Editor’s note: This week and next, we’re counting down our favorite new Portland restaurants of 2022, starting with our No. 10: Pastificio d’Oro, a pint-sized St Johns neighborhood pasta restaurant where almost everything is made from scratch.
Casting back to summer, some of my fondest memories involve sitting with friends on the wobbly picnic tables outside this St. John’s pasta spot, the sun’s last rays disappearing behind The Wishing Well’s neon palm tree just down the street.
At the time, Pastificio d’Oro was still a promising pop-up at Gracie’s Apizza. On Mondays and Tuesdays, former Jacqueline chef Chase Dopson would make the entire pasta by hand while painter Maggie Irwin took orders, poured wine and tossed farm-fresh salads with her signature honey-sweet dressing.
The restaurant, which took over the pizzeria space full time last month, remains a true Mom-and-Pop, the only one where, according to Dopson, everything but the bread, wine, Parm and charcuterie are made from scratch.
“Yeah, but I do slice that,” Irwin points out.
Along with Gracie’s, it’s also the newest restaurant bringing a little heat to St. Johns, a North Portland neighborhood where the dive bars might be better known than the restaurants.
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But what makes Pastificio d’Oro unique is Dopson’s commitment to making his pasta entirely by hand. That means mixing up balls of golden dough by hand, then rolling each into a billowing sheet using a mattarello, or a long wooden rolling pin. It’s a time-intensive method more familiar to Italian nonnas than typical American restaurants, where even the fresh pasta is typically flattened by machine.
Dopson started making pasta after he was laid off at the start of the pandemic, reading cookbooks, watching videos and buying an imported mattarello from Evan Funke, the pasta evangelist whose new Los Angeles restaurant Mother Wolf is almost as hard to get into as Portland’s Kann . Like many chefs, he was drawn to the pastas of the Emilia-Romagna region.
“It’s so diverse for such a small region, but it’s also so luxurious,” Dopson says. “It’s rustic but rich, gluttonous but so fun to eat. Think of a lasagna Bolognese: It’s so over the top but just so delicious.”
After initially launching a meal kit service at Jacqueline, Dopson’s pasta caught the eye of Craig Melillo, the owner of Gracie’s Apizza, where Irwin had previously worked. In 2021, Melillo reached out to the couple about using the pizzeria on Monday nights, when he was typically closed. The first Pastificio d’Oro’s pop-up took place that September.
As The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported, Gracie’s Apizza is in the process of moving to a new location with room for a larger oven just a few blocks east. With construction underway, the two businesses have switched roles: Pastificio d’Oro now operates on weekend nights, Gracie’s Apizza pops up on some Mondays and Tuesdays.
Visit from Thursday to Sunday now, and you’ll find Dopson’s pastas — some squash-stuffed tortelli, perhaps, or a tagliatelle al ragu — bowls of that zippy salad and plates of aged prosciutto. A rustic tart or sugar-dusted cake rounds out a menu kept blessedly small.
Like Funke, Dopson sometimes cooks his pasta a few seconds short of al dente, a level of doneness some will prefer more than others. (The late Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold found Funke’s style distracting enough to leave his blockbuster Santa Monica restaurant, Felix, off his last restaurant guide; I also like a more supple texture, but didn’t find it disqualifying here or at Felix. )
And the pleasures of Pastificio d’Oro go beyond pasta. There’s a small wine list, plus good Negronis and other cocktails courtesy of The Garrison, the bar next door. You might find platters of puffy Italian frybread served with a pear-plum mostarda. And though the sun dips below the horizon before Pastificio d’Oro opens these days, it remains a fantastic place to meet friends for dinner, perhaps followed by a movie at the St. Johns Twin across the street.
What to order: With a group of two or more, it would be borderline irresponsible not to order the whole menu.
Details: After launching as a Monday pop-up, Pastificio d’Oro switched to Thursday-Sunday dinner hours in November; 8737 N. Lombard St.; doropdx.com
Read more: Follow along with our guide to Portland’s best new restaurants of 2022
—Michael Russell; [email protected]; @tdmrussell
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