Audrey’s Kitchen

Off the menu, we chose the Ore Cart, which consists of 3 huge beef back ribs, half a slab of pork baby back ribs, and half a rotissiere chicken. It was so huge that the sides (grilled asparagus) came on a different plate, as well as the signature cheesebread. I thoroghly enjoyed the pork ribs–the flavor was smokey and highly flavorful, and the accompanying sauce is my favorite kind: tomato based but not sour. I’m sure somewhere in Texas, a diehard BBQ fanatic is groaning right now, but darn it, this is tasty! The beef ribs were meaty, but also had a thick layer of fat on one side that wasn’t pleasant when all the melted oil runs out. Be careful to eat around it! The chicken was good–not memorable, but not disappointing. The skin wasn’t as crisp as I like, and the white meat was very flavorable, but the sauce helped it out a lot.

(better rib shot)

The accompanying bread option, garlic cheese toast, was not as good as I’ve had before. It was lukewarm, chewy, and lacked the hot crispy bite that a good Texas toast should have. It tastes like it was mass baked in advance, which it probably was.

The grilled asparagus was fine. Not stellar, but not disappointing. It was lightly oiled, sprinkled with garlic and salt, then grilled. Simple, but it worked.

Between the two of us, we licked the platter clean. At $27.95, it was well worth it for the taste, comfortable/sports bar atmosphere (except with cattle prods instead of team emblems), and the excellent service. I do feel my arteries clogging and I will definitely need to eat lightly and work out for the next few days to compensate for this splurge, but I just may come back here if I’m in the Clackamas area, especially after a hard day of shopping.

1001 SE Water Ave
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 235-2294

What can I say? I passed by a sketchy industrial street on the way to OMSI late one night and was startled to see soft lights emanating from what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. I did a double take and turned around to pass it again, and was immediately charmed. On what looks like glass garage doors are rows and rows of softly lit candles placed stragetically on each beam. I realized then that it was clarklewis, a restaurant that has had a lot of buzz in the past year or two, but I have yet to try.

It was stored away in my “must-try” files until I found a suitable occassion. This occassion arose when I decided to plan a dinner party for 16 guests. This is quite a feat in Portland, since many of the restaurants here either charge room fees or they just cannot accomodate such large groups. After getting off the phone with the 4th restaurant, I remembered clarklewis and was immediately granted space, providing that I gave them my credit card as a guarantee. I asked about separate checks and was told that they’d split the bill in 6 for us without any problems. We arrived a teeny bit late for our reservation (10 late instead of a few minutes early) but keep in mind that it is very hard to find if you are not used to the east side, and there’s no real sign that tells you the restaurant name. The hostess was very anxious to get us seated and asked to take our drink orders almost immediately. We just got seated and were waiting for the last car of people to arrive, so we weren’t ready yet. When I told her to give us another minute, she said in a worried/vaguely annoyed tone that another party is arriving at 9:45 that evening. That didn’t really start us off on a good start because we then felt rushed as if we were intruding even though it was very early in the evening.

After we ordered out selections, the server brought out 2 breadbaskets and brought out little plates for everyone. Most places in town provide bread and butter. Some super stellar restaurants such as Iorio even provide a delicious chickpea spread so this did not strike us anything extraordinary. Keep this in mind as I review the rest of the meal.

We started out that night doing individual/couple dinners instead of sharing it family style with the entire table. Among the items our group ordered were: butter lettuce salad, ravioli with black truffle oil, tagliatelli with game hen, pork chops, lambchops, and sturgeon.

The salad was very aggressive, topped with salty proscuitto, it was tossed in a salty/sour vinagrette along with olives, salty pickled onions, almonds, and goat cheese. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this salad if it was not so salty and overpowering. Food should be enjoyable to eat, not something you must grimace and swallow. It was so salty that I kept having to pile it onto my bread to eat it. I was hungry though, so I ate the whole thing, wiped the plate clean with bread even, but it was very very salty. I think this would be an excellent dish if they used only half of the flavoring.

I didn’t get to try the pork pictured below, but my friend ordered a half size and they brought out a full size unbeknownst to her until the final bill came. It wasn’t mindblowing, but it was a decent dish.

The lamb was very good-probably their best dish. It did not have a strong gamey lamb taste, and was perfectly seasoned and tender.

Here it is again-the abundant use of salt! The tagliatelli pasta was perfect-eggy, chewy, and cooked to perfection. I liked the thin shavings of cheese on top, and the chicken blended nicely with the dish. The only drawback was how salty this dish was. My dining partner kept scraping the sauce off and eating it with bread to make it lighter in taste. Great dish, ruined again by salt. I did not take a picture of the ravioli because it looked boring sitting there swathed in a thick white sauce. The truffle taste was not discernable at all, and the ricotta filling was salty and grainy.

Although the ambience was nice and the restaurant had a nice crowd, I just did not feel comfortable there. Maybe it’s because she told me that another group was waiting to take the table (although we finished eating around 8:30pm), maybe it’s the fact that she kicked over my COACH purse and didn’t pick it back up but I did not like it. After dinner, we geared up to unveil the cupcakes we brought for the birthday boy. The server was in the process of laying down plates (unsolicited), so I told her that there was no need for plates since we brought cupcakes. She looked surprised but said she’d give it to us anyway.

