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No other restaurant in Portland approaches the mastery of rice on display at 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. If you must depart from it, do so with the whole trout that shows up on almost every table whose diners don't order in English, a bowl of delicate fish maw soup or a five-spice duck and taro clay pot as tender and gentle as a provincial French stew.
Pro tip: If you've spent more than $20 a person, you've accidentally bought yourself two meals apiece.
GO: 2446 SE 87th Ave., Suite 101, 772-1808, purespicerestaurant.com. 9:30 am-10 pm daily. $.
Willamette Week
