Pok Pok?
The
woman in the woolen hat mouths the words on the sidewalk in Manhattan’s
Lower East Side, where Andy Ricker has opened the latest outpost of his
Thai-food realm.
She scrunches her face as she reads the sign. Pok Pok?
MARATHON MAN: Andy Ricker has decorated the walls of Manhattan restaurant Pok Pok Wing with Thai record covers.
IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted
But she never glances
at the narrow walk-down storefront below, where behind the window a pan
full of huge Ike’s Vietnamese fish sauce wings crackles over an
electric range. The 15 customers packed in the tiny dining room chatter
about the three choices on the menu, and overhead a vintage Thai-pop
cover of “Hit the Road Jack” trills from the speakers.
She mouths the words again, as if satisfied she’s got it right. Pok Pok. She moves on.
The funny name of
Ricker’s restaurant, the latest Portland export to New York’s food
scene, is just one more oddity here. The question of how many New
Yorkers will want to solve the mystery behind the name and actually try
the food is key to the success of Portland’s most celebrated chef.
Seven
years ago, Ricker opened his first Pok Pok in a wooden shack on
Portland’s Southeast Division Street, with $60 left in his bank account.
Nine months ago, he won the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef
Northwest Award in what amounts to the Oscars of food. He has opened or
co-opened five restaurants in Portland, with a sixth on the way, because
he’s the white guy who serves the obscure, difficult Northern Thai
dishes that native Thai cooks don’t dare try on Americans.
Now Ricker is
leveraging the whole thing—using $300,000 of his own money and
small-business loans—in his bid to become a major player in the nation’s
toughest culinary scene.
“The time is now to
pull the trigger, if you’re going to pull the trigger,” Ricker says. “Is
there a chance I could get my ass handed to me? Of course. New York
loves to love and they love to hate.”
Ricker’s big moment
comes as Portland enjoys its own fling with New Yorkers. Our Stumptown
coffee is now their coffee. Our TV show is their show. Will our chicken
wings be theirs too? Even if you’ve never eaten Ike’s wings, Ricker’s
gamble is by extension this city’s as well.
THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS: Pok Pok WIng in Manhattan is packed.
IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted
Succeeding in New
York is exponentially harder than succeeding in Portland. It’s more
expensive, the attention spans are shorter, and restaurateurs are
fiercely protective of their territory—both geographic and culinary.
Ricker doesn’t just
want to survive in New York. He’s opening two places at once and wants
his restaurant to explode into a chain that will bring Northern Thai
street food to all parts of the city.
To succeed, Ricker
will need skill and luck. But he may also need to move beyond the
intense DIY ethos that made him a success in Portland. He obsessively
controlled every detail of Pok Pok to the exclusion of nearly everything
else, making quiet but unyielding demands that his people cook Thai
food his way.
But if he’s going to
expand—if he’s going to have an empire that spans two coasts—he must
grow Pok Pok beyond the point where he can possibly control it.
And that’s a place where Andy Ricker has never been before.
Ricker is 48 and looks like Bruce Willis—cold gray eyes,
thick jowls, and the intensity of a detective on one last stakeout. He
speaks softly but swears so often it’s as if he’s being paid by the
f-bomb.
He arrived in New
York as a foodie celebrity. Eater NY, the influential food blog, has
wryly dubbed him the “chicken wing messiah.” In November, a New York Times freelancer followed him around Thailand. Bon Appétit magazine gave his recipes its center spread in January.
But right now, Ricker doesn’t need press. What he needs is a cooking scale.
It’s 10 minutes
before the restaurant-supply shops in the Bowery close, and Ricker walks
double-speed eight blocks west across Manhattan.
“I don’t have a life
outside the restaurants,” he says. “I don’t have kids. I don’t have any
other significant interests. I’m single at the moment, and probably will
be for some time. I’m a pretty ambitious guy. I’m in survival mode.”
THREE WAY THAI: Pok Pok Wing’s Three Dishes.
IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted
He makes it to the
restaurant-supply shop Bari Equipment with five minutes to spare. The
store is owned by a manifestly proud Italian family; a framed poster
shows Don Corleone holding a slicer and reads, “I’m gonna make you a
pizza you can’t refuse.”
Ricker hunts for a
scale amid the aisles of blenders, ovens and plastic ketchup and mustard
bottles. The owner asks him the name of his restaurant.
“Pok Pok,” says Ricker.
“Pok Pok?”
