I recently went with friends to lunch at Pok Pok. Whatever meal you visit here for, I always recommend getting an order of the Vietnamese Fish Sauce wings, ask for it spicy. The half a dozen natural chicken wings include the leg along with it as you can see for a good amount of meat, and after beeing marinated in fish sauce and palm sugar are fried and further tossed in caramelized Phu Quoc fish sauce and garlic. It comes with Vietnamese table salad on the side, but I recommend two orders of sticky rice to go with.
The recipe comes from daytime cook Ike, and was named one of the top ten restaurant dishes in America 2007 by Food & Wine magazine. It is as a sticky mess to eat as it appears in the photo (they do give you little wipes)- and also just as full of intense flavor as you might imagine from the photo.
Since they don’t have Kaeng hung leh (a pork belly and pork shoulder curry that I adore from my mom’s Chiang Mai/Northern Thai area) at lunch, and I was a bit too chilled for their namesake som dtum (they call it the “papaya pok pok”) I opted for the one dish meal of khao muu daeng/muu krob. This is a pork dish done two ways- the top slices you see are the muu daeng, which is their housemade chinese bbq red pork, and the bottom is a crispy pork belly. The whole dish is then doused with a sesame sauce and on the left is a steamed gailan.
The gailan was a nice break from the sesame sauce which I thought they put too much on the dish. Their housemade version of chinese bbq red pork could not stand up to any bbq pork you can get from any random Chinese place- and although the Thai interpretation is a little more thin and bland the taste is made up for using a red sweet and salty sauce which didn’t have a presence here. The crispy pork belly was ok but not quite what I was expecting- there was only a little bit of crispness to it, although I do recognize they gave better pork meat along with it.
I think I’m a harsher judge because what Pok Pok excels in is making street- style Thai food, no holding back the flavors that you would get if you were really there in Thailand- but I’ve had street food in Thailand. Most Thai restaurants have compromised on the homeland taste in order to survive normal consumer demands when Thai food started becoming acceptable take-out and because taste buds here are just different, understandably, then the home country. Also, ingredients that compose the dish are hard to find or just don’t taste the same as if fresh from the Thai markets there. Many times, the kitchen in Thai restaurants are also turning out home cooking, and don’t have the recipe or even intend to compete with the flavor profiles coming from food cart style expertise. Just like here in Portland, in Thailand, certain stalls are famous and followed to inconvenient locations because of their signature take on a dish. Pok Pok has been rewarded for holding true to Thai strong flavors even on American soil- but it also means that if you’ve had the real thing in Thailand and remember it well, as I have- sometimes Pok Pok can’t win the inevitable comparison. IMHO, their khao muu daeng/muu krob wasn’t bad, but just can’t compare to the real thing on the other side of the world- if you’ve had that experience. Otherwise, you might find this wonderful- and you wouldn’t be wrong either.
Whatever you do- don’t forget to get the chicken wings. And, order items off the menu that you haven’t seen before in other Thai restaurants- there’s more to Thai food than the 20 kinds of standard Thai dishes that you see on most Thai restaurant menus; here especially try the Northern and Eastern Thailand regional speciality dishes. Also, try to overlook the prices- sorry they are in dollars not baht (if you don’t know the costof these dishes in Thailand in Thai currency, you may not even think about the prices given the intensity of flavor it buys)… remember it’s saving you airfare! Besides, I have to admire the guts of a chef who is willing to dish out pretty much the real thing to the general public, not just in secret “in the know” to Thais only via secret menus or hole in the wall word by mouth only locations. To get the recipes they do use, he has to have the charisma to learn cooking in Thailand, so extra heart points.
Our regular beer bar, Bailey’s Taproom, was having their second Cellarfest. Our friends brought their liquid crack brie, while I brought the cheese board and utensils as well as (counter clockwise from the brie) a Beecher’s No Woman, a sharp cheddar, and Port Salut.
We also had two kinds of local bread: Franz’s Palouse Plateau all natural steel cut oat, and Great Harvest‘s 9 Grain (loaves baked fresh daily all day!). The usual bread, Portland French Bakery‘s asiago bread, was missed since it wasn’t at the Fred Meyer’s during the grocery run, but Great Harvest was a fine tasty (in a different way- sweet rather than the chunks of cheese) and much healthier substitute. I’m thrilled to be able to be a supporter of so many local bakeries- and that there are so many to choose from (I am also a fan of Dave’s Killer Bread and Gabriel’s Bakery).
Our plate went great with all the beers we tried at the Cellarfest- and we tried all 18 of them that were available- and our seconds (and thirds) of tastings of the Block 15 2009’s Pappy Dark, though the sweet when emerging from the cellar Dogfish Head 2009 120 Minute IPA was a strong 2nd place favorite of ours. Last year this event is what convinced me that I wanted to start cellaring beers along with wines. Thank you Baileys.
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