Portland's 10 best new restaurants of 2019

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Smoked meat meets smoking wok at Eem (Photo by Beth Nakamura/staff)

Mid-September might seem like an arbitrary time to take stock of the past year in Portland restaurants. But this weekend brings Feast Portland, the Pacific Northwest’s biggest food festival, with its cooking tutorials, collaborative dinners and big-tent tasting events. And it was a dish at a previous Feast — the 2017 rendition — that led directly to the biggest Portland restaurant opening of 2019.   For the following guide to Portland’s best new places to eat, we searched the city for intriguing restaurants that opened, more or less, in the 12 months before August 1 (plus one exception, found below, that opened a half year before that). Before we get to the picks, here are five things we learned while visiting dozens of new Portland restaurants in the past year.

  • Our barbecue-backwater days are gone: With major food cart additions in Matt's BBQ Tacos and Holy Trinity, the return of Botto's in Northwest, Bark City's successful move southeast and Matt's shorter move north, the high-on-the-hog 'cue at Bullard and the Thai-Texas mashup at Eem, Portland should now be considered the most important barbecue city on the West Coast.

  • And our plant-based future looks bright: Food carts also played a big role here, from Mis Tacones' tacos to Dinger's Deli's hoagies to the Egyptian street-food wonder Peri Koshari. But restaurants filled the leading roles, most notably Berlu's occasional vegan weeks, Farm Spirit's big expansion and its new sister restaurant, Fermenter, which serves a $23 lunch built around some mind-altering tempeh.  

  • Approachable is the new exclusive: If you're looking for signs of an oncoming recession, we might have one for you: Most of the new restaurants in town self-identify as "approachable," or some variation on the theme. That might mean menus that treat $20 like a limbo stick, no reservations or lively tropical cocktails that borrow the best parts of Tiki without the faux Polynesian kitsch.  

  • Portland finally figures out fine dining (perhaps): It's been years since a new tasting menu restaurant made waves locally. This year we had two, with Erizo's commitment to truly sustainable seafood joining Berlu's progressive takes on everyday ingredients. (Fermenter might be too casual to include under the fine-dining umbrella, though its chef's counter sister, Farm Spirit, is doing interesting things in its new space.) Perhaps one can prove that Portland, despite its relative lack of Fortune 50 companies and the executive expense accounts that come with them, can support a modern approach to fine dining.

  • Earl Ninsom is on an all-time run: The PaaDee and Langbaan owner not only eclipsed Pok Pok chef Andy Ricker in his own town, but firmly seized the title of Portland's top restaurateur. Two of the restaurants on this list are his, and that doesn't account for the second location of Hat Yai, a Southern Thai curry and fried chicken spot that might be Portland's most under-appreciated restaurant. (If anyone can persuade "Top Chef" Season 12 winner Mei Lin to open a restaurant in Portland, it's him.)

And now, Portland’s best new restaurants of 2019.


Price key  

$ (about $12 or less per entree)
$$ ($13-$20 per entree)
$$$ ($21-$30 per entree)
$$$$ ($31 or more per entree) 

— Michael Russell    


10. SMOKIN FIRE FISH

3258 N.E. Broadway
503-265-8200
smokinfirefish.com
Lunch and dinner, Monday-Saturday
$

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Meat jun and other delights (Photo by Michael Russell/staff)

You might think that Hawaiian food, with its historic fusion of Japanese, American, Korean, Filipino, Chinese and Portuguese cuisines, would draw a little more interest in Portland. Yet over the years, local mom-and-pops and island-based chains alike have come and gone with little fanfare. And when restaurants do update their menus with higher-quality ingredients or more polished technique, they have often been critically panned.

At Smokin Fire Fish, a new Hawaiian restaurant near the Grant Park New Seasons (the two businesses share a parking lot), Korean-American chef Chris Cha explores the global influences of his former home through daytime plate lunch and poke menus and a more elaborate — but still counter-service — dinner. The space, which was originally a Pieology, retains the bland, assembly-line look of the Panda Express-backed pizza chain. But for fans of sweet shoyu chicken, mac salad and two-scoop rice, the food is invitation enough.

If you really want to test Cha’s chops, visit at night, when big platters of garlic-tossed prawns and oven-smoked kalua pork truly meant for sharing hit tables engraved with the restaurant’s namesake tuna decal. But lunch deserves equal attention.

