Honeymoon: Whiskey Soda Lounge and Pok Pok, SE Portland OR

Friday May 3, SE Portland OR

After our scenic tour of SE looking for an open bar earlier where we could get a bottle of wine, we pretty much had the lay of the land and finding our B&B, The Clinton Street Guesthouse, was a breeze. It's one of many nicely updated and well cared for Craftsman-style cottages along Clinton Street, this one built in 1913. After we let ourselves in with the key code, we made our way to our second floor room and found that the room has a private balcony overlooking the back yard, which is complete with a large fig tree and a chicken coop with several Barred Rock chickens, which we heard from inside the room long before we ever saw them. We wouldn't meet our hosts, Jason and Ann, until the following morning.

Given our very close proximity to the universally acclaimed Thai restaurant Pok Pok, which like Lardo also started as a food cart, I wanted to go, not because everyone has to go here—I don't give a crap about that, but because Andy Ricker is doing food there that is unknown in this country and barely known in most of Thailand. This is an opportunity that a chef doesn't willingly give up and so we planned to walk there around dinner time.

Pok Pok is situated about a 10-minute walk in the absolutely perfect spring weather from where we were staying. During the walk to the restaurant along Clinton Street, we marveled at all the gardens in full bloom and at the swarms of bicyclists traveling along Clinton Street, designated a Bike Boulevard where bicycles have priority to motor vehicles. The poppies and the lilacs are all bursting forth in full bloom now along with dozens of other plants that being from the East Coast, I don't recognize.

When we arrived at Pok Pok at 6:45, we checked in and were told that we were looking at a 60-90 minute wait, which on a pretty night was not a horrible thing, but certainly not something that we are accustomed to. I generally wouldn't wait this long at a restaurant, but this was the one restaurant that I came to Portland to visit. We walked across the street to their bar, the Whiskey Soda Lounge, and commandeered a picnic table on the sidewalk of 32nd at Division and watched a veritable parade of people, mostly youngsters. Portland proper appears to be a young person's town. In fact, one young waitress told us, "This is where 30-year olds go to retire."


Punny Khing and I

Parked outside on the street beside a drinking establishment on a phenomenal spring day is rough duty, I know. But we suffered through it by ordering drinks, my favorite Asian lager, a Singha for me and one of the house specialty drinks, a Khing and I for Ann, and settling in to watch the people go by. Ann's cocktail was mekong (a sugar cane whisky much like rum), lime, ginger, and ginger syrup, the pun being that ginger in Thai is khing. I doubt a lot of people get that little pun, but I have cooked a ton of Thai food in my life, albeit southern Thai food and not the northern and Chiang Mai-style food served at Pok Pok.


My Favorite for Spicy Food

And what is the point of being at a drinking establishment at happy hour without having some drinking food? A dish on the menu caught my eye: Som Tam Thawt. I know enough to know that this is the traditional green papaya salad, but the last word—thawt—got my chef wheels spinning. That's one transliteration of the Thai word for deep-fried. Deep-fried green papaya salad?!?!! Gotta have it! And what a beautiful sight it was too. The papaya and long beans were battered very lightly and fried gently and the traditional dressing was served on the side. Too awesome!


Som Tam Thawt (Deep Fried Som Tam): How Freaking Awesome!

Sitting on the sidewalk, we have passed the hour mark and are now at an hour and fifteen-minute wait for Pok Pok. Ann, who has been suffering silently for weeks, can no longer suffer in silence and it is perfectly clear that she is feeling poorly and needs to go back to the B&B. I know this and I resign myself to asking for the check and passing up on the one restaurant that I came to Portland for. I would do this for her. Just at that moment, a server came up to us and asked us to cash out, that our table at Pok Pok was ready to go. Knowing how much I wanted to go, Ann put a brave face on it and we walked across the street and entered the bedlam that is Pok Pok on a Friday night. She would do that for me.

