Tyler Lund

Review of Eventide Restaurant

Eventide is an awesome restaurant in Portland that...

Eventide is an awesome restaurant in Portland that often has a ridiculous wait for good reason. If you get in at 5 or even just before 6, you may be able to get a table in less than 3 hours. Depending on the hostess, you may or may not get a text confirmation which makes it much easier to find a nearby bar to hang out at instead of the street. Best of all, they are dog friendly at the outdoor tables which are quite nice and a little less overbearing like inside.
The beer menu is good with a few local craft beers on tap, though not huge. The inside is cool with a huge raw bar. Service is good and pretty fast, but definitely doesn't rush you or the people whose table you are waiting for out.
The food is exquisite. Anything from the sea is amazing and worth a visit. The best way to approach the menu is like tapas and just pick a few things that sound interesting and let the staff suggest a few more for you.
The oyster shooters are a great place to start and you can get your paired with the spirit of your choice. The jalapeno vodka was a good one to take away some of the fishiness of the oyster and ended up complimenting it well.
The octopus salad was delectable and stacked up well to the excellent ones we recently had in Croatia. No rubberiness or burnt flavor here. Just huge tentacles in a nice glaze with some tasty veggies. It's sort of like discovering a giant sea squid under the murky depths of lettuce. Jacques Cousteau would be proud.
The green curry lobster stew was one of the more interesting dishes as it managed to merge two things I love, without ever having thought to put them together, and pulled it off well. The coconut curry soup was a very good thai one with excellent and succulent lobster bits in it. Somehow this went amazingly together and no one else seems to have figured it out.
The lobster roll was good, but a different type than you may expect. The brown butter and bao bun made it feel a bit more like a bbq roll and the taste was a bit more like korean bbq. This was fine, but don't expect a huge Maine style roll.
The bbq fried oysters were absolutely stunning. They looked great with huge shells and a colorful palate of stuff on them, and tasted even better. The crispy potatoes lent a great texture to the dish and the cabbage gave a nice tanginess. This was the waitress' favorite and it was so good, we ordered a second round.
The crab roll was good, but the least memorable of the dishes. It could use some color to be a bit more appealing as it is white meat on a white bun. However, it was quite tasty and definitely on the good end for a crab roll. Maybe there just isn't much more you can do with a crab roll.
We typically only get dessert is a meal is off the chart, and so naturally we went with the ice cream sandwich. It came with great ice cream inside a huge cookie and was nothing like a normal ice cream sandwich. It was just delectable. If we weren't ready to lay down and die in the street, we would have had a second.