Alma seemed like it was doing just fine. But chef-owner Vedran Jordan shut his Northeast Portland restaurant down this spring after less than a year in business.
Turns out it was all part of Jordan’s plan to bring his love letter to Balkan cuisine and culture back even better. Alma reopened in June, transitioning from a somewhat generic dining room to one adorned with trinkets, brass lamps, and photos of his family, who hail from Bosnia.
It also moved to a hard-to-beat new format: Two hours of all-you-can eat Balkan bliss, no rules, no limits. For $55 a person (there’s also a $65 premium option launching soon), you’ll encounter as much silky baba ganoush, olives and feta, lamb kabab, and calamari as you care to eat.
Alma is absolutely where I would bring a birthday party. Or my gluten-free friends, or a vegetarian, or someone I just wanted to get uncomfortably full with.
With the transition, eating at Alma now feels like you’re settling into a cafe in Sarajevo, down to pours of rakija brandy, sipped solo or in a cocktail with tequila and raspberry shrub. Even on busy nights, the room’s excellent sound design means you can still hear your tablemates as you pass around grilled flatbread, best swooped into garlic-heavy toum yogurt and spiced mousaka.
The plates are small, but that means that a hungry three-top could probably work through one of everything—and there is nothing better than ordering one of everything.
There’s also no rule against ordering a dish more than once. As our waiter gamely informed me, if I wanted to get 10 plates of the Vegeta wings—named for the Croatian all-purpose seasoning—I could. Next time, I just might, because I keep thinking about these deep-fried chicken wings marinated in kefir and served with house-made hot sauce, juicy on the inside and crackling on the outside.
The problem with that strategy, though, is that you’d miss out on too much other good stuff. A shepherd’s salata, a simple blend of gamy feta cheese with hunks of tomato and cucumbers with good olive oil, is an ode to peak summer. A small portion of mackerel arrives atop a cabbage slaw that pairs with the oily grilled fish, both the skin and the slaw providing nice crispness.
One dish that you should just plan to order at least two of is the occe, a fritter that I would feed to someone who could not see as a way to describe the color green. Verdant herbs are mixed with peas, creating a lightly fried ball, brightened by dollops of yogurt mint sauce, and dusted with olive-hued za’atar. Kermit wishes it was this easy being green.
You can add a few extra add-ons, including Manila clams for $5 (go for it, if you’re a clam fan), or larger platters for $15. We sprung for the whole charcoal-grilled squid, which landed Cthulhu-like in a sea of vivid lemon parsley sauce. Unfortunately, the squid was terribly chewy, and was the only true low point of the visit.
Alcohol is not included in the all-you-can-eat price, but make sure to pick something from the wine list, with bottles harkening from Croatia and Slovenia. I wound up grabbing two glasses of a crisp white grown on an island off the coast of Croatia, the minerality playing with the garlic in the ground beef cevapi sausages.
Jordan took a gamble by pulling the plug on Alma’s original iteration, but this is definitely an argument for breaking something down in order to make it better. Get a reservation, bring a crowd with serious appetites, and prepare to feast like family.
Alma, 5237 NE Martin Luther King Jr, Thurs-Sun 4:30 pm-9 pm, almapdx.com, @alma.pdx