We were ready to leave by 9, and had our bill brought to us. We were all shocked to see a charge of $29 for the bread. Each loaf of bread was $8 each, and one of them was $5 (although I don’t know how or why). None of us specifically ordered bread–it was brought out to us. The server asked if we wanted bread, and we said sure. We ate it and they kept refilling it, simple as that. We did eat a lot of bread–much more than we’ve ever done when eating out, but that was due to the unbearable saltiness of the food! Now $29 isn’t much on the grand scheme of things, but it was the principle of it. I felt like it was very misleading the way the way the bread was presented. I told the server that I felt it was very misleading and her first response was, “Well, it’s on the menu.”

I should have read citysearch earlier, because another reviewer complained about the same thing happening to them. In fact, their most recent reviews have all been negative. I only read one fellow food blogger’s review, but he reviewed them before Chef Morgan left.

Anyway, I told her that we all felt misled and she apologized for it and went away. We continued divying up the bill when she came back, told me that she spoke with the manager, and said that they’d take 50% of the bread cost off our bill. I thought that was very nice of her and truly did not expect her to do anything about it but then she had to ruin it by saying, “And we normally charge for the cake-cutting plate fees, but we decided to comp that as well too.”

Okay…where does this cake plating fee coming from? I specifically told her that we did not need plates because we were serving cupcakes. Even so…what if we did bring a cake? Isn’t it a tad unscrupulous to bring out the plates, offer to cut it, and then present us with a tab for plating it after the fact? I hate that area restaurants in Portland do that. This is why I only bring cupcakes from now on.

Needless to say, we were all let down by what could have been an amazing dining experience. We went there expecting to love the place. The sleek atmosphere, the idea of homey italian cooking, even the cute play on name was endearing to us. I’m glad I tried it because I would have hankered over it until I had done so, but it’s not worth going back

3226 SE Division St
Portland, OR 97202
(503) 232-1387
Open Mon-Sat, Sundays closed

I first heard about Pok Pok almost a year ago but it has taken me until now before I had the chance to try it out. I was a bit skeptical about it…despite touting the authentic Thai BBQ’s on the premise, how authentic could it really be? Also, how much can I trust the reviews of other people? Still, after reading yet another glowing review for the umpteemth time, I had to make a stop into the Whiskey Soda Lounge that was the little thai bbq shack on Division street.

We went on a midweek night, around 7, thinking that the place would be less crowded. We got in and were seated almost immediatly. WSL is very small but it had a nice cozy feel to it. Right away, we were given a carafe of water and little tin cups. The water had the texture of cooled boiled water and tasted vaguely of rice. If you’ve never had cooled boiled water, it’s a thicker, almost silkier texture. Most Asian people drink boiled water, so I was impressed by this tiny attention to detail.

The menu was chock full of exotically named dishes, but thankfully there were descriptions next to them to explain what each entailed. We had to order their BBQ game hen, their claim to fame, and followed that up with skewered baby octopus, and Pok Pok Papaya salad. Each of us ordered our own rice: I, the sticky rice, and E, the coconut rice.

The order came out quickly enough, but I wonder if it cooled on the way from the kitchen to the lounge. The waitresses kept ducking in and out of the place, each time opening a cold draft into the lounge. This is good, because the cramped quarters could easily make the place stuff, but the chicken wasn’t as hot as I want my food to be. It was very well done though…the dark meat was falling off the bone with that delicious sticky quality that only bbq’d or roast chicken can have. The white meat wasn’t very flavorful, but the skin made up for it. It came with a side of sweet chili sauce–the same kind that can be found bottled at any Chinese store, and it didn’t do anything for the chicken so I ignored it. It was $9.50 for a whole, $5.50 for half. The rice that we ordered was not very good though. It costs $2 for a bowl of coconut rice and $2 for a small piece of sticky rice. The sticky rice was too dry, and the portion was tiny. The coconut rice had a nice aroma and taste, but the quality of the rice was lacking. That worried me because rice is the primary staple of Asian cuisine!

After that, I tried the skewered baby octopus. I was impressed by how tender it was, and the light lime/cilantro vinagrette was an interesting flavor, but gosh, there were only 6 baby octopus in that dish for $8.00. It was not worth it. I felt so ripped off by it because it wasn’t very special to begin with and the portion was tiny! Size does matter when it comes to this. On a recent board, owner Andy explained his reasons for cost claiming that high overhead costs and specialty ingredients were the reason for the price. That may be true for his Carlton pork ribs, but I just don’t buy it in this case.

However, the star of this place would be the Pok Pok Papaya salad. It was everything a good papaya salad should be: intensely flavorful, slow heat that builds fire with each bite, crunchy long strands of papaya, and a sweet, sour, spicy salty kick. At $6, it’s definitely worth ordering one for each person at the table! Sharing was something I never wanted to do less when it came to this salad.

Overall, I had a good time and the food was a welcome kick in the middle of a cold Portland winter. I was just a tiny bit underwhelmed. While the chicken and the salad were good, the place has been so hyped up by local foodies and touted as one of the best Cheap Eats of Portland that I had unreasonably high expectations for the place. With the addition of their more expensive sides, it’s not a true cheap eat either. Still, I would come back when the craving hit, and this time, I’ll know what not to order.