This is the first place in Portland I’ve run into Hawaiian-style meat jun, the Korean-inspired, egg-battered and pan-fried beef. Order it as part of a two- or three-meat combo with that tender kalua pork and some Korean chicken wings or beef bulgogi, plus white rice and mac salad, and the juicy meat will come draped over the lip of its handsome ceramic plate.


9. ERIZO

215 S.E. Ninth Ave. (enter through Bar Casa Vale)
503-206-8619
erizopdx.com
Dinner, Thursday-Saturday
$$$$

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Will we find the next lobster at Erizo? (Photo by Mark Graves/staff)

Consider the lobster. In the 17th century, the now-costly crustacean would wash up on the shore of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in two-foot-high piles. Boiled dead, it was food fit for pigs, cats and prisoners, not as a last meal, but for a Monday lunch.

Times and appetites change, and lobster eventually became the special-occasion delicacy we know today, with a price to match.

Will we find the next lobster at Erizo? The jury’s still out, but that’s one way to describe the upscale restaurant’s project. Here inside the former offices of pioneering Portland izakaya Biwa, chef Jacob Harth serves a $125-a-head tasting menu made exclusively from sustainably harvested seafood. Some of it, including the chopped gooseneck barnacles and horseneck clams served on oversized ice trays, were pried from Oregon’s rocky coast by Harth and co-owner Nick Van Eck themselves. Others, including the centerpiece grilled chub mackerel, are so-called “trash fish,” caught as unintentional bycatch from fishing boats chasing more lucrative hauls.

Some of these ingredients are eye-opening. After a taste of chopped limpets tossed in mustard oil, you might wonder why — besides any mythical aphrodisiac powers — we’ve ignored the mollusk over the years in favor of abalone or geoduck. And Harth is unafraid to serve off-putting food. You might find the adductor muscle of some old mussels or forgotten oysters grown massive on the Puget Sound floor. Creamy eggplant agnolotti in a pungent broth made from squid inadvertently trapped in Garibaldi crab pots.

Other dishes feel out of place on a $125 tasting menu. The mackerel was nicely grilled, just as it would be at a better neighborhood izakaya. Aged day-boat tuna with tonnato and simple Carolina Gold rice is pure comfort, but lacks the kind of flourishes or surprises you found at Castagna, Nodoguro or other restaurants in this price range. A simple sea bean salsa verde appeared again and again.

Still, it’s a noble mission. Exacerbated by climate change, warming ocean waters and overharvesting have imperiled many fish populations and the communities they support. Meanwhile, the American seafood diet remains frighteningly narrow, with shrimp, salmon and tuna alone making up more than half of all consumption. Other seafood restaurants in California and New York have attempted to steer diners to fish they might not otherwise try. But Erizo is the first to go all-in with a tasting menu. If you’re here, you’re most certainly all-in too.


8.
AKADI

3601 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
503-477-7138
akadipdx.com
Lunch and dinner from noon, Tuesday-Saturday
$$

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Fatou Ouattara is the chef and owner of Akadi. (Photos by Beth Nakamura and Michael Russell/Staff)

Though it opened quietly a year and a half ago, we didn’t stumble upon this friendly, unhurried West African restaurant until late in 2018. But once we found it, Ivory Coast-born chef Fatou Ouattara’s cooking, particularly the whole grilled fish in a dijon sauce, jumped right to the top of the best things we ate that year. As the only brick-and-mortar restaurant focused on West African food in Portland, it deserves a spot on this year’s list.

Come for that poisson braisé, the signature grilled fish of the Ivory Coast, a whole tilapia rubbed with salt, pepper, garlic and more, charred to a deep and gorgeous brown and served with fluffy fermented cassava, tomato and onion in a pool of thin, dijon-scented sauce. The mixture brings to mind a backyard cookout, even when you’re sitting indoors in a dining room with yellow walls and a mural of giraffes and elephants strolling at sunset.

Until now, with the exception of the Portland State University-area food cart Black Star Grill, African food in Portland has generally meant East African food, specifically Ethiopian. Yet despite being on the same continent, flavor-wise, the two cuisines are worlds apart. Due to the horrors of the slave trade, West African food has as much in common with the cuisines of the Caribbean and (albeit distorted by distance and time) the American south, as it does with its neighboring states in Africa’s east.

