COQ AU VIN — Restaurant in Portland

COQ AU VIN, owned by local family and operated by Rose in the front & George in the kitchen is the most unique dining experience I have had.

Not only did it blow away all expectations I had coming in, but it gave me a new perspective into how personal a plate of food can be, how developed a plate can taste when paired well with a bottle of wine, and how delicious a plate can be when the upmost importance is put into the core of a dish - the ingredients.

Every, single, dish was dripping in flavour and enticing you to take another bite the moment the first one is within your mouth. Each dish we tried was very refined and felt concentrated on a few elements, letting the most powerful ingredients take center stage which I loved.

The wine pairing cannot be skipped, it was such a fun experience getting to try multiple different wines with the different dishes, it was unlike anything I have experienced before! I loved that the bottle is left at the table so if you get one you love, you can continue to enjoy it (and buy a bottle after dinner is concluded).

COQ AU VIN is the exemplary example of what makes Portland food special; it's unique, it's personal, it's delicious, it's sourced from local ingredients, and it's beautifully crafted. COQ AU VIN is the best dining experience I've had and I hope you are able to try this place. It is very expensive so I think it's a great place to go for a special event. I could write so much praise for every single dish we had but that would make this review even longer than it already is. Just do yourself a favor and go experience COQ AU VIN in beautiful...

This is a challenging review to write. I made reservations for Valentine's Day and like a total fool I may have been somewhat tardy in making reservations anywhere. That's on me. This place had openings. Within a day or two of making reservations they sent out an email indicating this was going to be a very special evening with a set price, which was actually considerably higher than I had planned on spending, but included food and wine pairing. After reading a lot of reviews I decided to spend the money it sounded amazing. The food was incredible, and the wine choices were fantastic! We even brought home a bottle of our new favorite at a very reasonable price. Now the less favorable part of the evening. Even though we understood it was going to be very much French style of eating we sat on very hard chairs for 4 HOURS. Maybe dealing with some deep vein thrombosis here. We'd saved up our appetites all day expecting a wonderful sumptuous French feast. Unfortunately as wonderful as the menu was the servings left us ravenous. Again the food was fantastic!!! Just very tiny. However the wine did flow quite freely. The Uber driver was not going to let us stop at Taco Bell on the way home. And in his defense I wouldn't want to drunks trying to eat Taco Bell in the back of my car either. I would still go back and try the regular menu, as soon as I pay off my now bloated...

I took a little while to write this, but as days have passed this was a uniquely bad dining experience.

The service was quite slow, and while you could argue it is designed to be the slow French dining experience there were large swathes of time when no server was present at all in front of house. The kids were present, this didn’t bother me much, but some in my party hated it.

For me the real kicker was the food. All these reviews commenting on being fantastic, it was really bad to mediocre. The quote of the night from my wife on the duck pate was “that duck must have had cirrhosis”, it had a bad flavor to it. The tomato soup was great, but the main dish had pork that was so cooked as to look like a strip of beef. The wine pairing were not good and every bottle came already opened, so be aware that you are likely getting some bottles from yesterdays service. And yes portions are tiny.

At the end of it all, you have spent around four hours and $145 a person and it is entirely unsatisfying. I have had many other farm to table experiences that carried a lot more value and quality. They have just moved to a new spot so maybe they don’t have the new kitchen dialed in yet, but I definitely left asking myself “did I read the reviews for the same place?” As my experience was so divergent from what is...