Ava Genes is a spectacular restaurant in Portland, Oregon that never fails to wow it’s guests. Head here for a fabulous meal.
Ava Genes is not the easiest restaurant to get into right now, because of extremely high demand. Lucky for us we were able to walk in and get two seats at the Chef’s table.
We were already in the area with a bunch of other food bloggers to check out Saint Honore Bakery (it’s awesome) and wanted to go somewhere for dinner within walking distance. The food bloggers suggested Ava Genes, but then quickly dismissed it thinking there was no way we could get. Although that was basically true, it is impossible to get regular reservation that is not the case to sit at the Chef’s table. We got there just in time to take up the last two available seats at the table. Whoo-hoo!
Sitting there watching them work was awesome. It was like dinner and a show. They obviously take great pride in their food and prepare every single dish one at a time.
Like any good Portland restaurant, they use locally sourced, in-season ingredients so the menu is always changing. I’m pretty sure none of the food we had is currently available. It changes that fast!
In this photo above you see one of their “breads’. They offer 3 or 4 or these types of breads that change seasonally. It was good, but they had another with a pea spread on it that we wish we had tried. Apparently it is everyone’s favorite when it is available. These breads cost between $6-10.
This was the kale salad. It was great, but next time I would try one of their more adventurous salads. 
This was one of their simple pasta dishes and it was outstanding. Like the salad it was a simple dish, but full of flavor and so fresh. It was just has good as any of the pasta we had in Italy. It was actually better than half the stuff we ate in Italy.
Last but not least was strawberry panna cotta. It was divine and look how pretty it was.