“Over on Rivington.”
“Down Rivington,” corrects the owner. “By the bridge.”
Ricker chuckles. His
restaurant, Pok Pok Wing, is indeed a block from the Williamsburg
Bridge. The old guy is marking his turf for the outsider.
New York City’s dining market is notoriously tough. The most commonly cited number, first asserted in the 2004 documentary Eat This New York, is that 80 percent of new restaurants in the city fail within five years. A restaurant lasting three years is a marvel.
But many people
believe Ricker will make it. “Out-of-town chefs almost always wash out
in New York,” says New York-based food writer Josh Ozersky, who founded
the Grub Street blog and now writes for Time. “They never
succeed. They get chewed up and spit out. The city invariably roughs
them up pretty good and sends them back to whatever province they came
from. But Andy may be the exception.”
LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN: Pok Pok Ny, Ricker’s full-menu restaurant in Red Hook, has a view of Lower Manhattan.
IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted
Mark Bitterman, who
recently expanded his Portland salt shop
the Meadow to a second location
in Manhattan, is more succinct: “Ricker is going to destroy.”
And he’s trying to do it twice.
Pok Pok Wing is in
the former Rivington Street location of a Chinese pork-bun restaurant
called BaoHaus. Ricker redecorated it himself in a collage of
rainbow-colored Thai vinyl albums from a used-record shop in Bangkok.
His
second shop is Pok Pok Ny. (In Thai, “Ny”—pronounced “nigh”—means “in
the city.”) It’s on Columbia Street, on the west edge of Red Hook, a
Brooklyn neighborhood with handsome brownstones that look like the
exterior shots from The Cosby Show. Workers are still putting the place together.
But the unopened
shop—cluttered with boxes of papayas, cabbage wedges and roasted
peanuts—is currently serving as the prep kitchen for Pok Pok Wing. An
employee drives the prepared food across the Manhattan Bridge to
Ricker’s only open shop. Ricker concedes he’ll be lucky if Pok Pok Ny is
open by March.
Ricker has already
been discovered by Portland expats. During one evening at Pok Pok Wing, a
half dozen customers volunteer to the cashier that they knew Ricker’s
food from Portland.
“My parents live in
Northwest Portland,” a twentysomething woman says. “I dropped my phone
when I found out this was coming here. Now they think I have no reason
to visit them.”
And Portland has
clearly been discovered by New York. Stumptown Coffee now operates a
roaster in Red Hook, a half mile from Pok Pok Ny. The Stumptown cafe in
the Garment District’s Ace Hotel—just like the Portland Ace, but
fancier—has Friday-afternoon lines 20 people deep. In March, former
Castagna chef Matthew Lightner is opening Altera, a restaurant in
Tribeca. The headline of a Grub Street article last September asked, “Is
New York About to Become New Portland?”
All of which runs in Ricker’s favor. Everything else seems to run against him.
Matt
Piacentini, a co-owner of Portland’s Ace Hotel restaurant Clyde Common,
recently started a New York eatery called the Beagle. He says the
Beagle is gaining an industry following (“We’re doing extremely well
considering none of us is anybody”), but the challenge is immense.
“To
put it plainly, there are thousands and thousands of places that are
better than you,” says Piacentini, who has never met Ricker. “You get
absolutely trampled, like a train running over a fly. Right now,
everybody’s really excited because these legendary chicken wings are
coming to town. But how long is it going to be before people say, ‘Pok
Pok is bullshit. This place in Queens has been doing that for three
generations’?”
Continue reading: Page 1 | Page 2 |
Great job. Great piece. I wish you guys would devote this amount of column inches to local behind-the-scenes food stories as well.
My sons and I, who have eaten at Ricker's places in Portland, recently enjoyed dinner at Pok Pok Wing. The food is good, and the Portlanders might even succeed where others have failed: teaching New Yorkers grammar, syntax, and manners.
Jerry, you can keep your impeccable syntax. We'll keep our multitudinous artistic institutions, ethnic diversity and jobs.
I just wonder, really, why people always have to go big and go national. Isn't it enough to make a good (a great!) living at home, employing locally and staying humble? I honestly don't understand why small businesses are so eager to become big ones, at seemingly any cost. I don't bear this guy any ill will, so long as he doesn't contribute to the sell-out-ification of PDX (I'm looking at you, Stumptown), but I gotta wonder.
