On a chilly Thursday evening in January, Langbaan co-chef Rassamee Ruaysuntia is prepping the first meal of the night, assembling dishes with an adroit cast of the hand. One course gone, Ruaysuntia turns her attention to the next, grabbing an oversized pestle and pummeling shallots, garlic and other herbs and spices to form the base of a made-to-order curry.
Co-chef Akkapong "Earl" Ninsom, wearing a signature cap, works nearby. Ninsom is Langbaan's owner, but the spirit here is Ruaysuntia's, a petite chef who came up at high-end Bangkok hotel restaurants. Small, yet potent, the restaurant, like its Mighty Mouse leader, has already made an outsized impact from its 24-seat space. In June, Langbaan was highlighted among the city's top pop-ups and secret supper clubs in The Oregonian's 2014 Restaurant of the Year feature. More accolades followed this month: First, a James Beard Foundation Best New Restaurant semifinalist nod; then, a second-place spot on GQ Magazine's Most Outstanding Restaurants list.
So far, I've written about the restaurant twice in depth, but never in a formal, starred review. Before we fix that (and with apologies to close readers), let's recap: Langbaan, literally "back of house," sits in the ground floor of the boxy gray condo at Southeast Burnside Street and 28th Avenue. Enter through PaaDee, Ninsom's casual street food restaurant, head toward the bathrooms, make a U-turn, approach the trick bookcase there and pull on the meat-grinder handle.
I've visited the covert restaurant tucked behind that bookcase half a dozen times, both before and after our Restaurant of the Year feature. Month-to-month, Langbaan will rotate its menus regionally throughout Thailand. In practice, that might mean more pork in the Northern Thai menu, more spice in the Northeastern, more seafood in the Southern. But the progression remains the same -- about a dozen dishes total, starting with a few small snacks, a salad, a soup, then a rapid-fired procession of plates, usually including crudites, a curry, some meat and a bowl of plain white rice, all finished with a pair of coconut-rich desserts.
But that summary doesn't do Langbaan justice. Meals here are a landscape, with citrus and fish sauce as the reeds and mud, vegetables the foliage, meat and fish the beasts and fowl and tropical fruits the radiant bursts of a Technicolor sunset. The experience is a monsoon of ethereal flavors: fried shallots and lime, lush fruit and chiles, lemongrass and coconut. The notes from my most recent meal read like the pull-quotes on a blockbuster movie poster. "Awesome!" "Phenomenal!" "Devastating!" "Man oh man!" "Four Stars!"
What kind of food could produce that hyperbole?
Well, "Awesome" was the pristine pomelo segment laid on a broad betel leaf, its sweet citrus balanced by smoked moonfish, shallots both fried and raw, lime and a roasted coconut sauce. "Phenomenal" was a crisp rice cup filled with coconut custard and a blend of chopped scallops, citrus and galangal -- lay it in your mouth and the cup caves away, as if the very floor had collapsed beneath you, releasing a gush of seafood, coconut and lime. "Devastating" was a soup of lotus root, black trumpet mushrooms, curls of young coconut, basil and tender jellyfish wrapped in egg like a weird, profoundly delicious Thai omelette. "Man, oh man!" was the spicy, ginger-lime marinated prawn tail served with strips of heart of palm, chiles and the prawn's crunchy, funky, deep-fried head.
And "Four Stars?" That should be obvious by now.
. . .
If you're hoping to understand Langbaan, few influences loom larger than David Thompson, the Australian-born celebrity chef and Thai cuisine scholar. In his cookbooks, Thompson has expressed his belief that Thai food reached its apex in the last decades of the 19th century, when palace-bound royalty demanded dishes so frustratingly complex they never would have been made had those aristocrats been asked to lift a finger.
Langbaan
Rating:
**** (Extraordinary)
Cuisine and scene:
A semi-hidden tasting menu restaurant focused on 100-year-old royal Thai recipes.
Recommended:
Reservations.
Vegetarian friendly?
Not particularly.
Sound level:
Lana Del Rey croons over the heavy thock-thock of a mortar and pestle.
Beverages:
Wine pairings, cocktails, beer and more from PaaDee.
Price range:
$65 (with optional $30 win pairing).
Extras:
Reservations, major credit cards, on-street parking, handicapped access.
Serving:
Two seatings nightly, Thursday to Saturday.
Details:
6 N.E. 28th Ave. (behind PaaDee), 971-344-2564,
Langbaan constructs much of its menu from the same century-old recipes found in Thompson's books. In America, the idea of Royal Thai cuisine has come to signify rosetta-carved carrots sitting next to a plate of gloppy pad Thai (if it signifies anything at all). At Langbaan, it means something more: soft textures and sensuous luxury filtered through the prism of Thai cuisine's signature flavors: hot, salty, funky, sour, sweet.
Ruaysuntia worked at Nahm, Thompson's Bangkok restaurant, which, in its original London iteration, was the first Thai restaurant to be awarded a Michelin star. (Portland chef Andy Ricker's Pok Pok NY followed last year.) Her style of cooking resembles that of Thompson's Thai mentor, Sombat Janphetchara, a descendent of royalty who employed an instinctive yet expert approach to cooking.
Ruaysuntia works like that. A squeeze of lime. A scoop of palm sugar. A dollop of fermented bean paste. Taste and adjust. A style of cooking born from confidence and authority.
. . .
Her pestle work complete, Ruaysuntia mixes the paste with coconut cream. She tosses in slices of torch-seared octopus, then buries the mixture under a moist beehive of herbs, fried shallots and flying fish roe.
What follows -- a cavalcade of courses built around a simple bowl of fluffy coconut rice -- is always my favorite. That night, it includes a bouquet of Thai herbs; two slices of rare, curry powder-rubbed steak; white curry with fermented rice, herbs and the smooth, salty yolk of a duck egg; a profound turmeric curry with clams, mussels and sweet jackfruit hitting at the finish like a boost of nitrous to a car already doing 100 mph.
Two mellow desserts came next, first a bouncy ball of smoked mung bean wrapped by a chewy lattice of white tapioca balls in coconut cream, then a dipping bowl of pandanus custard inundated with shredded coconut and more coconut cream.
There's no such thing as a perfect restaurant, and Langbaan has places it could improve. Service is solid these days, with dishes explained succinctly and completely, but the restaurant still lacks an ace server, someone who can put the restaurant over the top the way Andy Fortgang did at Le Pigeon. The beverage accompaniments are welcome, though easily skipped -- I prefer to order a bottle of dry riesling, the varietal that already dominates the pairing. And sometimes, a street-food dish appears, a stowaway, perhaps, from PaaDee, like a culinary Kanye West pretending to snag Beck's Grammy -- delicious, but not entirely appropriate.
Star rating
The Oregonian uses a star system for its restaurant reviews, with ratings ranging from zero to four stars, reflecting the critic's opinion of the restaurant's food, service and ambience, weighted toward the food.
But Langbaan is remarkable. Add a course or two, a bit more polish in the service, and this is the kind of meal that could fetch $150 or more in New York or Los Angeles.
Besides, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be perfect for its place and time. And right now, Langbaan is exactly that: A four-star restaurant for Portland in 2015.
-- Michael Russell