Because Ann wasn't feeling well, we ordered in a hurry and ate in a hurry. We ordered an appetizer and two main dishes to be delivered at the same time. Like everyone else in the place, we ordered a plate of Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings, huge fried wings tossed in a gooey fish sauce caramel. I won't do that again. I liked the wings, but they weren't stellar. They were huge to be sure, but I have made lots better fish sauce caramels in my life. Chicken wing box now ticked off, I would explore the rest of the menu if I ever had the chance again. If you are visiting Portland and want the wings, go to Whiskey Soda Bar and grab a couple drinks and some wings. You won't have to wait on line.


Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings

The two main dishes we ordered were Da Chom's Laap Meuang, a Chiang Mai-style spicy minced pork dish, and Kaeng Hung Leh, a Chiang Mai-style pork belly and pork shoulder curry of Burmese origin. The Burmese curry powder tastes predominantly of coriander and I noted lots of long thin strips of ginger in the curry as well; it had a slight sourness that I attribute to tamarind though I could be wrong about that. The laap/larb was exquisitely superior to any other I have ever eaten in my life. I would have liked less oil in the dish, but the flavor was incredible. I have had lots of larbs and lots of curries from all over Asia, but nothing like these two dishes. And that's why I came to Pok Pok. Mission accomplished.


Da Chom's Laap Meuang

Kaeng Hung Leh

One thing about the Pok Pok business model confused me. Rice costs extra and the servers are constantly hawking rice, it seems as a ticket builder. The three kinds of rice are all around $2 a portion. I'm not looking to cheap out and I want rice with my meal, so ordering rice wasn't a big deal, but it was an issue for several tables that I saw. Why not build the rice into the price of the meal and save the servers the song and dance and having to deal with pissed off wannabe cheap customers?

If I lived in Portland, Pok Pok is where I would hang out on my days off. I would finagle my way into the kitchen and would happily pound chiles in the pok pok all day long just to see how the dishes are made and to start picking some brains about northern Thai cooking.

[Note: Andy Ricker closed his entire Pok Pok empire as of the fall of 2020. I'm sad.]

Honeymoon: Olympic Provisions, Portland OR

Friday May 3, SE Portland OR


How to Tell You are in the Correct Location

After begrudgingly leaving Lardo and its wonderful pork sandwiches, Ann had the idea of finding a place to hole up and have a bottle of wine while waiting to check in to our B&B. We started driving around Southeast looking for a place to sit and have some wine, but nothing doing. Very few places are open before 5pm.

I admit that I was getting a bit frustrated (read "bitchy") when Ann hit on the brilliant idea of going to Olympic Provisions' original store in SE. We had already visited the "new" store in NW, where the charcuterie fabrication has now moved, the preceding Sunday on our way from the airport to the beach. Are you sensing a theme here? What could be better on top of meat than more meat? It's really kind of funny, but in our regular diets, we don't eat much meat. But we do have a crazy fondness for the pig!

I Want One!

When we arrived at the beautifully restored industrial building right on the river, the telltale hambulance was parked beside the building. We meant to get a picture of it when we visited the Thurman St NW store, but we forgot.

We perched ourselves at the bar just opposite the range at the tail end of lunch service and right at the beginning of happy hour and happily chatted away with each other and the staff as they were changing shifts. One thing is very apparent when talking with the people at Olympic Provisions and that is that they are all very proud of the product that they serve and are happy to be working there. As well they should be: their charcuterie is the best I have yet tasted anywhere. I've got a couple of other places I want to check out, but they have it down.


Yeah! Go Meat!

While sitting there, we ordered another bottle of Scott Paul "La Paulée" (the first bottle of which we purchased at OPNW and consumed the previous Sunday). We found this wine a bit disappointing the second time around after we had calibrated our palates to really good Oregon Pinot earlier in the week.

Once Again, Not Quite as Good

After a glass of wine and a few minutes to digest lunch, we ordered a chef's choice charcuterie plate. From the upper left corner clockwise, there was lomo, nduja, pork and pistachio terrine, loukanika, and chorizo andalucia, along with fabulous pickles: celery, bread and butter, and rhubarb.


