Portland’s love affair with Thai cuisine belies a certain demographic incongruity. The metro area has more than 100 Thai restaurants—double if you count carts and pop-ups. Yet only around 6,000 people of Thai descent live in Oregon, making up just 0.14 percent of the state’s 4.27 million population, per the latest census. There is no significant immigrant population to explain the city’s full flowering of Thai food cultures, as you find with, say, Mexican food in Southern California or Chinese food in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

With due respect to the legacy of Bangkok Kitchen (a popular Portland Thai restaurant in the 1980s and ’90s) and the Siripatrapa family who ran it, many trace our city’s Thai food obsession to an American guy from North Carolina by way of Vermont by way of Thailand via the late-twentieth-century western backpacking trail—Andy Ricker, who opened Pok Pok in 2005. His generation
of Gen X Portlanders helped remake the city: uncompromising, punk-twinged, flavor-forward, and almost preternaturally cool, however you define it. In contrast to peers, Ricker was also quite serious about recreating dishes in Portland you may have previously found only in Thailand. Soon Pok Pok won James Beard Awards and showed up on national best-of lists and television shows. By 2015, The New York Times declared, “In Portland, Thai Food Moves Beyond the Usual.” 

Maybe our climate suits the food, a riot of heat and sour and sweet and salt to cut through the dreary drip with a satisfying crunch. Or maybe we were readier than most places to challenge the hegemony of pad thai et al. Portland is open-minded, yes, but also semi-ironically oriented toward a group-herd version of iconoclasm. Somewhere along the way, Thai food became embedded in the local consciousness, our answer to New York City steakhouses or Kansas City barbecue. 

Pok Pok closed in 2020, but the city’s hunger has only increased. OK Chicken & Khao Soi opened in the early days of 2026 in the original Pok Pok location, on SE Division. Packed nightly, it’s easily the buzziest local opening of the year, of a Thai restaurant or otherwise. But two other new Thai restaurants just as worthy of attention opened within a few months not too far away: Bangkok Belly and Yui. In just about any other city in America save perhaps Los Angeles (home to the largest Thai population outside Thailand), these other joints would have diners out in the street shouting at the tops of their lungs. Here, they’re just another set of options.

OK Chicken is the work of Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom, all-world Portland Thai restaurateur, himself a Beard winner for his work at Thai tasting-menu destination Langbaan and a proprietor of Hat Yai, Phuket Cafe, Eem, Yaowarat, and Paadee. Ninsom teamed up with Yaowarat chef Sam Smith and Eem bar maestro Eric Nelson (a former Pok Pok server) to resurrect the old Pok Pok space. 

OK Chicken is not Andy Ricker’s joint, of course. But if you remember the halcyon onomatopoeic days of Pok Pok well, the ghosts are barely hidden. The place is heavy with the dust of memory. As of press time, Pok Pok signage hung in the walk-up window (Ninsom says this may change), and upstairs there’s a Pok Pok tribute hallway of sorts, with Ricker’s Beard Award still on the wall. “It’s our version of memory lane,” Ninsom says. “The impact of Pok Pok’s food to the city is a big deal.”

My general footing is to be skeptical of Old Portland nostalgia, but I forgot all that when the food arrived and the magic kicked on. Of OK Chicken’s papaya salad options, you want the som tum Lao, which is flamethrower hot and extra funky with crab paste, its flavors amplifying psychotropically with each bite. This is the real punk rock. It’s loud, mildly habit-forming. It makes you see colors, or else reach for a bite of sticky rice or slug of Thai tea. 

There are wings, but they aren’t Pok Pok wings (which weren’t Thai in the first place but Vietnamese). At OK Chicken the wings are of the crispy-crunchy bar variety, served with a green chile nam jim seafood dipping sauce and confetti of fried shallots. Khao soi, the iconic soup from Chiang Mai, is less brothy than other versions in town, its rich coconut curry nicely coating shaggy noodles. Two takes on the chile dip nam prik, styled like small relish trays, might be my favorites of the menu so far. Both get a jammy boiled egg. The red pork and tomato version is served with pork rinds, and a green version gets long beans and mustard greens. 

The correct order here involves a salad, some dip, a form of chicken (the wings or a marinated half chicken from the charcoal grill), and the longan sticky rice for dessert, which pops with perilla seeds. You might hear Thai emo on the stereo; you might see famous-for-Portland people in the dining room. It’s a scene. 

Yui is casual compared with OK Chicken. Owner Chalunthorn “Yui” Schaeffer and her mother, “Mama” Ta Triamchainon, have grown a cult following since first opening on NE Killingsworth in 2020. After a brief hiatus and a run of pop-ups, they reopened in a new space on SE Belmont just a few weeks before OK Chicken.

It’s open for lunch. It’s not a scene, at least not yet, though Triamchainon’s sakoo sai mu tapioca dumplings (rare in the US) have made her famous at the local Thai temple. Filled simply with sweet radish, palm sugar, white pepper, and peanuts, the chewy dumplings are little pocket marvels.

“My mom is actually Chinese,” Schaeffer tells me, “but she grew up in Thailand.” The family is from Bangkok, a gigantic city with a famously diverse culinary scene. That meld of regional Thai dishes shows up on Yui’s menu with some Chinese influences—the dim sum staple shumai, for instance, spiked with fish sauce. 

Triamchainon, 68, still oversees the prep kitchen, and her practiced hand ties the restaurant together. Even landmarks of international Thai cuisine like massaman curry and pad thai are fresh with uncommon attention to detail. As are the chicken wings, which are closer in style to Pok Pok’s than what’s served at OK Chicken: crispy-fried, sticky with sweet fish sauce, and worth shouting in the street about. 

Five more minutes down SE Belmont sits Bangkok Belly, which strikes me as an inheritor to the drinking snacks and casual party vibes of Ricker’s Whiskey Soda Lounge. It’s owned by two first-time restaurateurs, Portland local David Fiske and his wife, Kat Thirakomen, who is originally from Bangkok. Satay skewers (served by the single stick but sizable enough to share) are the star of the small menu, supported by frequently rotating small plates like steelhead and citrus tossed with Thai herbs and a burst of fresh chile. Far past the bland music-festival food-stall variety, Bangkok Belly’s chicken satay is outstandingly tingly-spicy, with peanut sauce and strips of grilled white bread. The mushroom skewer—delicately soft and salty-sweet—gets a similarly fiery and unctuous green nam jim. 

Elsewhere on the menu, things get more playful. A macaroni salad riff has the citrus, herbs, and spices of Thai larb, a family picnic mashup with a subtle, creeping heat. For dessert, a vanilla ice cream sundae loaded with crunchy coconut, chocolate sauce, and a dollop of that good spicy peanut sauce lands like a spicy-sweet chocolate hot fudge turtle. I left saying we’d come back sometime just for the sundae.

You’ll likely pass a dozen Thai establishments on your way to any of these three, and even more Thai restaurants are forecast to open in the coming months. The cuisine endures in a challenging moment for restaurants. Maybe some of this is a nostalgia for the Portland of Pok Pok’s era, a simpler time municipally, culturally, civilizationally. Or maybe that food flipped something in our brains, rang a bell that can’t be unrung. Today the scene is in full flower, with new heroes and new stories at the fore. Portland’s love affair with Thai food isn’t going anywhere. These flavors get in your bones, somehow.