The December Hit List: Decarli, G-Love, Precious Pizza, and More

This longstanding restaurant has been a hallmark of downtown Beaverton since the restaurant opened in 2007. The lengthy menu straddles chef Paul Decarli’s Swiss and Italian roots with dishes like cork-braised octopus with chickpeas and Castelvetrano olives, a classic chicken liver mousse with port gelee, and mussels with Pernod. A short pizette menu, whether topped with speck and fontina, portobello mushroom and pesto, or the original tomato and mozzarella, bridges the gap between starters and the meat- and fish-rich mains. There’s a trio of pastas, now hearty and saucy for the chillier weather, as well as squid ink risotto with shrimp, dried prune-braised short ribs, and halibut with oyster mushrooms and cannellini beans. It’s past patio season now, but find outdoor tables in the warmer months.

A take-out and delivery-only ghost kitchen, Brazakaya melds Brazilian and Japanese cuisines into a familiar menu of bar food with a twist. Options start with a short menu of yakitori — with everything from the classic shishito peppers and chicken thighs with scallions to bell peppers and lamb meatballs. The fusion continues into the small plates, with options like Japanese potato salad, dressed with kewpie mayo chef Marlon Alonso makes in-house, and a creamy polenta, Alonso’s grandmother’s recipe. Main dishes are meat-heavy, with a steakhouse-inspired assortment of steaks, picanha with rice, beans, farofa, and Brazilian salsa included, pork belly, a lamb burger (and a Beyond Meat version for vegans), and a churrasco plate big enough to feed an army.

Dos Mundos, parked next to a Starbucks in a pawn shop parking lot in Newberg, is among Oregon’s best taco spots. This past summer, the cart opened a second location to expand into dinner hours with a menu of plated dishes, alongside their fantastic and downright beautiful tacos and burritos. Main dishes at the new cart look like New York steak asado, served with roasted salsa de molcajete, guacamole, calabacitas guisada, and handmade corn tortillas; grilled pork chop with pumpkin seed pipian and wild brown rice; achiote-marinated chicken with Spanish-style rice and pinto beans; chicken tinga empanadas, and more. And if you missed snagging a plate of tacos during the day at the original location, there’s a half-dozen of the greatest hits available here: slow-roasted pork belly, the impossibly crunchy and addictive shrimp and rockfish “baja style,” and the Oaxacan mole with chicken. It’s definitely a drive if you’re heading down from Portland, but after a day of wine tasting through the Willamette? Perfection.

Portland’s “reverse steakhouse” G-Love has paired up with Olde Moon Farm to bring the freshest veggies to your table, and to help close the gap between restaurants and farms. Cooks work rotating shifts at the restaurant, and all vegetable trimmings from the restaurant are taken back to the farm for compost. Those farm veggies show up as earthy fresh beets brightened with lime yogurt and goat cheese snow; oxheart carrots balanced with fresh mozzarella and macadamia nut pesto; and baby lettuces with plum vinaigrette and apple relish. Meatier options, like charred hanger steak with new potatoes and yogurt-caper whip and everyone’s favorite, fried chicken, served with avocado ranch, fill out the rest of the veggie-heavy menu.

Something about the holidays just feels like red sauce season. A Sellwood neighborhood classic, Gino’s has been serving those quintessential family-style Italian plates since 1996. Start with something light and bright, like the clams or mussels steamed in white wine, before delving into your pasta course with classics like Grandma Jean’s ragu over penne or ravioli filled with butternut squash and gorgonzola, tossed in a sage brown butter sauce. Then settle in for one of the meat-centric mains, which range from seared salmon to an herb-roasted half chicken with braised greens. Bottles of red, white, and rose are available to pair with dinner or take home, but you’d be remiss to not at least stand at the old-school bar, cocktail order in hand.

This past fall, a deeply wild and foraged restaurant took over the former Verdigris space on Northeast Fremont. An expanded concept from former Fireside chef Cameron Lee Dunlap’s Wild Origins pop-up, Morchella showcases just how much of our natural world is edible. While you’ll recognize some of the usual foraged suspects like mushrooms and edible weeds on the menu, many ingredients picked by the restaurant’s two staff foragers likely will be new. A wild salad of oxeye daisy greens, sheep sorrel and chicory gets a lift from wild sumac vinaigrette and apples. The housemade sourdough arrives with pickled elderberry and whipped duck fat or pine nut butter. Mains here, though protein-heavy, take the same foraged mindset into consideration, and primarily are built around wild game sourced from Nicky USA, like venison and quail. Some are mushroom- and nut-based. Close out dinner with vegan hazelnut milk panna cotta sweetened with yellow birch syrup or yarrow ice cream with porcini pie crumb and wild berries.

