Dining out in Portland, Oregon and other Food Travels
I was able to attend Shipwreck PDX at their first pop up in March at Jacqueline, and they made my Eater PDX top pop up list. I plan to attend again at their next pop up in May 15 next from 5 PM to 2 AM at Taqueria Nueve, which is now additionally partnering with Rum Club while waiting for your table. It’s a strong sign how they are continually improving and actively making choices by learning from their experience in March.
This quarterly dinner series by Imperial Session duo Advanced Cicerone Ryan Spencer (Bailey’s Taproom) with dishes from Chef Spencer Watari (Clyde Common) pairs beers and food. Unlike many beer and food dinners, this pop up concept does not beholden itself to any particular breweries or restaurant so they can select any beer or dish to make an interesting pairing without worrying about representing or promoting any business. The last dinner focus was on beers from New England.
Once a month, Jane Hashimawari pops up as Ippai PDX at Milk Glass Market offering Japanese home style cooking like from her mom. Her simple but comforting meals vary by the monthly theme and season and really do seem like what would be on the table at a regular family dinner if you were doing a homestay. Recently, I attended the Ippai PDX Osechi Dinner, which featured some dishes of traditional Japanese New Year’s Food to give 2017 (or any new year) an auspicious start.
A new pop up is starting up in Portland this time focused on food with another PDX famous love, beer! Advanced Cicerone Ryan Spencer (you may have seen him at Bailey’s Taproom) and Chef Spencer Watari (Clyde Common, Pok Pok) are collaborating together under the name Imperial Session to launch a quarterly dinner series focused on beer and food pairing. The first Imperial Session Beer Dinner will be a five course dinner with pairings for each course on Sunday September 18th at Shift Drinks’ Makeshift Room (former home of Nomad PDX). The dinner seating starts at 7 PM with reservations via tickets available now on EventBrite, with a suggested cash donation of $55 paid at the end of the meal.
Ryan and Spencer are working together to break down the biases and commitments of a typical beer dinner, with the goal of offering guests the ability to experience a wide range of beer and food interactions without boundaries. For instance, usually beer dinner events feature a single restaurant working with a single brewery.
“The problems we found with these dinners were that they all felt more promotional than genuine. Brewer’s wanted to showcase their flagship beers and restaurants wanted to promote their establishments. Both parties seemed to be looking out for their own best interests with little collaboration taking place. We wanted to create a dining experience where we could pour whatever we wanted and serve food that created the ultimate pairing.” Ryan and Spencer explained.
Meanwhile, Imperial Session has intentionally selected beers that are a little outside of the norm. For instance, for this initial dinner, 2 of the 5 beers are unavailable in Oregon, 2 are vintages which are no longer available, and 1 is a small batch brewery only release.
The dinners are intentionally small in order to have guests easily interact with Ryan and Spencer as well as with other guests and allow for smaller batch sourcing of quality ingredients, including rare beers.
Down the road Imperial Session hopes to feature different local chefs to create unique tasting menus for the dinner series, where Spencer operates as the permanent chef and assists the guest chef in formatting their menu into their constraints while also working with Ryan to create pairings.
They have also discussed the opposite situation where they bring in someone from the beer industry to curate a selection of beers to pair with one of Spencer’s menus. Imperial Session could be a venue and opportunity to work out some creative ideas with people whose formal positions in the food and drink industry don’t currently allow that chance.
Ryan and Spencer have known each other for the majority of their lives, both having grown up in the Portland Metro area and first meeting in third grade and then attending University of Oregon where they home brewed together. Growing up in The Pacific Northwest, surrounded by a wide range of food and beverage, they said it seemed pretty natural to both of them to pursue careers in those two fields.
Ryan got his start as a dishwasher position at Hopworks before expanding to jobs at Deschutes, Gigantic, and his current position at Bailey’s Taproom where he also has been getting cicerone certifications (the equivalent of a wine sommelier, it requires various levels of examinations). Meanwhile, after college, Spencer moved around for a bit until he settled at Pok Pok for two years before he transitioned to Clyde Common to continue to develop his skills with a more diverse range of cuisines.
