Nel Centro's Blog

by Ben Waterhouse – Willamette Week Nov. 25, 2009
Restaurateur David Machado seems to have a thing for culinary trysts—those places where the foods of two or more cultures, after a night of steamy passion, find themselves with delicious child. His first two restaurants, Vindalho and Lauro Kitchen, serve dishes inspired by the great culinary crossroads of the spice road and the Mediterranean. His latest enterprise, the house restaurant for Hotel Modera, continues the theme: Nel Centro’s menu draws from the border-crossing cookery of Nice and Genoa.

Aesthetically the restaurant is a bit of a departure. Nel Centro occupies a corner in the heart of downtown’s banking district, with windows looking out on the Unitas Plaza and the hotel’s own lovely garden courtyard, a bright cove of hardwood and ceramic tiles where diners can sit by firepits and the city’s only “living wall.” The 150-seat dining room, designed by Holst Architecture, is stunning: strips of chocolate-brown paneling and white columns accented with blond wood and gleaming glass light fixtures.

The spacious kitchen prominently features a large rotisserie (fire is a Machado signature) that turns out excellent roast chicken and lamb ($18). The menu is a notch more expensive than Lauro’s—entrees average $21—but equally broad in appeal. The housemade pastas ($15-$17) are excellent, the meats moist and desserts delicious. And don’t skimp on wine—David Holstrom’s wine list is exceptional in quality but not in price.

While you might expect Nel Centro to slouch during non-dinner meals, when it caters primarily to an audience of hotel guests, such is not the case. Brunch was the most well-rounded meal we’ve had at the restaurant, and the most economical. The kitchen’s take on eggs Benedict, on polenta with cured pork loin ($12), was flawlessly prepared. Even better is the steak-and-eggs platter ($14), which pairs a New York strip with two eggs, roasted peppers and a mound of oven-fried potatoes.

The restaurant does have a few odd flaws. The chairs are too short, leaving taller diners aching from stress on the knees. This makes for an uncomfortable dinner, and I imagine could be excruciating for an older customer. Fortunately for the Big & Tall set, the booths and bar stools are just fine.

The kitchen is also less consistent than at Lauro and Vindalho—herb gnocchi ($17) varied between heavenly soft and unpleasantly chewy, and some items (“Burrida” seafood stew; croutons) were shockingly oversalted—but generally quite good. We imagine food consistency will improve with time; we can’t say the same for the seating.

Deciding to open a restaurant in 2009 seems, in retrospect, like culinary suicide. But what are you going to do when you’ve committed to a space, a concept, a landlord? If you’re Dave Machado, who in May opened Nel Centro, inspired by the foods of Nice and Genoa, you charge on.

“Failure is not an option,” says Machado, the 54-year-old chef-owner of intimate eastside bistros Lauro Kitchen and Vindalho, but whose latest venture, in the Hotel Modera in downtown Portland, seats 200 in the modern dining room, patio and bar. A veteran of hotel dining — Machado was at the helm of Pazzo in the Vintage Plaza Hotel in 1991, back, he says, “when most hotel restaurants had some old chef from the Navy” — he often breakfasts at the hotel’s antithesis, the warm and homey diner Toast, where owner Donald Kotler brings over a complimentary slice of a buttery, crunchy breakfast cake.

MIX: You have three thriving restaurants in Portland — is that why people give you free food?

DM: There is no thriving anymore; “going” is more like it. But no, Don used to be my bar manager at Vindalho. Then he was at Giorgio’s. When he decided to open this place, the dinner crew at Giorgio’s said, “Can we come make breakfast for you over there?” They knew it was going to be great.

MIX: You signed on to open Nel Centro (pronounced nel chentro) in May 2008. Five months later, the bottom dropped out of the economy. What was that like?

DM: Scary. It’s a terrible time to open a restaurant. But I think with these deals, you have to see the future of the area. The MAX was going in and PSU is growing; the streetscape around that part of downtown is new. I had a sense of what that would be when I committed, and it’s kind of panned out.

Owning a restaurant is a workingman’s job. That’s why a lot of people who rise quickly and get a lot of glitter wind up closing. They want to shine and they realize: This is a grind.
— David Machado

MIX: Why do you think it’s panned out, while other restaurants are closing?

DM: I learn who my customers are, what dishes they like, what prices they are willing to pay. We had a reviewer who said we didn’t serve [at Nel Centro] four items he considers the classic Riviera dishes. Well, I had all those on the menu when we opened, because we thought: People will love them! They didn’t order them. We took them off the menu. You have to be willing to change.

MIX: Speaking of change: your restaurants are all very different, Portuguese at Lauro, Spice Route at Vindalho, now Ligurian coast at Nel Centro.

DM: That’s about my psychological makeup as much as anything else. Every 24 to 30 months, I get restless, I want another design, another menu. I never want to reproduce the same restaurant, and I don’t think it can be done. They all have different vibes, different clientele. When I opened Vindalho, I thought, ah, it will be an Asian-inspired Lauro-type place, and the people who love Lauro will also love Vindalho! They didn’t love it. They would actually come up to me and say, “I don’t like it.”

MIX: And yet both remain open.

DM: You learn with these eastside boxes, if you have 60 seats — not 40, not 90 — and you’re open for these hours, at these prices, you will make a living and offer a good experience. You make money when the market is going up, and you suffer when it goes down. At a certain point, you realize: You rose because the whole lake was rising. A lot of people in the restaurant business don’t want to believe that.

MIX: They want to believe that it’s their genius and their cooking.

DM: Owning a restaurant is a workingman’s job. That’s why a lot of people who rise quickly and get a lot of glitter wind up closing. They want to shine and they realize: This is a grind. Well, you have to be able to grind. I grind on the east side so I can shine downtown.

MIX: I imagine asking whether one of your restaurants is your favorite is like asking which of your three kids you love the most. But which do you love the most?

DM: I love the one that can pay all its bills.

— Story by Nancy Rommelmann