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Fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, and seafood jambalaya are coming to NW Couch Street. Screen Door, a longstanding Portland Southern destination, will open its second restaurant on May 12.
Screen Door has been a first stop for Portland visitors and Burnside neighbors for 15 years, famous for its chicken and waffles and praline bacon. The restaurant has shown up in the Washington Post, Southern Living, and Portlandia, with more than 7,000 Yelp reviews, making it the most reviewed Portland restaurant on Yelp. In 2019, owners Nicole and David Mouton had big plans for Screen Door: The second location in the Pearl was slated to open in 2020, with a Portland International Airport outpost coming in 2021. Now, that timeline has been pushed back a year, with the airport location set to open in 2022. “We did go through some turmoil,” Nicole Mouton says. “We probably lost about a year on it, but it’s back on track.”
The Pearl restaurant’s menu will include a number of classics and new arrivals — potlikker oyster broil, praline-glazed riblets, chicken-fried steaks. “Chicken-fried steak is something we’d run from time to time at Burnside when we could, but there are a number of things that we couldn’t do over there because of a lack of space,” Nicole Mouton says. One of those things the Moutons wanted to do: serve chicken and waffles all day, which the team will be able to do at the Pearl. The brunch menu will also get a number of new items, from a French-onion-and-bacon egg tart to French omelets. Some of the standards — praline bacon, brisket — won’t be on the menu on day one at the new locale, but as the staff settles in, more of those standards will return.
The bar menu at Screen Door takes much of its inspiration from New Orleans cocktail culture, with vieux carres and sazeracs; the brunch menu will also include favorites like blood orange mimosas and bloody marys. As for non-alcoholic drinks, diners will find a house-made cream soda on tap, with seasonal flavors — think: strawberries in the summer and mandarin in the winter.
Screen Door’s new location will open with indoor and outdoor dining, as well as takeout; the Burnside locale will stick to takeout for the time being. Screen Door’s Pearl restaurant will open at 1131 NW Couch Street.
• Screen Door [Official]
• Colossally Popular Southern Staple Screen Door Will Open a Pearl District Restaurant [EPDX]
• Previous Screen Door coverage [EPDX]
