Future Drinking: A Kitchen For Pok Pok

Plus shopping mall vegan, and a northerly empire for Eric Manfre of Alleyway Cafe

 Our sorta weekly roundup of gossip about new openings and change-ups in the bar and restaurant biz, courtesy of OLCC license applications:

After years of moving its main kitchen around Division St., from Pok Pok to Whiskey Soda Lounge to Sen Yai, Ricker's string of Thai restaurants is investing in a central commissary kitchen and office space in the nearby Brooklyn neighborhood, at 3320 SE Milwaukie Ave. An employee at Pok Pok describes the previous kitchen spaces as "people on top of people on top of people."

Though he's run the tucked-away Alleyway Cafe and Bar as a hidden gem (it still has no website), Eric Manfre now seems set to expand into northerly empire, first with the recently opened Biloxi Deli Lounge cajun eatery and bar, and now apparently with a planned bar in the old Cafe Alchemy space called the High Water Mark Lounge, at 6800 NE MLK Blvd. 

Damon Clark and Aaron Sorenson will be starting a distillery called Moon Rock in Milwaukie.

Soobies 18kknd strip club, at 333 NE 122nd, is apparently tired of being a juice bar; owners Jim and Michelle Stahly would like to sell liquor as well.

Beaverton may be getting a brewery with the very X-Files name of Area 503, at 5915 SW 152nd Ave, owned by Chris Liles. As a homebrew, the brewery has apparently put out brews by the name of Soul Patch Amber, Bamboo Brown and Mother of Texas.

One of the retired Einstein Bagel Bros. locations—the ones that used to be Kettlemans—will be resurfacing as a brewpub called Baerlic at 2235 SE 11th St., run by Richard Keller Hall of Seven Corners Cycles and Ben Parsons, previously of OMFG Co. design company and currently of Ficusamongus. So we assume the brewpub will be styled very handsomely.

Clackamas Town Center is getting its very own corporate chain vegan restaurant in Native Foods Cafe. With the addition of that eatery to the aging Hot Topic, two entirely different varieties of rebellious Happy Valley mall rats will now be able to show their distaste for their parents by giving money to large chain stores.

A Thai restaurant called Siam Grill,  at 10355 NE Halsey St., is changing owners to Nittaya Saephan.


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