Chef's Choice Charcuterie

For those of you without a working vocabulary of Italian charcuterie, nduja ("en-doo-ya"; recognize the similarity in pronunciation to andouille?) is a spicy and spreadable Calabrese salame. Nduja is cured in a casing like a hard salame, but it has a soft, spreadable texture because it is made from about three parts of fat to one part of lean, just the opposite of a hard salame.

Honeymoon: Lardo, SE Portland OR

Cool Logo

Once we crossed the Willamette River from downtown in Southeast, we were rolling down Hawthorne Blvd on a GPS-guided pork mission to find chef-owned sandwich shop and biergarten Lardo, a brick and mortar restaurant that started as a food cart. Ann, in her pre-trip planning, decided that we were not going to miss eating at a place called Lardo. And how cool is their logo? It finally dawned on me three weeks after eating there that the logo is actually a stylized pig. Am I stupid or is it that subtle?

You know it is a chef kind of place when you walk in and you see the following wall decorations:


Don't Mind if I Do

Oink!

All the sandwiches are listed on a chalkboard behind the counter and while there are a bunch of tasty sounding options (Rapini: aged provolone, red pepper agrodolce, caper mayo and Griddled Mortadella: provolone, marinated peppers, whole grain mustard) we were there for the big pig feed, so we ordered the Pork Meatball Bánh Mì with sriracha mayo, pickled vegetables, and cilantro, and a Korean Pork Shoulder sandwich with kimchee and cilantro.

Food ordered, Ann went outside under the big tent next door to scout out a couple of places at a picnic table while I stayed behind inside and ordered beers for us. I happened (through no planning whatsoever, didn't even realize it was one of the random shirts that I packed) to be wearing my Boccolone t-shirt, the one that reads "tasty salted pig parts" on it. The whole counter crew got a kick out of that. I guess it wasn't that difficult for them to pick me out as a fellow traveler.

The beers are listed on a separate chalkboard over a line of about a dozen taps and most are from Oregon, but range as far afield as Stone Brewing in San Diego and Epic Brewing in Salt Lake. I picked a Crux Imperial Mosaic IPA from Bend OR, and for Ann a pilsner from Commons Brewery also located in Southeast. Our second round of beers was an Epic Spiral Jetty Malty IPA and an SOB (Southern Oregon Brewing Medford OR) Na Zdraví pilsner. I can't say that we were blown away by any of the beers. I really think that I am spoiled by having Tröegs beers as our house beers. Too bad the folks from Oregon have to come back East to taste them!

As I walked outside, Zeppelin was jamming on the speakers and I finally found Ann at a picnic table sporting a wooden spoon bearing the number nine, making it easy enough for one of the food runners to find us. As we waited for our food, Zeppelin morphed into some old-school bluesy Clapton and then to more true blues. Good tunes for a wonderful afternoon sitting in a beer garden drinking beer with my girl who doesn't like beer! She keeps trying though!



Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine...

OK, Twist my Arm!

Pork Meatball Bánh Mì

Korean Pork Shoulder

Now these were great sandwiches and I am truly amazed (after living in our painfully culturally deprived, uptight, and conservative food market) to find a place where these sorts of restaurants not only can survive, but can thrive and become institutions in the cultural landscape. I do have to say that my pork meatball bánh mì is better though!

Honeymoon: Portland Japanese Garden

Friday May 2, Portland OR

A more spectacular May day we may never see again in our lives and as we wound our way the back way past Raptor Ridge winery and into first Beaverton and then in to Portland, the weather was begging us to stop at the Washington Park/Zoo/Rose Gardens/Japanese Garden complex overlooking the city just off highway 26. I had been there many times before in the past and wanted Ann to see what a beautiful place it is especially on such a gorgeous day. Because we were too early for roses, we decided to walk up the hill from the Rose Gardens and visit the Portland Japanese Garden, a spectacular place if there ever was one.

Because the weather was so nice, the park was overrun by people, both locals and tourists, but mainly locals making a three-day weekend for themselves. I can't blame them: I have never seen such a run of beautiful weather in Portland in my life. It was so nice that I saw Mt. Hood more times in this one trip than I have seen in all the times I have been to Portland in my life prior to this time. In the second photo below, you can see Hood just in the background, looking all Fujiyama-like behind the Japanese lantern.

