OK Omens — Restaurant in Portland

Wine: 6/5 Food: 2/5

We came here for our 3 year anniversary, and left very confused about what we just had.

$350 for two people is a lot of money. I'm mostly sad that we spent this much and didn't get the experience which comes with dining at this level.

Back to the positive, wow your wine menu is good. We each tried 4 or 5 wines, and they were fantastic.

The food though... very confused.. and the chefs were constantly tasting as they went (I watched) so how did we get such poorly balanced food?! Every dish was one or two ingredients overboard on acidity or salt.

The bread and butter were great, smoked butter is pretty neat, I'm not sure why there was no sign of salt in it.

Mandarin vinegar/Brined Mackerel.. Had no sign of mandarin flavor when had together.. Mackerel completely overpowers such a subtle flavor.

Mussels.. Hurt your tongue acidity, and some quite fishy mussels, it really tasted like sour cream and onion pringles.

Dungeness Crab Salad.. Was an amazing... Radicchio salad, but had very little crab, and even the largest chunk of crab did nothing to enhance the salad. Very confusing.

Winter mushrooms- Mushrooms had great texture and flavor on their own, hazelnuts really competed with the flavor, and our dish was not mixed properly (some bites were salty & inedible)

BBQ mackerel - Was cooked to perfection, seriously good. But eating an entire plate of mackerel, with very dilly, and strongly seasoned potato salad wasn't a great combo. We were dying for a bowl of white rice to cut the intensity of the mackerel, and we love mackerel. We took 3/4 of the dish home so we could use it for leftovers.

Steak Diane - Again, cooked to perfection. Wildly over-seasoned and overpowered the meat- it tasted like we were eating shin ramen, but it's a $35 steak.. not ideal.. also using for fried rice tomorrow.

We will definitely be...

I want to like this place. It's in a cool space in an interesting location. Parking can be a little tough in the area, but I always seem to manage.

The food is good; interesting and well prepared. I had the salad which was ice cold and had an interesting kick from the Corn Nuts - highly reccomend. Also had the fried chicken which was good, but not great. It was covered in pepper, but somehow not particularly peppery. It was kinda dry; I guess when I ordered fried chicken I was imagining greasy and satisfying. It's probably just me.

I doubt I'll be back since I found it all a bit underwhelming and two things are an absolute turnoff for me.

First, it's a very loud place. I think that is mainly the concrete floors and hard surface walls, but conversation was nearly impossible. It's an intimate dinner kind of vibe, but since everyone is shouting to be heard, it's not intimate at all.

But what absolutely will have me not coming back is their automatic inclusion of a 20% gratuity on top of a "Wellness Charge". I fully understand that it's become more common in the industry to make gratuities compulsory, but I think that whether that's right or not is still a debate and since when do tips start at 20%?

I'm normally a pretty big tipper (usually 30-40%), but I'm not leaving one more penny when someone takes it from me rather than letting me decide if the service deserves extra compensation. The service was slightly below average (indifferent and cool - at least act like you're glad I'm there spending my money to pay your wages) and I think worth 15%.

Dear owner: pay your employees properly and price your product appropriately and let me decide if the server deserves more for exemplary service. And since you're shifting your costs to me without my consent, at least instruct your servers to show some gratitude via good...

We struggled with OK Omens. The food selection was competent, surely, but seemed uninspired. Bread and "fancy butter" was $7...and a bit stale. The "OMG, you have to try X" thing never happened once. I would love to point out a plate, but it never got above "good." Nothing was excellent. They are James Beard award winners? The wine descriptions were desperate to sound fun and cute, but they were ridiculous and unhelpful, as if good wine pairings were stupid. For instance, this is the description for one of their red wines: "like carrying a bag of peppercorn dust through a spring forest at twilight while feeding chocolate covered blackberries to feral forest creatures." If you are familiar with the taste of feeding dipped berries to feral creatures, regardless of the time of day, I beg you to use different descriptors, as most of us don't know what that tastes like. When the check came, we noticed the 22% gratuity. The 20% goes to the staff and the 2% is a "wellness charge." This charge is to have you pay for the staff's health benefits instead of the restaurant having to do so. We've seen the guaranteed gratuity, eliminating that pesky need to actually perform high-quality service to ensure a large tip. Our food was late, it wasn't excellent, and the wine recommendations (beyond the cutesy descriptions) weren't helpful. Still, the additional 2% addition so they could actually pay their employees properly seems especially disingenuous. Their hamburger with fries is $18. If they needed to add a couple of bucks to it, would anyone notice? You charge $7 for plain (stale) bread and butter with Maldon salt on it but that didn't include the cost of the employees? It made a mediocre meal a bit less...