{TERROIR IS NOW CLOSED – 2.08}
By Nancy Rommelmann
My neighborhood, near Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Fremont Ave., is not exactly teeming with restaurants. Unless you walk up to Mississippi, there’s Pizza a Go Go and the Fifth Quadrant, both on Williams, and on MLK, a Popeye’s, a new Subway, and, a little bit south, Tiny’s and Echo. All these places slant young, and you can pretty much eat with pocket change.
Whether the ‘hood can support a more upscale place is a question Terroir is trying to answer. Construction began two years ago, when the Food King on the northeast corner of MLK and Fremont was demolished. The lot then stood empty for about a year, until a brick building started to go up. My family and I pass this corner a dozen times a day, so you can imagine, we had hopes: what would it be? The building did not, as it evolved, evince much personality; it was squat and two-story and middle-of-the-road, guaranteed to insult no one but also, not to impress; one could imagine it in any sort of walking mall from here to Maryland. For a time, it seemed as though some condos would also be built, on the east side of the lot. But as the months went by, they did not materialize; the bland brick building got some blue awnings, some outdoor flowerpots, and some windows, one of which was etched with scrolled script spelling “Terroir.” We – as well as everyone else we knew – started calling it Terror, because it was more fun to say than Terroir, which loosely translates to “a sense of place,” and which does not, no matter how good your French accent, roll loosely off the tongue.
My husband and I looked in Terroir’s windows one night, a few months before it opened. A small sign told us, it was going to be a Northwest wine bar. I was a little disappointed, and also wondered, if the neighborhood could support it. I will not presume to know what my neighbors like to eat, will only say, it wouldn’t have been my first choice in cuisine. Or maybe it would have been, I couldn’t tell; the vibe I was getting was just off.
My daughter, a kinder person than me, told me to stop prejudging; that maybe it would be great, even though she, too, did not much warm to the building’s Pier One-ish design.
A friend in the food business asked whether I knew who was opening the place; I did not.
“Stu Stein,” he said.
The name didn’t mean anything to me, until he reminded me of the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project imbroglio, wherein Tami Parr (who occasionally writes for this site) found several articles of Stein’s that appeared to lift, word for word, from her own work. Apparently, Stein had walked this territory before.
And so, I am admitting up front, I had some problems with Terroir before I even walked in the door. But walk in the door I did, about a month ago, to meet a friend. Actually, we did not walk in the door, but took one of the outside tables, which sit about nine feet from cars driving west on Fremont. I’m a city girl, and love a city view, but this one is not conducive to wiling away a few hours over wine. I asked that we move inside.
The restaurant’s interior is open and airy, and if the furnishings are a little Ikea, that’s okay. The waiters were attentive and, because we were here to give Stein – who I could see in the open kitchen, along with four other chefs – a chance to impress us with his food, we decided to order a massive amount of dishes, which is possible because the prices are incredibly low. Frankly, too low, as in, only one dish over $9. They are serving what they call tapas, but not in tapas portions; to me, they either seemed portioned normally, or just a tad under, for about a third of what you’d expect to pay. As an example, I offer what I thought was the best dish of the evening, roasted beef marrowbones, with herb salad, sea salt and toasted brioche. These were three meaty bones, with plenty of bread, the salt a wonderful touch in a dish that just worked. It’s the kind of thing you don’t see that often and for which you might happily pay a premium, but which here, is $6.
The other dishes we had did not quite wow: manila clams with bacon vinaigrette were fine; duck fat French fries were nice but not as nice as they sounded. Lavender honey glazed rabbit was… also good, as was a salad with goat cheese, and another with caramelized radicchio, and pasta with lamb ragu… if the descriptions here sound dull, it’s because that’s how I was feeling. There were no tonic items to offset the richness. Everything was laden with cheese, or nuts, or fatty meats and fishes. I love rich food, but the sensation was deadening, not merely to the palate, but to the mind.
“What did you like last time?” asked the friend I went with last night, a local chef, who also lives in the neighborhood and had been eager to try Terroir. He, my husband and I walked over at 7:30, and were greeted by Stein’s wife, who asked if we had a reservation. We did not. She looked around the room, which was about two-thirds full; she looked in a way that said to me, wouldn’t it be nice if people made reservations, which, from what I’ve read on Stein’s blog, the locals do not.
“Inside or out?” she asked, which made me laugh, as it was still in the 90s outside and nice and cool in here.
We were given a good table very close to the open kitchen. My chef friend, who I’ll call Charlie, looked at the menu and said, “How in the world is he making any money?”
I had the same waiter as last time, though this time, he had a little preamble, about how “99% of the ingredients used are local” and how Terroir has the best selection of Oregon wines in the state. We all nodded, ordered two gin & tonics and a gin & soda, and continued to peruse the menu. Again, Charlie asked what I liked last time. I told him, I could only remember the marrowbones.
“That means, nothing was very good and nothing was very bad,” he said, and then, he and my husband agreed the waiter’s claims of 99% locality were likely an exaggeration.
“What are you going to serve in February?” asked my husband.
“I actually saw Stein on a TV show in about February,” said Charlie. “He was making a salad, and he’s peeling a cucumber and chopping some fennel, and saying, ‘the great thing is, I get these locally.’ And I’m thinking, cucumber? In February?”
