Portland, Oregon’s 2024 Eater Award Winners

Each year, the Eater Awards recognizes the best and brightest local talent among a city’s chefs and restaurants. As we researched to uncover the best restaurants that opened in Portland in the past year, scanning the breadth of its dining scene was essential. With pop-ups and residencies that draw crowds of diners and bars and taprooms that serve exceptional food, it’s likely that the best meal Portlanders ate in 2024 wasn’t experienced at a “traditional” restaurant. The places we keep returning to and recommending are all the latest chapters for folks who have helped write the recent culinary history of the city. Below, we reflect on Portland’s superlative new talent, from a cider taproom to a brightly nostalgic brunch-only Vietnamese cafe.

Bauman’s on Oak: Best New Restaurant

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Since 2016, cidermaker Christine Walter has pressed her family’s orchard-picked apples into liquid gold, whether it’s a dry, traditional-style cider or a modern concoction that features other Pacific Northwest fruit such as marionberries or peaches. Her ciders, many of which are award-winning, are all poured at Bauman’s Portland taproom, where patrons can enjoy glass pours, quaff cider slushies, or discover new favorites in flights arranged by categories like Co-fermented or Hopped. From the kitchen, Cafe Olli alumnus Daniel Green produces snacky yet refined dishes: crusty, spongy-on-the-inside sourdough accompanied with a thick swipe of cultured butter; a buttered and toasted roll stuffed with miso mayo-dressed Dungeness crab; and chicories tossed in peppered buttermilk.

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Celeste Noche

Mémoire Cà Phê: Restaurant Team of the Year

In any given restaurant, it’s a task to tick all the boxes: memorable dishes, compelling drinks, and sweets that diners make room for even when they’re full. At Vietnamese brunch cafe Mémoire, the burden of that challenge is shared between Matta’s Richard Le, Portland Cà Phê’s Kimberly Dam, and Heyday’s Lisa Nguyen, friends turned collaborators. Here, Portlanders start their day with fluffy coconut milk omelets fortified with shrimp and tomatoes or burritos filled with fish sauce-lacquered bacon, crispy hash browns, and Thai chile avocado salsa (or both, if they have room). Nguyen’s pastries tie everything together, from the green-tinged pandan waffle that serves as a platform for Le’s fried chicken and waffle dish to the black sesame sugar cookies and slices of hojicha banana cake that are meant to pair with Dam’s Vietnamese coffee drinks.

The Love Shack: Best New Bar

Carter Hiyama

Cross a ’60s cocktail party with a tropical vacation and you’ll end up with something close to the Love Shack, G-Love’s next-door sibling bar. Tropical cocktails like the Fight Milk (rum, POG, lime, clarified milk) sipped under the bar’s palapa evoke a vacation somewhere warm, but the flair crafted by owner Garrett Benedict and team screams party. There’s always something attention-grabbing at the Love Shack, be it the dim sum-esque bar carts that weave through tables carrying mini martinis, oysters on the half shell, and shrimp cocktail — or the prime rib bearing a lit sparkler that gets paraded around the room before arriving at the table to delight diners with its twinkly glow.

Mika Paredes

Cornet Custard: Best Desserts

Cornet paddles its egg-rich custard into scoops atop torch-style gelato cones imported from Rome, Italy, with customers returning for new releases of flavors like corn blackberry cajeta, plum and bitter almond, and avocado milkshake. Although this subway-tiled scoop shop only landed on Division Street in June 2024, the genesis of Cornet’s ultra-creamy custard can be traced back to one of Portland’s most influential restaurants — Beast. It was in the kitchen of the late Naomi Pomeroy’s bygone tasting menu restaurant that she and pastry chef Mika Paredes adapted a recipe from The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern. As Beast morphed into Ripe Cooperative, the custard gained a cult following, spinning off into a weekend pop-up at the Pomeroy-founded flower shop Colibri before moving into its own space.

Kari Young

Mariscos con Onda: Best Pop-Up

Gleaning inspiration from a trip to Ensenada, Mexico, Adán Fausto leveled up his former parking lot pop-up Paradise Mariscos into a summer residency, taking over the kitchen at the now-closed but eternally beloved Houston Blacklight. Fausto’s celebration of seafood included several preparations: grilling oysters before topping them with pork chorizo butter; marinating a Baja-style mixto of shrimp, octopus, mussels, and clams with salsa cóctel and lime; smoking black cod before folding it into hand-pressed tortillas; and deep-frying rockfish Milanese before assembling tortas. For folks who haven’t visited Baja California, Mariscos con Onda made its seafood scene accessible right here in Portland, complete with kimchi micheladas brightened by salted plum chamoy and Tajín-rimmed mangonadas.