Restaurant Zoe

I first wrote about Restaurant Zoe years ago when it was in its old location, now occupied by Coterie Room. The old Zoe was one of my favorite restaurants in Seattle. When I found out that its new incarnation was opening on Capitol Hill, I got as excited to try it as your mom gets at the prospect of trying a new variety of crystal meth.

Popovers w/ béarnaise were pretty good. For $6 we got two giant muffin-ass popovers. Each of these was clad in a stately bronze crust, with a steamy, yet strangely empty interior. Tan and puffy outside, steamy and hollow inside: these Jersey Shore popovers came with a ramekin of creamy béarnaise which was rich and imbued with a jolt of tarragon.

Ricotta gnudi ($10) were presented interestingly enough: three perfectly round balls of gnudi were clustered on the plate, along with a couple similarly spherical lamb meatballs, so that the plate looked like a savory bumper pool table. The gnudi were delicate, seemingly held together only by atmospheric pressure, and the meatballs were so tender, they were like my own balls after being kicked. A few fried sage leaves and a shallow puddle of citrus vinaigrette on the bottom of the plate finished it off.

Wild Boar Bolognese ($12) showcased a pretty standard Bolognese sauce, with little chunks of rich boar meat clinging bravely to the pasta. The pasta in question was an arugula pappardelle. It was good enough, but maybe a bit too leathery. The biggest outrage was the color: I for one have never been able to stomach the green pasta with red sauce bullshit. It looks too Christmas-y. It might taste fine, but from a graphic design standpoint, it stinks.

An order of steak tartare ($12) was served in a pretty big pile of minced beef with all the usuals: caper, onion, and egg, which in this case was a quail egg, smeared almost as an afterthought off to one side of the plate. This was accompanied by a big pile of housemade potato chips. These were VERY TINY potato chips, I might add, obviously made from either fingerlings, or some variety of midget leprechaun potatoes. There was also a grilled scallion puree, uncomfortably granular, lurking beneath the mound of tartare. The waitress assured us this puree would lend a certain lingering smokiness to the tartare. While I appreciate her effort in the description, come ON dude: it wasn’t THAT smoky.

Grilled asparagus ($12) was a fucking slam dunk. Having said that, grilled asparagus with an egg on top is one of those flavor combinations that seems to fit as seamlessly together as a horse fits into your mom, so I suppose it’s more like a slam dunk when the hoop is like 4 feet off the ground. The asparagus were topped with a smoked duck egg: big and wobbly, this was soft boiled, then smoked until the white was stained a streaky burnt umber. When cut into, a lurid gush of orange yolk spilled all over the asparagus stationed below. There were also a couple baby artichokes, halved lengthwise and grilled. Frequently baby artichokes piss me off because they can be leathery and unchewable and petulant: more like adolescent artichokes. But these baby artichokes were luckily not very long in the tooth.v Short ribs ($32) were pretty fucking rustic. We got two cubes of short rib. These tender squares of meat so luscious and yielding, you could probably blow them off the bone if you breathed on it too hard. Underneath was a lumpy green mixture of braised nettles and oats. On paper it would seem like this would taste terrible, but the chewy oats and fresh tart nettle flavor was a good counterpoint to the hazy fattiness of the ribs.

Dessert was very interesting. A Chocolate Orb was $8 and yes, it was listed on the menu as “Chocolate Orb.” This candy-coated ball of mystery was indeed a perfect sphere which came to the table looking like some kind of magical globe. In fact, this chocolate orb was like the cocoa-flavored scrying glass with which the Chocolate Wizard (played by Andre 3000) foretells the doom of his arch nemesis Count Chocula. The orb actually resembled a very round Three Musketeers Bar, with a smooth shiny carapace of tempered chocolate on the outside, and a foamy center of mousse. Served along with it was a compact quenelle of hazelnut ice cream and a smear of kumquat marmalade. Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I write the word “kumquat.” But the jam made from the only fruit that sounds like your mom’s typical Saturday night was tasty, with a beguiling combination of sweet and bitter that paired well with the chocolate.

