If you were eating seriously in Portland between 2005 and 2020, there’s a good chance you had a favorite Pok Pok dish. Chances are also good that your favorite was Ike’s Vietnamese fish sauce wings: crispy, sticky, funky, and a national star when they first made waves. Like most of the food at Andy Ricker’s converted house of a restaurant on Southeast Division, the wings are one example of the Southeast Asian dishes Pok Pok championed that were extraordinarily under-represented in American restaurants at the time. If you’re quick at navigating Open Table, you have a shot to eat them once again, but only for two nights.

Pok Pok chef and founder Andy Ricker is coming through Portland September 8 and 9 to resurrect his wildly influential Thai restaurant as a pop-up. Jeju, Han Oak’s sister Korean barbecue restaurant in Southeast Portland, will host Ricker for two nights of tasting menus, running through a highlight reel of the original restaurant’s dishes. Ricker closed all of Pok Pok’s locations permanently during the pandemic, which at one point included a handful of Portland restaurants and outposts in LA, Vegas, and New York. He moved to Thailand at the same time, which was always sort of his dream. But he’s done a few greatest hits–style dinners in the states over the past couple years. He hasn’t yet made it back to Portland until now.

“This is a bit of a homecoming,” says Jeju chef and cofounder Peter Cho. The dinners are part of a makeshift tour Ricker is assembling that will stop in Bozeman, Montana, Salt Lake City, and New York, though it seems to be more of a lark than the roots of a second wind for his empire. Cho’s expansive restaurant, with its central charcoal grills, is the perfect setup to cook Pok Pok’s char-happy cuisine—even if the digs are a bit more deluxe than the cobbled together house Pok Pok used to occupy.

Cho says he and Ricker have been in touch for months planning logistics. Famously exacting—he’s known for his fidelity to the dishes he saw traveling and living throughout Thailand and its surrounding countries—Ricker is even reconnecting with some of his old purveyors in town ahead of the dinner. The menu, $125 per person, is still under construction, but a draft includes plenty of dishes from the Pok Pok cookbook: muu paa kham wan, tender wild boar collars scented with chili and glazed on the grill, and khao phot ping, charcoal-charred corn on the cob with salted coconut cream. 

Aside from those famous chicken wings, pork is everywhere on the menu, perhaps a product of Jeju’s whole animal butchery program (the dinners aren’t fully a collaboration between the two restaurants, but Cho and his staff will support Ricker in the kitchen). Starting with that boar collar, it’s easy to trace how the event could make use of a whole animal, if not at least some larger, “primal” cuts. Kaeng hang leh pork curry, a dry-spiced Northern Thai dish with Burmese origins, might make use of offcuts. The spareribs will no doubt become sii khrong muu yaang, crosscut and marinated in warm spices and honey before sizzling over the coals.

Chicken, however, seems to be a different story. The menu is only interested in a specific cut. “I had heard the legend of these wings,” Cho says. He was cooking in New York when the Pok Pok wings became an icon, and only set up his first Portland restaurant, Han Oak, in 2016. But he was well aware of Ricker’s rigorous cooking. “If we do the wings, it’s gonna be a production,” Cho says Ricker warned him. They’re doing the wings.

Tickets to the Pok Pok dinners are available now through Jeju’s Open Table.