Eurydice

One dines at Eurydice, an ultra-trendy, hard-to-get-into cloth napkin joint in Downtown Portland. It’s a farm-to-table place where the scallops come from Oregon’s nearshore and the truffles, from a truffle-hunting pig deep in the Douglas-fir forests of the Northwestern parts. Everything is white on white, and all of the dishes are a deconstruction of something in season at the right place at the right time.

All components fire on all cylinders, but nothing stands out. Not a single dish screams of any personality or uniqueness.

Eurydice is a restaurant of the moment. Not good enough to place in your Instagram library, but only your story. And you know what happens to those? They go away after 24 hours.

Restaurants like these are a dime a dozen in any major city, but what makes Eurydice a little more disappointing is that Portland is supposed to be weird. It made donuts outrageous and put strip clubs on the map.

You can tell me a dish took 2 days to create and finesse, but it’s still only cool for a minute. Pretty for a second. And when the hands shove each morsel into the mouth, there is nothing there. No artistry. Just something that wants to be like everyone else.

And like every other major metropolis in the US, to succeed as a restaurant in Portland is tough. Half of the cookbooks based on Portland’s trendy restaurants within the last ten years are permanently closed, and that was before the pandemic.

If Eurydice does lock up shop, will people remember? No. And maybe that’s a good thing. Because the Pearl District in Downtown Portland needs a good pub after all and an even better scotch egg with honey cream mustard. That’s legacy right there.