He looked back at the menu. “There’s no way he’s making money selling albacore tuna carpaccio for $7.”
I told him, I know the city funded some of the building.
“Right, but that has nothing to do with food cost,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, I couldn’t stay open if I sold for these prices.”
Ten minutes later, the waiter returned with our drinks, and I remembered, it took this long last time. This time, he gives everyone the wrong drink. We ordered: the tuna, two salads; risotto with caramelized cauliflower, horseradish and almonds; a “B.L.T.” of pork belly with lettuce veloute and tomato gelee; an English pea flan; manila clams steamed in wine with fennel and lamb sausage, and the marrowbones.
Charlie looked to the kitchen. “That is a lot of chefs,” he said, of the five people working side by side. I will say, they’re fast, because we had the marrowbones in about a fifth of the time it took to get the drinks. I scoop some of the fatty marrow onto the bread, and take a bite.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s a little lamby this time.” I asked Charlie if the bones could possibly be from a lamb. He said, no; too big, and takes a bite.
“It tastes okay to me,” he said, as the waiter put down the plate of tuna. We all stared at it, and stared some more, because something was telling us, the color was wrong.
“Why is it so gray?” I asked.
“Well, it’s albacore,” said Charlie. “It’s not the color that’s off, it’s the texture. It’s kind of dead.”
I lifted a piece of the tuna with my fork. The stiffness reminded me of the frozen micro-slices of meat they use for Mongolian barbecue.
“Yeah, but that’s cooked,” said my husband.
Charlie took a bite. “It’s not off, but it is old,” he said. We each took a nibble and left the rest. The salads arrived, the oak leaf with toasted hazelnuts tasting of no dressing, and the accompanying slab of grilled radicchio just not a good idea; it lay there, limp and brown. The gem lettuce with creamy roasted garlic sheep’s milk cheese dressing tasted of none of those things.
“I love these little gem lettuces, I use them,” said Charlie. “But they’re really hard to dress. Plus, there’s no salt in anything, and the croutons are stale.” We left half the salads.
“Everything okay?” asked the waiter. We nodded, noncommittally; hoping for better to come.
We were rewarded, and we were not. The risotto was very good, nicely cooked, flavorful, complex, and if Charlie thought the bits of cheese a little too large, it was a small thing. Of the BLT, the B (for belly) was the only component working; a nice, not-too-fatty slab that we all agreed had great flavor, but the red and green pools in came sitting in were tasteless and gruel-like
The English pea flan arrived. It had been baked in a four-inch circle, about an inch-and-half high. On top, were a tangle of fried carrots, though as Charlie pointed out, not fried enough; you’d want them really frazzled, both aesthetically and to offer some contrasting texture to the soft flan.
Or maybe not, because this flan was not soft. This flan was full of hard peas, and the texture of the custard very dense, the sort of thing you’d expect in a steam tray.
“It’s cruise ship food,” I said, passing it over to Charlie.
“Oh, man, this is bad,” he said, scraping at the overcooked custard. “And why did he use peas, which came into season like four months ago? He could of done it with carrots, which are awesome right now.”
We pushed the custard to the side and commenced with the manila clams. There must have been 25 of them mixed with hunks of lamb sausage, in a big bowl of broth made of white wine, fennel, cilantro and chiles, though there was redolence of none of these.
Charlie and my husband were busy talking as they each ate one clam, and then another, but I was not feeling as confident of the mollusks. I tasted one; it’s okay, but I did not want another. I tore off a bit of the toasted bread that came with the dish, to dip in the broth, but stopped myself. It was murky and I just… I didn’t want it. I looked up to see that Charlie and my husband had not felt the same; they dipped; they ate. They stopped eating.
“No,” said my husband, pushing away the rest of the bowl. I asked, did he have a bad feeling? He said, maybe, though the sensation turned out to be unfounded.
We looked at the table. We’d left over more than half our dishes, of which the waiter did not take notice when we asked for the check.
Popping into the bathrooms before we left, Charlie and I exited at the same time.
“That was pretty cool,” I said, of what was piped-in to the bathrooms, Juila Child talking about roasting mushrooms.
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “But I don’t know if you want to be broadcasting someone in your restaurant who’s a better cook than you.”
Child, of course, is a better cook than most, but as we walked to another restaurant for dessert, Charlie said, he’d once met her; she’d asked him to make her a ham sandwich. I told him, it must have been the most nerve-wracking ham sandwich-making experience he’d ever had.
“But you know, it really wasn’t,” he said. “She was just so cool, and the thing is, when you watched her on TV, she was never afraid to make mistakes. She didn’t want to be perfect, she knew is was better not to be, and more fun.”
Yes, because we learn except from our mistakes. But it might be too much to hope that Stein is in the practice phase at Terroir, as I’ve seen little evidence of fun on the plate.
Phone: (503) 288-3715
Address: 3500 NE Martin Lurther King Boulevard, Portland, OR 97212 GoogleMap
Hours: Tues-Sat 4pm – 11pm
Website: TerroirPortland.com
Nancy Rommelmann writes for the LA Weekly, Bon Appetit, the Los Angeles Times, Portland Monthly and other publications. She is the author of several books, as well as the pinch-hit baker/bottlewasher at Ristretto Roasters, her husband’s coffee roastery and cafe in NE Portland. Her personal blog can be found here.
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