ChefStable Comes To Lake Oswego

***Author’s Note:

Dear ZevEatsIt readers,

As some of you may know, last spring I secured the opportunity to write for a local magazine, Lake Oswego Living. I wrote a (in my humble opinion) fantastic review of Lardo with the pretense that Lardo would soon be making its way to Lake Oswego. However, I dined at the Lardo on Hawthorne on March 3rd, 2020. Not great timing for a restaurant review. As a result, my review sat on the virtual shelf for quite some time until January, when the magazine reached out to me about updating it.

I realized that a restaurant review written in a pre-pandemic world was no longer relevant. So after a quick correspondence with Kurt Huffman, owner of ChefStable (the restaurant group responsible for more than a dozen Portland franchises, including Lardo), I set up an interview. From that interview, a brand-new article was born. And you, my loyal readers, are being given a sneak peek at my article, which won’t appear in print until May. Enjoy.

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Out here in Lake Oswego, one can sometimes feel isolated from the bustling metropolis to our north, bursting with shops and restaurants.  But in just a few short months, when the weather is warmer and COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed, the brand-new Mercato Grove apartment complex will welcome new locations for six of Portland’s finest restaurants.

This project is spearheaded by Portland restaurant empire ChefStable, responsible for icons of the Portland food scene like St. Jack, Ox, and Lardo.  Back in 2018, the owner of ChefStable, Kurt Huffman, was approached by an investor who also happened to be a real estate broker about expanding some of his restaurants out to Portland’s suburbs.  Huffman was interested, but did not want, in his words, “St Jack to be next to an Outback Steakhouse.”

To avoid this, Huffman and his team fashioned an innovative solution.  “I can fill out all the restaurant spaces out here, but you have to let us be the only restaurants,” said Huffman to the investor.  “That way, we can create a little community of chefs who also happen to be friends.  In a way, we’re recreating a Portland neighborhood.” 

As time progressed, the project took shape.  ChefStable eventually determined which of their many restaurants would occupy those six spaces in Mercato Grove.  St. Jack, Portland’s signature French restaurant, would be joined by the sandwich icon Lardo, pasta spot Grassa, Oven & Shaker pizzeria, Fills Donuts (serving primarily Berliners and described by Huffman as “the Salt & Straw of donuts”), and Tasty, a new venture born out of three now-closed restaurants: Tasty N’ Sons, Tasty N’ Daughters, and Tasty N’ Alder.

Everything was humming along smoothly until the pandemic struck in March of 2020.  ChefStable had already signed the leases on the property, but suddenly the entire venture was threatened.  “I can’t raise millions and millions of dollars in the middle of a pandemic. And nobody’s gonna invest in restaurants because we’re closed and we don’t know when we’re gonna open,” reflected Huffman.  Miraculously, the landlord and property investors agreed to partner with ChefStable to make it happen.

While Lardo, Grassa, and Oven & Shaker will serve the same menus as their Portland counterparts, the other three will look a little different.  St. Jack will serve lunch (which their Portland location does not), and their dinner menu will be slightly different.  Tasty will serve the “greatest hits” from its three predecessors for brunch, and the dinner menu will resemble the steakhouse Tasty N’ Alder.  Fills Donuts will expand their menu to include soft serve ice cream and a “Shake Shack style burger.”

While the restaurants won’t open for dining until June 1 (though all six restaurants will begin taking reservations in early May), Lardo and Grassa will be open for takeout only starting in early May.  My advice?  Get takeout from Lardo as soon as it opens.  Their Dirty Fries, topped with morsels of pork belly, marinated peppers, herbs, and a generous sprinkling of parmesan, are a must-get.  In fact, the Dirty Fries are so good that Huffman joked “If Rick [Gencarelli, founder of Lardo] wasn’t going to do Dirty Fries in L.O., I’d be like ‘you can’t come.’”

As for Lardo sandwiches, I recommend the Nashville Hot Fried Chicken.  It’s a humongous chicken thigh fried to crispy golden brown perfection with a few strips of bacon visible underneath, topped with a drizzle of amber-colored hot honey, pickles, and mayo.  The sweetness of the hot honey, the spiciness of the chicken, and the acidity of the pickles all stand out yet seamlessly work together.  Then again, with ChefStable, it’s hard to go wrong.