Tabor Tavern

Portland is a foodie town. If you are not from here and crave something from your home town we guarantee you can find a good rendition of it somewhere in the City, if not just outside of it. But be forewarned Portlanders also like to put a Pacific NW twists on what others would call regional icons. One of these iconic dishes has been showing up all over Portland restaurants and that dish is Poutine.  Many thanks to our neighbors to the north, mainly Quebec City, for this french fries sprinkled with cheese curds and covered in brown gravy treat! We've had delicious versions of Poutine in Chicago and recently at some Portland restaurants, such as the Potato Champion and The Original Dinerant.

So, remember that Pacific NW twist we mentioned earlier? Well the picture above is an example of that twist going terribly wrong. Found at Tabor Tavern this was all kinds of wrong. First of all, their gravy was an onion gravy that tasted like sweet french onion soup. To make things worse, the oddly sweet gravy was luke-warm, where the cheese curds didn't even melt and become stringy gooey goodness, that was a deal breaker. But the final straw was the fries were over cooked and tasted like my highschool cafeteria's fries. Forks are now officially down. The rest of the meal didn't go well either.

We were there to try their burgers and the Tabor Burger was good. A Pacific NW twist on a typical bacon and blue cheese burger that actually worked with a housemade bacon jam. But the brioche bun was not good and we ended up eating their "Naked Burger with gouda cheese" burger patty only, leaving the bun on the plate. Which we NEVER do. NEVER. As the dinner crowd started to pile in we really wished the original Bangkok Kitchen was still in the building. We would have preferred to pay for pourly seasoned pad thai noodles at that point.

I'm beginning to think this meal started my whole fall season grumpiness mentioned in the previous blog post.