Pure Spice

2446 SE 87th Ave., Suite 101, 772-1808, purespicerestaurant.com. Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily.

No other restaurant in Portland approaches the mastery of rice on display at spartan, brightly lit, no-frills Pure Spice Chinese restaurant. Almost everywhere else, rice dough comes dry, stickily starchy or offensively limp—so often that failure seems normal. But at Pure Spice, each $4 rice noodle plate comes delicate as flower petals, layered as filo and flavored gently with chive and scallion or the bitter tang of almond. It is a sweet, subtle bliss unparalleled by most Portland dishes that cost five times as much. Throw in rice noodle pork-chive dumplings at dim sum—made fresh, not hardened in the hot metal of rolling trays—rice battered fish sauce wings blooming with spice, spaghetti-strand Singapore rice noodles touched in oil and some shrimp-studded kimchi rice noodle soup, and a single ingredient becomes almost a philosophy of life.

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