Soho House landed in Portland as exclusive dining reached its national peak. In bigger cities, where a month’s worth of tables can disappear in minutes, hustlers are scalping restaurant reservations on reselling apps. Instead of chasing them online like sneaker heads, the well-connected are buying standing reservations at members-only restaurants charging as much as $20,000 for initiation fees. Food is part of the draw, but having a certain je ne sais quoi is most important. You need infamy, something storied or salacious behind the curtain. The people who can’t go have to want to.

Portland isn’t a very members-only town—dusty country clubs and the MAC don’t fit this bill, the Multnomah Whiskey Library only does if you’re into whiskey—but we’re all in on cool restaurants, especially if they’re impossible to book.

Exclusivity, the cool kind, is Soho House’s thing. The international, restaurateur-founded social club is famously selective about its members. Only the right “creative type” applicants get in, at half price if you’re under 27 and free if you’re an artist with a painting to swap. Lawyers and hedge fund managers are turned away. For 30 years, it’s positioned itself as the brand name of contemporary private clubs. This private restaurant moment should be its moment. And with a Michelin-pedigreed chef, the Portland Soho House restaurant seemed primed as Portland’s entrée into the world of members-only restaurants—ones you actually want to visit.

A friend who’s a new member invited me this summer. To join her, I had to make an account online, pass security, and let her escort me from the lobby. The restaurant is on the second of three floors, above the gym and below the rooftop pool. Southwest-facing windows let the setting sun’s orange glow hang in the air, a fog machine pumping vacation haze into the room.

It looks like a hotel that’s really good at looking like it’s not a hotel: emerald leather dining chairs, humongous planters, dozens of lamps, and a colossal linen room divider with panels painted by the artist Jess Ackerman. From our table, I spot a child—maybe 10 years old—perched on a velour banquette lording over a “Dirty Burger,” wearing a polo shirt like he owned the joint. Isn’t this place the anti–country club? I thought. The server asked for our member number and told us the DJ starts in the bar at 9pm. I was distracted by the kid’s white-rimmed sunglasses reflecting my own confused face. “Do people dance?” my friend asked. “Not typically.”

There’s a weird juxtaposition between the overtly expensive decor and the boring presentation of the food. That “Dirty Burger” comes wrapped in paper that reads “Dirty Burger” and with a chrome cone of not-quite-crispy shoestring fries. Pizzas sit on wiry pizza-parlor stands. Wait, pizza and burgers? Not exclusively, but I’d venture they’re the most popular items.

The restaurant is unnamed, which is unfortunately not the devastatingly chic move you want it to be. Instead, it evokes the obligatory shrug of a hotel’s room service menu but lacks the context or history that a storied institution can bring to this approach. All Soho Houses have similar restaurants, serving malleable breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus capable of keeping 10-year-olds and creative directors happy—think $98 steaks and caesar salads with chicken, salmon, or tofu. A few corporate brand staples are constants, but menus are otherwise distinct, at least in theory. Some locations, however, have additional, separately concepted restaurants, with a big-name chef, autonomous menu, and potential thrills. Though not without familiar comforts, each Soho House is said to be built around its host city. In a nationally celebrated food town like Portland, you’d think adding the fun restaurant would be a no-brainer. Alas, that’s not what happened.

Signs of chef Matt Sigler mostly get lost in the formulaic setup. Sigler cooked at Bay Area Michelin spots Quince and Flour + Water before arriving in Portland to open the wood-fired Italian restaurant Renata. Next was Il Solito, a pasta-centric hotel restaurant downtown, but he moved to the Oswego Lake Country Club during the pandemic. Here, his assignment was Italian American, a composite cuisine he’s been cooking his entire career. While he’s made it more exciting than it needed to be, this isn’t a pedestal for any chef to shine.

Raw seafood dishes—steelhead tartare in an herby dressing, tuna crudo with chile crisp—might divert furthest from the country club template, but only so far. They’re about as adventurous as daring to eat raw seafood. By contrast, a snack of briny Castelvetrano olives stuffed with spicy nduja sausage and fried with breadcrumbs are a joy.

Sigler sneaks a few more tricks into the pizzas. They come from the open kitchen’s wood hearth light and shareable with a solid chew-crunch-char balance. Restrained toppings highlight the Neapolitan-style crust and smartly assembled ingredients. Buttery green olives and capers play nicely over the cheeseless Napoli pizza’s zippy tomato sauce. Nettles appeared on a late-spring pie. Prosciutto and stracciatella on another.

Housemade pastas are most exciting. Though not much of a looker, plump and bouncy late spring cavatelli with fava beans were excellent in a rich lamb ragu. Linguini, toothsome and limber, hit the same technical benchmarks when twirled—prettily—with Dungeness crab in a spicy tomato arrabbiata sauce.

The roasted piece of fish and big fancy steak (“choose two sides”) at the bottom of the menu feel more circumscribed, in line with that underlying, people-pleasing structure. They’re simple to avoid upsetting anyone instead of simple to honor exceptional ingredients. A few of the entrées appear at other Soho Houses, like the chicken under a brick and the “dirty burger.” Hard to say what makes the latter “dirty.” It’s not quite a dressed-up fast-food burger, nor is it the hefty, bistro-style burger you’d expect from a ritzy club. It’s worth charging to the family account, but nothing you need to scheme your way past security for.

But there is some joy in these cookie-cutter elements—the Soho House cookies, in fact. Handsome and chubby, they are, I’ll admit, the Platonic ideal of salty, half-chewy chocolate chip cookies.

So the food is fine. The restaurant is a reliable daily driver with a few pops of flair, and maybe that’s just as well. But as a civilian voyeur, I’m looking for something else. Were this Portland’s first veiled, alluring restaurant, getting in should feel like an event, something singular that miraculously goes on night after night. I was looking for scandal, pomp and circumstance, minor celebrities. If nothing else a tableside flambé! But this nameless restaurant is not that. It’s just a decent place to grab a bite between a jog on the Woodway treadmills and a dip in the rooftop pool.

On our way out, we stopped for a drink in the bar. I wanted to try one infamous Soho House staple: the Picante de la Casa cocktail, of internet lore. The DJ was tame. The server was right, dancing would have been weird. The drink came in a cut crystal glass with a neatly salted rim and the butt of a jalapeño floating on ice: a totally fine spicy margarita. The bartender set it on a monogrammed napkin. “Your member number?”