Lil Dame

Best new restaurant in PDX! This is exactly how I love to eat and the staff makes you feel right at home! We loved everything we had, including their selection of hot sauces! Food: 10/10 would order anything with roasted elk. I got the sun bowl with wild rice, giant creamy scarlet runner beans, delicada squash, arugula, roasted elk, and pickled red onions. We also got the elk frybread topped with arugula, pickled red onions, and blueberry bbq sauce that cuts through the richness! For dessert, we had the fluffiest blue cornbread cake and maple butter! Drinks: 10/10 Try their First Foods Cider with apple, cranberry, and sumac (my favorite!) and if you’re looking for something else, the coffee is delicious! The coffee is from Bison coffeehouse, another great Native-owned business in Portland. Service: 10/10 We were greeted by Chef Alexa and seated within a couple minutes. Both owners checked in on us. Ambiance: 10/10 The restaurant is gorgeous and cozy, full of beautiful Native art and momentos of Chef Alexa’s family and heritage. We’re incredibly lucky to have them in Portland. Take your people!

I would say the food was 4/5, our focaccia was a bit burnt, the cesar salad was good, but nothing to write home about, and our pasta was overcooked. The service was not so good on our end. Everything took very long to come out and parties that arrived after us received their dinner first. We even saw our server deliver our pasta to the party next to us mistakenly, subsequently apologize profusely to them for the mistake, and then a few minutes later bring us the same plate and only said "here's your pasta." No acknowledgement of the inconvenience to us, just to them. It felt weird and a bit rude. We eat out a lot and are rarely made to feel that way in Portland. We really like the restaurant space they use and look forward to trying the other pop ups in there.

Javelina is the best new restaurant in the Portland area. The Elk fry bread and cornbread are outstanding. My wife had the Sun bowl with Elk.

Was so lucky to attend the collab between matta and lil dame. Food and service was unmatched. Can’t wait to attend other events at lil dame!

Jewan is a visionary, especially in the vegan food scene. If you have the privilege to catch this DAME/Plant-Based-Papi pop-up, do it! This is some of the best ramen you'll ever have, & from one of the nicest & most hard-working dudes in the business. We are cider-people, so simply having the choice between French, Italian, or Spanish ciders would've sold us, regardless of the food on offer (spoiler: it is all wonderful). Would recommend to anyone, vegan or not; this is about FOOD, & it is DELICIOUS.

Service at Lil Dame is awful. Went for Valentine’s Day for the La Damita pop-up. First my table was delayed an hour twice, all done via text. Second when we arrived the host mumbled us towards community seating which I did not reserve. Then the ridiculous community seating table had us sitting side by side, terrible for my neck. After sitting for 10 minutes without any service we had to call the waiter over to take drink orders. Then we had to wait another 10 minutes for him to take food orders, which was absurd considering it was a set menu. I had to ask for water glasses. At the end of the meal the dessert order was wrong and the mains were bland. Then when the check comes around, and I give my card the waiter mumbles something, the check comes back and I’m charged an extra $30~ without any explanation. Avoid this place until they figure it out.

First of all, our server was A+. I missed her name unfortunately. The food was fresh, not too heavy, and tasty, with a good variety of both vegetarian and meat options and just the right portions for the price, given the setting and costs nowadays. Overall happy to eat here, and would love to come back with family and friends. The fun part was you can see the kitchen, so we saw them roll our flatbread fresh just for us.:)

I’ve had two of my all time favorite meals here and can’t recommend it enough! (Plus the neighborhood is a delight!)