Lechon: South American happy hour in Portland

During a recent trip to Portland, we checked out Lechon, a South American restaurant in downtown Portland. Lechon’s happy hour is from 4-5pm Mon-Sat and you’ll need a reservation because the restaurant was already bumping when we got there at 4pm.

Interior

We are seated as a table of 4 in a booth, so it was comfy but not a very spacious booth. The restaurant itself seems kind of narrow as our booth is against the wall but also really close to the bar seating (one person can walk through that passageway). The bar seating is very long and it faces some water tanks, which is cool.

Furniture and decor is mostly wood and very rustic/hipster looking.

Drinks

We order some drinks for happy hour. Note that all prices in this review are in USD.

Lechon margarita ($8), mal humorado ($12), and something else lol

I can’t remember the happy hour prices for these drinks, but these are their regular cocktail prices. The margarita and mal humorado are both quite strong with a tequila base. The drink I got (the white one) was more fruity and had kind of a pina colada taste to it.

Food

We order several happy hour food items to share with 4 people.

Braised brisket empanadas ($8)

We order the braised brisket empanadas, which come in servings of 2 and ancho aioli. They also have a pepper version for vegetarians.

The empanadas are crispy on the outside and stuffed with beef brisket and cheese on the inside. A nice small biter.

Pork belly baocitos ($9)

These baos have pork belly, firecracker slaw and sesame bbq sauce held together in a steamed bun. The servings size is 2 per order. Generally, it was a decent bao and had lots of flavours in the slaw and bbq sauce.

Smoked bone marrow ($17)

This is actually not on their happy hour menu but regular menu. We wanted to order it anyways! This dish comes with guacho bread, parsley, shallot, a caper mustard salad and chimichurri sauce. You get 4 big pieces of bone marrow and you are supposed to scrape it off the bone onto the bread and eat it with everything. Very yummy and a must order!

Peruvian fried chicken bites ($12)

This dish was recommended to us by our server. It is a fried chicken dish with fermented hot honey and basil aioli. It was a very yummy dish! The chicken is crunchy and the sauce has a nice kick to it so it’s actually a little spicy.

Foraged mushrooms ($14)

This dish was also recommended by our server, but we hesitated because we always hesitate on vegetarian dishes lol. But I like mushrooms so we decided to give it a try.

The foraged mushroom comes topped with a farm egg, aged parmesan, caramelized onion puree and a toasted brioche. This dish was a little hard to share, but delicious. I found the taste to be quite sophisticated and elegant compared to some of the other dishes that were more casual. Mushrooms were saucy, had lots of flavour, the toast soaked in everything. Puree was smooth.

Final thoughts

Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

We had a fun happy hour at Lechon. Everything was quite yummy and the drinks were strong so we only needed to order 1-2 haha. Out of all the dishes we tried, I liked the bone marrow, fried chicken bites and the foraged mushroom the most. I really wanted to order their octopus dish but it was sold out so I recommend you order that one too because it seems popular!

Server was good, it was a busy night so the server wasn’t always able to help us if we wanted to order more stuff, but it was fine as we liked taking our time and chatting anyways. The 4 of us were all full when we left the restaurant.

I recommend trying out their happy hour because I was told by the server that most of the dishes are the same portion size as their dinner menu, just at a lower price because of happy hour.

Sincerely, Loewe