Service with a smile

One of my San Francisco friends was visiting me last night, so we were looking for a good place to eat. She's recently stopped eating gluten, and was happy to find a great online resource, Gluten Free PDX. (pdx is the airport code for Portland, and is often used as shorthand around here)

We decided to go to Tasty n Sons, which is one of many highly-regarded spots in town. I ate there once this winter, so I was glad to be able to vouch for the place. They serve their food in small plates style, with the intent that the diners share their food. When we got there, my friend asked the hostess if they had a gluten-free list of foods, and what happened next was amazing - the hostess grabbed a pencil and proceeded to mark up the menu for my friend's use. She slashed out the items that relied on gluten (like pasta, for example), starred the items that were naturally gluten-free (polenta, steak), and then wrote "w/o" next to all the items that could be made gluten-free (by omitting croutons, crackers, bread crumbs, etc.).

It made SUCH a great experience for both of us, as otherwise ordering can feel pretty stressful when there are food considerations in play.

I didn't take pictures of the food, but we got:
a green salad (a very generously-sized bowl); roasted asparagus with a farm-fresh egg served sunnyside up atop some bacon; shakshuka, which is a baked egg-and-tomato dish; and steak frites. WOW was that steak amazing. It was pretty small, but a nice finish to our meal. We ordered it medium and it was a lot more red than I'd expect, but I loved it. The fries were the way I like them - thin and very crispy - but I was too full to eat very many.

It felt like a  nice contrast to the Bay Area that we could walk into a hip restaurant at 7pm on a Thursday and were offered a few seating options. Granted if we were a party of more than two, we'd have had to wait, but it worked out great for us.