Andy Ricker's James Beard Award-winning Northern Thai street kitchen. The fish sauce wings alone justified the pilgrimage. Portland will not see its equal again.
There is no Portland restaurant story quite like Pok Pok's. Andy Ricker opened his Thai street food kitchen on SE Division Street in 2005 — not in a purpose-built restaurant, but in a house, serving food from a street cart in the driveway. What began as an experiment in Northern Thai cooking that Portland had never encountered became, within a decade, one of the most celebrated restaurants in the United States.
The food was revelatory because it was authentic in a way that American Thai restaurants had never attempted. Ricker had spent years in Thailand studying the regional cuisines of Chiang Mai, and what he brought back — the fish sauce wings glazed with Pok Pok fish sauce and palm sugar, the ike's Vietnamese fish sauce wings, the papaya pok pok with fermented shrimp paste, the khao man gai that arrived each day in a limited quantity — was not adapted for American palates. It was the real thing, served with the directness and confidence of someone who had nothing to prove.
In 2011, Ricker won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Northwest — the highest regional recognition in American cooking. He had already expanded Pok Pok to New York. Portland Monthly called it one of the twenty-five restaurants that "made Portland." The Oregonian named it the city's defining restaurant for more than a decade. When Ricker closed all Pok Pok locations in 2020 due to the pandemic, a generation of Portland diners lost something they had taken for granted: the certain knowledge that the best Northern Thai cooking in the Western world was happening on SE Division Street.
The original Pok Pok space at 3226 SE Division Street is now home to OK Chicken & Khao Soi, opened in 2026 by James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Earl Ninsom and partners. The new restaurant carries deliberate echoes of its predecessor — the building's history is present in every decision made about the menu.
Pok Pok mattered beyond the food. It demonstrated that Portland could produce a restaurant of genuine national importance — not a Michelin-starred refinement of European technique, but something entirely American in its directness and confidence, built on deep study of a non-Western culinary tradition and served without condescension to an audience willing to follow wherever the cooking led.
The fish sauce wings became a cultural artefact. Food writers who visited Portland often made Pok Pok their first stop and their highest recommendation. The James Beard nomination queue for Best Chef Northwest would reference Ricker's example for years afterward. Every Thai restaurant in the Pacific Northwest — and many across the country — reckoned with what Pok Pok had done and asked what they could learn from it.
Portland's current Thai food scene, which remains among the strongest in the country outside of New York and Los Angeles, carries Pok Pok's influence in its bones. Langbaan's Thai tasting menu at #3 in Portland owes something to the seriousness Ricker brought to the cuisine. The next generation of Portland chefs cooking Southeast Asian food understand, because of Pok Pok, that authenticity and excellence are not in conflict.
For the spirit of Pok Pok — serious Southeast Asian cooking, genuine regional knowledge, food that does not compromise — the following Portland restaurants carry the tradition most convincingly.
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