A 1970s Thai funk disco band greets you at the door. Thwack, boing, ping. Jolly beats ramrod through your chest. Walls are a vision of Thailand, collaged found images, hundreds of frames methodically cut and pasted into a montage of expressive faces, forgotten streets, and fragments of daily life. It’s cultural anthropology, an invitation to imagine, a celebration of art and glue, and a reminder of where passion and insanity can go.

And that’s just the bathroom at Yaowarat.

To enter Yaowarat, a Thai Chinese joint opened in October in Montavilla (7937 SE Stark St), is to plunge headlong into the beauty and chaos of Bangkok’s Chinatown, somewhere between Blade Runner and a teeming night market. The bar is film noir–red, as when viewed through tinted glasses. Votive candles cast shadows over vintage Thai Chinese pottery and a bejeweled deity. Sound and fury erupt all around from rattling cocktail shakers, hypnotic Asian pop, and ladles banging furiously against woks in a cramped, steamy open kitchen, with diners camped on the edges. In the dining room, entranced customers eat elbow-to-elbow as if in a fever dream, digging into charred noodles perfumed with enough pork fat to warrant a devotional poem.

Welcome to our Restaurant of the Year, very Thailand, very Portland, and very personal. It’s the latest venture from Bangkok-born Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom and an all-star cast of Portland food thinkers: Eric Nelson, Kyle Linden Webster, and Sam Smith. This is no side hustle. These industry vets are all in, on campus hosting and fretting over the placement of every found tchotchke in the room. In just 10 years, Ninsom has rocketed from rookie cook to unstoppable ringleader of Portland’s lauded Thai food scene, from Eem to Langbaan. LA has Thai Town, an entire zip code of celebratory eating. Portland is Earl Town, where old-school Thai cooking meets Portland’s love of experiential adventures, goofy-yet-erudite cocktails, and curated everything.

Yaowarat, his seventh project, adds another dimension: an evocative dive into what Ninsom calls “one the most fun streets on Earth, equal to Times Square on New Year’s Eve”—Bangkok’s Chinatown, traversed by its main artery, Yaowarat Road. Already, it’s a restaurant like no other. One reason: It’s rare to find a menu devoted to this food outside of Thailand, with this level of flavor truth and storytelling. Think silky Chinese comforts meets Thailand’s head-rushing vibrancy, backed by hundreds of years of tradition.

Beer, the water of Bangkok’s Chinatown, is here, Singha to nonalcoholic options. Yaowarat adds its own refreshments, including some high-roller Champagnes, because why not? House cocktails are lip-smacking joy rides, one better than the next. A drink called Print the Legend is, in Yaowarat’s parlance, like “an amaretto sour and mai tai had a baby.” Pochana tastes like a Jolly Rancher fell into a vat of mezcal and lemon meringue pie. I think I have finally found my last drink, the thing you want before they put you to sleep.

Turns out, two of Portland’s top cocktail philosophers are in Yaowarat’s band. Nelson, a tropical drink wiz, is Ninsom’s partner in Eem, Langbaan, and Phuket Café. And Webster’s Expatriate bar is esteemed for its exquisitely balanced drinks (and dueling turntables). Meanwhile, chef Smith (formerly of Sweedeedee and Tusk) sweats the arc and flow of the menu, backed by a slew of talented cooks, with Ninsom as spirit guide.

Dishes reflect the group’s months-long food benders in Bangkok’s Chinatown. As they tell it, they ate until they “bent over in pain” in search of an edible biography of the Yaowarat neighborhood, to be translated for Portland. There’s no right way to make this food. Twenty vendors might specialize in the same dish, with the same ingredients, yet no two are exactly alike. Day and night, they pounded through entire menus to find the hallelujah moments, then returned to eat favorite versions, just to make sure.

Their mission plays out in a tight collection of snacks, noodles, stir-fries, and binge-worthy desserts, most $18 or less, in a restaurant where every detail is so considered, so painstakingly handpicked, you feel this place was created just for you. What gets you is the textural surprises, the intriguing shifts from simplicity to boom. The food is not spicy per se, but it takes you places—peppery, vinegary, fatty, funky, rich, chewy, an irresistible comfort coma. As my friend Drew put it: “I just ate so much food I might be going blind.” Yaowarat can do that to you.

Begin with pickled cabbage salad, to eat between bites throughout the meal. This is your herbaceous palate cleanser, a taste bud reset. Among the appetizers, chive cakes are a must, double-fried to a thunderous crunch, their centers like magic marshmallows. If no one was looking, you’d eat a hundred of them. This is Portland’s next cult dish. Add garlic-blazing grilled squid, a Bangkok Chinatown signature, and crispy bean curd dumplings that shatter like filo pastry and hide a power shot of shrimp inside.

Next, guay jub, a prized Chinese-style Thai noodle soup, marches into your mouth with concentrated pork stock, long chewy noodles rolled like little burritos, and a white pepper attack that steals the crown from Italy’s famed cacio e pepe. Smith’s homemade fish cakes, floating on top, are as delicate as angel food cake. Even the soup’s pork belly skin is legit—taut, crackly, and puffy, like hyped-up pork rinds.

Chinese black olive pork is a must, as it encapsulates the Thai Chinese food evolution: a stir-fry of crumbled pork and salted Chinese olives is born in mainland China, then makes it way to Bangkok, where lime, shallots, fried garlic, and Thai chiles jump on top. It’s pure umami, times two.

Come back just for kuay teow kua gai, wok-charred wide rice noodles with chicken, pork fat, and a steamed egg. Can four ingredients embody the essence of great eating? So simple but so complex—the noodles crisp, gold-crusted, and caramelized on top, yet soft and springy below, melded together with art and pork fat, like a new kind of hash browns. This is the story of Yaowarat: Smith sniffed out the best version down an alley. “We couldn’t stop eating it,” he says. Nelson punctuated the point at my table one night: “This is the reason this restaurant exists, to eat and sell these noodles. We ate our weight in them.”

Fair warning. Not everything hits a euphoric zone. Curry and fried rice are so bland you wonder if they snuck in from a different restaurant … definitely wasn’t Eem, where curry and fried rice drive lines out the door.

But that leaves more room for Yaowarat’s strong desserts. Toasted buns are soft, sweet, and crispy, butter oozing out of every pore, with two custards on the side for dunking. You rip them apart like raccoons raiding a picnic basket. Black sesame paste dumplings, bobbing in ginger broth, appeared on Langbaan’s first night in 2014—a little-known Bangkok Chinatown dessert that lit up the room, made by a shy guy everyone called Earl. I never forgot that moment. Now, it’s a star of Yaowarat’s dessert menu, delivered by Ninsom with a sly smile, a decade later.

In a sea of fast-casual, investor-driven concepts, Yaowarat makes a compelling case that restaurants can deliver an affordable, singular experience that can’t be replicated in cookie-cutter fashion, from recipes to records. To remember key flavors, Ninsom smuggled dumplings and dipping sauces back home in his suitcase, sloshing in a coffee thermos. Webster, who masterminded that aforementioned bathroom, music to murals, carried 70 pounds of old Thai vinyl back to Portland to make playlists just for Yaowarat. “It’s not for AirPods,” says Webster. “You have to be there or not have the experience. Some things still matter in person. Restaurants are one of them.”