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In a city full of excellent Thai restaurants, Eem’s white curry with brisket burnt ends ($23.50) stands out as a signature Portland classic fusing Texas and Thai flavors.
In 2017, Langbaan and Paadee owner Earl Ninsom approached Matt Vicedomini of what was then the tiny Matt’s BBQ food truck to collaborate on a curry and brisket for Feast food festival’s Smoked event.
“The partnership clicked—it was a hit,” Ninsom says. “That success inspired us, along with Eric Nelson, to team up officially in 2018 for what eventually became Eem, a Thai BBQ project that merged all our passions.”
Eem was met with rapt reviews in 2019, including restaurant of the year accolades from multiple publications, and the crowds followed. The initial collaboration that inspired Eem, a jungle curry with sliced brisket, helped put it on the map, but it was the unusual white curry with the chunkier fat end of brisket that has become its most iconic dish.
Matt’s BBQ’s mini local empire of kitchens, food trucks, and tacos now smokes out around 4,500 pounds of brisket per week from five offset smokers built out of 1,000-gallon propane tanks. To match Eem’s Thai flavor profile, the restaurant required a new technique of treating those primal cuts to use the full slab of meat from the flat and thinner cut to the crusty tip. Eem’s fried rice and jungle curry both use the popular long and uniform slice of brisket highlighting the juicy center. The challenge was integrating the fatty point of the brisket that is typically coated in thick and sweet barbecue sauce before being smoked again.
“I spent a lot of time working on our burnt-end method, something that can be repeated consistently and at high volume and still felt like it was barbecue,” Vicedomini says. “The challenge was to get the consistency and balance right without using ketchup. Unsurprisingly, ketchup is not good in curry.”
“Matt brought over some brisket burnt ends he had caramelized with soy sauce. They were incredible—rich, fatty, and deeply savory—but I wanted to find a Thai flavor profile that could balance all that richness,” Ninsom remembers on their early recipe development process.
The marinade was dialed in with a mix of garlic purée, sugar, molasses, dark corn syrup, soy sauce, and white vinegar that when caramelized around the burnt ends give it the right texture and balance of salty, sweet and acid. “That touch of tang and sweetness ties the BBQ element back to Thai flavor fundamentals,” Ninsom says.
“You could bring it to Matt’s BBQ and dip your brisket in it, and it wouldn’t feel too out of place,” Vicedomini adds, but unfortunately “it came out great, but it didn’t really pair well with the jungle curry we had done at Feast.”
After a few unsuccessful attempts at pairings, Ninsom remembered a dish they had served at Langbaan in 2017: a white curry inspired by a childhood memory of a dish he had eaten in Thailand that was traditionally served with Thai mackerel.
“I tried pairing the brisket with the white curry, and it worked. The gentle creaminess and subtle acidity of the curry lifted the brisket beautifully—it was the combination we were looking for,” Ninsom says.
Curry—the flavorful spice and herb-forward paste with popular regional interpretations from Thailand, Japan, Malaysia and India, to name a few—is commonly found in red, green and yellow variations. Massaman, panang and the lesser-known jungle curry are all popular alternative curry flavors. In Portland, you can find the hearty stew made with fruit and vegetables like pineapple, mango, Brussels sprouts and avocado; or chunks of meaty duck, cod, salmon, chicken and beef, or even salmon, pork belly and egg. But a survey of more than a dozen of the best and most popular Thai restaurants in town found not a single white curry outside of Eem.
Thai white curry (not to be confused with Japanese white curry) is a milder and creamier coconut milk–based flavor that has fallen out of favor even in Thailand. Eem’s rendition is full and soupy with a milder piquancy of heat and lubricating funky fish notes kept at bay so as not to fight, overpower or push the punch of Matt’s BBQ into an over-the-top dish. It’s an exercise in balance between Eastern herbality with Western smoke and fat, equal parts plant and protein.
A steaming bowl of white curry from Eem arrives chunky and pasty as a chowder, with cloudy lumps of white cauliflower floating in a sea of coconut cream dotted with chives. Bubbles of fat and oil rise to the surface like an underground volcano spewing lava into the Pacific. In the center an island rises in the form of a pile of brisket chunks black like obsidian and smoking from the pyrolysis of amino acid–rich soy sauce and molasses crystallizing in a Maillard reaction across the crusty surface.
Eem moves up to 1,000 bowls of white curry with brisket burnt ends per week during its busy season.
“I think its success comes from how unexpected yet natural the combination feels,” Ninsom says. “It’s comforting, bold and familiar to both Thai and barbecue fans—but when you taste it, it feels completely new.”
EAT: Eem, 3808 N Williams Ave., #127, 971-295-1645, eempdx.com. 11 am–9 pm Sunday–Thursday, 11 am–10 pm Friday and Saturday.