Of the 150 or so frames I took while I was there, I gave myself a limit of 20 for this post. I believe 19 follow. Enjoy.

Honeymoon: Friday Breakfast

Friday May 2, Newberg OR

Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night. Maybe it was just time to move on. In any case, by Friday morning, I was feeling kind of wined and dined out and looking for a beer and some simpler food. Nothing against chef's tastings and wine pairings, but a guy needs a break now and again.

The lack of sleep, yeah, that was fun. At 0230, I was awakened by a blood curdling scream in the night. I have heard a lot of coyote vocalizations before, but nothing that ever sounded like someone was being murdered. Until last night. Over the course of 15 minutes, the coyote would sound off at random intervals, but none of his buddies joined in. Strange. I have never heard a coyote call that another dozen wouldn't start yipping and yowling in response. But it seemed that every freaking dog in all of Yamhill County decided to bark back. What a racket! No wonder I couldn't sleep.

We were up fairly early and got ourselves all cleaned up, all packed up, and then came downstairs to spend the final morning in Newberg sitting on deck admiring the splendid views while listening to the spotted towhees call from the tree line below. Kristin came outside after she finished preparing breakfast and asked if we wanted to eat outside, but since the dining room was all set up, we declined, there being no point in relocating everything.

When we sat down to the table, we noticed the butterfly print napkins folded in the shape of a butterfly. Ann and Kristin had got into a discussion about napkin folding the previous morning when our places were set with a fairly intricately folded napkin. And you know how Ann is about a beautiful table, so Kristin was showing her a thing or two.


Butterfly Napkin

Besides the napkins, the table was also set with plates of cantaloupe and watermelon with marionberry sauce and feta cheese, a loaf of lemon poppyseed bread, blackberry rosemary jelly, and strawberry orange jam. I'm a big fan of Kristin's unconventional jellies and jams. The marionberry has a complicated heritage, but for all intents and purposes, it is a large, elongated blackberry and probably the most widely planted variety in production in Oregon. After we were done with the fruit, Kristin brought out scrambled eggs with nasturtium pesto and zucchini and lemon thyme pancakes. Certainly the most creative food that I have ever eaten at a B&B.


Cantaloupe, Watermelon, Marionberry Sauce, Feta Cheese

Lemon Poppyseed Bread

Blackberry Rosemary Jelly and Strawberry Orange Jam

Nasturtium Pesto Scramble; Zucchini-Lemon Thyme Pancakes

After breakfast, we settled up with Kristin, thanked her for her wonderful hospitality, and set off via back roads for Portland.

Honeymoon: The Painted Lady, Newberg OR

Thursday May 2, Newberg OR

After a morning tasting wine and a killer lunch at Nick's Italian Café in McMinnville, we spent the afternoon at the B&B where I got in a nice long and much needed nap before we headed down the hill once again into downtown Newberg where we ate at the restaurant that is by most accounts the top-rated one in the Willamette Valley, The Painted Lady. Chef Paul Bachand from Recipe had booked our table for us the night before and The Painted Lady texted me to confirm early in the day on Thursday and I let them know that I was a visiting fine dining chef and I just wanted them to cook for us.


Clean, Spare Dining Room

So when we arrived at the lovingly restored but very tiny Victorian wood-frame house situated on a corner lot behind a white picket fence and were seated in the very nicely appointed, but not over the top, dining room, it was no surprise that food just started coming out of the kitchen. Other tables seated near us were just getting going as well and they were getting the menus and the spiel from the service staff and I could see some of them wondering why we were getting different treatment. All it takes is a phone call.

Before we get into the food, a few comments about the restaurant and the staff. Once the sun set, the dining room was too dark for me to see most of what I was eating and the older I get the more light I seem to need. I don't mind dim lights, but when I have to use my cellphone to illuminate a plate to see the fantastic artwork on it, I call that too dark. I'm not faulting the restaurant on this choice, because that's how they have chosen to do things. I choose differently in my own restaurant. And you will see from the limited number and poor quality of photos how dark it was. I didn't bother to take any photos knowing they wouldn't be any good anyway.