Panna cotta ($8): this isn’t what you might think. Slabs of quivering, milky cream were alternately stacked, pagoda-style, with thin sweet tuiles. Dotting the roof of this Leaning Tower of Diabetes was a gloopy orange pile of spherified apricot jam, which while admittedly tart and delicious, was also uncomfortably similar to salmon roe. This was a pretty high-tech dessert and I expected it to come with several HDMI ports.

Before I wrap this up, let’s recap dinner: popovers. Gnudi with meatballs. Pappardelle Bolognese. Steak Tartare. Braised short ribs. All of these were fairly standard recipes, and confidently prepared. But dessert was a strange departure from the rest of the menu’s tone. Either the desserts were too technical for dinner, or dinner was too rustic for dessert. They were just too fucking wacky, and way too technical. It was as if some future pastry chef of Restaurant Zoe, in this high-tech futuristic land, built a dessert time machine and sent some examples of his craft back in time to show us present-day fools the error of our ways. “Flourless chocolate torte? Crème brulee? Fuck that,” said the futuristic pastry chef. “As soon as I change out of this silver jumpsuit I’m going to send a CHOCOLATE ORB back in time to blow those cavemen’s minds!”

Rating: 8 orbs out of 10

Restaurant Zoe is located at 1318 East Union St.

For reservations call 206-256-2060



PS The Chocolate Orb had nanobots impregnated into the shell which allow this orb to not only taste very chocolatey, but the orb can also store several gigabytes of MP3’s.

A trip to Portland Part 3: Tanuki

This is the third entry in my three-part installment about a field trip to Portland, OR. I hope you enjoy. Fuckfaces.

This place is one of the most hard-core artistic visions you’ll find in the culinary world. It’s an izakaya: a Japanese-style sake house which serves food. A glance at Tanuki’s website might be a bit off-putting, because the list of “no’s” is longer than a horse cock: they don’t take reservations. They don’t accept parties of more than 6. No kids allowed. And they don’t sell sushi.

But this maddening persnickitiness is in part due to logistics: proprietor Janice Martin only has 3 employees, and turns over Tanuki’s 18 seats thrice daily, using a veritable toy kitchen comprised of two hot plates and a small oven approved for use in reheating pastries in coffee shops. So the embargo against large parties is warranted. Plus, lots of small, chic restaurants don’t take reservations. And they don’t allow kids because the giant flat screens, which in most bars are typically tuned to some variety of sporting event, at Tanuki are usually displaying porn, horror movies, or at the very least, smutty cartoons.

Is the food worth all of this weird bullshit? Short answer: Fuck. The. Yes. This bar is the true expression of an auteur’s vision. There is a pretty extensive drink menu, with many different varieties of rare sake, as well as Japanese whiskies, none of which are excessively expensive. This is Portland, remember. As for food, there is an a la carte menu, but don't consult it. The omakase menu is where it’s at. Don’t be a pussy. Trust the kitchen. You can tell them how much you want to spend, and they bring out dishes depending on how cheap you’ve chosen to be. We chose to be pretty cheap, so they only sent out a few things.

Starting with pickled quail eggs: these rich little nuggety nuggets were pickled in tea, served cold, were densely packed with the kind of flavor that only a game bird’s fetus can provide, and with a pleasant backdraft of cinnamon in the finish.

Next up was uni. If you’ve ever eaten it, you know that uni is probably the most polarizing food item on earth. I’ll be up front: I fucking hate it. Sea urchins are covered in SPIKES for a reason: because they DON’T want their testicles eaten. Yes, you heard me, you fucking uni fans, who shall subsequently be referred to as unitards: the slimy orange goop, which you chumps think is an aphrodisiac, is actually the urchin’s BALLS. So eat balls. Personally, I prefer my urchins to sell matches on the streets of London. But we ate all of the uni. Testicles, after all, should never go to waste.