These work-from-home days we don’t often think of heading downtown for dinner, but Mucca Osteria is still worth the trek, 10 years later. Mucca, with its white tablecloths, brick interior and more traditional menu, feels like a time capsule in a way, taking diners back to a time before the Before Times in Portland. The menu follows the classic setup, kicking off with antipasti, like a quintessential steak tartare, bruschetta with oxtail ragu and goat cheese foam, and burrata with 500-day prosciutto di Parma, before the handmade pasta course arrives. At Mucca, that looks like beautiful, regional specialties, including a Roman pasta alla gricia, here made with spaghettoni; a squid ink-infused chitarra ai frutti di mare tossed in a white wine butter sauce; and gnocchi with pheasant ragu and porcini mushrooms. A tight menu of secondi includes all the major meat groups — beef, pork, fish, and duck — and rounds out the savory side of the menu before (of course) diving into the coffee-, chocolate-, and cream-infused desserts.

Langbaan, Portland’s formerly forever-sold-out, back-room Thai tasting menu restaurant, has returned to its roots. After a long and lovely stint as an a la carte, outdoors-only restaurant over the summer, the restaurant has moved back indoors to its tiny-but-mighty dining room. The first indoors menu since the pandemic began is inspired by Phuket, and still leads with two of the restaurant’s most iconic dishes: the cara cara orange and fish sauce caramel miang som, and the crispy, sweet, salty, coconutty kanom krok, made with Hokkaido scallop. The rest of the menu flows in a wonderfully familiar manner, with some more snacks and soups, this fall a turmeric broth with roasted chicken roulade, shimeji mushroom, and cherry tomato; and small dishes to share, like grilled Spanish octopus with kabocha squash and grilled pork jowl with Japanese eggplant and pickled apple; and the complementary, multi-dish main. This season a Southern Thai curry with sablefish,  betel leaf, fermented mussels, and lemongrass is paired with smoked duck breast with golek curry. The menu closes out, just like it did in the Before Times, with a duo of coconut-infused desserts.

Call 971-344-2564 for more information.

It’s almost always an exciting time for Portland’s pizza scene. Among the newest additions to the scene is Alejandro Preciado’s (Burrasca) Precious Pizza, which opened as a cart inside Southeast Halsey’s Barley Pod at the end of the summer. Pies here are an extension of Preciado’s former Friday night staff meal at the sadly, now-closed Tuscan restaurant Burrasca. Once the restaurant called it quits, Preciado continued the weekly tradition, at first for friends and family and soon as a pop-up called Precious Pizza Project down in Salem. Now, those thick crust nonna pies have a home back in town at a cart, with a menu of a half-dozen pies, some classic, some creative, alongside a classic Caesar salad. There’s the traditional, a 10” x 14” cheese and pomodoro pie topped with basil and Parm. And the less traditional, still 10” x 14” but dotted with a flurry of pepperoni, tocino, pineapple, jalapeno and hot honey. Whether you’re a purist or not, the pies are worth the visit.

The newest spot on Alberta, inside the former Kargi Gogo space, is the small-but-mighty and impossibly cool Thơm, serving little more than a quartet of soups and noodle dishes. The tiny, 10-seat restaurant, from brothers Jimmy and Johnny Le, whose parents have run Vancouver’s Phở Lê for 30 years, focuses on four of the most archetypal Vietnamese dishes: phở bo, phở chay, bún thịt nướng, and cơm gà. A love letter to their restaurant roots, dishes here bring a little new school to the staples from their parents’ restaurant. Brisket and bouncy meatballs swim in the deeply beef-y and rich phở bo while the vegan version taps the country’s oldest tofu maker, Ota Tofu, as the star. On the non-soup side, their dad’s thin-sliced pork with a hint of char shines in the bún thịt nướng and the golden chicken and rice gets an earthy kick from five spice. A small selection of crackers, cookies, and candy are available for purchase to bring the evening home.