Coleman Guilts Over Gilt

Welcome to ColemanWatch, a weekly feature in which we parse the particularly florid stylings of the Portland Mercury's resident food critic, Patrick Alan Coleman. Seen a sentence we've missed? Log on to your bright, burning email screen, and wend a grandiloquent email our way.

After the utter glory that was last week's cuss-filled review of Montage, resident mascot Patrick Alan Coleman dials back the insanity and ups our guilt--sorry!--with today's soothing take on Jamie Dunn's downtown late-night standby Gilt Club. It's a lovely review, easy to read, full of lilting cadences and flowing descriptions of dishes like a "tasty, sophisticated" rabbit and pork mortadella, or "expertly prepared" ricotta fritters, or the "essentially an excellent burger" of an elk tartare. There's even a charmingly discursive digression on the nature and use of bitterness.

So what's going on here? Did the cold numb Coleman's otherwise-en-fuego dendrites? "The chitarra pasta is dreamy." Dreamy!?! Or is it possible that he's just been totally won over by the swoon-tastic nature of Gilt's new(ish) chef, Chris Carriker, last observed chasing a herd of sheep with a rolling pin? Or maybe it's the darkness, the seductiveness, the club's homonymic qualities.

When you take the Gilt Club's Anne Rice meets Donna Reed atmosphere as read, the addition of Carriker's expertise should serve mostly to fill the high-backed red-leather banquettes with more foodies snapping surreptitious camera phone pics well past midnight.