As if they anticipated that I would need a palate cleanser after gulping down a slippery tongue of slimy orange urchin testicles, the next course was kimchee. Sometimes I’m on the fence about kimchee. It can be good, or it can be really nasty. Kimchee you buy from the grocery store, for instance, is fucking rank: when you open it the jar immediately emits an old-man fart. But Tanuki’s kimchee is the tits: made in house, this kimchee is briny and sour, with a raking spiciness on top.

Following the kimchee was boro. These were thin sheets of rice noodles, delicate as an elf’s hymen, stuffed with shredded wild boar: bantam-weight dumplings. They were carefully layered with noodle and meat, with an herbal mélange of basil et al, so that it ended up seeming rather like a really shallow asian lasagna.

The finale was hanger steak. We got a small pile of steak, sliced and shingled neatly on the plate. The steak itself was caramelized a fuck on the outside, as rare as a beating heart on the inside. This was served in a beguiling pool of mahogany sauce, as rich and sumptuous as the drapes in a prime minister’s office. This sauce dropped like a savage umami bomb on the tongue, scratching every itch and playing with my taste buds as though they were a million miniscule clits: this sauce, I was later told, was composed of pan juices from the steak thickened with, of all things, rabbit kidney.

And we got all of this for $55.

There was no dessert. I don’t even think there is a dessert menu, which is all well and good, because authentic Japanese businessmen getting shitfaced at an izakaya after work don’t eat desserts. If they want something sweet they buy used schoolgirl panties. Or you can try the kimchee/ bacon/ cheese buns, big cloudy balls of brioche filled with the eponymous ingredients. These are singularly delicious and will annihilate your hangover before it’s even hatched.

Tanuki isn’t perfect. It’s not the easiest place to get into, and the kitchen sometimes gets asymmetrically overwhelmed during peak dinner hours. Some people complain that the service can be brusque, but if you’re looking to be fellated by a sycophantic waiter who writes his name upside-down in crayon on the table, and refers to your party as “Hey guys,” then go the fuck to Cheesecake Factory or some fucking shit like that.

My advice is to drop in to Tanuki around 9. The suckers will have cleared out by then, and it has this weird college dorm after-party vibe to it. Go hungry. And thirsty. Or else.

Rating: 9 Japanese horror movies out of 10 Tanuki is located at 8029 SE Stark St in Portland OR They don't take reservations. Don't even try.

A Trip to Portland Part 2: Le Pigeon

This is the second entry in my three-part installment about a field trip to Portland, OR. I hope you continue to enjoy. Fuckfaces.

Next up on our 2-day culinary tour of Portland was Le Pigeon. Consistently ranked among Portland’s best restaurants, Le Pigeon has accrued accolades and James Beard awards the way African warlords accumulate medals and mirrored sunglasses and epaulets. I was very excited to eat in this legendary dining room. Much more excited than I’ve ever been with your mom.

We started with an arugula salad ($10), which was basically a pile of arugula, draped in a hazy goat cheese dressing, laced through with crispy fried fennel shards, and garnished with a couple plump candied figs which were dusted in fennel pollen. On the very bottom was a melted round of goat cheese. The candied figs and dressing were tragically salty, but for the most part this was an acceptable, if pricey, green salad.

A whole quail ($15) was dusted with 5-spice powder then grilled. This miniscule game bird was served atop a silken dollop of a very literal “pine nut risotto.” We thought it would be a risotto with a couple toasted pine nuts thrown in for texture, but no: it was made ENTIRELY of pine nuts, used as the grain in place of Arborio rice, slowly cooked until they took on a texture as creamy as a debutante’s décolletage.

Pork tenderloin ($25) was braised in butter, then seared, sliced into medallions with of puns: “pretzel spatezle” and “Brussels kraut.” The Brussels kraut was pretty tasty: Brussels sprout leaves were tender and salty, with the fermented twang of classic sauerkraut. The pretzel spaetzle was similar to regular spatezle in that it was a big pile of squiggly dough, but it had been boiled in water made caustic with the addition of baking soda, then (I presume) baked so that the spaetzle sported a glossy, mahogany crust… just like… A PRETZEL! Thus the clever name.

