Lauro Kitchen feels like a chain, or at least part of a big restaurant group. It’s very slick and trendy, not really in the spirit of the very cool, anti-corporate neighborhood it’s in. That’s not to say it isn’t a nice place to be; huge windows look out upon the street and the lighting is magnanimous, coming from red-hued Lego-like lighting fixtures overhead. It’s just too big to be intimate, and there’s too much self-promotion going on to invite adoration.

The staff is friendly, if less food-nerdy than other Portland staffs. We can’t totally blame them—“Mediterranean” is a broad, somewhat vague cuisine to serve, ranging from southern Spain and Morocco, eastward through France and southern Italy, and into Turkey and Greece. Add to that list Pacific-Northwest-style cooking (local ingredients in creative but non-locale-specific platings) and you have a plan that looks good on paper, but whose lack of focus invites mediocre renditions of everything. Jack of all trades, master of none.

Take the pizza oven, which is fancy, but gas-burning; the resulting pizzas aren’t terrible, but they don’t get enough sear because the pizza oven isn’t hot enough (it’s kept around 600°, about 300 degrees lower than a proper pizza oven should be). Plus they’re taken out too soon, and are much too cheesy. Spanish patatas bravas can be wonderful, but here they’re butchered, dry and mealy like frozen-and-reheated steak fries, and served with a bland marinara-ish sauce and a mayonnaisey aïoli with little garlic flavor. Mussels are cooked in the pizza oven in an amusing clamshell contraption, but they disappoint, too; the broth doesn’t get all funky-mussel-wonderful, and an onion-and-pepper mix doesn’t do much.

Fish and meat mains aren’t a lot better. The Middle Eastern end is represented less well by chicken tagine that is irresponsibly shoved into the pizza oven with no lid, drying it out.

The wine selection, much of which is (unusually) offered by the quarter- or half-carafe, is decent—including many lesser-known wines that go well with “Mediterranean” food—but this broad a cuisine type could support a much more exciting range. Markups are high, too, so the selection is limited further. Cocktails attempt to keep up with the artisanal movement, but you can see a vodka-happy -tini urge here that’s only thinly disguised with infusions. Lauro is not a bad restaurant, but in this great food city, why bother?