Tigard Plaza: Suburban Food Gem

Forced to choose, I would rather eat the rest of my days in the suburbs and outskirts of Portland, than in Portland’s core. No, I’m no fan of sprawl and McMansions. And yes, I realize that means giving up favorites like Toro Bravo, Apizza Scholls, Le Pigeon, Wildwood, and even the restaurants I own part of. But I’d gain places like Yuzu, La Guanaquita, Nakwon, Pho Oregon, Ocean City, El Inka, and Puerto Marquez. These small ethnic restaurants are the ones with the foods that I constantly crave — the ones I go to week after week. If nothing else, I’d certainly save money. There’s also not a single great ethnic market in downtown or inner-east.

As further evidence, I submit Tigard Plaza. In one strip mall are an Indonesian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and a Lebanese restaurant serving some of the best dishes of their kind in the metro area — many that you can’t find anywhere else. There’s another restaurant serving solid fish & chips and another serving decent Vietnamese food. Add to that a Mexican market, an Indian market, an Asian seafood market, a cake decorating shop, and a homebrewing supply store and you’ve got a lot of foodie fun per square mile.

Adem Ayem

I don’t know how many times I drove by Tigard Plaza, surveying it briefly, then continuing on my way to H-Mart, Victor’s, or Taqueria Sanchez. But, it was Adem Ayem that finally got me to stop. I love Indonesian food and its kissing cousin, Malaysian food. Think of both cuisines as having a familial similarity to Thai food, while also including the earthier flavors of Indian food.

Like on the streets of Java, most dishes are made ahead of time and re-heated to order. This works best for curries, stews, and soups. Dishes like the longtong sayur (pictured above), a pungent, wipe-your-brow-spicy yellow curry with boiled egg, a variety of vegetables and fried tofu, doesn’t suffer at all. In fact, it’s terrific. “Sayur” basically means “vegetable”, whereas “longtong” is a spongy rice cake. The little cubes are a great foil for the spicy broth. They have a unique texture reminiscent of the gelatinous buffalo hoof you find in some Indonesian dishes.

Likewise, the soto betawi, a thin, fragrant, coconut soup with ample ginger, lemongrass, onion, and other lively aromatics, worked wonderfully. The soup is made more substantial with tender, stewed beef. It’s served with white rice and thin, crispy taro chips.

Also very good is the empek empek, an over-sized, hard-boiled-egg-filled empanada with Chinese noodle soup. The broth is light, but darkly sweet and a little tart, deceptively spicy, building in heat as you eat it. A bit of cucumbers added a nice fresh flavor. The texture of the empanada is hard to describe. It’s almost spongy, but about the density of a stiff tofu. Yet it’s a starch. There’s no other dish like this in PDX and it’s delicious.

The quality of rice (“nasi”) dishes at Adem Ayem depend on what types of items come with them. The nasi kuning, or yellow rice, suffers because its chicken isn’t fried to order. The nasi rames is better largely because the bakwan, a vegetable fritter, was still crisp and light, while the beef stew was fine re-heated. The nasi gudeg, rice with jackfruit curry, and the nasi kapau, rice with beef rendang, a thick, coconut milk curry, are quite good because the dishes re-heat well.

Despite these quibbles, the restaurant should be a destination for Portland food lovers. The owner is nice and nearly all dishes cost less than $8. However, they are only open during lunch hours.

Adem Ayem Cafe
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 202
Tigard, OR 97223
503.639.7770
ademayemcafe.com

7 Estrellas

When Fearless Critic published their guide to Portland dining, they named 7 Estrellas, hidden on the bottom level of Tigard Plaza, the best Mexican food in Portland. Portland taco hounds like myself gasped a collective WTF. They didn’t name somewhere mid-scale, like Nuestra Cocina or Autentica, and not one of the better-known and respected taquerias like Ochoa, La Bonita, or de Leon. Almost no one had heard of this place. To further confuse things, Fearless Critic had given the address for Taqueria La Fuente, an acceptable, but less-than-impressive taqueria a half-mile or so away. Yet….While I’m definitely not prepared to say it’s the best Mexican food in Portland, it’s an undeniable find.

Ignore the menu. The reason for eating at 7 Estrellas is on the white board next to the entrance to the kitchen. That’s where the tacos and tortas are. And the item you should try first is pictured at the beginning of this report, the torta ahogada. “Ahogada” (they have “hogada” on the board) means “smothered” or “drowned”. And that’s what this specialty of Guadalajara is, a large Mexican sandwich with tomato, avocado, lettuce, sour cream, and meat of your choice, smothered in a fiery red chile sauce. The classic meat — and what you should ask for — is what 7 Estrellas calls “carnitas”. But they’re not carnitas. That’s just the term they use because it’s familiar to most customers. Rather, they use pierna, the leg or ham, slow-roasted and then sliced into bacon-sized pieces rimmed with crispy fat. It’s one of the best sandwiches in Portland.

I was unimpressed the first time I ordered tacos. Meats for tacos and tortas are uniformly good, not great. But the tortillas were commercial-grade. It wasn’t until I stepped up to pay and noticed the tortilla press in the kitchen that I had the better-late-than-never idea to ask if I could order hand-made tortillas. The answer, of course, was “yes”. When you go, ask for the hand-made tortillas. It makes a big difference. And for meats, try the birria de res or the cabeza, two of their better options, each stewed in salsa.