Unfortunately, the pretzel spaetzle was better in theory than in practice because it was just too leathery. I can certainly sympathize, though, since many of my own ideas seemed cool at the time but didn’t pan out: people couldn’t bring themselves to actually eat the Turducken Centipede, choosing instead to vomit uncontrollably. And the Shitzfrei, the dog who never needs to be walked, tended to irritate pet owners when it inevitably died in a fiery poosplosion. The Foliautomaton, the robot which detects fall foliage, seemed to work well at first, until I took it to Vermont, when its circuits overloaded and it went on a Westworld-style rampage, pointing at every tree in sight, claxons sounding. Why, God? Why? Why did I have to install so many claxons?

Still, all in all the tenderloin was juicy and delicious, served with a piquant mustard seed sauce, which of course couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Blanquette de lapin ($28) was interesting: a rabbit roulade had been cooked sous vide, then served atop a vivid green nettle puree with sauteed black trumpet mushrooms, fried nettle leaves and some big cross-sections of sliced garlic. Accompanying this was a very interesting and delicious take on lasagna: in place of pasta sheets, this lasagna was constructed of crepes, whisper thin and laminated with a delicate béchamel sauce. I could’ve eaten a giant plate of this lasagna, the size of a tarp, and been completely satisfied.

Unfortunately, the sous vide roulade was the worst part of this dish. A good blanquette manages to be tender and moist, but the rabbit roulade just seemed pallid and cadaverous. I blame the sous vide method. It might have seemed like a good idea, at first, to make a blanquette in a sous vide machine. After all, blanquette traditionally must be painstakingly simmered, without letting the stew come to a boil, and what better way to control the temperature than with a water bath? Yet just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD. I really wish someone had told me that when I met your mom.

Foie gras profiteroles ($10) were pretty full of themselves. Pate a choux pastry balls, flaky like your mom outside but tender and creamy inside, like sex with your mom, were split and filled with ice cream, dusted in confectioner’s sugar, then draped with a sticky stripe of caramel sauce.

Le Pigeon invented these things, which of course started the worldwide trend of cramming as much cruelty into every dish as possible. I wholeheartedly support this trend, but I wish they would figure out a way to make rice cakes, or tofu, or some other chaste diet food more decadent, instead of an already highly caloric dessert such as profiteroles. EVERY SINGLE INGREDIENT of the profiteroles contains goose liver: the pate a choux is made with foie in lieu of butter. The ice cream is flavored with foie. The caramel sauce, like the pate a choux, replaces butter with foie. And the powdered sugar is somehow inexplicably ALSO associated with goose liver in some manner. If you were a goose, I advise you to STAY THE FUCK AWAY from Le Pigeon, lest your self be cooked!

Le Pigeon is a strange showcase of wonky technique, combined with reckless abandon. This is a kitchen that’s very clearly doing exactly what the fuck it wants to do, and damn the torpedoes. They’re cooking their asses off at Le Pigeon. This is the Iron Maiden of cooking. Sometimes they overreach, as with the pretzel spaetzle and the blanquette, but the talent in the room is enormous, and without risk there can be no reward. After all, even Iron Maiden wrote "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter."

Rating: 8 profiteroles out of 10

Le Pigeon is located at 738 East Burnside Street in Portland, OR

For reservations call 503-546-8796

A Trip to Portland Part I: Boke Bowl

This is the first entry in my three-part installment about a field trip to Portland, OR. I hope you enjoy. Fuckfaces.

On a recent trip to Portland, I discovered that there are TOO MANY utterly delicious dining options in the Rose City. As a result, we were having trouble deciding where to eat. But there’s one restaurant in Portland at which attendance, for me at least, is mandatory: Boke Bowl. Boke Bowl is the brainchild of one of my favorite motherfuckers: Patrick Fleming, author of the hilariously lowbrow blog Culinary Addict.

