Posts tagged Reba

As part of the “O-Rama” series, a number of Portland food bloggers are writing about burgers in a coordinated manner. This month’s theme is fine dining burgers. Somehow I misremembered the theme as “fancy burgers” and the entirety of my experience was accompanied by a mental soundtrack of Reba McEntire’s song “Fancy.”

And in a way, if I had to imagine a young, poor red-headed girl from a destitute rural community, just pushed into prostitution by her mother, being taken out to dinner in a velvet-trimmed dress, I feel like the Grill Room is sort of an appropriate setting. The ambiance is old-fashioned fancy steakhouse, complete with brick and wood and waitstaff in vests and ye-olde-hipster attire.

The Grill Room is one of three ‘room’ restaurants in Portland owned by Harding Lee Smith. I had had a somewhat mediocre experience at one of them a while back, so I hadn’t made much of an effort to try the others. This, however, seemed like a good opportunity to do some due diligence. In addition, I’m always looking for restaurants to take my in-laws when they come to visit, places that are nice and fancy-ish but aren’t particularly adventuresome food-wise.

So, Grill Room. We ate at the bar because we were here for burgers, which also gave us the opportunity to spy on other dates.

The Grill Room has one burger, for $12 (according to their online menu, I forgot to make note of the price while I was there), and you get to choose from a variety of cheeses to top (cheddar, gruyere, goat, and maybe a few others). I ordered mine medium rare with cheddar. Dave went with gruyere.

Thankfully, the bartender pointed me in the direction of a small chart on the menu* explaining the restaurant’s definition of rare, medium rare, and so forth. I have never before encountered a restaurant that needed to lay that out in writing, but I was glad they did, because I don’t imagine medium rare meat to be cool in the middle. And cool-to-the-touch ground beef isn’t super appealing to me.** So I ordered a medium burger and it was cooked exactly as specified, which is to say, exactly how I would expect a medium-rare burger to be cooked. I have this sense, absolutely not supported by any factual information, that if you were to order incorrectly and were displeased with the level of cooking, it would not be a “customer is always right” type of situation.

The burger is really good. It is a thick, juice-running-down-your-hand type of burger. It comes on a relatively unobtrusive, soft, squarish bun, so you’re not battling a mouthful of bread to get to the meat. The cheese was fully melted and relatively subtle. The tomato tapanade and roasted red onions enhance the burger taste without being intrusive, and the toppings and cheese are distributed evenly across the burger. My only complaint was that it was difficult to impossible to fit into my mouth in a single bite, but I also don’t think I can subtract points for a thick burger.

The thing that was really remarkable, though, was the mountain of fries. It was jaw-dropping. I spent a fair while trying to think of a good way to describe the size of the heap of fries, and the best I could come up with was baseball-glove-sized. But mounded instead of flat. I took a picture, even though I HATE taking pictures of food in restaurants, because I didn’t have faith that I could convey in words the amount of fried potato on my plate. I ate a fair number of the fries, because I like fries, and I made not a dent in the pile.***

These are the fries that remained after I ate as many as I could.

I also had a sazerac that was quite good.

All in all, fancy did not let me down.

* I did not notice the chart on the menu originally because the menu massive. Normally, that freaks me out a little and I become paralyzed by the number of choices. Luckily, Dave quickly spotted the burger and I could refocus my attention on whether we should order a side vegetable and the crazy date happening a few stools down.

** I understand that many people consider it unsafe to eat any hamburger that is not cooked to “well done.” I don’t want to eat a hamburger cooked to “well done.” So.

*** We were remarking about the fries to the bartender, who mentioned that a guy had just come in and eaten an entire 40 oz. steak. For those of you keeping track at home that is approximately 2 ½ pounds of steak.