Thank you, Kelsey for sending us this information. We all benefit from your first hand experience and most of all from the superb way you describe it.

I just got back from my first visit to Portland, Oregon, and I have to tell you that Andina is a gluten free dream come true! Aside from being some of the best food that I’ve ever tasted, the gluten free selections are totally abundant. I visited for 5 days, and I ate there twice, once for dinner and the next day for lunch.

Dinner: they present you with a completely separate GF dinner, it’s a full 2-page book with tons and tons of options. Then they bring out GF fried yucca with a yummy salsa. This replaces the bread basket that those dining off the regular menu receive. These yucca were light, not the least bit greasy, and delicious. They have small plates (that come in 3 sizes – S, M, L – actually), and actual full dinners. I opted to split several of the small plates (size small for all). Awesome peppers stuffed with ham and quinoa, mussels with corn & tomato salsa, avocado stuffed with crab, a causa (fluffy potato concoction) with cheese and asparagus, and the 5 elementos cebiche made from the 5 freshest fishes of the day.

Normally when I get tapas type food I typically favor one dish over another, but all of these dishes were fabulous, and had very unique flavors. And since most of them were fish, I didn’t feel like I was loading up something unhealthy.

They also have a separate GF dessert menu that had at least 6 choices. They had everything from chocolate cake, to flan, to a trio of daily special creme brulees, to sorbet. I chose the chocolate cake (torta de chocolate). It came with a caramel-like ice cream (some peruvian name I’ll never remember) that was divine.

For lunch you still get a separate GF menu, but it’s a little smaller. I had the mussels and cebiche again, but this time we tried the scallops baked in cheese and lime, and a tuna dish. Again, everything was excellent. The GF dessert menu is a little more limited as well, but I got the chocolate cake again and managed to persuade them to add the ice cream available at dinner. It was worth it. Btw, we still got the yucca instead of the bread too. Score!

In addition to great food, there’s a great atmosphere with yummy red sangria, and mojitos made the way god intended . . . with sugar cane straws. The staff is very knowledgeable about their GF items, and they go the extra mile to help. My service at dinner was a little better and faster than my lunch service, FYI.

Great, great, great food. I told the chefs they need to open an east coast version STAT. If I lived in Portland this would be my regular haunt.

I hope that I will have the privilege of publishing more articles like — first hand experience is worth much more than any summary of what appears on the internet. If you have information that needs to be published on this blog, please leave a comment at the end of this or any other article or send me an e-mail by using the button in the middle of the second column on this page.

Published 05/18/08