Skip to main content
My trick to subverting seasonal affective disorder in the Oregon gloom is a personal regimen that alternates firs and peppers. On dry days, hike among the big trees. When it’s wet, eat spicy food.
This is easily accomplished. Portland’s perch on the Pacific Rim endows us with outstanding examples of nearly every Asian and Latin cuisine, each offering distinctive warming dishes: soups, stews and noodles. The list that follows is not remotely comprehensive; it’s merely a few meals that I’ve found sufficiently seasoned to fortify me against the elements.
It’s also not an attempt to catalog the city’s absolute spiciest food. If you need that kind of challenge, order the Great Balls of Fire at Salvador Molly’s and call me in the morning. This roundup isn’t dining as masochism or a test of mettle. Most of the following dishes will make your lips tingle, not burn. Think of them as the culinary equivalent of a crackling hearth—and a good motivator to get out of the house while exercising your palate.
Baka Umai Ramen House
Portland has a bevy of great ramen shops, and nearly all of them feature at least one red bowl on the menu. (I’ve long been a partisan of Kinboshi’s tonkotsu red and Afuri’s hazelnut tantamen.) Only Baka Umai, however, presents itself as a laboratory testing how pork and chicken stock will respond to an array of hot peppers: habanero, ghost, reaper. The Spice Lover’s Menu—which warrants a full page—rates its soups on a heat scale starting at 3 and, like a Spinal Tap amp, going all the way to 11. (A server warned that the vegan ghost pepper miso, lacking animal fat to absorb the capsaicin, might break the scale.) At the shallow end of that pool, which is as far as I dared to splash around, the KG Classic mala shio ($18) was plenty fiery, with the pleasantly numbing sensation characteristic of Sichuan peppercorns. But the discovery of the menu, and the reason to seek out Baka Umai, is found among the specials: a Hatch chile miso ($19). The mashed New Mexican green chiles add kick to a golden broth of chicken, pork and miso tare. The result, like any successful experiment, feels intuitive: Of course, Hatch chiles and miso would make peerless comfort food! I finished the last sip and wanted another bowl immediately.
4703 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 971-255-0116, bakaumai.com. 11 am–9 pm Wednesday–Saturday, noon–7:30 pm Sunday.
Birrias Tamazula
The specialty here, and the reason you’re driving to downtown Gresham as soon as possible, is birria, a Jaliscan goat stew. This consommé is increasingly common across Portland as a kind of dipping broth for tacos—like a Mexican au jus—but at Birrias Tamazula, it’s the showcase dish called Birria Doña Lidia ($18). It comes with a full goat shank, meat falling off the bone, and a consommé that is deep, rich and warming. On its own, the birria is only modestly spicy, but the table is equipped with seven bottles of hot sauce, at least five of them housemade and none of them easy to find at other Mexican joints. Experiment with heat variety as you ladle the stew onto freshly made corn tortillas and then try your findings on a taco de asada ($4) or the bright and citrusy camarones aguachile ($23). You’ll have room: Food this beautifully prepared has a remarkable way of remaining as light as it is filling.
184 NE 2nd St., Gresham, 503-766-8965, birriastamazula.com. 11 am–8 pm Wednesday–Thursday, 11 am–9 pm Friday, 9 am–9 pm Saturday, 9 am–6 pm Sunday.
Hyderabad Hub
There may not be a more unlikely place in Oregon to eat something so extraordinary: a strip-mall storefront off Sunset Highway in Tanasbourne, tucked between a Jimmy John’s and a mattress outlet. But under the fluorescent lights of this unassuming dining room is the best biryani I’ve ever tasted. It’s rice like you’ve never had it (or as you remember it, if you hail from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad), seasoned with cardamon, cumin and cloves, and steamed with fried meat, cheese or vegetables packed inside. Just how spicy it will be depends on what filling you choose: I was daring and ordered the Vijayawada chicken biryani ($11–$15), which contained a rainbow of flavors but was also, easily, the hottest thing I ate for this article. (I went through two carafes of water.) To get the flavor without as much sweat equity, try the goat fry biryani ($12–$18) or the 555 veg biryani ($11–$14), which has a sweeter spice. To ensure that your lips tingle for hours, order a chili naan ($3.50), but stick to plain or garlic if you want to save your taste buds for that amazing rice.
18033 NW Evergreen Parkway, Suite C, Beaverton, 971-371-4149, hyderabad-hub-beaverton-2.cloveronline.com. Hours vary by day.
Pasar
As with Birrias Tamazula, the secret sauce of this Indonesian small-plates restaurant isn’t a secret, but it is a sauce. Specifically, it’s the sambals: housemade condiments designed to be stirred into the noodle and rice bowls to provide a little (or a lot) of punch. Each sambal is $2.50, and my favorite is ijo, a roasted green chile mash that packs as much woodsmoke as heat. (The shrimp paste and hot chili sauce called terasi is also good, and even hotter.) Stir them into ketoprak ($17.50), a dish of noodles and peanut sauce that’s like a garlicky, hotter cousin of pad thai, or spoon them onto the cabbage-and-onion fritters called bala-bala ($4.75). For maximum flavor bombing, order the lontong cap go meh ($21), a shrimp and coconut milk broth piled with green beans, carrots and fried tofu, along with little nuggets of flavor and texture you’re less likely to have tried before: tempe orek, which are sautéed, fermented soybean cakes; telor balado, a hard-boiled egg brushed with more sambal; and lontong, cylindrical rice cakes so tightly compressed they look like another vegetable until they flake apart in your mouth. Plus—unexpectedly, wonderfully—a pile of potato chips adorn the meal.
3023 NE Alberta St., 503-477-8232, pasarpdx.com. 5–9 pm Wednesday–Sunday, noon–3 pm Saturday and Sunday.
Xin Ding Dumpling House
It is a dish with a name as colorless as a day in January: fish fillet in hot gravy. But for my money, it’s the best winter thrill ride in Oregon west of Mt. Hood Meadows, and while any number of Sichuan restaurants serve some version of shui zhu yu—arguably China’s most popular seafood dish—for my $18.95 no one is doing it better than Xin Ding. A broth of peppercorns, chiles and other spices (I detect notes of anise and maybe a little cinnamon?) boils the imported flatfish in a crimson bath that keeps me and a select set of dining companions returning on a nearly weekly basis. (How do you keep friends in your 40s? Find a spicy fish.) While xiao long bao are the marquee attraction at the wood-paneled Old Town dining hall and its new offshoot in Sellwood, the menu contains half a dozen Sichuan items that are the soup dumplings’ equal: Along with the fish, try the ma po tofu ($17.95), the stir-fried beef with cilantro ($20.95) or the dandan noodles ($14.95). Or just explore the menu: Xin Ding serves easily five dozen entrees, most of them marked from 1 to 3 peppers for spice level, and I’ve never had a bad one. Bring on the rain. Order the fish.
Downtown: 71 SW 2nd Ave., 503-345-7777; Sellwood: 7135 SE Milwaukie Ave., 503-468-7777; xindingdumplinghouse.com. Hours vary by location.
Oregon Winter is Willamette Week’s annual winter activity magazine. It is free and can be found all over Portland beginning Friday, November 21, 2025. Find your free copy at one of the locations noted here, before they all get picked up.
