Editor’s note: This week, we continue our countdown of Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022, leading to our Restaurant of the Year announcement on Friday. At No. 5: Gabbiano’s, a new Italian American restaurant overflowing with warm hospitality, fun cocktails and melted mozzarella.
Want to understand Gabbiano’s? It’s not too hard. Just take a peek in the second bathroom, where the walls are hung with posters for the original Star Wars trilogy redone as if they were Italian spaghetti westerns.
Before the pandemic, local chefs seemed determined to reinvent Italian American cuisine in Portland, with restaurants and pop-ups including Omerta, Il Solito and Ava Geno’s topping tables with red-checked tablecloths, Chianti-bottle candleholders and cheffed-up takes on chicken Parmesan. But none of them nailed what we love about red sauce cooking until Gabbiano’s.
The restaurant was a surprise January opening in the former Yakuza, on a Concordia neighborhood block already crowded with pasta spots including the neighboring Ripe Cooperative and corner wine bar Dame. But David Sigal and Blake Foster of the Zoo Bar pop-up had the Gabbiano’s formula dialed in from the start. The room — breezy in summer, cozy in winter — quickly filled up with people happily enjoying sauce-drenched “cups” of fried mozzarella, big plates of spaghetti and meatballs and more espresso martinis than you’ll find on a full season of “Below Deck.”
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After years of COVID restrictions, Gabbiano’s feels like a release, and a perfect date spot for 2022. Even when the chef Liz Serrone’s kitchen gives classic recipes a tweak, they still feel respectful of Italian American tradition. Take the spaghetti and meatballs, a big plate of clearly fresh noodles, soft but not overcooked, with garlic-spiced beef and pork meatballs drenched in tasty marinara. (The impossibly harsh meatball critic I married gave grudging praise to the ones we tried in June, though my Sicilian father-in-law would have found a more recent version “too tight;” I liked them both.)
I’ve enjoyed the lumache with spicy ‘nduja, and am curious to try the brown butter alfredo and eggplant Parm “Liz-agna.” But it’s hard to break away from the favorites. There’s a heavily dressed radicchio Caesar in the long line of post-Nostrana Portland radicchio Caesars, plus other bright seasonal salads worth your time. I think I’d prefer an old-school antipasti board to the antipasto bruschetta, but with its coppa, cheese, red peppers, mushrooms and edible flowers, the toast does look good on the gram. And everyone here orders the fried mozzarella, a trio of golden-fried mozzarella “cups” cradling marinara sauce like so many crispy cheese shot glasses. At they a little too big? That might be the point.
If you order the white fish piccata, remember to save some focaccia to dip in the lemon-butter sauce (I would love to see a version of that sauce some day used with a shrimp Francese, my favorite under-appreciated Italian American dish). The chicken Parm is breaded, fried, as big as a catcher’s mitt, topped with melted mozzarella, marinara and a side of garlic bread. It’s as classic as they come, and a perfect pairing with the house Italian red. An order of tiramisu, with its line of espresso-soaked lady fingers, isn’t a terrible idea.
Gabbiano’s is a serious cocktail bar, too, albeit a seriously playful one. Come for the limoncello drops, the martinis served in their own little shaker and the “caprese” Negroni infused with sun-dried tomato and basil and garnished with a cherry-sized mozzarella ball. The Old Fashioned is excellent.
I have this restaurant at No. 5 on our new restaurant guide, but after revisiting this weekend, I’m already wondering if that’s too low. Among all the great spots on our new restaurant guide, this is the one I’m most likely to return to on my own time and dime. Gabbiano’s is that rare place we didn’t know we needed — perhaps even thought we didn’t need — a red-sauce restaurant overflowing with warm hospitality and melted mozzarella. Some things don’t need reinventing.
What to order: Mozzarella cups, a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs, an Old Fashioned and a bib.
Details: Gabbiano’s serves dinner Wednesday to Sunday at 5411 N.E. 30th Ave., 503-719-4373, gabbianospdx.com
Read more: Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com
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