Tucked away behind Bar Casa Vale, Erizo dazzles with a rotating 20-course seafood tasting menu, spotlighting sustainably sourced treasures from the Oregon Coast.
"This 18-seat restaurant located inside a former music venue serves up a fish-focused tasting menu three nights a week, from Thursday to Saturday (Sunday to Wednesday they’re open only to private parties). The focus here is on sustainably-sourced seafood, including bycatch (things accidentally caught by fisherman) and invasive species like sea urchin. Dishes also include foraged seaweed, sea snails, and rock crab. The menu is pricey—$125 with a $75 optional wine pairing—but well worth it for dishes like pacific octopus with green garlic and dungeness crab pie."
"In 2019, Nicholas Van Eck opened Erizo with Eater Young Gun Jacob Harth. The restaurant — one of Eater’s Best New Restaurants 2019 — specialized in hyper-sustainable, local seafood, often hand-foraged and caught in Oregon waters." - Alex Frane
"“The way I was introduced to harvesting wild seaweed for culinary use was when I first started going out to the Oregon coast to explore and... get more connected to the ingredients we use,” says Jacob Harth, chef-owner of Portland’s seafood-focused restaurant Erizo." - Terri Ciccone
"Chef Jacob Harth, owner of seafood restaurant Erizo in Portland, Oregon, dry-ages his fish in beeswax. Many of the local fish Chef Harth catches and serves are seasonal, and the preservation of seafood is vital to maintaining product throughout the year, and to minimizing waste. Dry-aging with beeswax adds a firmer texture, more of a bite, and a nice flavor and aroma to the fish." - Terri Ciccone
"At Erizo in Portland, Oregon, chef Jacob Harth prepares the 10-foot-long sea creature. This type of octopus, which is plentiful in this part of the country, usually weighs anywhere from 20 to 100 pounds, and measures 10 to 12 feet in length. The tough octopus is difficult to cook, so the chef freezes and unfreezes it several times to help tenderize it before embarking on the ancient Japanese technique of dunking it in boiling water to get the tentacles to curl. The tentacles are then grilled over an open flame, and brushed with a shitake mushroom paste." - Terri Ciccone