I have been a fan of Gado Gado Portland, a PDX popup featuring Southeast Asian food, by Thomas and Mariah Thomas Pisha-Duffly over the past year. Their food menu has varied drawing inspiration from all over Asia but usually with nods towards Indonesia from which inspired their Portland popup name. I was thrilled that now they are working on a brick and mortar restaurant home in the Hollywood Neighborhood for spring. Until then they are still a pop-up and probably will be testing out what will go on the menu for their anticipated dinners and brunches. I think the recent Gado Gado Portland Breakfast at Guilder during the past MLK weekend was just the start of seeing what people have interest in.
I’m always excited to see Asian breakfasts. I never thought that Portland would fall in love with Chinese breakfast – but Master Kong has brought congee and jian bing crepes into the common food vocabulary here in PDX so there’s a real chance to expand beyond our donuts or biscuits and gravy and into more types of international breakfast options. Having Gado Gado Portland Breakfast will be a popular standby for me when they open, whether or not the breakfast items I had a chance to try will all be there. The recent pop up included
Bakso, an Indonesian street food of thin yellow noodles in aromatic beef broth with springy beef balls, Chinese celery, enoki mushroom, pickled red onion, scallion, fried shallot, herbs, sambal trassi
Bubur Ayam, a Chinese Indonesian take on congee, with shredded chicken, Chinese celery, Chinese doughnut, crispy fried soybeans, freeze dried corn, sweet soy, shallot, chili crisp. This was also available vegetarian with pickled and roasted mushroom instead of shredded chicken.
Hong Kong Style Scrambled Egg sandwich with fluffy milk bread, soft scramble chicken egg, American cheese. Optional Sichuan pork heart ragu which I opted out of. If I wasn’t worried about other coming customers being disappointed that they would run out of this and not get a chance to have this (and they did run out of all their food), I totally would have eaten a second one, and probably taken a third one to go… it sounds and looks so simple, but that sweetness of the bread was spot on with the bread flavors in Asia.
Pandan Egg Puff Waffle with sweetened condensed milk, maple gula jawa, butter, optional fried egg (left out here)
For February, you will find Gado Gado Portland at Sammich on Thursday evenings for February 7 and 14- check their Instagram handle /gadogadopdx to see what might be on the menu and where you might be seeing them next and when the restaurant will open.
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Which of these items would you want to try? And support Asian brunch so its a thing – other options besides dim sum include congee at Master Kong, the brunch dishes I loved at Wares have moved to Smallwares, and the gem of a underrated brunch at Expatriate
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