Whiskey Soda Lounge- A Restaurant Review

Sounds like a bar, right? Well, it is technically but I would imagine that 99% of the folks here are coming for the food (or their nearby sister restaurant: Pok Pok). What kind of food are we talking about? I guess I would classify it as gourmet Thai street food. The proprietor of this establishment has been in the spotlight for the last few years with his restaurant, Pok Pok, which is just across the street. Pok Pok is a little different in that it’s not a traditional sit down restaurant but more like an open air street food vendor with a covered shelter for diners to be protected from the elements (from what I have visually gathered by driving by it frequently). I have never been to Pok Pok due to the massive crowds that are always present. My recent visit to the WSL allowed me to sample the signature dishes from Pok Pok while enjoying no waiting period and a sunny Friday evening in Portland. Normally, I prefer to eat inside but we ate outside as the weather was too nice; especially after 16 straight days of rain.

Let’s proceed with the dining and drinking experience. Since we were at a place called, “Whiskey Soda Lounge”, it was only natural that I started with a house specialty cocktail. I ordered the Tamarind Whiskey Sour which contained: tamarind, lime juice, palm sugar and bourbon on the rocks. It was yummy and significantly sour; the presentation was nice as you can see for yourself.

Upon successfully finishing my first cocktail, I opted to switch over to Singha beer which proved well timed with the heat from the food that we ordered. Let me just start out by saying that I really enjoy typical thai food and I eat it once a week or so. This dining experience was completely different from my usual Thai food experience. I would classify each of the following dishes as appetizers, tapas or whatever you want to call them. The descriptions are taken from the menu.

1. Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings: Fresh natural chicken wings marinated in fish sauce, garlic and sugar, deep fried, tossed in caramelized Phu Quoc fish sauce and garlic and served with Vietnamese table salad. Our daytime grill cook Ich Truong’s recipe from his home in Vietnam.

Review: A Portland cabbie recently hyped these wings as the best in town. He even went so far as to brush off my favorite wing joint. To be fair, these wings and the other aforementioned, buffalo-style wings are prepared completely different. They looked really hot but weren’t that bad. My friend mentioned that he thought they tasted a little gamey. I think I have to agree. I thought the preparation was very good but the quality of the chicken itself could have been better. There wasn’t any sauce on the actual wings; it was more like the chicken had the “perfect skin”. In other words, the exterior of the wings were dry. I would be interested to try these wings again in the future to see if the chicken quality was a fluke. Perhaps a Saturday visit would be best to let them go through the week’s back inventory with Friday’s heavy traffic.

They looked divine and were tasty (just not transcendent).

Note: I'd like to take this moment to give shout outs to two of my favorite dogs: Ike and Chewy. Both of their names appear in this posting.

2. Miang Kham: Chiles, ginger, peanuts, dried shrimp, lime, shallot and coconut with betel leaf wrappers and ginger sauce.

Review: My favorite of the dishes that we ordered. Leaf tacos (that’s what I call them dangit!); who would have thunk it. The leaves tasted great. The texture combination was fantastic. The leaf was soft, the peanuts and dried shrimp crunchy, chiles were hot and everything worked wonderfully together. On the surface, I would have thought this would have been my least favorite dish in contrast to the “touted” wings and various beef dishes. I guess you just never know. We ordered a second instance of these leaf tacos.

3. Neua Sawan: Deep fried marinated dried beef with lime leaves. Served with a spicy sauce.

Review: This was pretty good. It tasted like warm, thick, soft beef

jerky. A lot of flavor with a significant sodium kick that I imagine came from some type of soy marinade. The dipping sauce was tasty; it was spicy chile oil. I enjoyed this in round 1 and we went for a follow-up 2^nd order which was a bit over the top for me. The waitress asked us if we wanted to order any rice out of the gates and I thought it was a foolish question. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have some blander food to cleanse the pallet during the course of our pseudo-appetizer meal. I was also thinking that some pickled ginger would have been welcome to refresh the old taste buds.

4. Jin Tup Roht Dii: Slow grilled beef seasoned with a little bit of salt and MSG, pounded with a sledge hammer and served with naam phril kha, a chile-galangal dipping sauce.

Review: This sounds great on paper. However, I thought it was chewy, tough 5 day old brisket that had been slightly warmed up. As I said before, I was shocked that I enjoyed the leaf shrimp tacos the most. I think that this dish was probably executed to perfection and just didn’t jive with my taste buds.

Summary: For the dining experience as a whole, it was fun and I would do it again. They had a great, attentive staff that took excellent care of us. They were professional, focused and paid great attention to detail. That being said, two of us chalked up a $90 tab (pre-gratuity) in about 80 minutes. I think I can safely say that I enjoyed the experience more than the food (based on the overall value). It was fun to have something out of the ordinary but I’m not sure how anxious I would be to hit the WSL up again in the near future. I’m still interested to hit Pok Pok up at some point this summer; I understand that have some great ribs.

A few additional notes: This was a rather ambitious dining experience for my 2nd posting. One of the appealing factors of this blog was forcing myself to get out and try some places that have been on my "to do" list. I consider myself a foodie but also an everyman. I think you’ll find that my future dining experiences are a bit more standard with regard to the type of fare. Please disregard any minor formatting issues; I did my best to resolve them.

A few related links:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/whiskey-soda-lounge-portland

http://pokpokpdx.com

http://www.whiskeysodalounge.com/