Merchant of Venice
1341 NE Orenco Station Parkway in Hillsboro, (503) 640-1523
Can a scrappy little Italian from the inner city find happiness in the well-scrubbed homogeneity of the suburbs? Back in the early 1990s the Merchant of Venice occupied a run-down building on NE Broadway, then a fading commercial neighborhood occupied by a typewriter store, an outlet for window shades, a dark ancient tavern, and a few other businesses. But the gentrification of what’s now called the Lloyd District pushed the funky cafe out, and all those who loved the low-priced pasta and pizza mourned its demise.
More than five years later and about 15 miles away, the Merchant has been reborn in the award-winning suburban development called Orenco Station. With its brownstone-style lofts and Craftsman houses, the subdivision looks a lot better than the typical strip mall and townhouse blight that’s eating up prime Washington County farmland at an alarming rate. Where the big four-lane boulevards intersect out here you’ll usually find an Olive Garden, Chevys, Red Robin or other chain restaurant that offers food to match the bland suburban landscape. While Orenco Station provides a new model for what the ‘burbs could look like, the Merchant of Venice offers a light-rail accessible alternative to cookie-cutter food.
The Italian food at the new Merchant is a slightly upscale version of what was served at the old one, with a few entrees added to the basic formula of antipasti, insalata, pizza, and pasta. The best appetizer’s also the cheapest, a three-dollar bowl of olives spiced with a head-clearing dose of red pepper. Other starters include bruschetta, the ubiquitous and almost always mispronounced Roman garlic toast (note to servers: in Italian “ch” sounds like “k”). Here it’s light on both garlic and olive oil, but a trio of simple spreads—including roasted garlic, tapenade, and dried tomato pesto—compensates. Roasted and marinated eggplant slices wrapped with proscuitto are tasty, as are skewered and grilled shrimp over salad greens. Bits of smoked chicken, halved artichoke hearts, crumbled Oregon blue cheese, mushrooms, and filberts are tossed with spinach in the hearty insalata portia. A Caesar variant includes white beans and croutons, but no anchovies.
The spaghetti and meatballs, a favorite at the old place, makes a comeback here with the same rich tomato sauce. The chicken Bolognese also reappears, and this no-red-meat version of the classic ragu provides a robust if not very authentic boost to a plate of linguini or slab of lasagna. A modified alfredo didn’t do it for me, though. I prefer the original, artery-clogging combination of butter, cream, and parmigiano to the Merchant’s recipe, which adds garlic and spinach to the cream, but skimps on the cheese. An entree of grilled ribeye steak, nicely seared but still rare and served over white beans, tomatoes, and spinach came closer to the Italian ideal of minimal interference with good ingredients.
While the food marks an improvement over typical suburban fare, the service might make you feel like you’re stuck in the food court at the mall. The servers didn’t really know much about what they were putting on the table, and they often had trouble just delivering the food. On different nights salad and soup arrived before the appetizer, and dishes delivered while we were still eating the previous course were jammed onto the small table. On one visit I heard about the night’s specials as they were recited to the next table after I had ordered. We waited a long time before dessert menus were offered, and dirty dishes were left on the table when it was finally served. An occasional lapse may be annoying, but the servers at the Merchant of Venice need some training in the basics. It’s hard to focus on the food when the service is driving you nuts.
City dwellers tend to get jaded about eating out. There are good restaurants everywhere, and if we don’t like the way they fold the napkin over the bread basket at one place, we can walk down the street to the next. Out in the vast stretches of suburbia, where the majority of Americans actually live, the choices aren’t so great. If you live anywhere near Hillsboro, they’re a lot better now.