Oba (Portland, OR)

The itty bitty little candles at Oba are just not going to stay lit if you're half as good on a date as I am. My date blew them out a total of three times from laughing at my lame jokes. I think she was laughing at me. It might have been the half price bottle of wine actually. The wine list at Oba is extensive and interesting, but honestly I was expecting more cheap Chileans being a Quasi-Latin Restaurant. Most the wines were from Nappa and Willamette Valleys. The atmosphere is pretty trendy sophisticated being in the Pearl and all, but I am afraid I can't agree with City Search's description of it having pretty people. Pretty decor yes, but my date and I were clearly the best looking people there. Then again Portland has always had a different (see "obscure" "insane" or "wrong") view of what is good looking.

So we went for happy hour because its supposed to be just amazing on Sundays. The waitress we had was super nice and very attentive as was the girl shadowing her. The service here is second to none. I always feel bad about the shadowee like I should be directing some sort of instruction to her instead of the shadower, like that will help her learn or something, but I ended up ignoring her for the most part, something about the term shadowing makes me feel like I'm not supposed to notice them. Anyway, the waitress was very helpful in explaining how best to exploit the obviously infamous Sunday happy hour deal(s), but I still managed to spend $75 on 2 people. I have heard other people say even though the deals are good the prices are overly high to begin with so I guess I would recommend NOT going to Oba on a day besides Sunday. Also just to get the other bad point out of the way I guess people have said the staff can be pretentious and choose who they are going to be nice to. They were nice to me and my date (probably because of her) but I could see how that would turn one off to the place as well.

So I get a bottle of wine for half price to start. In order to get it for half price you have to buy an entre with no deal associated with it other than that. The waitress said to split one and then get two items off the happy hour menu. We obliged. We ordered a butternut squash enchilada with mole sauce and curiously topped pomegranate seeds on top. Very tasty. Also got calamari with a really good honey ginger dipping sauce and then we just had to try the jerk flavored Salvador-Molly-like hurricane fries. Yeah, wine goes well with all this right? Should have gotten the margarita in retrospect as I hear they are super good--next time. The Spanish coffees were very strong and made up for any lack of alcohol consumption we may have missed from not getting the ritas.

Also next time I will have to bring a non-vegetarian date. I don't eat red meat either, but there were a few chicken and pork dishes I wanted to try. Why didn't you just order one you ask. Well because 1) I always feel bad ordering meat on a vegetarian date and 2) I wanted to try and conform to the aforementioned happy hour plan of attack and needed to split a entre.

Apparently Oba was the hot spot in Portland MONTHS ago (okay maybe years ago). WTLW Bryan. But I still thought it was a pretty cool place. I will be going back - on a Sunday obviously.

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--Thanks Bryan.