Any Akadi meal should be built around the fish, preferably grilled, though the fried version is good as well, plus some sweet, deeply bronzed fried plantains. The crispy samusas, especially those stuffed with spiced green lentils, are wonderful. And you should try the fufu, another fermented cassava dish, only this one pounded by hand into a smooth ball, like an uncooked round of pizza dough. Use a pinch to dip in a tender goat soup or some root veggie-filled peanut stew.


7. YONDER  

4636 N.E. 42nd Ave. Suite A
503-444-7947
yonderpdx.com
Dinner, Wednesday-Sunday, weekend brunch
$$

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Yonder serves up fried chicken, sandwiches and a variety of sides. (Photo by Michael Russell/Staff)

At Yonder, chef Maya Lovelace weaves the same magic with Southern chicken and sides that she did at her Appalachian pop-up Mae, only in a more casual setting. The restaurant, found inside the old Delphina Bakery space, sits a step or two above fast-casual, especially after adding reservations and table service this summer.

The menu is a step or two above fast-casual as well, with chicken deep-fried in animal fat and several impressive sides.  Fried chicken comes three ways here: dusted in a tangy dry-spice blend, hit with a relatively tame Nashville-inspired heat and dipped in North Carolina-style tomato vinegar (which, as it so happens, is also my order of preference). No, it’s not skillet-fried, but it is a fair approximation of the chicken that made Mae a minor hit, with a crunch that — in contrast to fried chicken’s flaky/crispy branch — binds tightly to the bird, shattering less like glass, more like cracks in dry earth.

Lovelace casts a spell on carbs, from the flaky angel biscuits with their sweet sorghum butter to the buttery-good Carolina Gold rice and ham-braised lima beans to the potato chip-topped baked pimento mac-and-cheese (order two so you and your date won’t have to fight). But the best side of all might be the tangy iceberg lettuce salad in a buttermilk vinaigrette with sumac pecans, pickled onions and croutons that I once threatened to blend into the most beautifully unhealthy smoothie.

The only thing I haven’t liked is the comeback slaw, which is minced so finely it resembles a puree. Is there a cabbage-loving baby in your life? Then I have the dish for you. As always, your mileage will vary.

So far, Yonder hasn’t joined Mae in winning the heart of its Cully neighborhood. In response, Lovelace and partner Zach Lefler recently ditched lunch and counter service in favor of table service and reservations. It was probably the right concession as they prepared to reopen Mae in Yonder’s back room, but I can’t help but miss the lunch. Here’s hoping it comes back in some form soon, if only on the weekends.


6. GADO GADO

1801 N.E. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd.
503-206-8778
gadogadopdx.com
Dinner, Wednesday-Monday; weekend brunch
$$

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Wok Fried Coca Cola Crawfish at Gado Gado. (Photo by Dave Killen/Staff)

Like blockbuster movies, Portland restaurants sometimes come in twos. Two modern French bistros. Two food carts serving Texas-style barbecue, cheese boards or Jamaican food. This year, two other restaurants on this list, Bullard and Yonder, name-checked Nashville before opening. And this was the year two Indonesian restaurants opened about a mile apart in a town that previously had none.

Gado Gado, which takes its cues from the Chinese-influened cuisine of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, is the less traditional of the two, but also the more interesting (East Burnside Street's neighborhood-friendly Wajan is the other). It comes from two restaurant vets from Portland, Maine: Thomas and Mariah Pisha-Duffly, who have given our Portland something we weren't able to put together ourselves: an exciting place to eat in Hollywood.

As it happens, the Pisha-Dufflys stumbled on a great location. The restaurant, which took over longtime Northeast Portland pho spot My Canh, sits in a lost-to-time strip mall with a working Baskin Robbins and a faded sign advertising a nowhere-to-be-seen restaurant, Little King, "Where a sandwich is a complete meal." From the street, a big neon crab of the sort found at East Coast fish markets tells you you're in the right place.

