Thai Weekend Part II: Pok Pok

I headed out with my friend Lowrey this evening to check out the wildly popular Pok Pok. It seems you can't swing a dead cat in Portland without hitting a thai restaurant, but for the most part their menus are identical. There are exceptions, places which elevate the cuisine beyond the typical curries and stir fries, Thyphoon and Kun Phic Ban Thai being two which come to mind. With a northern Thai street food inspired menu, Pok Pok breaks the mold as well. They even landed the Oregonian's Restaurant of the Year award this year, so I figured it was about time I gave the place a look.

We started with one of the specials, Tap Waan:


This was a duck liver salad with cilantro, mint, and a fairly mild fish sauce based dressing. I'm not generally a big fan of liver of any kind, but this was quite tasty. The duck liver and mint made for an interesting combination of flavors and textures. Next up were Papaya Pok Pok and Sate Kambing:




The Papaya Pok Pok, the restaurant's namesake, is a salad of green papaya, tomatoes, long beans, Thai chili, lime juice, tamarind, fish sauce, garlic, palm sugar, dried shrimp and peanuts. We ordered it with the optional salted black crab. The salad was a bit hotter than I expected, but it was excellent nonetheless. It didn't come with a very substantial amount of crab, however. The crab is apparently only meant to provide a salty dimension to the dish. Strangely, the sticky rice we ordered at the waiter's suggestion to accompany the salad was served in a plastic bag...

The Sate Kambing, two skewers of lamb sirloin kebabs marinated in cumin, chili, sweet soy, tamarind, garlic and palm sugar and served with a sweet dipping sauce, was good, but not as interesting as the previous two dishes.

At this point Lowrey was done but I had some room left, so I ordered the Coconut Ice Cream Sandwich:


This, I have to say, was something of a disappointment. It wasn't an ice cream sandwich as you might imagine it, but rather four small scoops of coconut-jackfruit ice cream on a sweet bun and drizzled with chocolate syrup, condensed milk, peanuts and sweet sticky rice. You'll notice the sweet bun looks a bit like a hot dog bun. It didn't taste like a hot dog bun, but it had about the same consistency and didn't hold its own against the melting ice cream. The ice cream itself, which is made in-house, was great. If they were to reconfigure this with something other than the sweet bun, it would probably work much better.

Pok Pok is well-known for their Kai Yaang, a charcoal roasted stuffed game hen, and their pork dishes seem to be especially popular as well, so I'll have to make it back at some point to try those.

All in all, it was a good meal. The food was a nice break from the thai standards, the service was attentive, the atmosphere was nice, if a bit noisy. It was a good experience. But restaurant of the year good? I think not. Although I am willing to let that stuffed game hen change my mind at some point down the road...