In Culinary Addict, Patrick juxtaposes scenes from his sordid past as a full-on junkie with insights he’s gained during his recovery and subsequent career as a successful executive chef. Patrick’s writing somehow manages to be simultaneously insightful AND stomach turning, like one of those old “Nova” episodes where they put a fiber optic camera inside a guy’s dick so everyone can watch him jizz from the inside. You may think my simile trashy and inaccurate, but it’s actually quite apt: Patrick’s convoluted and juicy life experiences are the urethra of his soul, his inspiring battle to overcome drug addiction and alcoholism is his heart’s jizz, his pen the miniature camera which captures his literary orgasm as he shoots it all over your mom’s tits… I mean the internet. In much the same way that Coca-Cola is so popular in the south that people call any soft drink a Coke, your mom’s tits are so frequently seen on the internet that the two are basically synonymous.

Along with his business partners Brannon Riceci and Tim Parsons, Patrick launched Boke Bowl first (as fledgling restaurateurs are wont to do these days) as a pop-up. Boke Bowl: the Pop Up was hosted in various venues all over Portland to great acclaim and sold-out engagements. Late last year they opened a permanent location, and Boke Bowl instantly became the darling of people who care about things.

We started with the warm brussels sprout salad ($9). Roasted brussels sprouts were tossed with slippery cubes of fresh mango, roasted cauliflower, and smoked tofu. This was super fucking delicious. The sprouts were perfectly cooked: tender inside, caramelized outside. Sometimes there were crisp outer leaves still attached here and there, crunchy and brown and with a texture like your tongue leaping into a pile of freshly raked leaves on a crisp fall afternoon. The cauliflower was stained a pleasing mahogany color by having been either marinated, or roasted, or smoked, but probably all three. The tofu, too, was more delicious than this often-maligned ingredient (maligned by me, anyway) had any right to be: at Boke Bowl they treat tofu like pork, first marinated for days in a brine of salt, sugar, star anise, juniper, and bay leaves, then smoked.

Pork belly steam buns were okay. For $7 we got 3 gua bao, in which luscious rectangles of melty pork belly were nestled inside soft mitts of cloudy rice dough, along with some pickles, and a sprinkling of chopped scallion. This was a pretty standard if uninspired version of Taiwan’s most famous export besides electronic components, metals, plastic components, optical instruments, chemicals, and textiles. I hate to admit it but the tofu in the Brussels sprout salad was actually tastier, with a more nuanced flavor, than the pork belly. What the…? Tofu that tastes better than pork? Did you hear that noise? The universe just imploded!

Pork dashi ramen ($9) This isn’t like ramen you eat in college: a big swirly pile of house made ramen noodles, soft and slippery and starchy in the way that only hand made fresh pasta can be, swam around in an opaque pool of dark brown broth, with heavily muscled shreds of juicy roasted pork, water chestnuts and some braised greens, and topped with scattered emerald bracelets of sliced scallion. This broth is complex like a calculus word problem: not too salty, but very savory, with hints of smoke. That having been said, I would hope that this luxe noodle bowl would be tastier than what you can purchase at Costco, considering it costs 4500% more than one of those typical wavy bone-white rectangles of Top Ramen. But it’s totally worth the price.

Fried pears ($2.50) were so delicious, they boggled my tongue. I don’t know exactly how long they fried these pears for, but the fruit had been rendered down into sweet leathery quarters, the sugars concentrated into a crystalline caramel shellac, then doused in a garlicky sesame vinegar. I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be a dessert or not, but it doesn’t even matter: I’d eat these fucking fried pears for every meal if I could. What they tasted the most like was an Oompa Loompa’s dried ear, taken as a macabre souvenir by GI’s if, and when, we finally go to war with those candy-making bastards who cause Americans to be morbidly obese.

A chocolate coconut-cream Twinkie ($2) reminded me too much of an Almond Joy for comfort. A big sloppy schlong of chocolate pastry was filled with coconut cream, topped with slivers of candied almond and a couple stripes of chocolate ganache. Nobody likes Almond Joy: in a mixed bowl of leftover Halloween Candy, it’s always the last thing left, rattling around in the bowl with Sour Apple Jolly Ranchers and a Bit O’ Honey that had somehow become unwrapped and now has a piece of dog hair stuck to it. Eventually someone eats the furry Bit O’ Honey.