Seafood is often the right call at Gado Gado, particularly the deep red Columbia River crawfish served with a hunk of charred Hawaiian bread perfect for sopping up a warm, buttery broth spiced with Sichuan chile pepper and Old Bay seasoning. Pair that with the flaky roti and its creamy curry, some wok-fried rice noodle rolls and a vegetable — perhaps the restaurant's namesake Indonesian boiled egg, tempeh and vegetable salad — and you're seeing Gado Gado at its best. Cocktails and wines are cool and refreshing.

There's still some dialing-in to be done. Dumplings are often too thick-skinned and too busy, with peas, mushrooms, rice crisps and other distractions. Desserts, including an ice cream sandwich with rock-hard cookies, are being beta-tested on customers in real time. And the kitchen tinkers too much with its menu, with some of our favorite dishes — including those crawfish — either changed or removed altogether from visit to visit. A little more attention to detail and some patience with winners will take Gado Gado from an intriguing Portland restaurant to something more essential. And it's already the only place you'll want to eat before a movie at the Hollywood Theatre.


5. SCOTCH LODGE

215 S.E. Ninth Ave. #102
503-208-2039
scotchlodge.com
Dinner and late-night, Wednesday-Sunday
$$

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The bar at Scotch Lodge. (Photo by Mark Graves/Staff)

If you've followed Tommy Klus' career at all, from bartending at Kask to interning at Scotland's Bruichladdich distillery to hunting for rare spirits to build the Multnomah Whiskey Library, you already knew his first solo venture would have two things: carefully crafted cocktails and phenomenal scotch.

The food was a different question, but it's one that's been skillfully answered at Scotch Lodge. With Klus' La Moule running mate Aaron Barnett consulting and chef Tim Artale (St. Jack, Proud Mary) in the kitchen, this gorgeous bar inside the old Biwa space — with Biwa's sign still hanging outside — joins the ranks of Expatriate and Deadshot with one of Portland's most accomplished bar menus.

How many bars weave pearlescent stone fruit and cured pork loin into a dish as attractive as the one at Scotch Lodge? Toss charred beets and sorrel leaves in a black cherry vinaigrette? Pair white asparagus with black garlic aioli in a brilliant contrast of color and flavor? Bathe albacore crudo and Korean melon with tobiko in a shallow pool of rice milk? These are dishes that could find a home at some of Portland's very best restaurants.

And they co-exist on Scotch Lodge's menu with some seriously elevated comfort food, from the dill-pickle-spiced fries to soft-shell crab sandwiches with piles of vinegary crab and white kimchi remoulade to a habit-forming fettuccine with wild mushrooms, tart fiore sardo cheese and slow-burning Fresno chile heat. There's a beef tartare and a hanger steak with Montreal seasoning but no burger, though it's not hard to imagine one popping onto a late-night menu someday, just as it did at Biwa.


4. FERMENTER

1414 S.E. Morrison St.
fermenterpdx.com
Lunch, Wednesday-Friday
$

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What do you really know about tempeh? (Michael Russell/staff)

Portland’s most intriguing new restaurant is FERMENTER (name) a FOUR-SEAT  (adjective), VEGAN (adjective) LUNCHEONETTE (noun) run by a POWER-LIFTING (adjective) former SHARP (noun).

It’s hard to talk about Fermenter without pointing out, as a visiting food writer friend did recently, how much that logline sounds like a particularly on-the-nose game of Portland Mad Libs.

But the restaurant, which comes from Aaron Adams, the aforementioned strongman and one-time Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice, is more than its collection of “Portlandia”-approved adjectives. Though currently open just three days a week, the restaurant’s invigorating dishes, including some truly eye-opening tempeh, and its relatively low price, with three courses for $23 including tip, are enough to rank Fermenter among the most exciting plant-based restaurants in America right now.

Much of that excitement comes from Adams himself, a fixture in Portland’s vegan food scene for more than a decade. Adams has never seemed more in his element than he does here. Bounding from the back with a vacuum-sealed bag of black bean tempeh, taking (and making) to-go orders for inexpensive bowls between tasting-menu courses, recommending TV shows and singing along to mellow reggae, getting lunch-counter guests with a joke-y, “I hope you guys like fermented vegetables.” Well, we better.

