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Escape clause

LESS THAN A SAWBUCK: An all-you-can-eat turkey dinner.

By the time the Great Depression hit, fine dining in the United States was already reeling from 10 years of Prohibition. The scrappy neighborhood restaurants that had survived just had to get scrappier. Food got wetter — since milky, cheesy sauces conveyed calories more cheaply and could be mopped up to make staple toasts and biscuits more satisfying. Creamed meat was common. FDR himself liked to order “Country Captain Chicken” — a sort of spicy stewy dish made with curry.

Creamed meat is woefully hard to come by these days in Portland. But there are biscuits and plenty of soft food piled high on your first plate of Steve and Renee’s turkey dinner. The bird itself is boiled — a deeply traditional method that works out a good deal better than you might expect. It’s moist and mild-flavored with a texture very similar to a roasted bird. The dark meat was especially good. The light tan gravy was just the right amount of salty and there was plenty of it to sneak past the meat and mingle with the sides beneath and around it.

A good deal of what is so satisfying at Steve and Renee’s is soaking in what is going on around you. The waitstaff keeps up a funny and easygoing banter between themselves and the customers; it’s so natural that it seems almost unnatural — the sort of thing Mamet shoots for. Renee herself handles crises with a motherly soothing efficiency. A vegetarian who someone brought along is offered all the sides and a pretty good salad topped with apples and melon. “We’ll take care of you, sweetie,” says Renee. A crash reverberating from behind the counter is followed by a singsong “Nee! We need more glasses!”

Even though you are in a little strip mall, things at S&R’s have a comforting oldness. The long red countertop is worn pink where thousands of plates have slid back and forth. The walls are spotted with cheaply framed photographs of an eclecticism only time can achieve. Someone’s pottery-class bowls line a shelf. When the cook puts an order up he calls out the name of the waitress who will deliver it. They don’t take plastic.

You might stand in line for a bit. While the people queuing with you are not old enough to remember the last Depression, many might have been conceived during the post-New Deal euphoria. Some of your own layers of clothes might come off, since Steve and Renee keep it hot in their dining room — allowing you to sweat away some of those calories the way they did it before air-conditioning.