If you’re in Portland, you’ve forgotten your wallet, you are really hungry and you just have a few bucks on you, head to Trifecta Tavern & Bakery. Sit at the bar, talk with the friendly barkeep and order the bread with fresh churned butter. It’s only $3 (well, bread is free but the butter will cost you) and it will make your entire day better. Trust me. This might very well be the best rustic, just baked bread, and best salted, creamy butter you’ve had this year, or at least in recent memory, and possibly in your life—it’s that good.
While you’re sitting there at the long marble bar, watching imaginative drinks being shaken by bartenders Andy Boggs, Eric Nelson and their tidy team, you’re keeping an eye on the open kitchen to your right, and your ear tuned to the crackle of the wood-fired oven and grill. Plate after plate of delicious food is ran behind you—fresh shucked oysters, deviled eggs, brioche oyster sliders, potatoes boulanger (roasted in duck fat), steaming mussels in white wine with garlic scapes, wood-fired marrow bones and, the aptly named Big-Ass Steak. The piece de resistance, as far as I could tell by the number of people ordering it, is the burger. A Pimento Double Cheeseburger, as I’m later schooled, and one that cracked the top 5 burgers in the U.S. according to eatocracy.cnn.com.
Baker/owner Ken Forkish is no stranger to accolades, or to Portland’s respected chefs. Forkish won many hearts through stomachs, becoming widely known for his superior craft breads, first with Northwest Portland’s landmark Ken’s Artisan Bakery, then at Northeast’s game changing Ken’s Artisan Pizza. Last November, completing the trio, he opened Trifecta, setting up an airy space in a former auto upholstery shop in the heart of bustling Southeast Morrison Street’s reclaimed foodie hood.
The space is clean and simple, focused on bar and open kitchen, and the one-pager menu follows suit. Classic American dishes, done luxuriously proper, and entirely unpretentiously, have won fans from local and afar. I was thoroughly enamoured by the Andre Clouet Champagne Grande Reserve Brut by the glass, but craft cocktails do brisk business, as does Oregon-area based microbrews. Don’t eat all the butter—you’ll want to save room for more, by way of talented pastry chef Eve Kuttemann’s wickedly tempting dessert menu.
The atmosphere was bustling and brisk, but never loud or hurried, and the crowd happy—how could you not be—have you tried the bread & butter? It’s worth the last $3 in your pocket.
Trifecta Tavern & Bakery || 726 SE 6th Avenue, Portland || trifectapdx.com
