Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes. Before we get to the meat of today’s post, I want to vent about something: it has BOGGLED my mind how hard it is to get my hands on THIS common kitchen implement:

Good ol stick n bowl

That, if you don’t know, is a mortar and pestle. And for some reason, NO ONE in my family other than me acknowledges its’ worth ANYTHING. Despite it showing up in TONS of cuisines and dishes we like, the house doesn’t have one. Only I have one, in my kitchen stuff from my apartment. So, after doing like, two recipes in the last two weeks that called for it (technically more: the original recipe for aioli used garlic paste MADE in a mortar and pestle), and WATCHING 5 or 6 recipes in the last month that used it, I decided to dig out my mortar and pestle for something this summer...and then discovered that it was buried behind probably close to 500 pounds and 25 cubic feet of books, Christmas decorations, furniture, refrigerators, Etc. “Fuck that noise,” I said, and closed the cargo trailer. “I’ll just buy a $10-15 one when I next go shopping.”

So today, (well, yesterday, when you read this) I rolled up to Fred Meyer’s to get some milk, beef, a webcam, and a mortar and pestle. And no, it’s not to start an erotic meat-pounding web channel. Literally none of those purchases are connected to each other: The milk is for pasta-roni, the beef is for sloppy joes, the webcam is to help out a friend by recording something, etc. And guess what? They didn’t have one. And maybe that makes perfect sense to you, LINDA, saying “I mean, I’ve never had one, why should they?” But for a counter-argument, it’s one of the oldest cooking tools in existence. It’s used in Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Spanish, Middle Eastern…basically EVERY CUISINE EXCEPT France, Germany, England, and Urbanized America and Canada. You wanna know how fundamental this tool is? IT’S THE REASON FOR THIS RESTAURANT’S NAME.

Maybe not my best reference, but hear me out.

That’s right, ALL of that was a segue. (It was also true, and the fucking webcam doesn’t work so now I have to try and run to Wal-Mart in the morning tomorrow (today for you…actually, and also for me now, hello 1 AM) for two reasons.) Today we’re talking about Pok Pok, the Portland restaurant(s).

Now, that choice is new territory for me: One thing we’ve never done on the site is a restaurant review. And the reasons for that are simple: mercy, social awkwardness, and expense. To (I think re-)explain: while many high-level chefs take a very hardline approach to dish quality, where a dish has to be perfect or it can’t be served, because they want to ensure that the diner gets the best possible dish, I, as a consumer of food, and (I strive) as a judge of people, try for the reverse approach: assume that what you’ve gotten is the best possible dish you could get for that moment. There are restaurants I have eaten at hundreds of times, where one day the dish was off, or the potatoes not done quite the way I love them, whatever. I would hate to judge a restaurant on that one off day. So, to me, the only way to be fair is to go a couple times, trying different dishes, and the same ones, to establish consistency. (Apparently, I am not alone in this belief, as at least one professional food critic has explained a similar stance, as a sort of industry rule, so that’s comforting) And you might argue that using the ‘snapshot’ method (one time and done) best mimics the casual diner’s experience, and the randomness serves as its own arbitrating factor: maybe it was a bad day, maybe it was a good one, just as future diners will have to chance. But I’m too much of a comic book nerd to not notice that’s also the moral philosophy of Two-Face, and maybe that’s not a great indicator of the stability of the position.

“Agreeing with a Batman villain” is rarely a good place to find oneself, as too few people posting Dark Knight memes seem to realize. Not ALWAYS bad, but you really gotta think it out.

But the other method means that I have to go to a place several times, which costs more money, and the “what if I review a place where I like the staff, but not the food?”/“what do I do if a restaurant loves or hates my review of it” kind of social quandaries that I do not feel equipped to handle. So I haven’t done it, though I have turned it over several times as something I COULD do, in part because It’s often the first thing people assume I do when I mention I have a food blog. Which I’ve only just now realized is probably because of how fat I am…To be generous to myself and them, it’s probably also connected with the fact that I am a man, and I say “food blog” not “cooking blog”, but… Let’s move on.

