Mother’s Bistro & Bar
409 SW Second, Portland, Oregon, (503) 464-1122
reviewed March 2000
At her new restaurant, Lisa Schroeder is mother. She spends at least as much time in the dining room as the kitchen, stopping at one table to ask how they liked the chopped liver, at another to tell them about the day’s pie. And she tells you about that pie the way a mother would tell a grown child who’s maybe come over for Sunday dinner, with “I don’t know if you like coconut so much, but this new pie, it’s good.” What’s not to like about coconut, you’ll be thinking.Not much, it turns out.
The coconut cream pie, an ephemeral cloud of soft custard and whipped cream on a chocolate cookie crumb crust with lightly toasted slivers of coconut, is fabulous. It’s so good that next time dinner might be just a bowl of matzoh ball soup, the better to have plenty of room for the pie without feeling too full.
Mother’s Bistro & Bar serves, as you might suspect, what’s come to be known as “comfort food.” Ms. Schroeder, chef and owner, tells us in the menu that she’s come to the realization that “home-cooked food is the best food,” a rather rare admission from someone in the business of luring folks out of the family dining room. But what she’s getting at is the notion that while the rarified ingredients, complex preparation, and architectural presentation of haute cuisine can definitely result in amazing meals, it’s the down-home food of childhood, whether real or only wished for, that we inevitably return to.
Schroeder, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, raises the bar a bit. Your own mother might have resorted to Mac’n’Cheese from a bright blue box, and there’s a certain nostalgic flavor in that orange cheese powder that many adults still crave, however secretly. At Mother’s, the mac and cheese changes regularly, but is always made with good pasta and real cheese, and it may include smoky bacon, sour cream, or green onions. And there are a few other items, such as a grilled portabello mushroom served with organic field greens or a traditional bistro-style steak frites, that, while tasty, hardly qualify as home cooking.
But that chopped liver, a coarse pate sweetened with slow-cooked onion, fits the bill perfectly. So do the pierogi, the eastern European version of ravioli, here made from a tender pasta-like dough and filled with very traditional seasoned mashed potato. Served with little bowls of caramelized onion and sour cream, they are a delicious throwback to an earlier time. Ditto the tender biscuits and soft Parkerhouse rolls, baked daily and served warm.
Other reminders of those halcyon days include slow-stewed chicken with fluffy herb-flecked dumplings, fork-tender pot roast, and the ultimate comfort food, meatloaf. The roasted chicken is probably better than mom’s, with perfectly crisp skin and a moist interior. And unless she spent those carefree days before the children at Cordon Bleu, it’s unlikely mom ever called you to supper with a four-peppercorn crusted tombo tuna filet accompanied by wild mushroom and almond pilaf and topped with wasabi aoili.
Of course, that’s one reason why Mother’s has been popular since it opened. You can go back home, figuratively speaking, with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, but you’re not limited to “what’s for dinner tonight.” The regular menu offers mussels steamed with white wine and shallots, a chopped salad with Genoa salami, provolone, garbanzos, and red onion, or cioppino, the classic fish stew of San Francisco that combines prawns, calamari, mussels, clams, and fin fish in a garlicky tomato broth. Beef tenderloin fra diavalo, a special one night, topped pan-seared medallions with an aggressively spicy tomato sauce, perfect with a simple olive oil-and-garlic tossed linguine.
Schroeder ranges even farther afield with her Mother of the Month menu, an homage to a selected mother that includes her ethnic or cultural favorites. One month the M.O.M. menu listed Grandma Mary’s rigatoni with meatballs, with a long-simmered tomato sauce straight out of Bruculinu, the immigrant Sicilian neighborhood in the borough more commonly called Brooklyn. Recently the featured mother’s cooking has been a fascinating blend of French and Moroccan cuisine with a Jewish emphasis. Seven vegetable soup, a traditional Passover dish, combined leeks, onions, turnips, peas, fava beans, carrots, and potatoes with lamb and cilantro, in a smooth puree with an intriguing depth of flavor.
Pastry chef Debbie Putnam, responsible for the biscuits and rolls, also provides an impressive array of desserts. There’s that coconut cream pie, of course, but the bread pudding, which varies and might be flavored with dark chocolate or caramel, or fruit crisps are worth coming back for, too. Particularly homey, the mascarpone rice pudding is a creamy custard, may even more so with the addition of the fresh Italian-style cheese.
Of course, we all have issues with our mothers, and this one is no exception. The high-ceilinged, big-windowed space is inviting enough, but some of the tables are just too close together and turn conversation with a companion into a group discussion. Rustic wooden benches serve as banquets along the windows, and even with the extra pillows provided I find them uncomfortable. If you prefer to sit in a chair when you eat, ask for a different table. Mother’s does have a very nice little bar, a pleasantly dark spot of deep green walls with black and gold accents, crushed velvet drapes, and softly upholstered armchairs and couches. But it’s small enough that if only one person lights up, the smoke will drive those who don’t care to smell like ashtrays out into the fresh air.
But you shrug off your mother’s familiar refrain about her long wait for grandchildren or ignore the subtle digs at your new hair cut, because, well, she is your mother. And because nobody else can make pasta fagioli or rhubarb pie or whatever it is that she cooks just for you taste quite the same. Lisa Schroeder’s cooking at Mother’s can’t replicate that secret sauce or pie crust, but it comes close. So eat already.