Luckily the vanilla miso Twinkie ($1.50) did the Twinkie name proud. I don’t know how Boke Bowls keeps getting away with actually calling these things “Twinkies,” since I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Hostess slaps them with a cease-and-desist, but this Twinkie, unlike the chocolate-coconut one, was tastier than actual Twinkies: the dough was light, and not cloyingly sweet. The vanilla miso filling tasted like a mildly salty crème anglaise, but it was a perfect counterpoint to the pastry.

The desserts at Boke Bowl are fine, but if I were eating there and wanted something else to eat after I was done ordering, I would get a side ($3) of this motherfucking fried chicken. It was so tender you could eat it with a SPOON, and we did, since they didn’t give us a knife or fork, and the pieces were too big to pick up with chopsticks. The crust was shaggy and brown like a 1970’s carpet. The meat was salty, with a little spice, as juicy as fuck, and topped with a smear of “orange dot sauce,” which is a sweet-and-sour mélange of pickled mustard seeds and pickled cucumber suspended in a hazy aoli. I don’t know exactly how they make this fried chicken but I suspect it’s the kind of thing that takes at least 2 days to prepare.

Boke Bowl is awesome. Not everything is perfect: the concept is blatantly Momofuku-esque, and during the lunch rush this place can seem like a yuppie cafeteria, but those are minor complaints. They clearly use very high-quality ingredients, the prices are affordable, and all of the food seems to be handcrafted with painstaking care. Boke Bowl is a vital and cutting-edge addition to an already legendary food scene, and no trip to Portland would be complete without some of Boke Bowl’s fried chicken, which is so mind-bendingly delicious, I had to give it a separate rating! This chicken fundamentally changes your consciousness in exactly the same way your brain would warp if you saw a midget taking a shit.

Rating: 8.5 bowls out of 10

Fried Chicken: 10 midgets out of 10

Boke Bowl is located at 1028 SE Water Ave in Portland, OR

For inquiries (they don’t take reservations) call 503-719-5698

Terra Plata

1501 Melrose Ave Seattle, WA 98122

206-325-1501

At what point does something stop being innovative and start being cliché? How many repetitions does it take? 200? 1000? I’m sure the first time some 1930’s Hollywood screenwriter, hunched over his Underwood, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, hacked out a scene in which some impetuous hero strides into the villian’s court and does something brash, and in retaliation the villain roars “SEIZE HIM” to his loyal guards, I’m sure that was a breathtaking scene when that was written, but by now it’s boring as fuck. The same goes for “alternative rock”: at first, Eddie Vedder’s hurka durka dang was a refreshing sonic palate cleanser against the creaking falsettos of butt rock, but by the time Nickelback came around, no one gave a shit.

Ingredients, too, can become cliché. Think back to the days of artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes and tapenade and truffle oil and beet salads and, sadly on the horizon, foie gras and, probably at some point, bacon. The first time you ate salty caramel I bet it blew your mind the way your mom blows NBA teams, but now I, and hopefully you, have tired of it.

Which brings me to Terra Plata. Located directly adjacent to Capitol Hill’s ultra-awesome Melrose Building, Terra Plata is inside a sleek and modern room, wedge-shaped, with lots of wooden stuff everywhere, which makes it look like the inside of a canoe. Is the food as stylish as the décor? If you want to find out, read on!

We started with an order of blistered shisito peppers ($7). This was a good price for a big plate of these small green peppers: blistered like a suspicious set of genitals, but much tastier than the unfortunate simile I just made. The shisitos were smoky and sweet, with a weak thin burn of mild heat in the finish.

Stuffed dates ($12) were pretty 1990, filled with a soft core of some variety of tangy, biting cheese, wrapped in a thin crisp film of lardo. I wanted to be all sarcastic about these, but sometimes you really can’t fuck with the classics. Let’s call these stuffed dates the Nirvana’s "Nevermind" of appetizers and move on.

