Three words: view, view, view. People love it, they come for it, they pay a premium for it. Portland City Grill is perched on the top floor of the US Bancorp Tower, or “Big Pink,” named for its pink granite exterior. From here, you can see the entire city and the Cascades. Only the Wells Fargo Building is taller, by ten feet.

Thanks to the view, this restaurant is intensely popular during happy hour, with a somewhat egalitarian cross-section of Portland’s population: indie hipsters and yuppies; old and young; rich and poor. If someone else is paying, it’s even easier to love, but prices from 4:30pm–6:30pm and 10pm–midnight (all day on Sunday) are surprisingly affordable.

Even though experience has conditioned us to flinch whenever we see a menu this globetrotting—rarely does anyone master Japanese preps and risotto in one kitchen—we’re a little impressed by the competence here. Even sushi is good: fresh and not too thickly cut. Of course, if you order a California roll, you won’t get anything to stop the presses for. But at $3, it’s cheaper and better tasting than your grocery-store lunch staple. Better is furikake-crusted ahi tuna, the wonderfully umami flavors of seaweed, dashi, and glutamate taking this overrated fish high enough to negate the need for the “firecracker aïoli” that comes with it.

But we’d caution against ordering any of this off the regular menu—for the price, you can do much better at Japanese restaurants around town. Kung pao calamari is only palatable at $6, and “teriyaki chicken rice paper spring rolls” served with “Thai dipping sauce” (which is it?) are never good, no matter the price. We’d rather pay $3 to eat our napkins.

On the regular menu, avoid anything that pits nebulous words like “Thai,” “Hoisin,” and “Asian” against Euro-American dishes. Where we would commend an expert conjoining of spices, herbs, and chilies in otherwise French preparations, this is more akin to dumping a one-dimensional sauce impersonating all those flavors onto a dull piece of chicken or pork. Dry-aged steaks are good, but they ought to be better for the high prices they command. Again, we suspect that the glittering land out your window has something to do with it.

An offensively overpriced and unimaginative wine list appears to have been culled exclusively from Wine Spectator lists—something we rarely see in Portland. Perhaps being up this high has put the restaurant out of touch with what’s going on in the city below.