For years they have both talked about going into some type of venture together. The specific idea for joining forces to do beer and food pairing dinners came from attending several “Brewer’s Dinners” throughout Portland when Ryan was studying to take the Master Cicerone exam and trying to gain experience with beer and food pairing. Imperial Session is finally those talks, their history, experience, and their expertise coming together for them.
Here’s a look at the menu for this first Imperial Session beer and food pairing dinner. For this particular menu, a few of the dishes were dishes Spencer was really excited about, they tasted through them, and Ryan tried to find beers that might work. On the other hand, a few of the pairings started with a beer that Ryan felt would be really interesting and food friendly, then they designed a dish around the beer. They hope to impart some of the knowledge they acquired from the beer and food pairing process to guests as part of the dinner.
This is the omnivore menu, a vegetarian version is available by advanced notice at their discretion.
Course One:
Grilled corn, kewpie mayo, togarashi cracklin, and avocado puree
Paired with Trillium Pier (a hopped American Pale Wheat Ale from Massachusetts)
Course Two:
Radish and turnip salad, caramel egg dressing, carbonated citruses
Paired with Breakside Carte Blanche (American Wild Ale with Brett, gin and hops)
Course Three:
Lamb pierogies, mint chimichurri sour cream, peas, spring allium
Paired with De Garde/Heater Allen Doppelbock (Eichenbock, an oak barrel-aged Doppelbock)
Course Four:
Sai oua sausage, fingerling potatoes, charred green onions, mushroom demi-glace
Paired with Holy Mountain The Goat (Saison / Farmhouse style ale from Washington)
Dessert:
TBA
Paired with Block 15 2015 Kriek (Kriek is a cherry sour /wild ale style)
I’ve had the pop up Supper Club Meadowlark on my to do list for quite a while, and finally got to experience my first dinner with them earlier this week on February 9, 2016 with the Meadowlark PDX Seollal Korean New Year Dinner. They popped up at Din Din, located at 920 NE Glisan. Just getting to the location you may have some doubts if you’re in the right place along the dark roads and warehouses, but the bright lights of the Din Din sign confirm that you’re not lost and isn’t parking so conveniently easy?
After my experience at supper club, I kept kicking myself that I waited so long. Chefs Jen Datka and Emily Park focus on being very local and hand crafted, with everything made from scratch. Even though the dinner I attended included almost 40 people, it felt as intimate as a dinner party.
At the cozy location of Din Din, the open kitchen is brightly lit and teases you with direct line of sight and smell to the preparations and finishing touches as they bustle in aprons.
Upon checking in and hanging up your coat at the wall long coat hooks, guests were welcomed at the adorable bar nook with a cocktail of rye whiskey with Korean Cinnamon and Date Tea, as well as a little take out box filled with Popcorn with nori and chili powder.
The tables are decorated simply with a few vases of willow so that there is little in the way to chatting and making new friends with those around your seat. A menu at each setting also looks simple and straightforward, but belies the complexity of flavor and how fulfilling this dinner will be for all. Although there is regular water available for instance, at first the offering was a chilled barley water that has only a faint grain taste and is a nod to the ubiquitous roasted barley tea popular in Korean culture.
Bottles of Kooksoondang Draft Makgeolli (a rice wine) and Heater Allen Pils appeared shortly after the cocktails and popcorn snacks were cleared in anticipation of starting dinner. They remained on the table to share for each table of 6.
I tried to take the hint to try several glasses of the Makgeolli since it seemed like they were encouraging the pairing when 2 more bottles of it showed up to share by the time the main course arrived.
To get our attention before describing each course we are about to receive, the ladies behind Meadowlark ring a big bell.
The first course was Tteok Mandu Guk, with pork belly and shrimp dumplings, rice cakes, kimchi consommé. This was served last year at their Seollal dinner as well. Emily explained how Seollal is one of the two biggest holidays in Korea, and eating dumplings is traditional although they make no claim that all the preparation and dishes is necessarily traditional since they used local seasonal ingredients and added personal touches.
The ladies of Meadowlark PDX chefs Jen Datka and Emily Park took turns ladling in the Kimchi Consommé – the gentle focus I saw in both of them underscored the care they put into each dish and giving individual attention to the details.