Marrow bones were pricey at $14, The bones themselves were perfectly roasted, sliced lengthwise so you could conveniently sluice out the smoky globs of the melted marrow with your butter knife, but the accoutrements were too fancy and distracting: they only included 4 thin slices of toast, greasy with some kind of sweet marmalade and topped with a supreme of orange and a parabola of sliced red onion. Some awesome but unadorned bread would’ve sufficed. But an order of crispy bronze frites ($6) were super fantastic dipped into the marrow. I heard a muffled “…noooooo…” coming from my chest when I did this. “Fuck you, coronary arteries,” I told my heart, and that rapidly clogging motherfucker promptly shut up so I could continue to fill it with cholesterol.

Roasted Brussels sprouts ($11) were masterful: salty, with crunchy outer leaves but tender centers, with shreds of Serrano ham and some sweet citrusy flavor in the background. If grade-school cafeterias served brussels sprouts like these, kids would not only eat them, they would punch each others’ faces in an orgy of kid-on-kid violence in order to get a second helping.

The beet salad ($11) returned us to 1990 with chunks of roasted beets, a few leaves of watercress here and there, and thin rectangles of some variety of sharp dry white cheese. This salad narrowly avoided cliché, because while the cheese might, in fact, have been some variety of goat cheese (though probably sheep’s milk), at least it wasn’t chevre, and the cress was a nice touch.

Duck breast ($25) was presented simply, sliced on the bias into thin pink medallions, shingled atop a rich pan reduction, dotted here and there with sultanas. The breast was dark and tasty, but the true cod ($24) wasn’t as good. In fact, it was quite bland, the flavor washed out, with a pallid cod filet perched atop a pile of steamed potatoes, which sat in a limpid pool of broth. Only a few olives here and there darkened this lily-white platescape (the olives must be the help).

A big slab of braised short rib ($21) was similarly bland, though very tender and served with a small mound of mashed root vegetables and a pile of puy lentils. While I was disappointed by the short rib itself, please allow me to wax rhapsodic about the lentils: they were fucking awesome. Glimmering dark green like a pile of emeralds found in the hold of an ancient shipwreck, they were perfectly cooked, with just a little bite, but still yielding. Puy lentils are so much better than the drab green slack-jawed horse vagina lentils you usually get.

Unfortunately, we almost didn’t get the lentils at all, because at first they brought us the roast pig ($20) instead of the short rib. This is why you don’t put items that slant-rhyme on the same menu in a noisy restaurant. Luckily, the roast pig was actually way better than the short rib: a big succulent softball of pork shoulder, swimming in a pool of savory broth, with some chunks of potato and a big fluffy sheaf of crackling floating on top. Surrounding were a couple clams, briny and flavorful and not at all chewy, and a few rings of the same pickled red onion from the marrow bone toast.

Finally, the churros ($7) were tasty. This price got us three loopy donut turds, arced all over the plate and leaning on each other, as though Frank Gehry designed this dessert. With the churros was a shot glass of chocolate dipping sauce with a surprising amount of heat. A thick slice of chocolate terrine ($12) managed to be rich yet simultaneously NOT the heavy leaden chocolate shit that Twilight fans always seem to want to eat in lieu of getting a good hard fucking. Accompanying the terrine were a few scattered hazelnuts (sadly impossible to eat, as everyone knows, with a fork, so you end up resorting to just picking them up with your fingers) and a small puddle of crème anglaise.

Despite my complaints about dated cuisine, Terra Plata is tasty. That’s because nostalgia’s currency is inflation-proof. You might think, for instance, that fancy mac & cheese is played out by now, but you still return to it because in the end, like bacon-wrapped cheese-stuffed dates, it’s actually quite awesome. As in Portlandia, so too is the dream of the ‘90’s alive in Terra Plata. Put a bird on it.

Rating: 6.5 left-wing bookstores out of 10