Portland has a very competitive restaurant scene, and YouTube foodie Billie Harris spent some time with chef Anthony Cafiero to see how one of the more notable dishes at Portland’s Tabla restaurant is made.
Tabla makes traditional Mediterranean dishes like pasta, meats, beans, and appetizers and sells them in thoughtfully designed three-course meals. They price their meals very competitively, and yet employ world class chefs like Anthony Cafiero. Cafiero is a New York native who came to Portland to take advantage of its welcoming attitude toward chefs. Now, he is bringing to life with modern twists the kind of dishes that his mother used to make.
The dish Billie Harris was able to witness being created was a lamb and bean entree that used porticini mushrooms, lemon and horseradish. These all combined to create a dish that’s not heavy but is still packed with flavor. This is typically the second dish in a three course meal, coming after a pasta entree and followed by a dessert.
It’s very traditional in Mediterranean cooking to use a lot of spices and herbs and to mix beans, mushrooms and meats together. What makes this dish so contemporary, though is the way it is designed to be a landscape dish. That means it is arranged in a lengthy way that is quite attractive and ensures all the different pieces of the dish can be seen and experienced either separately or together. It’s a dish that is almost as much about the presentation as it is the flavor.
Another way this dish breaks conventions is that it doesn’t use fresh porticini mushrooms. Instead, the mushrooms have been prepared into a paste that serves as border for the entire dish. The taste of the mushrooms is still very evident, but that ingredient can now serve a dual purpose.
The lamb is prepared in an interesting way as well. It has been allowed to boil for a long time before the chef takes it out of its packaging and sears the lamb for less than two minutes, just to give it some caramelization.
The horseradish is used sparingly and is designed to give the entrée a bit of heat, as Billie mentions in the video. It’s not an overpowering amount of spiciness, and Mediterranean dishes are always supposed to be kind of light rather than intense in any way, and the subtler heat of horseradish works better with the various ingredients than something like a hot pepper would.
The guys get to try the dish at the end of the video, and the consensus from both is that it is excellent. The reactions they give are enough to make the viewer want to try a bite as well.
Even though Portland is rich with restaurants of all kinds, even Mediterranean ones, Tabla manages to stand out by taking conventional dishes and doing something a bit creative and different with them. They still offer the comfort food that people look for at a Mediterranean bistro, but they do so in a way that ensures their restaurant stands out from the very big crowd of competition.