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Categories: Photography
Portland Monthly: Homey Surprises Abound at Northern-Meets-Southern Chinese Spot Master Kong
There are few spaces left in Portland that sound and feel like home, to me at least. On a recent Saturday, at two month-old Master Kong (8435 SE Division Street), I sat in a sparsely decorated dining room with two dozen families chatting loudly in a swelling symphony of both Mandarin and Cantonese. The food and atmosphere felt more like the busy, family-filled restaurants—often just glorified lunch counters—that I left behind in Chicago’s Chinatown. Unlike most of the other Chinese restaurants in the city, […]
Categories: Writing
The San Francisco Chronicle: Portland: A taste of Japan — without the long flight
Tear your eyes, if you can, from the cloud-stippled skyline and the towering, snow-peaked Mount Hood, and gaze upon the sliding shoji doors of the Pavilion Gallery. You might forget you’re standing in Portland. Perched high above the city, on the terraced mountainside of the West Hills, lies the tranquil, 12 1/2-acre Japanese Garden, a mossy labyrinth of placid ponds, concentric, raked gravel circles and lush-yet-meticulously-clipped shrubbery. Since its opening in 1967 as a place of serenity for Portlanders and […]
Categories: Writing
The Takeout: Recreate Pok Pok’s cult-status Vietnamese chicken wings
One might argue America’s most beloved chickens wings are churned out of a former teriyaki stand in Southeast Portland. Each week, thousands of pounds of these wings are brined, fried, and glazed to sticky-spicy-sweet perfection from the depths of chef Andy Ricker’s A-frame, all-about-wings shack. This is ground zero for the Pok Pok empire, arguably the most famous Thai restaurant in America, and much of its success could directly be attributed to these addictive Vietnamese-in-origin wings. Those crispy, chewy umami bombs—lacquered in […]
Categories: Writing
The Oregonian: Grocers seek to cash in on Portland’s Asian population boom
Daryl Lau sank a large cleaver through a glistening side of crispy-skinned pork with rhythmic thunks as a diverse crowd of shoppers at Oriental Food Value gathered around a brightly lit case of roasted meats. His uncle shuffled in and out of the roasting room behind the L-shaped meat counter, checking on four whole roasted pigs finishing in the oven. Lau’s dad stamped price tags on packets of noodles a few aisles over while his mom and aunt checked customers […]
Categories: Writing
The Oregonian: The complete guide to every Asian grocery store in the Portland area
You can find almost anything in the Portland area, if you know where to look. With 45 (and counting) Asian grocery stores across the Portland metro area, finding ingredients for cooking nearly every cuisine on the continent has never been easier. We spent two days exploring — from Vancouver to Southeast Portland and Gresham to Hillsboro — to visit all 45 stores and discover what ingredients were stocked in their aisles. For each store, we’ve provided a basic outline of […]
Categories: Writing
The Oregonian: Perry is the cider lover’s drink you’ve never heard of
Perry is cider’s underrated, and undiscovered, cousin. An alcoholic beverage made by fermenting pears, perry is often confused with pear cider, a distinctly different drink. While perry is made with 100 percent pears, pear cider is typically an apple cider sweetened with pear juice. Similar in taste to cider, with some bottles providing a funky, blue cheese expression and others more like sweet bubbles, perry’s history has long been entwined with its apple relative. It’s been a common drink in […]
Categories: Writing
The Oregonian: Meet Kiosko, Portland’s proudly Latinx coffee shop
Angel Medina wants to be known as a “dude who roasts good coffee, not the Mexican dude who roasts coffee.” But in Portland, one of the country’s leading third-wave coffee cities, home to the pioneering coffee company Stumptown, Medina and his girlfriend Lucy Alvarez’s three-month-old coffee shop Kiosko stands out. The closet-sized coffee shop, lined with warm, dark wood, is tucked along Portland’s southwest waterfront. Issues of the Sunday New York Times and The New Yorker are casually strewn by […]
Categories: Writing
The Oregonian: Will wildfires affect the taste of Oregon’s wines?
Days after the Eagle Creek fire, a haze of choking smoke settled over Portland. It turned the sun and moon an ominous blood orange and forced many to wear specially rated masks to combat the unhealthy air quality. Across Oregon, that same smoke drifting off the more than 600,000 acres currently burning have blown through some of the state’s largest and most prominent wine regions, putting grapes at risk for developing what winemakers and scientists call “smoke taint.” As Oregon […]
Categories: Writing
