by Jaime Vázquez for pdxguide.com
December 2006

As NW 23rd begins to feel more and more like high school, it’s good to know where the cool kids are sitting. Besaw’s restaurant is the neighborhood’s resident wallflower, watching the cliques of coffee shops, fine dining establishments and boutiques, all from the outskirts of northwest.

Instead of joining one of the cliques, though, Besaw’s has managed to absorb many of their best features, and again proves that the outsiders are the ones most worth knowing. The small bar in the main room is classy and low-key, with a mood similar to M-Bar, but at a reasonable volume. The menu is date-worthy, and slips in comfort food like meatloaf along side Portland staples like wild salmon. The dessert, which isn’t as good as they’d have you believe, is elegantly presented, visually fitting in with the other specialty dessert shops in the area.

Located on the corner of NW 23rd and Savier Street, the unassuming storefront belies how cozy the restaurant feels inside. The rectangular space is divided into a bar and main dining room with a separate dining room in the back. There’s not a lot of room to maneuver, but even at the bar, this isn’t the kind of place that demands mobility, so mainly patrons are seated at small, intimate tables. The entire back dining room is adjacent to the kitchen, which can be distracting. For the most part, however, the evening atmosphere matches the location and the crowd: It’s on the outer reaches of cool. People are there to eat, not to be seen. That’s refreshing.

My dad and I met there for a weeknight catch-up dinner. Neither of us deals very well with restaurant fuss; waiting for a table, bumping into people in crowds, flagging down wait staff...that may be OK for the Applebee’s crowd, but it makes us both cranky. The moment we walked in, I knew we’d made the right decision. We were immediately shown to our table, and the server gave us the option of hearing about the specials—an offer which I would have heartily declined, but my dad’s a sucker for those things. (Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but think: They get big points for asking.)

Our two-top was smallish, but that’s part of the point—the low lighting and soft music (think jazz, but from the collection of someone who’s only just past Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue), all make it clear that this is a place, if not the place, for conversation.

Scratch that. This is a place, if not the place, for conversation…after you’ve decided what you want to eat. The menu hits all the right notes of good Portland eats, so much so that I found myself promising to try three different dishes the next time I came back. The foods we’re snobby about locally—Oregon steaks, crab cakes, and salmon, for example—are all done well (our neighbors were cooing over the seafood in particular). One might expect a longer menu from a place of this size, but the focus here is on quality, so much so that I had to pause multiple times mid-sentence just to savor the taste.

Our waitress had astutely picked up that we wanted to be left alone to talk, so we surprised her by opting for dessert. That was when I figured out that Besaw’s attempts to be too many things to too many people: they looked like high-end pastries, they smelled like high-end pastries, but they did not taste like high-end pastries. The chocolate was rich past delicacy, and as we left, I took note that the rest of the dining room agreed, showcasing a battlefield of abandoned, half-eaten treats.

Besaw’s may end up part of the clique of other snooty neighborhood bistros, but in the meantime, it’s ideal for intimate conversations and solid eats, provided you know when to quit.

The opinions expressed within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of pdxguide.com or The Columbian Publishing Co.