Each year, The Oregonian revisits dozens of Portland restaurants, then ranks the city’s 40 best for a guide that lands on web browsers, inboxes and driveways this week. Here we’re counting down the top 10 list for 2019, continuing with No. 6: Le Pigeon.
One of the most important restaurants to open in the Pacific Northwest in the past two decades and a key factor in Portland’s rise from dining desert to top American food city, Le Pigeon serves an elevated menu that’s about as French as its name. (If you’re saying “Le Pidgyohn,” you’re doing it wrong).
On a slow night, you can still walk in, snag a coveted seat at the L-shaped chef’s counter and order a burger and a Coors. What other restaurant at this level can claim that?
But don’t stop there. Gabriel Rucker, Le Pigeon’s preternaturally talented two-time James Beard Award-winning chef, remains a creative force, regularly turning over the menu with his team here while overseeing new dishes at the two other restaurants he runs with partner and wine expert Andy Fortgang, downtown’s Little Bird Bistro (215 S.W. Sixth Ave.) and next door’s Canard (stay tuned).
Recent highlights included the mussels scampi, an Italian-Thai mashup of spaghetti and mussels in a green curry sauce that was just spicy enough to keep you guessing, and a deeply bronzed pigeon with sprouted barley, pickled elderberries and sake-creamed morels. (We’re still hitting ourselves for not ordering the lobster-stuffed fried chicken when it was on the menu.)
Order: Regulars focus their attention on the left side of the menu, where the creative starters live, though one of Le Pigeon’s most enduring dishes, a beef cheek bourguignon that undergoes an annual reinvention, lives on the right.
Insider tip: Not sure where to start? Le Pigeon offers two tasting menus, five course for $85 or seven for $105 (wine pairings $45/$85).
Le Pigeon serves dinner daily at 738 E. Burnside St., 503-546-8796, lepigeon.com
-- Michael Russell @tdmrussell
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