@anatta: Not sure if you realize this, but owning a restaurant doesn't come with a great retirement plan. And the startup costs involved in a restaurant are much higher than most businesses. Usually it means going significantly in debt or selling a large amount of equity to investors, meaning you get a much smaller piece of the pie and can only depend on your salary. Also, because restaurants, especially independent ones like Pok Pok, have much of their success tied to the individuals at their helm, they often can't be sold for their full value. (It's common for them to just close after a while because people become bored of them.) So maybe he just wants to be able to pay off debts and tuck away enough cash that when he's 65 he can go sit on a beach somewhere and enjoy himself in a way more commensurate with someone who has had as much success as he ostensibly has had.
The comment "..because he’s the white guy who serves the obscure, difficult Northern Thai dishes that native Thai cooks don’t dare try on Americans" touches on something and I wish the author would have expanded on that. The fact of the matter is, Andy Ricker will succeed wherever he goes for three reasons: 1. The press treats him like a god. 2. (And this pertains to the above quote), he enjoys the priviledge of never being second guessed and is given every benefit of the doubt, allowing him to be able to sell more "obscure" dishes that Thai people have been selling since the beginning, but went always unnoticed. 3. It's Thai food (and culture) he's selling here. Hard to go wrong with the best and most varied cuisine in the world. Another quote in this story is also very telling: "Pok Pok is bullshit. This place in Queens has been doing that for three generations" Think about it.
That's baloney. 1) There are examples of people second guessing him in the article. 2) While others were doing the cart items, such as the som tum, khao soi, and kai yang, that Pok Pok was doing, no one was doing the bulk of the dishes on Pok Pok's restaurant menu when it opened. And no one was doing kai yang over actual coals using a rotisserie, nor using the quality birds that Pok Pok uses. Even in L.A. you couldn't find it like that. It was only after Pok Pok's success that you could see Thai restaurants experimenting a little more, places like Dang's/Red Onion or Chiang Mai. Prior, Thai food in Portland was dominated by the Typhoons and Thai Orchids and their very typical American Thai restaurant menus.
Even elsewhere, though, there were only pockets of atypical dishes, a restaurant in Houston, a few in Chicago, places in Thai Town or North Hollywood, a place on the peninsula in SF or in Oakland, Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas, etc. Though even most of these rarely if ever focused on quality. Even now in Thai Town you can find khao soi enriched with evaporated milk instead of coconut cream.
I really don't think you know what the hell you're talking about. I wish more Thai restaurants would focus on a broader range of the foods they grew up with (though it's worth noting that a lot of Thai restaurants are owned and run by Chinese, Vietnamese, and Lao) rather than focusing on the same 20 dishes that everyone else has.
Andy has earned benefit of doubt because he has been in this business for a long time and has consistently put out good food.
It's very easy to go wrong with Thai food. Most of the Thai restaurants in this town are not very good. It's hard to bring lesser-known versions of a regional food to the public and get them to try it. Andy has done that , with a lot of fucking hard work and long hours for many, many years, and he's to be congratulated.
Sorry you're mad that he's white. I used to work at a sushi joint that serves some of the best sushi in town and at least once a week someone would get upset that the guy making this awesome sushi wasn't Japanese. We had a white guy and a Panamanian guy making sushi, and it was awesome - but all that some people care about is the facade of "authenticity". You probably would love Koji, even though it's crap, because the guys making sushi there look like you expect them to look.
Get over it.
I am getting real tired of andy and kurt being glorified week after week in our rags. the media cannot even resist mentioning them when critiquing other like restaurants! we get it. everything they touch is gold. kurt and andy could open up an asian street roadkill restaurant and ww would be cooing before it even opened! lets just give andys kappaya spot resturant of the universe and kurt can gobble up every last restaurant and chef so we dont have to hear it anymore!
We've never named a Ricker or Huffman venture restaurant of the year. Are you sure you aren't confusing us with the Oregonian?
