When in Portland, eat as the locals eat.
Food-driven wine bars have been popping up all over town in the past couple years, but few are as irreverently fun and casually elegant as OK Omens. Don’t ask me what the name means, I don’t know—but after one bite of the cheddar beignets I completely stopped caring. Like some sort of upscale stoner food, these gougère-like bites are filled with a silky-smooth molten cheese fondue that tastes like amazing American cheese and are sprinkled with a barely sweet honey dust.
Known for being the casual sibling to the stellar, prix fixe haute cuisine Chef Justin Woodward serves at Castagna next door, the café went through a complete rebrand the summer of 2018, giving Woodward a stage to develop a fun and offbeat menu, and giving Castagna’s wine director, Brent Braun, a Food & Wine sommelier of the year in 2017, a place to go deep on natural wines from every corner of the world. You can tell the two are having a blast with the new project.
The wine list at OK Omens is exciting but doesn’t take itself seriously, with hilariously dead-on descriptions like"That Time You Caught Your Horse Smoking a Cigar by the Blackberry Bushes." All day on Sundays, and during the 10 p.m.–to–midnight happy hour, you can snag a bottle for just $28, or go for the"All You Can ‘Pink’ Rosé Buffet," which gets you a giant bottle of rosé lands on your table and you can drink as little or as much as you like.
As for the food, it’s as seasonally driven as you’d expect from a perennial James Beard Award nominee, and features several elegant bites, like the citrusy-herbal shiso-wrapped skipjack tuna. But nestled like Easter eggs among the composed salads are ingenious creations from what I think of as Woodward’s alter-ego, a benevolent Mr. Hyde who just wants Portland to have fun. Those beignets are one example; the tarragon cream and parmesan slathered"corn ribs" are another.
And then there’s the"Kinda Like a McFlurry," a nod to a post-partying, late-night McDonald’s run. With its creamy vanilla ice cream covered in a very generous shower of crispy Butterfingers, shot through with a Reese’s-like ribbon of sweetened peanut butter, you’ll want to grab a spoon and leave decorum behind.
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