SO LONG, OOLONG: Now it’s just Portland’s. |
I felt a little pessimistic about Portland’s Restaurant and Bar. There was something odd about the way that it took over from Oolong so rapidly. It was the same place, same décor, same staff in the front of the house, but suddenly foreign and eclectic became classic American. Like that Rocco DiSpirito reality show, Portland’s forced us to confront an ugly truth: restaurants, like human beings, are mostly persona. There is no such thing as character anymore. The new name played into this feeling in precisely the wrong way. A name like Portland’s is forgivable in a place that has been around for a long time. It is hard to swallow when you suspect it was thought up by a consultant brought in to deal with a cash-flow crisis.
But some personas are pleasing, and when you eat at Portland’s you feel much better about things. The décor is still striking, and works just as well in a steak place as it did with upscale pan-Asian. Brick walls dominate the main dining room, and there is a nice little raised section in the back near the water. The attractive horseshoe bar, where they pour the same great cocktails, dominates the front of the room.
Portland’s advertises its “steak, seafood and chops,” but I think it will ultimately be judged as a steak place. For those who take steak seriously, this raises a host of questions: grass-fed, grain finished or straight corn? Prime or choice? Hormones? Wet-aged or dry? I tried a few steaks to see what I could figure out. Then I just went ahead and asked our waiter. The steaks at Portland’s (between $19 and $29) are mostly prime (sometimes top choice) — which means they are well marbled with the fat that helps make a steak tender when cooked. They are grain finished, which lends them flavor compared to cows fed a simple corn diet until slaughter (though perhaps not as much flavor as grass-fed beef). They are sometimes organic. They are wet-aged. This means they are not like the beef you saw in Rocky, which was exposed to air while it aged until decomposition (and Rocky) made it tender. Eventually, such dry-aged beef becomes lined with mold, and the flavor becomes richer and more complex. Wet-aged beef is wrapped in plastic, avoids the mold, and is a little cheaper.
These characteristics were on display in the steaks I tried at Portland’s. The Angus New York Strip Steak, a big 12-ounce piece, had been cooked to a nice pinkish medium and its fat had made it quite tender. It tasted very good, but did not offer the strong, rich, and idiosyncratic flavors you find with dry aging. The beef came with a peppercorn-brandy cream sauce that was not so peppery as to overwhelm the meat. For this sort of steak, the sauce was perfect. At lunch the grilled tenderloin tips had the same basic qualities. I did not like the house steak sauce quite as much — it was a little gelatinous and a touch too sweet — but the beef was very good. During the day the sides were better. Rather than roasted sweet potatoes I got some vibrant and salty sautéed spinach and a cheesy, almost soupy twice-baked potato with big chewy pieces of bacon.
