The 10 Restaurants That Defined Portland Dining in 2024
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We asked our contributors to the Resy Hit List to share their top dining experiences in their cities this year — to choose 10 restaurants that define the state of great dining right now. Welcome back our Best of The Hit List for 2024.
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For Portland, this wasn’t a year of big flashy openings or long-awaited restaurant concepts. It was a much quieter and intentional year, with many of the “biggest” names instead turning inward and evolving. It was a year of reinvention, reincarnation, redefinitions, and rebirth. More than one restaurant on this list alone (Takibi, Ox) recovered from fires. Others persevered in moments of grief and crisis. Some challenged and pushed our preconceptions to new spaces (and we are grateful for it). All continue to represent the very best of Portland’s always-innovative food scene.
With that, here are 10 restaurants that, for us, defined dining in Portland in 2024.
1. Heavenly Creatures Sullivan's Gulch
From the duo that brought us St. Jack came Heavenly Creatures, a can’t-miss wine bar with a short-but-sweet menu of French-inspired drinking foods that, candidly, shifted perceptions of what a wine bar could look like. Opened in late 2022, Heavenly Creatures has held onto its cult-like status with snacks like whipped Camembert with potato chips and young yellowtail toast to pair with a truly singular wine list. Servers roam through the maze of tables with open bottles in hand, happy to walk guests through a deft and mostly European wine list. From high-end Champagne to Alsatian orange wine, co-proprietor Joel Gunderson’s virtuosity as a thoughtful wine buyer means you’ll be unlikely to find many of these elsewhere in town.
2. Bar Nina Alberta Arts
Bar Nina continues to carry the torch of fantastic wines in a singular space, namely the subterranean space that was home to Alberta’s famed Les Caves. Run by Ksenija Kostic House and John House of Ovum and Big Salt, who stepped in to fill the gap when Les Caves manager Jeff Vejr left to focus on his own Golden Cluster label, it offers similar, delicious-without-the-pomp glass pours, the same assemblage of grilled cheeses, and even Les Caves’ lengthy collection of fortified wines — now paired with a larger selection of Ovum’s own bottles. Snacks got tweaked, with an influx of heartier foods like Spanish sausages and Serbian pepper spreads. And the converted patio was transformed into Big Salt Bar, a summertime pop-up. But the continuity was unmistakable.
3. Ox Restaurant Eliot
This beloved Argentine grill has had a commanding presence over Portland’s dining scene since it opened more than a decade ago. That standing was tested this year, when the restaurant closed for months to rebuild from a kitchen fire. But again, it returned as good and constant as ever. Nights here, as always, should start with something from the fantastic cocktail list (we’re partial to the Dirty Grandma Agnes martini) before delving into Ox’s by-land-and-sea menu. As an elder of the scene, it has generated numerous iconic dishes, like the clam chowder with smoked marrow bone and the tripe and octopus. Order them. And when the halibut collar is on, it should be on your table.
4. L’Échelle Division
This final project of restaurant titan Naomi Pomeroy was in its toddler-hood when the beloved chef tragically died this summer. As an homage to her impact on the city’s food scene — really, no chef is more integral to where Portland sits today — the rest of her team continued on in her stead with this casual, no reservations pop-up. The menu incorporates lighter versions of French bistro food in Pomeroy’s style; dishes flit in and out as the seasons change. You might find country pâté with a seasonal fruit mostarda, or seared mackerel with lentils and aioli. The handwritten chalkboard menu tells all. And L’Echelle hasn’t left its chrysalis just yet: by next spring, expect a transition into a full-service bistro.
Find more info here.
