WIAW 5/23: Portland’s Whiskey Soda Lounge + Bar Crawl

Posted by Lauren

Where to begin?? How about with the clock? It’s really late on Tuesday night and the stupid Dancing With The Stars finale kept me side-tracked until 11 pm – I don’t even watch the show. WTF is my problem? I spent all night looking at car stuff on Craigslist, US News Rankings, and Fuel Economy.gov that now my brain hurts. Add a little bit of apartment hunting and you get one sleepy, lazy blogger who would rather let your imagination run wild with a collection of photos.

Oh, and then Picasa didn’t want to work for me when I tried cutting corners while making a collage. Maybe I should just send you over to Katie’s blog where her co-blogger, Kelly, wrote all about her family dinner at Pok Pok.

Except, shoot, we didn’t technically eat there.

In the spirit of Jenn‘s WIAW, I give to you our story from Friday night – my first night in Portland visiting Katie and Doug – where we ate and drank the night away!

Restaurants/bars featured include:

• Whiskey Soda Lounge – 3131 SE Division St, Portland (Website, Yelp)
• The Secret Society Lounge – 116 NE Russell Street, Portland (Website, Yelp)
• The Fixin’ To – 8218 N Lombard, Portland (Website, Yelp)
• Slim’s Cocktail Bar – 8635 N Lombard (Yelp)

Now about these:

Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings – six extremely addictive chicken wings coated in fish sauce and love and perfection. Andy Ricker is the brains behind both Portland staples Pok Pok and Whiskey Soda Lounge (he won the James Beard award for best chef in the Northwest in 2011). The two neighboring restaurants both serve this popular dish and I’m so glad I had a chance to try them. I wanted to walk around the rest of the night with chicken wings sticking out of my mouth like a walrus just so I could suck up all the flavor!

Alex Yellan’s 2010 article about Pok Pok explains how the two restaurants make over 2,000 pounds of Ike’s chicken wings each WEEK:

“They now have a vacuum tumbler to reduce marinating time from 24 hours to one. Instead of carrying the wings upstairs to cut, then downstairs to marinate, then upstairs to fry, then back downstairs to cool (only to return upstairs to freeze) they’re all prepped in one place in massive fryers and wheeled to the nearby freezer.”

I’m going to scour the internet for copycat recipes and attempt to make my own version! On a delicious food scale, I’d place these Smoke Eater wings in last place and the Whiskey Soda Lounge/Pok Pok ones light years ahead of them in FIRST PLACE.

Alex also explained how they make their “jelly beer,” which wasn’t as frozen as we had hoped:

“Outside the kitchen on the other side of the bar, they have two ‘bia wun’ or ‘jelly beer’ machines. Two plastic barrels made to look like wood, with elephants carved into them, are attached to a base with a motor that makes them spin. Bottles of Singha beer get submerged into water, ice, and salt until they’re frozen a few minutes later. Tap the bottom, open the top, insert extra long straw and voila ‘bia wun’ or ‘jelly beer.’ The beer goes opaque and slushy, a 22-ounce bottle was great to pass around the shaded back patio.”

That’s all for now. More Portland recaps to come!

-Lauren