This Incoming Seafood Bar Wants to Bring Pan Roasts to Portland

While chef and restaurant owner Ryan Moy was growing up, his father would often make pan roasts, a citrusy, gently spiced seafood bisque served with rice and bread. It was a dish the two would seek out together, visiting oyster bars or seafood shacks in his hometown of Reno, Nevada or on trips to California. “My mom’s side is from Hawai‘i, my dad is from the Fiji islands, so we love seafood so much,” he says. “We love pan roast dishes, fish and chips, seafood — that’s what our family is all about.”

Moy, who owns the local sushi burrito chain Rollin’ Fresh, often craves pan roasts, but has a tough time finding them in Portland seafood restaurants. So, instead of bringing another Rollin’ Fresh to the yet-to-open downtown food hall Flock, he’s opening a restaurant dedicated to the pan roast — so dedicated, in fact, that it’s the seafood bar’s namesake. When it opens in late May, Pan Roast will serve Moy’s family pan roast recipe, as well as oysters on the half shell, fish and chips, and his family’s crab bread.

Pan roast’s origins are somewhat disputed. Some trace a version of the dish back to the late 1880s or early 1900s, created at either Captain Doane’s Oyster Pan Roast, a historic Olympia, Washington restaurant, or the Grand Central Station oyster bar in New York. However, an oyster pan roast is not quite the same as a seafood pan roast. Many pan roasts served today hew closer to the Louisiana culinary canon, landing somewhere between a Cajun cream sauce and a bouillabaisse. Others say the modern seafood pan roast has Las Vegas roots, found often in the city’s oyster bars.

Regardless of its origins, the pan roast found at Moy’s spot will come with a choice of seafood, with options like lobster, shrimp, Dungeness crab, and fresh clams — or any combination of shellfish. The seafood will be cooked to order, finished with the creamy, tomato and clam-based broth. “What makes it good is the balance of the flavor, the creaminess and the Cajun spices, the citrus,” he says. “And lots of seafood.”

The pan roast recipe isn’t the only Moy family dish on the menu. The house crab bread is his grandmother’s recipe, in which crab tossed with mayo, butter, herbs, and garlic gets spread over bread before it’s baked until bubbly and warm. The restaurant’s oysters, sourced from the Pacific Northwest, will come with simple accoutrements like lemons, hot sauce, and mignonette; they can precede an order of beer-battered fish and chips, with a foundation of cod, salmon, ahi tuna, or halibut.

Moy moved to Portland 15 years ago, opening the first Rollin’ Fresh in 2017. Both of his businesses are homages to his parents. “That’s what I wanted to bring, some family recipes,” he says. “Like Rollin’ Fresh as well, which was sort of for my mom, this is a tribute to my dad’s side of the family.”

Flock and Pan Roast are located within the Block 216 building, located at 900 SW Washington Street. Moy anticipates food hall will open in late May.