The service was impeccable. I can remember exactly once in the whole 3-1/2 hours we dined at The Painted Lady that an empty wine glass stayed on the table for a minute longer than it should have (according to their service model; me, I could not care less if that glass stays there all night as long as it doesn't get in my way) and that's when every server on the floor was putting plates down at an 8-top nearby. Impeccable. New glassware and a totally new set of silverware with each course and everything about the service was silky smooth and polished.

The service was impersonal. We tried to crack through the starched reserve of some of the servers and we did elicit a smile or two from time to time, but they work from the model that they are servers, they do what you need, and they don't interact any more than necessary with the guests. This is a very old school European model that many of the very high end restaurants in the US aspire to and at The Painted Lady, they succeed very well.

But that's not what I want! I want personality and character from the staff and something that tells me that they are having fun at what they do. I want a server that comes to the table and exclaims, "This dish is freaking awesome; you are so going to love it!" I want to see pride without arrogance on the faces of the service staff, pride that comes from knowing that they are serving an amazing product and providing a unique experience. The service at The Painted Lady was not robotic, but it wasn't charismatic either.

The wines selected for our food were impeccable as well. I really appreciated the selection and variety of local wines that were paired with our dinner. As a chef who pairs wines with each dish on his menu, I can say to The Painted Lady, "Job very well done!" Thank you for introducing me to Walter Scott wines from Eola-Amity Hills, a tiny producer of exceptional wines.

And finally about the food. I sit here at the keyboard and I can tick off several dishes that got my chef juices flowing during the course of our stay in Oregon: the nettle gnocchi and the radishes at Thistle, the potato-nettle pizza at Nick's, and the laap at Pok Pok (to be discussed later in this series). But there was no one memorable dish for me at The Painted Lady. To be sure, I remember the scallop in the scallop crudo for being so sweet and fresh and I remember Ann's chocolate dessert for being so over the top, but the food didn't leave any lasting impression other than it was very high quality and very well presented.

This probably says more about me than it says about the restaurant and Chef Allen Routt, who spent a few minutes with us after dinner, when I learned that he is no stranger to this part of the world, having cooked a stint on the line at the Inn at Little Washington and also having worked for the late Jean-Louis Palladin. This says that I like more direct dishes that are mainly ingredient-driven and perhaps more rustic as a result than I like impeccably executed dishes that are more chef- and technique-driven.

Amuses: Fava Hummus on Papadum, Gougères, and ???

Chef's Trio: Salmon Tartare, Breaded Quail Egg; Goat Mousse on Cheese Straw

Oysters and Lardons

Crabmeat, Caviar, Delicious Curried Soup

Nettle Ravioli, Parsnip Puree, Summer Truffles

I'm a chef and I use truffles all the time. They rarely excite me.

Scallop Crudo, Avocado, Crispy Salmon Skin, Dashi Sphere

This dish got Ann to asking about the dashi sphere but spherification and reverse spherification techniques are not dinnertime conversation for anyone save super nerdy chefs. I played with all this some years ago, but it's just not me or my thing; however, this was probably the dish that I liked best.

Mini Margarita Slushie Intermezzo

You can see from the light of the votive in the intermezzo photo that it is just too dark in the dining room to take pictures. This votive was all the light we had! It's a pity because there are a lot more beautifully presented dishes that you can't see.

Missing are a ling cod dish, a salmon dish (that salmon was super well cooked), a foie gras course (foie doesn't impress me unless you bring out a terrine of it, a loaf of crusty bread, some great wine, and we all sit around getting fat, dumb, and happy!), a beef tenderloin (excellent flavor) dish, a venison dish, a small cheese course, and Ann's chocolate fantasy that was too big for four people. I wish you could have seen the amount of labor that went into that one dish. Chocolate is not my thing, but my hat is off to the person that conceived of and plated that dish.