One of my favorite restaurants in Portland is Local 188. I had a fabulous, expensive, extravagant dinner there at Christmastime one year with a friend. Folks, I am all about spending a lot of money for a great dining experience. I don't think twice about planning to spend $100 on myself for a meal if the food, service, atmosphere, and overall experience are memorable. I don't drink a lot, I don't smoke, I don't have expensive toys, so food is where my money goes.
This is all back story to my lunch today. I have had a few friends who have told me that they went to Sonny's for dinner and it was great--as good as Local 188 or better. When my friend and I saw that it was open for lunch we didn't think twice--we abandoned our initial plans for lobster rolls and headed up Exchange St. to Sonny's.
The restaurant is beautiful. They have taken any fast-food-feel (from the former O'Naturals) out of the place. It's full of exposed brick, nice window seating, comfy looking couches, and vaults; it looks like a really cool place you could go after work for drinks with friends and linger on through dinner. I especially loved the concrete bar which is enormous but does not overfill the main room.
We were the first lunch customers that I can recall. I ordered a cocktail and the waitress/hostess told me that she didn't know if she could make me one because the bartender didn't show up. After a phone call, she showed up with my drink. It tasted like it had absolutely no alcohol in it whatsoever but she charged me $8 for it anyway. They did not have ginger ale or root beer. Pepsi products (which is a minus for me every time; I'm a Coke or ginger ale girl at restaurants mostly). They did have ginger beer.
You can look at their menu through the link above; it's not a huge lunch menu, which is fine. Sometimes too many choices can be overwhelming. I chose the enchilada combo: a cheese enchilada with a red salsa and a bean enchilada with a green salsa. There was almost no cheese in the cheese enchilada at all. It was basically a rolled up tortilla with salsa on it. The bean one had a lot of beans, again, no cheese, and green salsa on top. The salsas were good but nothing stood out about them. There were more black beans on the side, with a tiny spoonful of rice that was yellow but had absolutely no flavor. This plate was covered with cabbage (I assume to make it look like a big plate of food). This entirely vegetarian meal that probably cost the restaurant no more than $3 cost me $9. I was totally underwhelmed. There was nothing wrong with the flavor. It tasted fine. But I didn't feel like I had $9 worth of anything, and honestly, would have been just as satisfied with a Taco Bell soft taco. It was that unimpressive.
My friend had fish tacos; two small tortillas, covered with salsa, lettuce, more cabbage, tomato, and two tiny pieces of fish. Each taco probably had 2oz of fish in it, and that is overestimating I think. Again, $12 for this extremely cheap-to-produce lunch. She said "It was a good salad, but it didn't have much fish." We also ordered an appetizer of yam fries with a poblano-cream sauce. The fries were delicious! They had a crispy breading with a mashed potato inside. The cream was more like a spread; it was too hard to dip the fries into without breaking them. It had a nice flavor. The fries came out with our lunches instead of as an appetizer (further proof to me how easy the lunches were to make and therefore should have been a LOT cheaper).
After a very long wait to have our plates taken off the table (again, there was 1 other party in the whole place and I spotted 6 people between the kitchen and the bar areas), the waitress brought us a dessert menu. $7 for every dessert. At lunch time? My lunch was overpriced at $9, I wasn't about to find out how disappointed I would be in such an expensive dessert.
1 cocktail, 1 appetizer, 2 cheap-to-produce lunches, and a bottle of water should NEVER cost $40; it should cost even less when the drink is weak and the service is bad. I will not try Sonny's again.
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