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