#Dinner dim sum portland full#

It feels a little dusty, but is always full of Cantonese speakers. Good Taste is the kind of bare-bones, no-nonsense, tight-tabled Cantonese barbecue spot where you're greeted at the door by a side of pork and a neat row of ducks hanging from meat hooks above metal trays of chopped pork. The hot and sour soup tasted like molasses. The beef was gristly, and the chicken was, too. Nobody else seemed to mind: One guy read the paper, and one looked at his phone, while three women rounded off their third pot of tea.

On our visit, the clientele was all retirees, and neither the food nor the ordering nor the payment happened quickly. If you go to Golden Horse, make sure you have nowhere to be. The hot-and-sour soup and General Tso's chicken can be safely ignored, but the Republic serves the most classic rendition of Mongolian beef ($11.95) in Portland, a massive platter that is all green onion bittersweetness and cellophane crunch, under strips of beef. You couldn't call it good, but it is a profound comfort. The egg foo young ($7.50) is like an old man's heart-full of egg and gravy. Sure, the place has seen better days (on our visit, the door had been smashed in, and covered with particle board) but almost nowhere in Portland is the distant past so present. Place in Portland where chop suey and egg foo young are still considered delicacies, with eight variations of each. The menu is similarly ancient: It is, perhaps, the only The oddly cramped dining room is hung with floral wall tapestries and a mural that looks like it was unearthed from an ancient tomb. The Republic is home to perhaps the most beautiful seedy bar in Portland, the Ming Lounge, a red-lit palace of baroque Orientalism dominated by a pagoda on one wall. And the other is the family-owned Republic Cafe, founded in 1922. One is Huber's, which was taken over by its Chinese chef, Jim Louie. Two of Portland's oldest restaurants are Chinese-owned. The hot-and-sour soup is lightly sour, sneezy with white pepper and corn-starch syrupy-and if it's not great, it still feels as classic as a greasy burger at the diner. Get the General Tso's chicken, a bread bomb thick with sugar and sesame and just a tangy hint of spice-which goes down better with the slightly singed chili oil on each table. At House of Louie, the trick is to avoid things requiring finesse, and probably also vegetables.

But hating Denny's is silly-it's like hating an elephant ear at the fair. As nearby Chinese restaurants closed, House served the third-best, and then the second-best, and now the only dim sum in Portland's old Chinatown, with glutinously oversticky dumplings and rice noodles, and sugar-sweet char siu. House of Louie has long been the plush-boothed Denny's of Portland American-Chinese, its door framed in a grand and kitschified circle.

Dinner dim sum portland