This airy, high-ceilinged, gently upmarket restaurant/bar just across the tracks from the western edge of the Mississippi hip strip is probably one of Portland’s coolest restaurants full of kids. Why bother with those big, boring family restaurants when you can take your kids here? You can sip one of the exceedingly well-chosen brews, including one on cask (at our last visit, it was a delicious fresh-hopped local IPA) while you bring the high chair on over and expose the kids… [More]

Impressive Mexican kitchens often occupy humble digs, and La Sirenita is one of the city’s most impressive and most humble.

Entering this cozy space is like walking into a simple family kitchen. Spanish is as welcome as English. The menu is short and sweet; La Sirenita manages to stay focused, unlike the long, meandering, Mexican-American menu at La Bonita, the inferior competitor down Alberta (which nonetheless manages, somehow, to be more popular—ah, the wisdom of the masses).

The meats that fill La… [More]