Fife
4440 NE Fremont
Portland, Oregon
971-222-3433
reviewed April 2003
Occasionally the good is a little too plain. A shiitake, portobello, and wild rice soup ($6) needed a bit of salt and dollop of butter from the bread plate to really come to life. Redemption arrived with an appetizer of battered and fried artichokes and eggplant($6), perfect little morsels of crunch, so good they almost didn’t need the old school remoulade served alongside. That made the disapointing acorn squash, roasted with quinoa, apricots, and red pepper ($13) even more so. The dried out grain stuffing seemed to have sucked every last bit of flavor right out of the dish. But this flop seems to be an anomoly.
Shaw grew up in Washington, DC, and he flies Chesapeake Bay blue crab out for his Maryland-style crab cakes ($7). I’m a local boy who thinks Dungeness rule, but I loved these. Barely bound with a little egg and just enough bread crumbs to give the outside some crunch, they fall apart at the first touch of a fork and taste, appropriately, like crab.
Except for that interloping crab, Fife sources locally as much as possible, and the grilled leg of lamb ($16) demonstrates why it makes a difference. Sue and Dan Wilson graze sheep on grass eight miles south of Canby. Their SuDan Farms lamb is tender and mildly flavored, perfect for a quick grilling that leaves it pink and juicy. Fife pairs it with ‘mint julep’ sauce, a simple reduction of stock and bourbon flavored with fresh mint that avoids the too-sweet mint jelly cliche.
Dessert is where Fife pushes the boundaries, and pastry chef Steve Smith takes all-American flavors on the kind of consiousness-expanding world journey you might wish certain politicians would try. Rice pudding ($6) goes beyond raisins with layers of jasmine and forbidden rices, the latter cooking up black as caviar. The plate includes a scoop of carrot sorbet, shockingly orange, the familiar essence of carrot there but enhanced with a little more sweetness, maybe the single best thing I’ve eaten all year. No wait, that would have to be the candied serrano chiles right next to it, mind-twisting, tongue-tying little strips of sweet and spicy. There were also shavings of dried carrot with bits of dried apricot (both orange, and a nice little play on color and flavor), and it all sat in a pool of blueberry creme anglais. It might sound like a sweet train wreck, but everything clicked and, full as I was, I wanted more.
More recently I ate apple-cheddar fritters ($6), crunchy brown disks that looked a little like hush puppies but tasted more like ephemeral, wispy apple donuts without the greasy aftertaste. Topped with housemade vanilla ice cream (that proved why vanilla is still the world’s favorite ice cream flavor) and slight squirt of caramel, these had me licking the plate.
The four best seats in the house are the tall stools tucked to the side of the pass-through that separates Fife’s dining room from its kitchen. It’s not that you can’t see the chefs working from the banquette that runs all the way down one wall or from the simple square tables arranged under the Brobdingnagian lampshades that hang from the ceiling. But perched at the counter you don’t just watch. You feel the heat of the stove, hear the sounds of sizzling fat and bubbling stock, smell the char forming on the hunks of red meat.
Shaw seems to thrive on it. On a busy Friday night, the orders flow in one direction across the counter only slightly faster than the plates going back the other way. The chef works in intense bursts, prepping a few orders while a few more cook behind him. Yellow flames engulf the saute pans on the eight burner range, the bright flash reflecting off the polished stainless steel hood to provide a fitting backlight as Shaw looks up to survey the dining room.
He sees a mixed crowd. One group of women have abandoned their partners, whether for good or just the evening isn’t clear, but they’re having a good time together. Some look like older parents and their grown children. I like to think they live nearby and remember when the kids were little, and they would bring them to Rose’s Ice Cream, which once stood on this very spot, for grilled cheese sandwiches and milkshakes. And there are some of the youngish couples who can somehow afford the neighborhood, or maybe they just drove up the hill from Mississippi. They all seem to fit in just fine at Fife.