Poking Around

You know when you have those serendipitous moments while traveling, when that place you wanted to find is suddenly right in front of you, and then right across the street is that other little place you'd heard about, and it seems as if some invisible hand is guiding you to exactly where you want to be? Those moments happened a lot in Portland.

Which is how we happened to eat lunch at Pok Pok not 2 hours after touching down at the airport (which is lovely, by the way, and possibly from the future). Looking for a place to get Z's hair cut led us to Division St and Rudy's barber shop; Pok Pok, the restaurant that sat atop our list of places to try, just happened to be right down the street. This felt like an auspicious sign, but it turned out to be life as usual chez Portland, where on good thing is never far away from another.

Pok Pok is nominally a Thai restaurant, but it's not like any Thai place I've been to. The chef is a white guy named Andy Ricker who decided to take on Thai street food after becoming obsessed with it on his travels. The menu changes according to what ingredients he and his staff can find, or riffs on esoteric local specialties; sometimes a family recipe from the sous-chef's village, or a version of some noodle dish prepared by a favorite Chiang Mai street hawker. There's also (this being Portland) a mouth-watering array of imbibables, and even though i hadn't ever thought of pairing whiskey with thai food, in the chill and rain of Portland it began to make sense.

So it happened that by 2pm we were sipping pandan-flavored water on the benches of the Pok Pok patio, perusing the lengthy cocktail menu (have i mentioned that portlanders like to drink?) and figuring out how the 2 of us could eat through at least half of the menu without compromising our dinner.

That translated to an order of fish-sauce chicken wings, herbal salad, and dry noodles with a salmagundi of delightful treats, including pork cracklings, pickled vegetables, sprouted and long beans, and bbq-ed pork. The fish sauce wings were a wonder: crazily flavorful, with that signature thai mix of sweet, sour, and spicy. The herbal salad, a jullienned array of veggies and herbs tossed with a lemongrassy dressing, came on tangy and finished with a nice twist of slow heat, taking the edge off the salty bomb of the chicken wing. And the dry noodles? There were about five layers of flavor and texture in there, which I think is what all good Thai cooking is supposed to deliver, but rarely does. It was my favorite among 3 superb plates of food.



Pok Pok is the kind of place that, to my mind, typifies everything that's great about the Portland food scene: personal, seasonal, relaxed, (dare I say homey?), and unpretentious. As we were eating, a couple showed up with their dog in tow; it looked like they'd walked from home. They plunked themselves down on a bench, looped fido's leash around the gate, and tucked in to their feast. I felt a pang of jealousy; I wanted to be their neighbor, to trot in with the dog or stop by on my bike and grab a whole roasted game hen (!!) with sticky rice for lunch. So why does my new favorite neighborhood joint exist 1000 miles north of home? More importantly, how does a place like Pok Pok not exist in Los Angeles? Can someone fix that, please?



pok pok
3226 se division st
portland or
503 232 1387
www.pokpokpdx.com