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By David & Susan Greenberg
Imagine taking a barrel of fermented cabbage (sauerkraut), dumping it into an enormous sieve, and collecting its liquid. Fish Sauce is the sauerkraut juice of the fish world, liquid sieved from barrels of fermented fish (interestingly, ancient Greeks and Romans had a similar sauce, guarum). It is finny bilgewater. It is umami and udaddy. It is essential to Southeast Asian cuisine. It fugs the food courts of Thailand, a fug to make epicures point like hounds, and, in our experience, it is missing from antiseptic Thai restaurants in this country. One exception is Paadee in SE Portland, Oregon.
Paadee serves sophisticated food with at least one nod to French cuisine but its roots are in the street restaurants of its homeland, as our quivering nostrils confirmed.
Their duck confit in red curry sauce is the dish you always wanted but your imagination was too limited to conceive of it in order to seek it out. Ducky ducky ducky, crisp skin, lightly salted, in a puddle of perfect red coconut curry, it pummeled us with flavor, texture, and scent. After eating it, we were ready to be pummeled again. This was probably the best fusion dish we’ve ever had.
Their green papaya salad was intense with fish sauce, lime, some sugar and heat from Thai chilies, just below the threshold of setting our nostril hairs on fire. A memorable salad.
Gai Grop Sam Yan (or Chicken with Cashews) bore almost no relation to that anodyne concoction found in so-called Chinese restaurants. Here, the chicken was coated (probably in semolina flour), deep fried so it was crisp yet pliable, and glazed with what seemed to be a reduction of fish sauce and sugar. There were large chilis, not nearly as fierce as they looked, to lend color and mild ambient heat.
Pork belly is one of earth’s great vegetables, fat free and utterly healthful. With their Pork Belly Noodle Set, they left the skin on and roasted it until the meat was juicy and the skin was a crackling, then cut it in chunks. Its crunch gave the same deep satisfaction, speaking gustatorily, as stepping on bubble wrap. It came with rice noodles in lime sauce and ground pork. The set also included a perfect, bifurcated hard-boiled egg which had the non-sequitorish quality of an erratic left by a receding glacier.
Both sets came with a bowl of mild chicken broth to dulcify the palate.
Sometimes Thai Coffee is cloying. Their iced Thai coffee, a particularly deep roast to balance the sweetness of condensed milk, was paradigmatic.
This is a small sampling from a large menu. We note that they have wonderful sounding cocktails.
Paadee has chef smarts plus street smarts. We feel compelled to return. Often. If only for the fug.