Fermenter meals typically begin with a salad tossed in Oregon-grown olive oil and year-old preserved lemons, and they often end with seasonal fruit. In between, a seared slice of house-made black-bean tempeh sits on a roasted red pepper-tomato sauce. For those of us who closed our minds to tempeh after eating a bone-dry vegan slice at some half-hippie Portland pizzeria years ago, Fermenter’s house-incubated version is a legitimate revelation, meaty with an earth-bound fruitiness, not quite juicy, but not dry either.

With its small size, it wouldn’t take much for Fermenter to get really busy, really fast. So far, lines have been manageable. If they do come, you can still swing by for pickles on sticks, house-made kombucha on tap and healthful bowls of beans, greens and grains in reusable takeaway containers. And Adams, who says he’s working on a vegetarian burger for Fermenter, probably has a few tricks up his tattooed sleeves. We can’t wait to try them.


3. BULLARD 

813 S.W. Alder St.
503-222-1670
bullardpdx.com
Lunch and dinner, daily, weekend brunch
$$$

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Chef Doug Adams of Bullard. (Photo by Beth Nakamura/Staff)

In the wrong hands, a downtown Portland hotel restaurant that highlights a tourism bureau's guide to Texas' most famous eats, from Austin-style barbecue to Whataburger-inspired burgers, could fall into cartoonish camp … or worse.

But Bullard's chef is Doug Adams, best known for his gritty finalist run on "Top Chef" Season 12. And it's the East Texas native's skill and passion that set Bullard apart. So the beef rib, which is smoked for 12 hours in the Woodlark Hotel's basement, comes with tomatillo salsa, bread-and-butter jalapeños and lard-rich flour tortillas because he fell in love with the tacos at Austin's standout Valentina's Tex-Mex BBQ. And there's a mustard-slathered burger, upgraded here with dry-aged beef, because Adams genuinely likes the one at Texas' Whataburger chain. (For what it's worth, this West Coast-born critic prefers Adams' In-N-Out-ish happy hour burger at next door's Abigail Hall).

Adams and his team — including partner (and Abigail Hall steward) Jen Quist, chef de cuisine Ricky Bella and bar manager Daniel Osborne — are leading proponents of the Keep It Simple, Stupid (K.I.S.S.) school of restaurants. Adams doesn't deconstruct dishes; he builds them up, adding layers of flavor to his Texas-red chili tamale or crunchy scallop tostada without upsetting their internal nature. On Sundays, you'll find some of Portland's most beautifully crispy smoked and fried chicken. Good margaritas come by the glass or pitcher. Bullard takes beer about as seriously as any restaurant since Higgins, from the esoteric can list to a draft list featuring a house bock from 10 Barrel Portland, where Adams' wife, Whitney Burnside, is the immensely talented head brewer. Not to mess with Texas or anything, but this bock would give Shiner a shiner.

When Adams isn't off living up to his "Top Chef" celeb status, making hot dogs on "Good Morning America" and the like, you'll find him front-and-center at Bullard, slicing those hulking bone-in beef ribs at a gorgeous island empty save for a wood-block statue of a flying pig. Adams took the carving station found at the front of some celebrated Hill Country barbecue joint and transported it to one of the best-looking new restaurants in Portland. And then he elevated some of his favorite Texas comfort foods right along with it. Yes, it's still feels like a hotel restaurant, even with the handsome brown leather banquettes and the mock "TexOregon" flag complete with longhorn cattle pulling a covered wagon in a perfect blend of Texas and Oregon. But it's a hotel restaurant done Adams' way, through-and-through.


2: OUR 2019 RISING STAR: BERLU

605 S.E. Belmont St.
berlupdx.com
Dinner, Thursday-Saturday
$$$

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Berlu is our 2019 Rising Star. (Photo by Noble Guyon/staff)

Before I get to why I loved Berlu, why it might matter as much as any other restaurant on this list, and why it’s our 2019 Rising Star, let’s put a fine point on it: This restaurant isn't for everyone. Even at half the price of the chef's tasting menu at Castagna, where chef Vince Nguyen once worked, the $80 cost before drinks or tip will be an expensive meal for many. And the experience itself — from the shockingly white walls to the pour-your-own test tube broths  — can be a little ridiculous, funny in a way I'm not sure the restaurant is fully in on.

