Adam Z.
Yelp
Legit pasta for $12-15/dish.
I won't say that it was the best pasta I've ever eaten in my life, but it was legitimately very good. A fancy restaurant will have better pasta, but that'll run you $30+/plate for half the amount of food. This was incredible for the price point.
I went with three other people and we shared four pasta dishes, meatballs with garlic bread, and calamari.
Oh, and a ceasar salad as well. Two of the pasta dishes were taking longer so they weren't able to serve us all four pasta dishes together. The server apologized for this and offered us free stuff due to the inconvenience. Amazing! How often do you see that happen? Maybe at a fancy restaurant once in a while. And this is the sort of place you order at a counter, not a normal waiter sort of thing. So it's not like they were hunting for a tip or something. They gave us a free beer too in addition to the ceasar salad. Pretty cool.
Ceasar Salad: Pretty good. Crisp romaine lettuce. The dressing was light and fresh. It came with slices of lemon too, which were really good!
Calamari: I don't like calamari, but the others thought it was good. Y'know what I do like though? Fried lemon slices! They were insanely good! Why are they not more popular?
Meatballs: These actually were not very good at all. I'd definitely recommend skipping them. They just were really lacking in flavor. Zero crispiness on the outside. The meat was kinda sponge-y, not juicy, and didn't have much flavor. The red sauce was lacking in flavor as well.
Pesto Pasta: This was probably my favorite dish. The linguine (?) was on the thicker side and had a good bite to it. But the flavors, wow. Very good flavors. There were thin garlic slices cooked perfectly, and I know how easy those are to screw up. Hazelnuts toasted perfectly and a variety of sizes (some were crushed more than others) which I appreciated. Some sort of soft, fresh, amazing, Italian cheese that looked like fresh mozzarella but I don't think it was. The pesto was great. I'd definitely recommend this.
Pork Belly Mac n Cheese: I was debating which dish was my favorite, and this was a very close second. As you can see from the picture, we dug into it pretty quickly, before I was able to take a picture. The cheese was perfectly gooey. The pork belly had a nice flavor and sweetness to it. The texture was pretty good, although I've had better "melt in your mouth" textured pork belly before. The little slivers of scallion were a perfect touch.
Cacio e pepe: Personally I though it was solid but not great. The pasta could have been fresher. Actually, all of the pastas I thought could have had a fresher tasting flavor to them, but I think that's especially true of cacio e pepe, since cacio e pepe is a simpler dish flavor-wise that is more about the quality of the ingredients and freshness shining through. I also thought that it was underseasoned. Could have used more salt, pepper and parmesean cheese. It was still good though.
Pasta with red sauce: We also got this pasta dish with fusilli noodles I think. It had bits of sausage and a slightly creamy red sauce. For the other people I was eating with, this was their favorite or second favorite dish. Personally I liked it but not that much. The spicy and meatiness of the sausage shined through into the red sauce, and it was good. I thought the red sauce could have had a deeper flavor though.
One non-food thing to comment on is that the environment wasn't the best. It was pretty hot in there, enough where we were uncomfortable and it interfered with the enjoyment of the meal. Granted, this is late July where Portland is having a bit of a heat wave. Temperatures are in the upper 90s. The other thing is that water was serve-yourself -- they had cups and a faucet thing -- but there was nowhere to get ice! So we had to get up and wave down a server behind the counter a few times to get ice.