Navarre

10/18/09

NEVAH EVAH AGAIN!

by Tarot Chick

My fiance and I were being taken out for a Thank You dinner by a friend that we helped with a project and his girlfriend. I suggested we try here. (Cue Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time")

Im not an unreasonable person. A popular restaurant on a Friday night; I expected a wait. No problem. I was pleasantly surprised when a friendly male server (who turned out to be the ONLY saving grace about our entire experience) informed us that our wait would be short. Maybe we should've clarified what "short" meant to him. In the meantime he brings us this RIDICULOUSLY, unnecessarily complicated menu/ordering system, a brief explanation of it that was shouted over the loud din of the diners and then left us to wonder if there was going to be an informational video to follow that would further clarify.

Forty five minutes later he comes by to apologize and say it looks like the table he thought was going to free up for us was ordering dessert. As my party smiled and said okay and goodbye and made our way outside, we realized there was a place to sit and eat outside. We should have just kept going!!! He said he would be happy to serve us out there and offered us some bread and water. Returning with menus he then says oh..the table was paying their bill and getting ready to leave after all. (Merry go round, much?) and said go ahead and order outside and he'd make sure we were seated inside when the table cleared and the food would be right after us.

We were finally seated. Happy in the knowledge that our order had gone in over 10 minutes earlier, we were sure we'd be eating at any moment and we were starving. Another TWENTY minutes passed and our good mood we had collectively managed to sustain was quickly turning sour, and FINALLY food arrives. Now I realize this is a tapas joint. Which is why we ordered mostly large plates. But apparently just like the waiter had his ideas of what a "short" wait was, the chef also has his ideas of what a "large" plate is. $20 for the large lamb plate equated to 3 small slabs of meat on 5 inch bones. $8 for a small serving of vinegar mustard chicken equated to 1 tiny piece of chicken thigh. Our potato pancakes were charred and so hard in places that I thought my fork would break before the potato did!

As for service...what an unfunny joke! I had a question to ask my server, couldnt find her, so I attempted to catch the attention of another and watched as she looked at me in my EYES and continued walking away. "Yes, that just happened" is the response my friend gave me at the look of incredulity on my face. We couldnt wait to get out of there and end what turned out to be a horrible dining experience.

When I saw the bill at $80 with nothing to drink but water and not one stomach sated, I felt on the verge of a blood vessel bursting and stroking out right there across the table. Total robbery. When you are sitting at a table with an $80 bill and thinking about what you're going to order at Wendy's drive through, you know you had a dining FAIL.

If you like throwing your money away, being ignored and having the tiniest portions known to man to boot, then Navarre is for you. Bring Lube. Everyone else, do yourself, your wallet and your blood pressure a favor and skip this black hole

• Pros: The dishes were clean... um...the water was refreshing...
• Cons: Absent service, Complicated Menu, Inflated prices

09/08/09

Worth a try

by Jackie in PDX

I think most people would agree that a restaurant can have an off night once in awhile. So when I tried to find a restaurant to have my birthday dinner at I did a lot of research on City Search and other restaurant review sites. Overall it seems to me that the people who tend to write reviews are the ones that say a restaurant, food or service was horrible. I especially like reading the really bad reviews when the owner responds asking why the reviewer/customer did not speak up when they had the bad experience. One great come back from an owner was something along the lines of “REALLY? You sat there waiting for your food for 1 1/2 hours and DID NOT say anything?”

My criteria for the restaurant were:

1. Somewhere I hadn’t eaten at before

2. Interesting décor or ambiance

3. A variety of dishes the three of us would like

4. Ethnic or specialty dishes

5. Not a food cart but not too expensive for my daughter’s wallet. After all she was buying.

6. Location, not too far away so as to make a long night of it driving clear across town and back

What I found I wanted to try were several smaller, niche or ethnic restaurants on what is known as Portland’s NE 28th Ave. restaurant row or a couple of others in that neighborhood. The difficulty was that a couple of my first choices were closed on Mondays.

So I narrowed it down to two restaurants. The leading contender became Navarre because a woman that I work with said she had eaten there and it was good. Navarre doesn’t yet have a website with their menu posted, they just have a blog. I found reviews on City Search titled A Real Disappointment, One of the worst meals I've ever had in Portland!, Rustic, gritty, real, organic in every sense., pretty good, One of my favorite places in town, A wonderful place to eat, etc, etc.

So what did we think? Navarre is a tapas place. We ordered 10 small plates ranging from really good rustic bread with lemon grass olive oil, chicken on the bone served in a bowl with a lot of broth (great flavor, chicken a bit over cooked), French cheeses, (my daughter thought that the Camembert smelled like my aunt’s barn). I loved the Brie, Blue Cheese and Camembert spread on the rustic bread. Other dishes – daughter and SIL really liked the porcini and corn salad, we had two potato plates, an a gratin and a pancake, both of which were really good, none of us really liked the braised greens, in fact daughter wouldn’t even try them. The one dish that we all agreed was the best was a pork plate. It was hot, juicy and had a wonderful flavor. We would have ordered a 2nd pork plate but they had run out. We all three had dessert and declared them all to be very good.

Our overall rating was something like “good maybe not great but we would eat there again, service was kind of slow but they have a very small kitchen and the place was jammed packed and we weren’t in a hurry. Tapas is a great way to try many things without committing to one dish that you may end up not liking. For three people, a bottle of wine and dessert with tip the bill was about $100. Not too bad.

• Pros: Small plates, lots of variety
• Cons: Service was a little slow but they were VERY busy

09/04/09

A Real Disappointment

by Peidmont Gastronome

My wife wanted to go out "someplace nice" The Oregonian may have called this the best restaurant for 2009, but we thought it was way overrated. Our stuffed pork was as tender as my shoe sole. No one asked how our food was or if we were happy with the dishes. If they had I would have been honest.

• Cons: Confusing Menu, Tiny Chairs, Tiny Side Dishes, Big Prices