But Nguyen’s cooking needs to be taken seriously. Many of his best dishes are little art deco masterworks. Rice vinegar-boiled bone marrow comes under charred lavender and zucchini woven into a latticework of half-moons. It’s wildly good. Next, a small disc of grilled leeks and bay shrimp with a snake’s eye depression filled with fig leaf oil comes with a test tube filled with a baby pink rhubarb tea and shrimp broth meant for pouring over the top. I’ve never enjoyed bay shrimp more.

Nguyen’s great idea, which he also practiced at his work-in-progress pop-up Jolie Laide, is to treat everyday ingredients (zucchini, bay shrimp, rice) with the same creativity, respect and zeal that luxury-focused destinations give truffles or caviar. Right at the center? An organic chicken from Marion Acres farm in Helvetia broken down and served four ways. It’s these ingredients that keep Berlu’s prices at $80, lower than any other restaurant this accomplished. In a gourmet sandwich town that has long struggled to support fine dining, Berlu might have cracked the code.

Nguyen’s biggest backer is Hat Yai (and PaaDee, and Eem) owner Earl Ninsom, who hosted Jolie Laide on off days at his back-room tasting menu restaurant Langbaan, then helped him build Berlu’s brick-and-mortar home next to Hat Yai’s long-awaited second location. Those two restaurants sit next to an open courtyard at the heart of a nondescript apartment complex in close-in Southeast Portland. Walking through these unremarkable surroundings to swing open Berlu’s big door and reveal the gauzy white curtains, white walls and white backsplash tile feels a bit like visiting the hippest new bistro hidden in Paris’ 11th.

So yes, we broke out in giggles once or twice early in the meal. But not just because the experience felt silly.

We were having a great time.


1: OUR 2019 RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR: EEM

3808 N. Williams Ave. Suite 127
971-295-1645
eempdx.com
Lunch and dinner, daily
$$

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Eem's signature jungle curry with brisket. (Photo by Brooke Herbert/Staff)

Some restaurants grow on you slowly and subtly, dish-by-dish, impressing you more with each experience until you can't imagine living without them. Eem, an only-in-Portland mashup of Thai flavors, Texas barbecue and tropical cocktails -- and our 2019 Restaurant of the Year -- is more like a sledgehammer to the face. 

Thanks to an All Star Cast including Akkapong "Earl" Ninsom (Langbaan, PaaDee, Hat Yai), Eric Nelson (island cocktail pop-up Shipwreck) and Matt Vicedomini (Matt's BBQ food cart), Eem is no undiscovered gem. Already, a quiet Monday night might mean a line of people waiting to get their hands on drinks served in ceramic blowfish or large brass-colored punch bowls. (Nelson, one of Portland's most prominent sober bartenders, also channels his creativity into a nonalcoholic drinks section.)

Executive Chef Colin Yoshimoto, previously of Poke Mon, chases a similar quality of fish for his crudo at Eem, currently featuring fatty albacore tuna and fresh summer corn in a fortified tom kha broth, complete with a fiery tomato nahm prik given the thumbs up by resident curry savant Rassamee "Nim" Ruaysuntia. After long threatening to serve a pork steak at his popular food cart, Vicedomini offers it here, only instead of a salt and pepper rub, Eem's is glazed with fish sauce and palm sugar, sliced into an accordion and served with a pair of spicy Thai dipping sauces and lettuce for ssam-style wrapping. Ninsom's fingerprints are all over the place: that smart tom kha addition to the albacore, the beets and puffed jasmine rice in magenta-bright coconut cream, the easy blend of smoky-funky-sour flavors rising from the barbecue fried rice.  

But the restaurant's keystone is the sliced beef brisket with fiery jungle curry, a dish that Vicedomini and Ninsom debuted at the Feast Portland food festival in 2017. At Eem, it's joined another coconut milk-free curry -- the elegant sour tamarind with halibut and daikon radish -- and several with, including a white curry with brisket burnt ends that mirrors my favorite dish at Hat Yai. Each comes with its own bowl of fluffy jasmine rice and — in traditional Thai style — a fork and spoon. 

Even now, Eem's most successful dishes are those for which some wise soul seems to have asked, "What would happen if this rich Hat Yai curry had some tender Matt's BBQ in it instead?" 

The answer, at least when you're at Eem, is that it's five o'clock somewhere, and life is good.

— Michael Russell

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Eem, where drinks might be served in a ceramic blowfish. (Photo by Beth Nakamura/Staff)

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