So this ISN’T, technically, a review. I’ve only eaten here once. It’s more an overview of the restaurant, its history, what’s happening to it now, and a sort of “sensory snap-shot” of what Nate and I experienced there.

Beaten to A Paste

As I referenced more than 500 words ago, Pok Pok is a the name of a Portland restaurant…chain (we’ll get to those ellipses), named for the Thai onomatopoeia of a mortar and pestle pounding food. If it’s been a while since you had to read a 3 dollar word like onomatopoeia, that means it’s the word for the sound, made to sound…like the sound. According to Andy Ricker, owner of Pok Pok, the name kind of sprung from a moment years before, where, during a conversation with some other men on a train in Thailand (Andy created Pok Pok, the cookbook implies, essentially as a nicotine patch for the time he had to spend in America, while he’d rather be traveling in Thailand) where he was discussing his travels, and how he loves to eat Thai food, and asked if the men could cook. “Yes,” one responded, pantomiming a mortar and pestle, “Pok pok pok”. That moment stuck in Andy’s mind as a symbol of the heart of Thai food. The man didn’t gesture cutting food, or flipping a pan, or grilling: he showed that he knew how to cook, because he knew how to use a mortar and pestle.

It’s the COVER of the BOOK.

The first Pok Pok opened in 2005, after decades of Andy traveling in and learning Thai, particularly Northern Thai, cuisine. It is most famous for, as I said on Monday, its Fish Sauce Wings, whose popularity was so great that the restaurant was able to spawn multiple offshoots built solely on the backbone of the wings: after a great review in the Oregonian, the initial restaurant became so popular that Andy opened a bar down the block just to have a sort of waiting room: You could drink, eat the wings, and wait for your actual table to open up. And later, he opened three “Pok Pok Wing” locations, offshoots devoted to serving the Wings, and other fast, more casual dishes. He built an EMPIRE on the back of these wings. An Empire that has, sadly, somewhat collapsed.

Due to COVID-19 related costs, of the 6 Pok Pok restaurants in Portland, 4 of them are closed permanently. Two of the Wing locations, the bar, and two restaurants that shared one building that we haven’t touched on yet. And that’s because it’s where we enter the story: Pok Pok NW was where Nate and I ate back in December, unknowingly mere weeks after a new venture opened in the same building (a charcoal fire focused “dinner club” in the upstairs of the venue). That’s partly why I feel more comfortable talking about the place now: At the moment, it’s gone. Maybe one day it will return (and I certainly hope it does, as the staff we interacted with were great people, and we greatly enjoyed our food. But it took 14 years for Pok Pok to get big enough to support all those restaurants the first time, who knows how long it will take before it’s even remotely feasible to bring them back?

So let’s talk about that night in December, before the world went mad.

Cool Customers

Around 5:30, Nate and I got to Pok Pok NW. The place was interesting: if not for the dim lighting and dark wood walls, the lay-out, with a curved bar looking back into the kitchen, tile floors, booths and tables, was somewhat reminiscent of an old-school diner. Nate and I had bar seats, and we both ordered drinks. I had the Lord Bergamot, because “bergamot-tea-infused-vodka ,drinking-vinegar-cordial, orange liqueur, and soda cocktail with “Lord” in the name” is a very specific niche, but it is MY niche. Nate had a drink using Yuzu, an Asian citrus, which does not appear on their standard menu, so we have to assume it was the special.

I’m MOSTLY sure this is my drink, since it looks like another picture of it I found, but I can’t be sure.

As we drank, and looked over the menu, and I suggested many options Nate refused to order. From betel-leaf packets containing “shrimp floss”, to a spicy Papaya salad, we munched on bar nuts, which for this establishment consisted of fried garlic and peanuts, fried in oil seasoned by frying Thai chiles and lime leaves, served with the lime leaves and chiles crumbled into the mix. It was salty, warm, not too spicy, and generally great.

