Restaurant Reviews

Certifiably Sweet and Sour

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Lemon Is Essential Sweet-sour agrodolce over roasted chicken and semolina pudding

When you’re a chef and you run out of flour, you send someone out for it. When you’re Maria Hines and you run out of flour, it’s a problem of a different magnitude.

Hines—James Beard Best Chef in the Northwest award winner and proprietor of Tilth and Golden Beetle—opened Agrodolce in the last days of 2012. She was going for something between her first two restaurants: not the French-inspired Tilth nor the Middle Eastern Golden Beetle, but the Sicilian cuisine that lies between them geographically and borrows from both culinarily. She was also aiming to get Agrodolce approved by the same strict standard--bearer, Oregon Tilth, by which her two other restaurants had been certified organic.

To achieve that level of virtue, Agrodolce’s chefs had taken to sourcing organic durum wheat berries from Idaho’s Purcell Mountain Farm, then milling them into the semolina flour they use to make the pastas by hand. I repeat: milling them into the semolina flour they use to make the pastas by hand. So alas, when Purcell Mountain not long ago ran out of wheat berries, there was no simple fix. “Usually when your source is out of something, you change your menu,” Hines says. “But this was wheat. In a pasta restaurant.”

With alarming resourcefulness (the kind that gets you pegged as a Rising Star, see page 77), Hines’s right-hand chef Jason Brzozowy managed to track organic durum wheat berries to a little survivalist store in Montana. Survivalist indeed. The tale illustrates the challenge of running a restaurant with sourcing and preparation standards as rigorous as Hines’s.

And so, as it happens, does Agrodolce.

The high-ceilinged space is as gracious as it was at Still Life in Fremont, then later as the dear departed 35th Street Bistro. By day—the place is open lunch or weekend brunch through dinner—sunlight streams through floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating rows of two- and four-tops. From the center of the room a ficus tree unfurls leafy branches over diners’ heads. In back sits a small bar and a cozy sitting room with couches and a chandelier. Compared to Tilth’s funky farmhouse feel and Golden Beetle’s homemade aesthetic, pretty Agrodolce with its comfortable seats is the first Maria Hines restaurant you want to linger in.

We arrived in the thick of Friday-night dinner, landing in a din that compelled us to stop talking and dive directly into the menu. (Rethinking the lingering.) Divided into starters, pastas, mains, and vegetables, the preparations showcase the gastronomic melting pot that is Sicily: plenty of citrus and olives and tomatoes with the Arab inflections of pine nuts and capers and raisins. We began with the Sicilian specialty of fried rice balls, or arancini, crisp and yielding to a meaty ragu filling that spilled flavorfully across a puddle of parsley pesto.

A wild arugula salad made glorious eating, its heaping tangle of bitter greens punctuated with dollops of ricotta salata, red pepper, croutons, bursting jewels of blood orange, and fragrant herbs. It offered a sense of unrestrained abundance that is rare at Agrodolce, a kitchen so circumscribed by its organic mandate that innovation stays within bounds, and—to remain affordable—portions trend small (particularly at brunch) and ingredients few.

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