Earlier this year, the Hotel Vintage Plaza underwent an extensive renovation. Newly reopened as the Hotel Vintage Portland, it and the attached northern Italian restaurant Pazzo are ready to entertain Portland visitors and locals alike.
For Pazzo’s new executive chef, Kenny Giambalvo, the reopening is also a homecoming. Giambalvo was the executive chef at Pazzo from 1998 to 2000. After stints in New York, Los Angeles and Singapore, Giambalvo returned to Portland to open the much-lauded Bluehour with restaurateur Bruce Carey. He later reinvigorated the McMenamins’ menu as the executive chef at the Edgefield’s Black Rabbit Restaurant.
Pazzo is a long, elegant restaurant that runs the length of the hotel lobby, decorated in dark wood that sets off the restaurant’s bar and large brick oven for guests walking by. The interior is spacious and the seating plush. Tables next to the large picture windows provide people-watching as an accompaniment to the appetizers. On a bustling Tuesday night, the clientele ran the gamut from impeccably suited businessmen, to a girls’ night out, to families with teenagers wearing headphones and infants snoozing in strollers.
Giambalvo’s additions to Pazzo’s menu include seared scallops on a puree of cannellini beans, a creamy counterpoint to the scallop’s whisper-thin caramelized crust. An earthy and fragrant mushroom and black truffle pizza was rich and decadent, and breaking the egg yolk on top cut its saltiness.
Visually, the most striking dish was Giambalvo’s gnocchi. An accompaniment of roasted beets tinted the sauce a vivid shade of magenta. But the dish lost nothing for being a little shocking to look at. The pillowy gnocchi echoed the melt-in-your-mouth texture of the beets. The entrée of wild boar, slow-cooked for eight hours until it fell off the fork and placed on a bed of pureed celery root, felt equally self-indulgent.
One of the meal’s highlights was dessert. A sweet, creamy vanilla bean panna cotta was drizzled with seasonal berries and a sauce of aged balsamic vinegar. My dining companion and I didn’t leave a single bite on the plate.
We enjoyed two excellent (and large) cocktails before dinner, the Pazzo Old-Fashioned and a classic negroni. But given another chance, we probably should have postponed those in favor of a digestif in the Hotel Vintage bar. The restaurant’s lobby is connected to the hotel, and on our way to the bathroom we were able to see guests sipping glasses of wine at a tasting bar, or checking their laptops in one of an array of ultramodern seats.
An eye-catching spiral staircase leads to a game room with pool and shuffleboard, a secluded lounge set away from the hustle and bustle downstairs. My dining companion and I thought about stopping to play a game or two, but decided we were too full to move. After all, you can play pool at other bars, but the opportunity to linger over a multi-course Italian extravaganza such as this don’t come around that often.
