The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: PALEY’S PLACE
June 21, 2019
I have been a fan of Paley’s Place since it opened, going for special occasions, introducing my young son to fine cuisine there, always impressed by the sophistication of its food. Masterful technique combined with vibrant imagination (tilted to Oregon ingredients) yielded amazing meals surpassing any other restaurant in Portland. The restaurant was a world-player.
I mainly live overseas now, and my return this summer coincided with a special occasion for our daughter. So, it seemed natural to take her to my favorite Portland restaurant.
We decided to get the five-course tasting menu with wine. We started with an amuse bouche of thinly sliced fruit (apple if I remember) with a dash of cheese and sprouts. It was tasty, but nowhere near memorable, the sort of thing you might find on-line under 30 Thanksgiving Appetizers.
For a first course my wife and I had a charcuterie plate: house-made salami, ham, pate and pickled vegetables. It was a very small portion and tasty, nothing more. It was obviously easy work for the kitchen, just slicing a few items and putting them on a platter. The charcuterie platters at countless restaurants – Olympic Provisions comes to mind – equal or surpass this one in variety and flavor. In my view, the restaurant could have upped its game considerably if they’d done something interesting with goose or duck or lamb or goat or rabbit, etc. This was plain jane, standard fare done well.
Our next course was a Kale salad, a conical mound of shredded kale (like you can buy in a bag at Trader Joe’s), parmesan, and bread crumbs, in a blue cheese dressing. It tasted fine, but required no chefy virtuosity, no lyrical flight of imagination, to create at all. To be blunt, it was on par with the salads at Cheesecake Factory, not what I would have expected from a restaurant of high reputation with presumably the finest chefs at the helm.
Salmon came next, overcooked, with a small pile of grains alongside, some artichoke heart, olives and salsa. Again, this was easy work from the kitchen, the grains obviously hydrated some time before and spooned on the plate. The salsa was tasty, but nowhere near as tasty as a lovely sauce would have been. I suspect it was chosen because it’s easy. Make a batch ahead of time and just spoon it from a Tupperware. There was little if any sense of a maestro artistically combobulating foodstuffs at the enchanted moment before serving. The food felt mechanical: pull from this container, pull from that container, put on plate. This wasn’t bad food, mind you. It was just nothing like what I would have expected from a restaurant of fabled reputation, working at the top of its game, competing with other superb restaurants at its price point worldwide. It was not food to delight, amaze, or overwhelm you with its flavor or originality, not close. And this is what Paley’s used to regularly deliver.
Next came Wagyu beef for me that was ordered medium rare and came rare. There was a mélange of vegetables alongside. Thin mushroom stock, with little flavor, was poured over, mainly making the meat wet and doing little to enhance its flavor. As with the salmon and charcuterie, this is a dish that leaned heavily on mise en place, too heavily in my view, asking little of the artistry or magic of the chef.
My wife unexpectedly received a completely different main course that the waiters hadn’t asked if she wanted and that she would not have ordered had she known. It was duck dumplings, rather like petite pierogi, akin to pot stickers with a ducky forcemeat. Obviously quite a few of these were made up ahead of time by the kitchen and just given a quick dip in boiling water and a stir in the sauté pan before serving. I forget what the embellishments were, but there was a strong overall feeling that this was quick and easy stuff that any new cooking school grad could easily sling.
The meal ended with a cheese course for my wife and myself which was tasty but required no virtuosity from the kitchen. The crackers it came with were house-made and delicious. Our daughter had a perfect panna cotta (delightfully wobbly) with a berry sorbet of some sort, artfully plated, a lovely finale.
There used to be tablecloths. There no longer are. This is not necessary, of course. But for a restaurant charging top dollar that I had thought of as luxe, I was surprised. It felt more like a cost-cutting measure than an aesthetic decision.
Five wines were served. All tasty, one containing gewürztraminer particularly so. The tab was $450 for three which we felt was outrageously high for a meal of such light caliber, even counting the wine (all of which were scant pours). For $450 I want more than a kale salad. For $450 I want more than standard charcuterie, a small portion at that. For $450 I want more than overcooked salmon, undercooked beef, and pre-made duck dumplings, each fashioned with no more skill than a good home cook might deliver. For $450 I want a little more than a minimum pour of wine. Around the world, there are restaurants that dish magic. This meal was not that. To give an example of what other restaurants elsewhere on the planet are delivering at the same price point, see https://www.ardentgourmet.com/restaurant-floreyn-in-amsterdam or, for just half the price, https://www.ardentgourmet.com/little-kitchen Or, as a local reference point, we went to St. Jack, down the street from Paley’s Place, last year and had a superb French meal with wine (for three) for about $300.
Service was excellent and we appreciated it.
The name Paley’s Place suggests that Vitali Paley is about the place. You might even imagine he cooks at the restaurant that bears his name. After all, it’s his place. I gather that he’s opened a number of other restaurants in town and so presumably he’s spread thin. Perhaps this is why his namesake restaurant has changed. Maybe we were there on an off night or our respective senses of what makes a fine meal have diverged. On the other hand, possibly the very talented Mr. Paley is dialing it in. With regret, and distinct affection for what once was, we will not go back.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 2
Ambiance: 3
Service: 4
Overall Value: 1
PALEY’S PLACE
1204 NW 21st Ave., Portland, OR 97209-1609
+1 503-243-2403