PORTLAND HAS A WAYS to go on the Korean cuisine front. Beaverton's got the kimchi crown right now, with its endless parade of all-you-can-eat grilled kalbi and bubbling red-hot bowls of bone-in beef stew.
But two newcomers, Han Oak and Fusspot Chicken, are bringing some gochujang pepper paste realness in two very Portland ways: Han Oak is a cheffed-up prix-fixe affair and Fusspot is a pop-up. Grab your shiny metal chopsticks and get that banchan.
I don't know what they put in the water in Lane County in the 1990s (like, really, it could have been anything... but fluoride), but I know the high schools produced some truly stellar graduates in the early aughts—myself (haha) and Peter Cho, chef at Han Oak, included. Cho, who went to Springfield High, spent a decade in New York working as sous chef to April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig and the Breslin. He's back, and since then has been elevating hot dogs and fried chicken into higher forms—first with Stray Dogs and then Stray Birds.
Now, Cho has landed in a light, airy space behind the Ocean restaurant pod on NE 24th, and is putting out a prix-fixe dinner on Friday and Saturday nights, along with a Sunday brunch.
When Han Oak is good, it's good. I'm still dreaming about a Korean fried cauliflower, resplendent in a glaze of gochujang and tamarind. With bread and butter daikon pickles on the side, it's one of the single most inspiring bites I've had this year—a bright orange crunchy shell of spice and complexity around a cruciferous vegetable that's attained its highest possible purpose. The parade of six to nine dishes ($65, includes gratuity) is served family style, but only for your party, avoiding that sometimes awkward dance over the last biscuit at true family-style meals. (Doesn't mean I didn't distract my dad so that I could get the last bite of that cauliflower.)