I figured we should occasionally give Portland the same treatment we give other cities we visit (that aren't our home town). I'm going to tell you about a place we stumbled upon last night called Sauvage.
We were on our way to the airport to pick up Kevin's mom. We thought we'd get out there early and grab some quick dinner at one of the restaurants in the shopping center nearby, but traffic was so bad that it took us about a half an hour just to get down our hill to the Burnside Bridge. I suggested we grab dinner locally and wait for traffic to die down so I found a sushi spot we hadn't tried on the East side of the river that had lots of good Yelp ratings. Perfect. We parked (a couple blocks away, in the pouring rain) and got out and headed for the restaurant. We'd taken about 10 steps when we saw a small sandwich board on the sidewalk, an open door, and a menu on the wall for a place called Sauvage. The menu sounded fabulous.
What about this place? Sounds good. Let's try it.
Sauvage is an intimate restaurant over in the SE industrial area that opened right before we left on our 4 month odyssey in July of this year. Fausse Piste is its craft winery sibling. The restaurant seats 33 and is open Tuesdays through Saturdays 4pm-11pm.
We sat at the bar and met and chatted with several of the owners/chefs/winemakers. There are four of them: Jesse, Jeff, Chris, and Nicolas. These guys between them have a ton of cool experience: Culinary Institute of America in NY, Herbfarm Restaurant in Woodinville, Owen Roe Winery in St. Paul, Oregon, 50 Plates, Bluehour, the wine bar Alu…the list goes on. They make wine. They make food. Really good wine and really good food.
They've got bar seating, a couple small tables, and one long family-style table that seats 16.
We had several small plates: a kobe beef tartare hand roll with a quail egg yolk, pheasant dumplings with Oregon truffles and sherry, a black garlic caesar salad with coddled egg and guanciale, and at the last minute we added the wild boar ribs with hazelnut and daikon and wow! Glad we did…those were amazing.
Sauvage also offers a Mystery Dinner: 3 or 5 seasonal courses (of their choice) with wines ($40 or $60). We'll be going back for that.
It's fun to read about somewhere new and hear what people say and decide you need to go try it, but it's sometimes more fun just to stumble onto something amazing that's brand new and only has 3 reviews on Yelp so far.
