Tabla
200 NE 28th
Portland, Oregon
503-238-3777
The results range from really good to eye-popping.
Starters can be simple, like olives and tiny artichokes in olive oil ($5), or just seem simple. The first bite of pancetta-wrapped grilled apricots ($ ) provides that great contrast of salty pork with sweet fruit, but then queso fresco, creamy and slightly molten, oozes out of hiding with a little explosion of mellow.
Pay attention and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Three or four ingredients make up most of the offerings, and while they’re often arrayed separately around the plate, they’re meant to be eaten together.
Sushi-grade yellowtail tuna, slowly poached in extra virgin olive oil, shares tabletop real estate with crispy house-baked flatbread, garlic aioli, and pungent tapenade made from oil-cured black olives ($7). Each of the four elements has its own integrity, and you could eat them one at a time and be perfectly happy. But spread the aoili on the flatbread, add some tuna, a dollop of tapenade, and happiness takes on new meaning.
A hot, puffy blini ($7) exudes the scent of bay leaf mingled with earthy wild mushrooms. A spoonful of creme fraiche tempers things and pulls the flavors together with a tangy, unctuous mouthfeel. If you’ve remembered to order a plate of Ken’s baguette ($2), you’ll have something handy to wipe every last crumb of pancake, sliver of mushroom, and drop of creme fraiche off the pretty little triangular plate.
The Tabla Caesar ($6) manages not only to avoid cliche but actually offer a refreshingly different version of this overworked favorite. The garlic, anchovy, and egg, hard-boiled in this case, become aioli, which is spread on the plate instead of drowning the greens. They’re romaine , but tiny baby leaves, and they’ve been dusted with a subtle curry and fennel spice blend, then topped with shaved grana cheese and crushed croutons for background crunch.
The menu lists only a handful of different pastas, but they cover a lot of territory. The egg pasta of northern Italy gets a shout out from both tajarin (ta-ya-reen), long, thin, fresh noodles tossed with truffle butter ($6) or sage butter ($5) and agnolotti, tiny envelopes filled with an ephemeral potato fluff, topped with shredded Serrano ham, and served in chicken broth ($5). In the south dried semolina pasta rules, and the spaghetti with chili, garlic, olive oil, bread crumbs, and the pressed, salted tuna roe called bottarga ($4) is just like what you’d find along the coast of Sicily, right down to the liberal use of hot red pepper.
Fish in all its forms always has a place at the Mediterranean table. There’s a hint of southwestern France, that corner where it meets both Spain and sea, in the delicately thin slices of seared rare tuna arranged on a crispy wafer of puff pastry with fennel and green beans in a sherry vinaigrette ($10). Our own Columbia River sturgeon, a fish that should be on more menus, is right at home with white polenta and grape-sized tomatoes splashed with citrus ($10). A smoky peperonata flavored with basil and black olives provides a nice counterpoint to sweet seared scallops ($10).
Tabla takes the traditional duck confit ($11) a step farther by pan-searing the leg-and-thigh piece to a crackling finish, then pairing it with a slice of Port-poached orange that provides both acidity and a little sweet to balance the rich fowl. Squab ($12) gets a similar treatment with a Moroccan spice rub but the tempering comes from fennel seed mashed potatoes slightly sweetened with sherry. An egg baked with a little cream, some Parmesan, and a few pieces of asparagus, then topped with crispy puff pastry ($8) strikes another delicious blow for liberation from the hash browns and bacon prison of breakfast.
With its more traditional dining room and full bar, Tabla feels a little more restaurant-like than its small-plate, wine-bar cousins down the street. Michael Rypkema, a former Serratto manager, keeps the front of the house running like a well-oiled machine. The service is friendly and unobtrusive, there when you need it but mostly transparent. Subtle touches such as high-grade stemware and silver add another hint of formality. But the wide open kitchen loosens things up a little, and the room manages to balance a sit-down dinner atmosphere with the Portland obsession for all things casual.
Co-chefs Adam Berger and Matt Johnson first worked as a team at Serratto, and they pulled the food there up to par with Portland’s best Italian ristoranti. At Tabla they’re seizing the opportunity to “do something besides straight Italian food,” according to Johnson. “We like to take the traditional dishes,” says Berger, “ and tweak them just a bit.”
The result is some incredibly good eating and the kind of concentrated flavor that makes you realize that great food takes more than just assembling a few good ingredients. Some things are astoundingly good, like the cumin-dusted risotto cake ($9), flecked with Dungeness crab meat and served in saffron-flavored broth with strips of fresh sorrel.
Tabla is Spanish for board, plank, or tablet. Johnson and Berger like to think of their new restaurant as a blank slate. It’s one where flavor is being writ large.