Leonardo’s isn’t going to make it onto any critical best-of
lists anytime soon, with a menu of passable Italian dishes dressed up
with bells and whistles that aren’t fooling anyone into thinking the
food is better than it actually is. (Pine nuts! Dried cranberries!) The
place is mediocre, but inoffensively so—and considering that
Leonardo’s is situated in a space formerly home to restaurants that
actually were offensive (the short-lived tapas joint Graze, and before
that Nina’s Place), this actually is a backhanded endorsements of
sorts. Simply put: Leonardo’s is the best restaurant to ever occupy 939
NW 10th Avenue.
Leonardo’s has entirely re-vamped the interior of the space, and
it’s an improvement. From the outside, the dining room looks like a
funhouse hall of mirrors, as it’s been subdivided with a row of booths
down the middle. Large hanging lights cap off an atmosphere of vaguely
corporate classiness.
The menu’s broadly generic Italian scope ranges from pasta to pizza
to pork chops, mostly standard Americanized dishes which are, I
suspect, exactly what many diners are looking for. The pizza is
unspectacular—thick, doughy crust, a spectrum of generic
ingredients—and pricey for the size and quality. (A 13-inch
cheese pie will run you $12, while a combo meat pizza tops out at $22.)
Not to mention that the inclusion of a pie called the “Maui Porker”
(Canadian bacon and pineapple) in an Italian restaurant draws the
credibility of the whole affair into question. The “Sedona Sun” pizza
comes with a pesto sauce, and is littered haphazardly with pine nuts
and sun-dried tomatoes, a combination that, by my highly scientific
calculations, wore out its welcome in 1998.
Well-cooked duck is one of the reasons I’ll never again be a
vegetarian, and Leonardo’s does a nice job with their house duck dish,
marinated and cooked to medium rare, sliced and layered against a bed
of forest-mushroom risotto. The risotto was generously studded with
mushrooms, but its gummy texture made eating it a chore, and the
accompanying pine nuts and dried cranberries were unwelcome and
unnecessary. The Anjou pear salad was a gimmicky, scattershot affair:
raspberry vinaigrette, candied walnuts, more dried cranberries, all
bracketed by two large chunks of under-poached, oddly-colored pear.
Our service was spot on throughout the meal, friendly and
encouraging (“Great choice! You ordered all of our best dishes!”),
which left me feeling a tad betrayed when the check arrived and I
realized that our waitress’ friendly “What kind of salad would you like
with your meal?” really translated to “Your meal comes with a house
salad, but I would like to trick you into ordering a more expensive
salad, for which I will then charge you a few extra bucks.” Crafty
waitress! Fool me once….
Portland is a tough town for restaurants, thanks in part to
relatively low meal costs across the board: It’s hard to recommend that
someone drop $18 on a mediocre pork chop when the same amount of money
will get them in the door at some of the best restaurants in town. But
if you compare Leonardo’s to Nina’s Place, which used to occupy the
same building (instead of, say, Ken’s Artisan Pizza, which serves up some of
the best pizza in town), Leo-nardo’s comes out all right after all.