They're just two letters, but they mean a lot.
"An ox is an older, more mature animal," explains Greg Denton, sitting with his wife and partner, Gabrielle Quinonez Denton, in an empty dining room that in six hours will be as busy as any in Portland.
"We think it fits us. We're not young people, and this is not our first restaurant."
Ox, The Oregonian's 2013 Restaurant of the Year, is built on the most basic element in cooking, the first recipe ever -- the application of fire to meat.
But to create the explosive success that has produced two- and three-hour waits on weekends, Ox puts on its grill everything that Greg, 37, and Gabrielle, 41, have learned in two decades of working in restaurants from Vermont to Hawaii, in eating from Spain to Argentina.
Their experience is on display in not only the detail-minded skill, but also the range of Ox's menu. It extends from the potent lamb T-bone to a charred slab of halibut anointed with edible flowers and -- defying any single point of origin -- an exquisite thin-sliced smoked beef tongue flecked with sweetbread croutons.
At Ox, says Greg, "No dish is ready for the menu unless we're both salivating over it."
Roots of a restaurant
It all starts with Gabrielle's Latin American sensibility, from growing up in Los Angeles with Ecuadorean roots, and with the New American themes from Greg's first restaurant job in Vermont.
Then there's what they learned at their first restaurant together, Terra in Napa Valley -- where, Greg says, the two fell in love over the grill. The lesson they took away was "you have to be as excited over the last bite as the first."
Later, there were moments of revelation at Asador Etxebarri in Spain, rated among the top restaurants of the world. "There are places that floor you because you can't understand how they did it," recalls Gabrielle. "This was the opposite, because you could see what they did."
There was the discovery of the shortcomings of paradise. Starting and running a successful restaurant in Maui, they realized Hawaii was just not the place to be if your cooking interests run to roasts and braises. "There were a couple of times," remembers Greg, "when we blasted the AC as an excuse to cook winter food."
They visited Portland during a rainy November, checked out the Winter Ale Festival, and immediately decided the city was "awesome."
But when they relocated here, they faced the ordeal of cooking at Lucier, the most spectacular failure in recent Portland restaurant history, reminding them that a restaurant has to be about what diners want. (As Greg puts it, "You don't have a caviar cart during the Great Recession.") So for diners, Ox can be either expensive or not that expensive, depending on their choices.
The Dentons' last stop before opening Ox last year was a three-year stay at Metrovino, an education for them in both restaurants and in Portland. They were the opening chefs at Metrovino, working to fit their menu around 90 wines offered by the glass. Critical response was strong, but at the far north end of the Pearl, Greg recalls, "The entire time it was a struggle to get people in the door."
They tried strategies to jump-start the operation, including winning a game cook-off, where they met two-time James Beard Award winner Gabriel Rucker, chef and co-owner at
and
, The Oregonian's 2008 and 2012 restaurants of the year, respectively.
When it was time for them to strike out on their own, Rucker -- who treats the role of chef almost as a talk-show host, chatting in the open kitchen as he cooks -- became a role model for the Dentons not just in the quality of their food, but in the atmosphere of their restaurant.
A place of their own
The Dentons made sure Ox's grill was placed in the center of the dining room, where a few fortunate diners a night sit close enough to the flames to singe their debit cards.
The menu ranges from crisp empanadas to housemade chorizo sausage, but its gleaming heart is the grill's treatment of beef -- skirt steaks and rib-eyes that hit the table rich and vivid, exulting in their own juices. "The more simple we get," says Greg, "that's when people say, 'This is amazing.'"
But it's an underestimation to call Ox a steakhouse -- unless you like steak. The grill sparks not only the menu, but also the feeling the Dentons wanted to build in their restaurant. Whoever is working the grill -- often Greg himself, while Gabrielle coordinates things in the back of the house -- has to not only cook but to converse with the customers, an arrangement the Dentons admired at Le Pigeon.
"Nobody works the grill who can't talk to people," says Greg.
The challenge, Gabrielle adds, is "How hospitable can you be when you've got 30 pieces of meat grilling in front of you?"
The carefully tended mood is part of an excitement that spreads through Ox like smoke from the grill. Hospitality is a constant expectation for everyone, perhaps especially keen for the people who have to tell customers there's a two-hour wait, and suggest that maybe they'd like to get a drink somewhere. To soften the news, the Dentons added a bar next door.
Since the restaurant's opening last year, its most significant change has been two openings cut into the brick wall between the main and back dining rooms, to get the rear tables more involved in the vibe.
Ox could be as inviting as possible, though, and it wouldn't stand out in Portland's crowded dining scene if the Dentons hadn't fine-tuned their particularly lively blend of Northwest ingredients and wood-fired Argentine inspiration.
At Metrovino, the couple had become known for particular dishes, including a seafood chowder that reached depths of maritime richness. When they left, Gabrielle remembers, "People kept saying, 'Are you going to take the chowder?' Greg said, 'No, I'm going to do a better one.'"
He started with some things he'd learned. "People in Portland, they love shells," he says. "They like chowder with shells in it." He didn't want to thicken his with flour, and looking for a way to deepen the richness and flavor, he had an inspiration: a smoked marrow bone.
The impact, he says, is simple: "It's fat on fat."
Now, the chowder with a marrow bone resting in the bowl has become a signature dish for fans of Ox. More to the point, Greg says, "We'll sell a lot of chowder in a night."
Reflecting on the Dentons' years of experiences and insights, it's what you might call a mature chowder -- which has nothing to do with people being willing to wait two hours to eat it.
But at Ox, maturity is one reason why people do.
-- David Sarasohn