Ned Ludd - Portland, Oregon

There are times when you are just utterly charmed by a restaurant. It may not be the most breathtaking food, it may not be the most ostentatious decoration, it may not be the most obsequious service, but sometimes a place captures a bit of magic that seems to make every piece of a meal fit together perfectly. That was our experience with Ned Ludd.

Ned Ludd the man was a late 18th century weaver who, in a fit of unexplained rage, destroyed two knitting machines. Decades later, this little incident acquired something of a mystical aura as he became the mascot to the Luddites, a group of rebellious textile workers who vainly opposed the developments of the Industrial Revolution, opposition that was often expressed by breaking the machines that were taking away their jobs.

Ned Ludd the restaurant is not quite so revolutionary, but the name is definitely a signal. The food here is very down to earth, the preparation methods simple, primarily using a wood-burning oven that was left behind by an earlier tenant. The decorations are similarly rustic: weathered wood furnishings and surfaces and rough exposed beams are softened up by decorative twisting vines and branches, old-timey cut-glass light fixtures and candle-holders. It felt to me like a farmhouse from a Peter Greenaway film. Outside, bins of fruitwood (the fuel for that oven) form a perimeter around a few park benches that serve as an outdoor seating area.

The menu is divided into "forebits," "kaltbits," "warmbits" and "plats," indicating starters, salads, slightly more substantial cooked dishes, and heartier entrées. We cobbled together an order for the table that included something from each, focusing primarily on an abundance of tempting-sounding vegetable based dishes.

First to hit the table were these warm pita-like flatbreads, hot from the oven, toasty and browned on the edges, and given a generous bath of good olive oil. The distinctly assertive note of caraway seed was an unexpected and welcome jolt of flavor.

I'm not usually one to get excited over salads, but the salads at Ned Ludd were gorgeous. Tender soft lettuces were paired here with translucent pink slices of duck bacon, lightly pickled cherries, and meaty walnuts, dressed in a simple but pitch-perfect vinaigrette. Hearty flavors, delicate textures, and great balance to the components.

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Pok Pok - Portland, Oregon

The story of Pok Pok goes as follows: Andy Ricker is a chef who fell in love with Thai food during repeated trips to the country in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually set out to do it himself. Pok Pok started as a rotisserie grill take-out business in the driveway of a house, and over time expanded, in somewhat haphazard fashion, into an actual restaurant. "Authenticity," a hot-button word recently, comes up often in discussions of Pok Pok because (a) Ricker is white; and (b) notwithstanding (a), the food at Pok Pok is regularly praised as being more "authentic" than what you will find at most typical Thai restaurants in the U.S.

The issue of "authenticity" gets a lot of attention lately. Is it "authentic" when Ivan Orkin, a white guy from New York, goes to Japan to open a traditional ramen shop? Is it "authentic" when Grant Achatz and crew set out to do a Thai menu for three months at their everlasting pop-up restaurant, Next? Why don't we ask the same questions about authenticity when they do a menu of Escoffier French classics from a hundred years ago?

What about when a Burmese-American and Jewish-American couple start serving dinner out of a hole-in-the-wall Chinese take-out shop in San Francisco's Mission District, sometimes doing contemporary adaptations of Chinese-American classics prepared by a Korean-American chef raised in Oklahama? (Note: if you haven't yet, do check out the Mission Street Food book; it's often a little too pleased with itself, but is nonetheless a fascinating read for a multitude of reasons, the food being only one of them). And surely there's nothing "authentic" about Torrisi Italian Specialties serving up lamb's tongue gyro salads and curried cavatelli?

"Authenticity" is the mantra of many a typical food snob, and yet it's never entirely clear exactly what it means. There is a great piece in the Lucky Peach magazine by Todd Kliman called "The Problem of Authenticity" (sorry, not available online) which persuasively makes the case that it doesn't mean much at all. So many cuisines, even in their "native" forms, are capable of so many infinite variations, and so many "traditional" dishes are actually themselves the result of historical cross-cultural mash-ups that would today go by the sobriquet of "fusion" dishes, that labeling any one particular iteration as "authentic" is a fool's errand.

Kliman suggests, for instance, that Torrisi, with its attention to fresh, local ingredients and its effort to honor the foods of its immediate surroundings or "micro-culture," is authentically Italian in spirit, a different kind of faithfulness than to particular ingredients or their traditional combinations. As Torrisi chef Mario Carbone puts it, "Italian food is not sauce and cheese and pasta. It's an attitude. It's an approach."

Karen Leibowitz of Mission Chinese Food has a somewhat different take:

We feel authorized to make dishes outside our families' ethnic traditions, and we freely mix different cultures' ingredients and techniques, because we like to eat delicious food, wherever it comes from. After a while, sticking with 'authentic' food from your own identity is boring. (Especially if you're Jewish.)

All of which is a long way of saying: I'm not going to be the one to say whether or not Pok Pok and its chef Andy Ricker are serving "authentic" Thai food.

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Coba-Yakko-San - Cobaya Dinner with Chef Hiro-San

There is no restaurant I have eaten at more often than Hiro's Yakko-San. I literally can not count the times: for the past five years we've been there probably an average of once a month, but often as frequently as weekly, with Sunday dinner at Yakko-San being something of a family tradition. So yeah, I kind of like it.

Our kids grew up on their chicken katsu and kurobuta pork sausages, later finding their own favorites among the more than 100 items on the menu (for Little Miss F: kimchi tofu, octopus ceviche, seabass miso, lotus root kimpira; for Frod Jr., edamame, salmon onigiri, yakiniku don, shoyu ramen). For years Yakko-San was located in a hole-in-the-wall on Dixie Highway where the waits for tables often flowed out the front door. Recently they moved to a bigger, fancier location on 163rd Street Causeway which has more than enough room for everyone. It also has room to set aside a space for 30 guinea pigs, giving us an opportunity to do a Cobaya dinner there.

The Cobaya "mission statement" is pretty much parallel to what the Japanese call "omakase," or "It's up to you, chef." That's what we told Chef Hiro-san, and he prepared a seven-course meal, many of which had multiple components. I will be candid in saying that I was hoping it might be more adventurous - this was more crowd-pleaser stuff - but especially for those who had never been to the restaurant before, it was a good introduction to Yakko-San's" izakaya-style (often called "Japanese tapas") repertoire.

You can see all my pictures from the dinner in this CobaYakkoSan flickr set. Here is the menu, with further descriptions and pictures below:

Chamame Edamame

Plum Wine

Tuna, Salmon Sashimi Salad

Crispy Fish Onion Salad

Nigori Sake

Shrimp Spicy Mayo, Fried Oyster

Hitosuji Junmai Sake

Kalbee Yakiniku and Spinach Butter

Akita Junmai Ginjo Sake

Seabass Miso Yaki

Kikuizumi Dai Ginjo Sake

Uni Garlic Pasta

Assorted Maki

Iki na Ona Dai Ginjo

Green Tea and Orange Mochi Ice Cream, Strawberry with Mint Cream

Dessert Pear Sake

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