St Jack

I know it's been a long time since I've last posted. Basically, I realized that I was treating my traveling to Portland every week like an extended vacation. When you're on vacation, you eat out all the time, try great food, and your waistline pays for it. But if your vacation turns into a 6-month (or longer) time frame, then that kind of lifestyle just isn't realistic long-term. So I limited my culinary adventure to going to Whole Foods every night for a salad. So adventurous!

However, there are still nights every other week or so that I go out with coworkers to new restaurants, so there will still be posts, just less often!  A few weeks ago, I went to St Jack with a coworker, and we had a fantastic meal!  It was part of Portland Dining Month in June, so we had our 3-course prix fixe dinner, which was great. St Jack is a little french restaurant with great light inside the restaurant, but was nice and cozy - a little bistro feel.

St Jack - photo credit: portland monthly mag

One of the neat things was the candles on the bar. They had tons of wax dripping down, from weeks (years?) of use! I thought they were pretty cool.

Candle wax on the bar - photo credit: portland monthly mag

For dining month, Betsy and I got a roasted beet salad, a half chicken, and St Jack's special house-made madelines.

Dining month menu

We also started the meal with a cheese plate: one cow, one sheep, one goat. I really liked the cow and goat cheeses, but didn't care for the sheep one. I wish I knew the names of the cheeses... but they were good!

Cheese plate

Our next course was a roasted beet salad with chèvre, arugula, toasted walnuts and red wine-Dijon vinaigrette. I really liked this salad. I'm not normally a huge fan of beets, but they were very nice here. Not too earthy (like beets can be), and were roasted until they were sweet. The chevre and arugula were very refreshing and paired nicely with the beets. I also liked the cute plates used at St Jack!

Roasted beet salad

You can tell that we went for dinner because the light is fading for my photos with my phone's camera. Our main course was a roasted half chicken with tomatoes over polenta (or as the menu said: Poulet Basquaise – bell peppers, olives, tomato, white wine, chilies and fresh herbs with soft polenta). This chicken was FANTASTIC. It was so moist, and the sauce was delicious. The polenta soaked up all of the juices from the tomatoes and wine, and it was really a great pairing. I would definitely recommend this!

Half chicken with polenta

Finally, we had St Jack's famous madelines for dessert. They bake them in house, and they were delivered to us hot from the oven! We each got our own little bowl of mini-madelines... and I definitely ate them all (vacation mode, remember?). They were light, spongey, and the perfect size to continually pop in your mouth until they're all gone!

Madelines - baked to order

I really enjoyed St Jack, and will definitely be going back.

St Jack
2039 SE Clinton St, Portland, OR