Some of the Best Pasta in Portland Isn’t Served at Italian Restaurants

While working on an update to Eater Portland’s Italian restaurant map, a nagging feeling kept scratching the back of my neck. I’m forgetting something, I thought, referring back to my notes and cross-checking my longer list. It wasn’t until I finished my proofread that it hit me: I was writing about the city’s best pastas, but I hadn’t written about my favorite spots for pasta in Portland. That’s because none of them are pasta shops — not really, anyway.

When Hollywood District restaurant Xiao Ye opened in the fall of 2023, it branded itself as “first-generation American food,” pulling inspiration from meals at chain steakhouses, Korean barbecue restaurants, and Chinese takeout shops. But that isn’t really the whole story: Chef Louis Lin has worked in all sorts of restaurants around the country, including the lauded Los Angeles restaurant Felix Trattoria. So in addition to the jalapeno masa madeleines, the tempura-fried sardines, and fried chicken with curry jus, Xiao Ye also knocks out a tiny little menu of fresh pastas that are impeccably executed: never overcooked, with just enough bite and a beautifully balanced sauce.

The genius in these pastas comes from subtle tweaks. A combination of gochugaru and preserved Chinese chiles in a rigatoni Amatriciana add more depth to the sweetness of tomato and acidic tang of Pecorino and guanciale, compared to the typical Italian red pepper flakes. The cheesy cream sauce coating the tubes of macaroni al tartufo gets its lightness from savoy cabbage. And the aptly named Jolyn’s Favorite Noodle, which eats almost like a dan dan noodle, swaps the typical Chinese noodle for an alkaline spaghetti.

These judicious tweaks also add something special to the pastas at Scotch Lodge, the subterranean Buckman cocktail bar from longtime Portland whisky aficionado Tommy Klus. Chef Tim Artale, an East Coast expat who spent time at places like Proud Mary and Aviary, very quickly brought attention to the bar’s food menu, with dishes like fried brie sticks with verjus and soft shell crab sandwiches. But even on my first visit, the pasta was the standout: fettuccine in a velveteen sauce, with a tickle of heat from Fresno chiles. The dish was super simple, but the pasta itself was beautifully executed, adding just a bit of intrigue.

These days, when I’m craving comfort food, I go straight for the Scotch Lodge bar and order a pile of seaweed butter pappardelle, tangled among broccolini and candied duck lardons, with the allium whisper of garlic chives. Oddly, it reminds me of chicken broccoli Alfredo — rather, it makes me feel the way chicken broccoli Alfredo made me feel when I was eight, though I think revisiting the generic Italian restaurants of my childhood would not hit the same way today.

Brooke Jackson-Glidden/Eater Portland

Portland’s pop-ups also offer compelling entrants in the city’s pasta showdown. I recently ate a pretty stellar version of ravioles au Dauphiné at the French pop-up Le Clown, from St. Jack alumnus John Denison. For those unfamiliar, ravioles au Dauphiné is essentially a single sheet of uncut ravioli, often filled with French cheeses like Comté. It’s a regional French dish that is becoming increasingly popular in the states; at Le Clown, they arrived doused in nutty brown butter, with a pile of so-barely-wilted, lemony spinach on top. The juxtaposition of the spinach and the pasta balanced the dish, without diminishing the unapologetic decadence of the ravioli.

Even reflecting back on shuttered restaurants, I think of the pastas: I still miss the carbonara once served at the now-closed Ripe Cooperative, or the cacio e pepe with truffle milk crumb at the now-closed Tercet.

Of course you can find exceptional pastas at Portland Italian restaurants: lemony cream-coated fettuccine at Luce, truffle butter tajarín at Montelupo, Pastificio d’Oro’s hand-rolled pappardelle — the list is lengthy. But there’s something so thoroughly Portland about restaurants and bars having a hidden secret weapon: dive bars with nationally celebrated fried chicken, pizzerias with knockout lomo saltado, convenience stores serving beautiful birria de chivo. Scotch Lodge and Xiao Ye didn’t need to have really great pastas; they just happen to. And it’d be a shame to let the city’s pasta connoisseurs miss out on some of Portland’s finest just because the restaurant isn’t a true trattoria.