wait staff and, for once, the front- of -the house attention to detail was meaningful.
Portland may not be a city of financial titans or internet billionaires (at least not by New York, LA or London standards) who covet trophy dining with star chefs. But it can be proud of its chefs like Masa Miyake who is as much of a force in Portland’s dining scene as his compatriots Chris Gould of Central Provisions, Larry Matthews of Back Bay Grill, Sam Hayward of Fore Street, Damian Sansonetti of Piccolo and other gadabouts from the culinary girth of fine dining here.
Moreover, in my last few visits to his venerable noodle house and pub, Pai Men Miyake, the food is still admirably done.
Though, pardon this round of nitpicking, there is, I’ve noticed, a slight curve ball of discombobulation in how the restaurant is run and the scope of the menu, which seems more stagnant than vital.
Deep down in its warped well of vocabulary wisdom the Urban Dictionary defines foodie as “a douchebag who likes food.” If that’s the case then Portland’s streets are teeming with them, and the general wisdom is for us locals to stay away from our most formidable dining haunts until the turistas all leave in the next 30 to 60 days. In fact, one local savant confided that he won’t step foot into a place like the revered Central Provisions until the masses go home. Indeed, it may be that of all the new restaurants in our dining world, the one that lives up so supremely to its accolades is the venerable Central Provisions.
The serious look of diners at Central Provisions seated at the dining bar facing the open kitchen; lower right, chef Chris Gould
I wasn’t planning to visit there until the fall, but destiny prevailed as a parking spot opened up a few doors away while cruising down Fore Street during the lunch hour earlier this week. I took this as my cue to enter this bastion of gastronomy for a bite of lunch.
Grazing is a great way to experience several restaurants in one fell swoop, torching your testbeds into fiery submission as you go from one to the other for splendid dining. This was the course I followed starting on Friday evening. What ensued was the progression of two dining establishments to create the evening meal in which the new world met the old and a weekend to follow with multiple ports of call in the offing.
Sur-Lie presents an inventive but very approachable modern-day menu of small plates done with utter creativity and style. The second stop was Back Bay Grill, where more traditional techniques and fare—done superbly—offered great counterpoint.
First order of business was to order a drink made by Sur-Lie’s great bartender, Sam Babcock. I proceeded to have my favorite dish at Sur Lie- the sweet pea hummus. It’s presented in a big white bowl that contains the brightest puree, almost blindingly green from the freshness of the peas rendered into a luxuriously silken dip. Chef Emil Rivera—whose cooking gets better and better to be, at times, absolutely wonderful- floats the flavors of lemon and mint that capture the sublime texture and flavor of the sabayon, which tops the hummus like whipped cream on a sundae.
Note: Because of the extended July 4th weekend, Friday Dining is appearing today.
Sometimes I feel like the churlish critic who ate Portland, Maine, or is it eating me? No matter because when you come upon such a restaurant as Tempo Dulu, in the utterly glamorous new iteration of the Danforth Inn where it’s magnificently housed, it makes nearly all other dining experiences that you thought were so good tame by comparison. That’s not to say that dinner at some of our most revered restaurants like Central Provisions, Back Bay Grill or Fore Street is not duly fabulous. But it’s a combination of the exotic blending of cuisine—Indonesian—taking place in an absolutely gorgeous setting that makes the distinctive shoals of fine dining so singularly superb here.
The waiters are all handsome with Ipana-perfect smiles and beautifully attired. The principal rooms where cocktails are served shimmer like gold dust so worldly it could host cads with escorts or dowagers in diamonds.
You can dine out every night of the week in Portland and confine yourself to the upper echelons of every new restaurant that has opened recently. This week alone two pivotal establishments have debuted: the sumptuous Tempo Dulu at the Danforth Inn and Evo, located at the base of the Hyatt Place Hotel on Fore Street. (The latter is not, however, a “hotel restaurant” as described in a recent post on a food site but rather merely a leased retail space at the streetside corner of the hotel that was transformed into a stunning two-level dining room.)
The dining room at 555 at last year’s Christmas dinner; a quiet corner table is a coveted spot in the dining room
Still the baubles of Portland’s increasingly frothy world of fine dining are on a magnanimous tear. More than ever, perhaps, mightn’t it behoove one to pay homage to the core posts of dining in the city, the ones that made our mini-metropolis into a national destination for foodie obsessives?