The dish is exquisite- the chewiness of the rice cakes, the slight kick to the broth, the rich chubbiness to the dumplings, and the beauty of those floating carrot flowers…
Each dumpling is hand formed, and the skin, the filling, broth is all from scratch like from a Korean grandma.
The tease of seeing them put together the banchan, or side dishes, and seeing Jen take the Bo Ssäm roasted and smoked pork out of the oven and start plating in that bright open kitchen…
while Emily supported a pescatarian option by frying up some fish!
Here’s a detail look at all the banchan and sauces:
I love banchan – all the little dishes all over the table as small bites of accompaniments to go with the main!
Bo Ssäm is pork belly that is traditionally boiled, but Jen and Emily not only upgraded us with the best pork shoulder in town from Tails & Trotters, but also chose to slow roast and then smoke it. Rather than slicing it, the ladies served it shredded to show off its tenderness and perhaps as a nod towards American pulled pork.
Add Hapa Rice and Lettuce and time to eat!
My plate with a little bit of everything from every plate… man I really want this plate again. You can see such a mix of sweet and salty and savory and spicy and acidic/sour
You can eat it with rice, but wrapping it in lettuce adds that extra refreshing crunch to the slow roasted and smoked organic sustainable pork shoulder and pretend healthiness to the fattiness and richness, here accompanied by Ssamjang sauce for spicy funky kick. I also admit I may have just smeared a bunch of Ssamjang sauce on rice and been every happy with that combo.
Dessert was a satisfying lightness of ice cream sandwiches – a duo of Ginger Cookies with Yuzu for tartness or Brown Butter Cookie with Black Sesame that offered more toasty notes.
I did at first miss a little bit that they didn’t have my favorite banchan, which is the Mung Bean Sprouts. I can dump a whole little plate of that on my own plate and ask for more several times at a Korean meal. But, since the sauteed until just wilted mizuna provided the same flavor profile of garlic and sesame, I didn’t miss it much and plan to do this with my spinach in the future.
F tells me that he always can tell when I find something spectacularly delicious. I stop talking for a while to turn internally because I want to focus on just savoring each bite, and my eyes may not even be focused. I take smaller bites to stretch the experience. I might take little samples of elements of a dish, or before, with, and after a sip of beverage, and then compose a perfect bite with a little bit of everything. I may even shake my arms with excitement.
I did all of these at Meadowlark. I can’t wait to visit another Supper Club Dinner again and enjoy the care and thoughtfulness in composing each dish that Jen and Emily do. Most chefs have an appreciation for Northwest ingredients, and Jen and Emily particularly are adept at keeping it simple but also doing just enough to coax the best of each ingredient in a way that as an eater, you have that same appreciation while also recognizing the expertise of labor and vision brought by the chefs to transform ingredients into a dish and an experience.
Oh no, me and my camera have been caught by Jen and Emily! It’s true, I’m one of those people…
I was also really struck by the warmth and how it really feels like they enjoy nourishing everyone – chefs often vibrate with excitement for ingredients, the enthusiasm of inspiration and ideas behind a dish, the control and mindfulness of perfect execution, the focus of tracking details and being organized. Some chefs are boisterous with the bravado of creativity, some are quietly deliberate, some are organized and meticulous, others are flexible and a bit chaotic. Jen and Emily stood out to me for how they emanate the feeling of welcome, generosity, hospitality, and especially grace.
Meadowlark changes up their theme every month, so make sure you follow them on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and sign up for their mailing list to be in the know before a dinner sells out. When you purchase your Brown Paper ticket (this meal felt like a steal at $40 – their prices generally are in the $40-$60 range historically so far), everything is included – food, beverage, and gratuity.
Have you had Bo Ssäm before? What’s your favorite banchan? Do you have a favorite Korean restaurant in Portland, what is it?
Pechluck's Food Adventures
Enjoying deliciousness in Portland & wherever travels may lead me.
My name is Pech, short for Pechluck. I enjoy adventures in eating - dining out and cooking and imbibing for local Portland deliciousness or wherever travels lead.
Disclosure: There may be at times sponsored posts where the ticket to an event or meal or sample product to review was complimentary, but I will always provide my honest opinion and assessment of all products and experiences I may be given. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own.
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