The Best Things Eater Portland Ate in July 2025

Eater

2 days ago

Welcome to The Best Dishes the Eater Portland Team Ate This Month, featuring the dishes that the Portland-based Eater team can't stop thinking about.
Panisse at L'Echelle
Panisse at L'Echelle. Brenna Houck
I finally got to check out L'Echelle this past month, the new French restaurant from owner Luke Dirks and chef Mika Paredes that's been widely heralded as the late chef Naomi Pomeroy's final restaurant. Located along the busy SE Division dining corridor, L'Echelle occupies a corner space and is all trimmed out in royal blue, giving the feel of an understated but refined bistro. The menu is fittingly understated. My co-conspirator Nicole and I sampled a few things including the oeufs in aioli with a crown of salmon roe, pork crepinette, seared duck breast, and salad verte. But the standout were the panisse — little cubes of fluffy chickpea fritter served with a sauce Algerienne. The fritters themselves had the crisp outer texture of a tot and a fluffy whipped chickpea interior to slather or dip into the creamy sauce. To top it off, they're gluten-free. — Brenna Houck, cities manager
The Sinful Trinity pie from Prettyboy Pizza
The Sinful Trinity at Prettyboy Pizza Nicole Fellah
It's not often that a gluten-free pizza pie comes out so aesthetically appealing that my gluten-tolerant dining companion reflexively reaches for a slice. But that's what happened during a recent visit to Prettyboy Pizza, the newish pizza shop housed in Little Beast Brewing, one of Portland's easiest-to-like breweries (it's probably that butter-yellow signage and homey outdoor patio). Here, ordering via QR code doesn't seem charmless once you encounter the friendly staff shuttling crispy, cheese-laced pies out of the kitchen in rapid succession. The pizza here falls somewhere between 'grandmother-style,' as Prettyboy calls it, and classic Detroit, with a sharp, craggy cheese rim that crackles at first bite. Chef Justin Moore masterminded the gluten-free crust, which, while thin, has surprising airiness and remains sturdy enough to stand up to a trio of sauces. Any pie blanketed with blistered pepperoni cups is worth ordering, but I went with the Sinful Trinity — slathered with marinara, vodka, and pesto sauces, then finished with nutty Pecorino. Either way, you can't miss. — Nicole Fellah, Eater cities manager
Kimchi mac and cheese at Frybaby
Chicken and kimchi mac and cheese from Frybaby. Brenna Houck
It can be intense and unforgiving cooking at a big festival. Such was undoubtedly the case at Project Pabst in July, fortunately Frybaby came in clutch with a limited but lovely menu with under a 10-minute wait. My partner and I ordered the chicken tenders tossed in ginger soy and an order of the kimchi macaroni and cheese. The chicken tenders were extremely hot and crispy — and a big portion for the price — but the kimchi mac may have impressed us more. The dish is super creamy and a little spicy with a generous helping of furikake striping the top of the cup. It was maybe too hot of a day for such a rich bowl of macaroni but not a single bite went to waste. My partner remarked it might be the best restaurant macaroni he's had. Shoutout to the team for pulling off such a seamless operation. — B.H.
Egg custard tart and BEC bánh xèo from Berlu
What's there to say about Berlu that hasn't already been said about Berlu? The Vietnamese cafe reopened to much deserved fanfare in late June, satisfying longtime fans who mourned the loss of its inventive diasporic pastries when chef Vince Nguyen closed it in October to reimagine its future. Now back in a bigger, brighter space with its beloved pastry lineup and a couple new savory additions, Berlu has entered its next era. I made two visits in one week on a recent trip to Portland. The first pastry that broke my brain with its goodness wasn't the very popular, beautifully corrugated pandan bánh bò nướng — it was a coconut egg custard tart crowned with a shaggy layer of salted egg yolk. The crisp cassava crust and not-too-sweet filling gets a shock of salty richness from the dried yolk, making for a nuanced bite. The BEC bánh xèo, one of Berlu's newer savory dishes, takes a bacon-egg-and-cheese approach to a Vietnamese crepe kicked up with turmeric, coconut milk powder, and rice flour. I ordered it without bacon and still got enough fattiness from the the egg, cheese, and accompanying avocado, the bundle of which I tucked into lettuce, topped with herbs, and dunked into tangy nước chấm. — N.F.
R&R relleno at Javelina
The wall of books and art stands tall as the first thing a diner sees walking into Javelina, a display that captures contemporary Native American culture (Poet Warrior by former national poet laureate Joy Harjo) and fine dining (cookbooks by Enrique Olvera). A stuffed pepper at the restaurant works to blend those ideas together. The blue corn batter is light and not too stodgy, the white tepary beans firm, the verde sauce on top vibrant and fragrant. It's stuffed with rabbit and rattlesnake, a lighter meat pairing in a well-made sausage. Chef Alexa Numkena-Anderson's restaurant and dishes provide both neighborhood vibes, a place to eat on a regular Sunday evening, and something much more profound, a restaurant merging her high-end chef skills with a cuisine unfamiliar to European fine dining kitchens. The rabbit and rattlesnake relleno is a triumphant topnote crowning all that complexity. -Paolo Bicchieri, associate editor
Fried chicken biscuit at Jojo
The chicken biscuit at Jojo. Brenna Houck
A friend and I hit up Jojo for Saturday brunch this month — at opening time, when Portlanders were already clamoring to get into the restaurant. We placed our orders at the host stand and snagged a picnic table on the patio. In these expensive times, you'd expect restaurant portions to begin to shrink. However, I'm pleased to report that this is not so at Jojo, where you can find a fried chicken and biscuit sandwich so hulking that you may struggle to finish it in one sitting — particularly if you ordered jojos on the side. This sandwich was not only huge, it exceeded all expectations. The biscuit holds up well against the chicken and sauce and the meat itself is tender, juicy, and well-seasoned on the inside with a shatteringly crisp skin. — B.H.
Tamarind mala fried chicken from Oma's Hideaway
Sometimes a severely gluten-intolerant person wants to eat somewhere so badly they will joyfully tolerate a gluten hit (and weather the aftershock the next day). That person is me at Oma's Hideaway, a restaurant I visited once two years ago and vowed to revisit on my next trip. This time, I tried the Oma's Table tasting menu, which offers an array of Southeast Asian small plates before the pièce de résistance: a tamarind-mala fried chicken platter. Spun with sweet and spicy tamarind sauce, smashed sichuan peppercorns, crushed peanuts, lime leaf salt, and 'hella herbs,' as the restaurant's website states, this is a bite you can't stop picking up even as there are other dishes on the table that demand attention, like cooling cucumber raita salad, caramelized carrot and leek curry alongside flaky roti canai, and salted egg yolk curry fries pocked with fermented serrano chiles and scallion (we added the latter on). Wash it all down with whatever the cocktail for a cause is, or something zero-proof like the 'I Am Serious' with pandan, coconut, and lime. — N.F.
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