The bar lighting made almost all of the pictures I took like, 60% moodier.

I feel like we had to pay for a replacement bowl, and were happy to do so, but maybe I’m mistaken. My point is more that even if we did, we were more than willing.

We got the wings, of course, as we featured on Monday.

Shining, shimmering, salty.

The wings arriving at your table really helps the restaurant ‘click’, I found. As we mentioned on Monday, and as I haven’t mentioned yet, there is a musk produced by the process of making these wings. It’s not unpleasant, but it is unusual, and it hangs in the air almost like a modern version of cigar smoke, a sort of haze across the restaurant. When the wings come to the table, that haze is defined and refined in the presence of the actual wings.

Following the wings, Nate and I ordered Khao Sois. Khao Soi is, as I have mentioned many times before, one of my favorite Thai dishes, a sort of Curry soup with noodles, meat, and a variety of flavorful toppings, often including more crispy-fried noodles. I had the Khao Soi Gai (Chicken), while Nate had the Beef version. And while delicious, I complained that this was my major mistake of the evening for two reasons: one, Nate’s curry broth was closer in flavor to the one I had first grown to love than mine, and two, my chicken was a touch too authentic for me. By which I mean that, being an enormous baby, I was used to my Khao Soi Gai to use pre-shredded chicken. This did not, instead having a chicken drummette in the bowl to shred myself. Truly an arduous task. So arduous I couldn’t use my hands to take photos until we were done eating, and got “dessert”.

The moist towelettes in the back are provided with the wings.

That, as you might guess, is alcohol. It is also an act of...very close to spite. That is a shot of Kavalan whiskey, the most prominent Taiwanese whiskey distiller, making it a drink that our mother and ourselves had expressed interest in trying, given her (at the time recent) new obsession with Taiwanese dramas, and all three of our noted enjoyment of spirits, particularly whiskies.

I then had mango ice cream, because you don’t get fat enough for people to assume you’re a restaurant critic by just drinking for dessert. Nate had…some other kind of ice cream.

The specific sense memory of the evening has somewhat dissolved in my brain, in the way that happy family gatherings sort of fray around the edges into a sense of general contentment. Which is one of the higher commendations I can make for the place, if you think about it: The restaurant, on our first trip, chatting with the bartender, eating peanuts, wings, and curry soup, felt something like home.

The warm feelings might also somehow be connected to this other drink that showed up at some point.

It is a warm memory that I will hold to, of a place currently taken from us by the terrible times we face. It is a place I did not reasonably know well-enough to mourn, but still feel as a stinging loss. It deserved better. And because that is true of so many other places, and so many people lost to this tragedy, I urge my readers to remember the good, and do what you can to make similar places, to inspire similar feelings. We make the world good first by sharing comfort, joy, hope, and love to those who need it. And we all need it right now.

Jesus, I think I’m getting drunk off the MEMORY of that evening. Let’s raise a glass to Pok Pok NW, and call it a night (day, for you).

MONDAY: MAN, I WAS GOING TO DO SOMETHING WEIRD, BUT NOW I WANT TO DO ANOTHER POK POK RECIPE SO I CAN TALK ABOUT THE COOKBOOK NEXT WEEK, OR I CAN TALK ABOUT THE BRITISH THING I MADE BECAUSE IT’S RIGHT AFTER THE FOURTH…I DON’T KNOW. I HAVE STUFF, DON’T WORRY. I JUST DON’T KNOW WHICH THING WE’LL COVER.

THURSDAY: LOOK, SOME THINGS CAME UP, I’VE BEEN BUSIER THAN EXPECTED THIS WEEK. I’LL GET YOU ALL A BETTER SNAPSHOT OF THE WEEK ON SUNDAY OR SOMETHING.