The Old Dekum Street Firehouse Finds New Life As Fabulous Restaurant

As a resident of Woodlawn, a section of town some Portlanders may never have even heard of, I was jonesing for some good neighborhood grub. The Good Neighbor Pizza restaurant opened last year, and, I hear has some very tasty pie, but as a Gluten Free girl, they most certainly did NOT fit the bill for me.

The work on the old Dekum fire house had everyone in the neighborhood curious. I had actually been in the building when it was on the market and, though it had very beautiful bones, it was quite the fixer. The exposed brick walls and weathered wood floors were beautiful, though, and when I heard that it would be a restaurant, I was thrilled.

While I couldn't see the progress on the inside, I saw a TON of work put into the outside. They built a flagstone patio, and surrounded the building with perennials, fruit trees, and raised beds for vegetables and herbs. A great sign that these people cared about food, and where it comes from.

When it finally opened, my husband and I high tailed it over there. It was summer, so the patio was open, and lovely, but we needed to get inside and see how they had handled the daunting task of rehabilitating the old, neglected building. What we found was beautiful. Perfect, really, at representing the essence of the restaurant, which we discovered when reading the menu. Lots of old, weathered wood, the exposed brick walls lined with pictures of the restaurant in its previous life as a firehouse, an open kitchen highlighting the tiled and brick wood oven.

So on to the food, which like the design of the interior, is simple, beautiful and lovingly prepared. Yes, it is as great as we hoped— clean, fresh, tastes like FOOD, not butter and salt. Most dishes are cooked in the wood oven and so have a pleasing, but not overwhelming smoky flavor. We love to start the meal off by sharing their lemony romaine hearts with tangy and sweet shaved pecorino. If I am feeling gluttonous, I'll get the buttery mussels with corona beans and leeks before making my choice between the tender rotisserie chicken, the perfectly cooked hangar steak (you won't even need a steak knife), or the smoky rock fish with tomato, saffron, and starchy sun chokes. My husband is thrilled that you can get some of their crusty thin pizza as an appetizer, so that he doesn't have to miss out on fennel roasted pork shoulder with cannellini beans.

The food is consistently good, and easily paired with their versatile and inexpensive wines. They have a beer lovers list of bottles, but I can't comment more extensively than that, since I am allergic to the stuff!

We make frequent treks there for the food first and foremost, for the atmosphere to be sure, but also for the folks who run the place. We are greeted warmly by all—even the chefs, as busy as they usually are, smile and nod to us through the heat of the kitchen. Our servers have been known to remember what we had the last time we were in, what we had going on in our lives since our last visit ("How did the exam go?"), and offer up some helpful reviews of new menu items. The owners always take the time to chat us up in between making efforts to ensure that everyone else is having an experience as pleasant as ours.

Did I mention their prices? You would be hard pressed to find a comparable value in town. The Firehouse is one of those ever-so-slightly out of the way places (unless you are a lucky resident of Woodlawn, like us) that you should jump to get to before the rest of town finds out about them.