Ironically, the Kappaya space isn't mentioned in the article and also isn't a Chefstable project. Maybe you could reserve your angry jealousy for when it's more fitting.
extramsg - in your hurry to defend the King, you completely failed to grasp the point that I am trying to make, and I'm not surprised. It's hard to view other people's views if your mind is closed. The point I am trying to make is that - (and this again goes back to the quote I referenced above) being of the majority race, Andy has an enormous advantage in selling Thai food that is more adventurous and "obscure" (as the article states). He has the benefit of the doubt. Partner that with being made a Demigod by the media, he is unstoppable. These dishes, while not "boutiqued"out Portlandia style, have been offered by Thai restaurants forever, but have never garnished the same attention. Why is that? Yes, we all wish more Thai restaurants would offer a broader range of dishes. But they're afraid no one would buy them!! Seriously! This point is ever so painfully illustrated by a new restaurant of (ironically) one of Andy's former chefs called Manao in Moreland. That guy's trying to do more obscure stuff, but all he ever gets asked is "where's the Pad Thai?" In fact, I just read an article somewhere that he's actually going to add Pad Thai to his menu now, even though I know for a fact he was trying not to! Now why is that?? Again, I implore you (and all of Portland) THINK ABOUT IT. I'm making a valid point here!
We've never written a review of a restaurant before it opened. I wrote the first reviews of both Pok Pok and Foster Burger, both of which were published about a month after the restaurants opened. I interviewed Ricker and Huffman about the problem of opening a restaurant in the midst of the recession, in early 2008, but the interview hardly mentioned the food. We were very, very late reviewing Ping, and never wrote a proper review of Whiskey Soda Lounge.
Benny, I think you're confusing causes. You think Pok Pok doesn't get asked about pad thai all the time? After they got named restaurant of the year, I was sitting next to a table where they literally said, "What kind of Thai restaurant doesn't have pad thai?" It has nothing to do with Ricker being farang. It's a matter of having the business acumen, palate, and feel for the market to make a place that can succeed. Dang got shit tons of press and accolades despite being in Lake Oswego and doing a menu that was largely normal. He gets lots of press where he is now in NW Portland. Chiang Mai, owned/cheffed by Thai also, get plenty of acknolwedgment. I haven't been to Manao yet, but 1) it's in Sellwood, not exactly a neighborhood known for adventurous eaters, 2) from friends, the food has been a mixed bag. 3) it's in a strip mall. You can't just have an interesting menu when there are other places doing what you're doing, but better in better spaces. You also have to have good food, have a good location, get your pricing right, etc, etc. Honestly, I think Ricker being farang has been a DISADVANTAGE. If it wasn't for him having great marketing skills and a great restaurant, it would hinder him. He has succeeded in spite of that slight disadvantage.
I guess we could go on and on about this one and I certainly appreciate that the conversation has remained civil, although what I’m saying obviously isn’t getting through. So I’m just going to leave it at this...All I wanted was for people to see that maybe there’s more going on then just a rags to riches (and fame) story here. You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s a level playing field out there, and to say that Andy had a disadvantage in this game is one hell of a stretch! Even Andy himself, if he were a humble type of person, would have to acknowledge that he has a tremendous advantage being a white guy selling “obscure” Thai food over a Thai person selling “obscure” Thai food, especially with the media as his bitch. Or maybe he doesn’t get that, or maybe no one gets that, or wants to gets that, especially if they are from the dominant culture. And when he wins all these culinary awards for this ethnic food that he “channels” from a certain part of Thailand, he needs to ask himself what does it mean to channel something from someone? Is he cooking or importing? Who’s recipes are these? And are people only comfortable with accepting this food because he's from the dominant culture? Maybe this isn’t all about Andy, maybe it’s about Portland only accepting something that has always been there, but only if it comes packaged in a hip and exciting way, by a person they’re culturally comfortable with. And that’s human nature, I guess, but that’s still kind of bullshit I thought Ptown was better than that. Look, everyone obviously knows a lot about Thai food here in Portland, but don’t dismiss the fact that there’s some truth to what I’m saying. In fact, I think we should all go out for Thai food sometime, just not at Pok Pok. (I know of a place with the exact same food, only cheaper and less pretentious).
Benny, the problem is that 1) you haven't given any evidence for your claim; you've just asserted it, and 2) there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, eg, that still the most successful Thai restaurants in Portland were by Thai people, such as Bo Kline with Typhoon!, until she just recently closed down due to having abused her success. You also have other Thai-owned places I've named, such as Chiang Mai, Dang's/Red Onion, and Mee-Sen that have all received press, accolades, and plenty of business. 3) Elsewhere, Thai-owned restaurants doing interesting dishes have also done well. Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas probably still ranks as the most lauded Thai restaurant in the country, despite, imo, its food being rather mediocre compared with places such as TAC Quick in Chicago, Pok Pok here, or probably a dozen places in LA.
I'm happy to consider your point, but you have to do more than ask me to trust you. Give some evidence. You may see it as self-evident, but it's not.