5. Takibi Northwest
After a fire tore through the kitchen at this beautiful outdoors-meets-indoors Japanese American restaurant, Takibi was forced to rebuild. But it came back with a new team and menu. Taking up residence behind 23rd Avenue’s Snow Peak store — a high-end Japanese retailer of outdoors gear — it celebrates the feeling of sitting around a campfire at the turn of the seasons. In addition to the seasonal, wood-fired dishes that have defined the menu since it originally opened, the restaurant also invited Niigata chef Yoshimitsu Seki to open a lunchtime-only ramen truck on the patio. There, lucky Portlandians found a trio of bowls, one a butter-rich tori shio, the second a sansho-pepper infused shoyu, and a vegan-tonkotsu subbing mushrooms and soy protein in for pork. It all revealed how traditions come together beautifully in this city.
6. Mémoire Cà Phê Alberta
This long-awaited Vietnamese American brunch spot from Matta’s Richard Le, Cà Phê’s Kimberly Dam, and Heyday’s Lisa Nguyen highlights the importance of identity and perspective; it distills the trio’s experiences as third0culture kids. Those familiar with Matta will see Le’s hand present — a chef who rose to popularity with “authentic” dishes that spoke to first- and second-gen kids like the McDonald’s Big Breakfasts with clever Vietnamese infusions. Dam inaugurated the city’s first coffee shop focused on robusta beans sourced from Vietnam. And Nguyen is known for Vietnamese baked goods and doughnuts that effortlessly incorporate flavors like black sesame, ube, pandan, and hojicha. Put the three together and it was a recipe for one of the best cafe openings all year.
More info here.
7. The Paper Bridge Central Eastside
Most restaurants rely on servers to educate diners on the unfamiliar. Not so at The Paper Bridge, which provides an “excessively detailed” menu (really, a manual) about all the dishes it serves. For every item, you’d find a miniature history lesson and glossary entry, often noting the origins, regional significance, and geography alongside ingredient and cooking descriptions. The browse of the menu alone made it worth a trip; but Quynh Nguyen and Carlo Reinardy’s cooking shone too, from stir-fried morning glory with three types of garlic to piping hot Hai Phong-style breadsticks with pate.
8. No Saint Vernon
No Saint remains not just one of the best pizza restaurants in town, not to mention a home for fantastic salads, pasta, and natural wines. But it also is definitional to a strong class of pizza and pizza-adjacent restaurants that have come to define one of the greatest new pillars of Portland dining: restaurants with excellent bread programs and phenomenal seasonal vegetables. Simple? Maybe, but the devil is in the details. A recent salad of chicories and pistachio butter showcased a tight-wire act of bitterness and earthiness. The chewy, fire-kissed pizzas support a cast of toppings like nowhere else in town. And the menu is constantly changing, which shows that great Portland restaurants never stand still.
9. Toya Ramen Buckman
With Portland’s close ties to Japan, our surplus of very good ramen spots is unsurprising. Among the newest to the pack is Toya, from Colin Yoshimoto (Eem), which provided a home to Yoshimoto’s obsessive pandemic-era noodle making. Named for his maternal grandfather, its specialty is the clear chintan ramen that typically get overlooked in favor of its bombastic tonkotsu cousin. Yoshimoto proves here why the style deserves its own place in the pantheon. Add in a robust menu of crispy, cold starters — plus two very good tonkatsu cuts — and not-traditional bowls like a truffle XO-spiked shio al tartufo and a brothless carbonara men whipped, and this might be as close as we get to Japan’s famed ramen stalls.
Find more info here.
10. Xiao Ye Hollywood
Xiao Ye, the “first generation American” restaurant from partners Jolyn Chen and Louis Lin, was one of the city’s most anticipated restaurant openings last year. Now it has settled into a lovely routine. The short-but-sweet, dinner party-esque menu boasts five sections, each offering a handful of familiar dishes with a twist. Add a once-a-month burger special pop-up, plus one-off events with visiting cookbook authors, wine parties, and a cottage-core aesthetic, and you have one of the loveliest dinner spots in town. Yes, the mini madelines with whipped butter and jalapeño powder remain a mainstay. But Xiao Ye continues to mine our collective memory for new dishes, whether finding inspiration from post-work takeout or or late-night fridge raids. Memories here get not just re-created, but made better.
