Grandma Leeth’s
February 28, 2009 by cynthia
- Restaurant website
- Location: SW Portland almost to Beaverton, just off HW26
- Price to dine two people: About $40
Say there’s this BIG landslide, and the daycare center crashes into the organic restaurant, picks up speed and piles into IKEA. I think they’d call the result “Grandma Leeth’s.”
Robyn and I had a quiet dinner there the other night. It was quiet because, aside from the hostess and our waitress, we were the only signs of life in the place.
Grandma Leeth’s sits in a strip mall off HW26, exit 69B (there’s a Harbor Freight there too, o frabjous day!) About three times as long as it is wide, they’ve put in a dining loft in back, over the kitchen, and split the main dining area exactly in half, lengthwise, with a giant red wall.
The wall’s got all kinds of geometric window cut-outs, allowing you to see into the toy-encrusted play area that takes up the left side of the space. It’s all larger-than-life, primary colored fun in a cold and echoey kinda way. Yet we were there for the food.
Grandma Leeth’s advertises comfort food, but if your idea of comfort food is meatloaf and tuna noodle casserole, you’re in for a surprise. This is comfort food for the guy who grew up in a northwest organic Indo-Hispanic-Austrian-Chinese-Italian household.
The multipage menu is mostly essays, and when you distill it down to actual food offerings there’s not much choice: lots of appetizers, a nice-sized kids menu, few entrees and a dessert menu that’s mostly pudding and ice cream.
Robyn chose turkey biryani; being a salmon nut, I passed up the quiche and coconut milk curry for the cherrywood-smoked salmon pasta.The food arrived–clunk–without decoration, ceremony or much accompaniment besides fork and napkin.
“When I pay $12.95 for a biryani I kinda expect more than rice and a couple of pieces of turkey,” Robyn grumbled, although it was nicely flavored rice.
She agreed that I got the far better deal: My $15.95 salmon pasta was delicious. There was plenty of salmon, and it was the well-smoked kinda salmon you DON’T get out of a supermarket refrigerator case. In fact, they could have ditched the pasta, served a bigger chunk of salmon and I would have been totally delighted.
As we ate, we watched the hostess rearrange the magnetic letters on the playroom wall. “You know,” said Robyn, “I think this place is mostly for stay-at-home moms who meet their girlfriends for lunch, dump the kids in the playroom and spend the afternoon dishing. I don’t think it’s for adults who come to eat dinner.”
I had to agree, especially after several pointed comments from the staff helped us discover that this place CLOSES at 7:30 pm. (We’d arrived at a quarter to 7 and didn’t bother to read the big sign on the door.) It certainly explained the emptiness, anyway, but I’m not sure a lot of people will buy the whole notion of a Chuck E Cheese done northwest organic-style.
In the end, I can’t say we were terribly impressed. When enough kids have been dumped in the echoey daycare side to make this place viable, it’ll be noisier than a Minnesota hockey game. Maybe I could sneak in, though, and get that salmon pasta to go…
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Hope you remebered who recommended gramdma leeths to you.
We stopped for the second time at a bar on Mississippi named MOLOKO. It is a hip bar with a row of odd neon signs across the top windows and no name sign as far as we could see. We found it in a book, Portland Happy Hours looking for cheap food and drink. They have lots of infused vodka drinks and a nice bar selection. Being a beer drinker I was enthusiastic about the $2 bottles of Black Butte Porter, normally $3 regular price, anywhere else $4.50 minimum. They have a great pineapple salsa with blue corn chips. In our two trips I had the tuna melt both times. Watch out for the house mustard if you don’t like HOT. Donna had the salami first time and a turkey sandwich the second. All of these have been panini pressed and good. This is a bar and not a food place, when we hit the happy hours right we get two beers and two sandwiches for $15. First night we went it was empty for the first 20 minutes then it just got packed with hip folks, tonight it was jumping. They have played jazz on turn tables both night we were there. Don’t be in a hurry for food as they want to sell drinks first.
Ed