The actual menu is a ridiculously option-heavy eyesore with everything from chicken nuggets to burgers to tamales to shrimp to combo platters to nachos to club sandwiches to BBQ pork sandwiches to burritos to hot dogs. They must have a giant freezer. Lots of Tex-Mex and as much standard American fare as Tex-Mex. However, one item worth ordering off the menu is the tacos dorados — crispy tacos. They’re actually the most common street food item I saw when in Guadalajara. There they’re toothpicked shut with the filling inside and then fried. These are more Tex-Mex style, the tortillas fried first to leave space for hot and cool fillings to be stuffed inside. Though I imagine you could ask for the Tapatio version, since these were obviously fried to order.

Taqueria 7 Estrellas
11945 Southwest Pacific Highway, Suite 104
Portland, OR 97223
503.747.0864

Tigard Mediterranean & Pizza Kitchen

At least with Tigard Mediterranean & Pizza Kitchen, the most interesting dishes are on the menu. But if you just saw the signage in the window which only says “Tigard Pizza Kitchen”, you might think it was one more crappy suburban pizza joint shoveling out cheap calories from a strip mall storefront. That might be true, too. I haven’t tried the pizza. But it also might be the best Lebanese restaurant in the burbs.

Every item I’ve tried from the Lebanese menu has been enjoyable. The hummus, dominated by the earthy garbonzos, tastes home-made. A subtle balance of tahini, lemon, and garlic rounds out the flavor. Ultra-creamy, like eggplant aioli, the baba ganoush falls just shy of being overly smokey, but an undertone of lemon and garlic keeps the pungency in check. You can tell the falafel are out of a box from their cakiness and heavy use of dried spices, but they’re fried fresh, crisp, and ungreasy. While pleasantly chewy, the pita is thick and under-baked.

The dolmas, though, stand out as possibly the best in all of PDX. Fresh grape leaves are slowly cooked in a flavorful broth. Instead of pre-cooking the rice, it’s cooked in the grape leaves which impart their flavor to each grain. The result is something toothsome, tart, and tenderly spicy.

Tigard Mediterranean & Pizza Kitchen also serves manakish and fatayer, both of which they call pies. For the cheese pies, they use a combination of mozzarella and akawi, a cheese similar to feta, but most often made of cow’s milk. The zataar pie is topped with a blend of dried thyme, oregano, and other herbs. Their version is atypically restrained, one of the better tasting versions I’ve had. The light topping of sesame seeds adds nuttiness, while lemon adds brightness. The spinach pie, a fatayer, similar to spanakopita, wraps the flavored greens in a flaky, golden-brown crust. The house-made baklava is less sweet than most, perhaps disappointing to honey lovers, but welcome to my palate.

Tigard Mediterranean & Pizza Kitchen
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 228
Portland, OR 97223
503.968.3030
www.tigardpizza.com

Gaffer’s Fish & Chips

An abundance of lottery signs don’t usually portend good food. In fact, I usually assume the quality of food goes down as the number of lottery signs goes up. So, I grudgingly decided to visit Gaffer’s Fish & Chips only because I had gone to every other restaurant in Tigard Plaza and I have a compulsive desire to be thorough in such things. Inside, it’s not much more encouraging. If someone had said that other than the Keno tickets on every table, both bar and dining room, the restaurant hadn’t changed in 30 years, I’d believe them. And as @Omnivore said on Twitter, “The bar in the back, away from the dining area, with the lottery room, is an entirely different level of curious depression.”

All that said, I enjoyed my fish and chips. And they’re crazy cheap. A two-piece order of fish and chips is only $6.25. The from-frozen fries were crisp, ungreasy, lightly salted without any off aftertaste. Large portion, too. Gaffer’s has items like fried prawns, oysters, clam strips, etc, but the fish is all cod. It’s hand-cut, freshly battered, and fried to order. The ungreasy batter was crunchy and stuck to the fish. The fish was moist and had no off flavor. Honestly it was more moist than I’ve come to expect from cod around town, though less moist or buttery than halibut. The tartar sauce on the side was adequate. I preferred the vinegar they brought to the table.

I have no clue how anything on the rest of their menu is, but I’d be willing to give a few more things a try. They have a 1/3 lb burger with fries for only $5.45. You can get a double-decker with cheese and bacon for $7.25. It’s simple American pub food. But the prices aren’t any higher than you’d expect at Denny’s, but maybe they have people who can actually cook back there.

Gaffer’s Fish & Chips
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 206
Portland, OR 97223
503.639.7025

Pho Binh Minh

The best that I can say about Pho Binh Minh is that the food is good enough. Service is slow and impatient. The constant toots and clangs from the lottery closet can make you feel like you’re in a Chuck-E-Cheese, though the smell of the patrons walking back and forth between the noisy room and where they take a break to smoke should easily convince you otherwise. That said, it’s the only Vietnamese in Tigard that I know of and it’s acceptable.

Pho Binh Minh
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 242
Tigard, OR 97223
503.968.0121

Markets & Shops

The restaurants above, especially Adem Ayem, 7 Estrellas, and Tigard Mediterranean & Pizza Kitchen, make Tigard Plaza a worthwhile destination for Portland food lovers. It’s just an impressive density of cheap, tasty and unique food. But five food-related shops also make it good place for food lovers nearby to make it a regular stop:

• El Porvenir is a small Mexican market that sells everything you’d expect in a corner tienda: chiles, spices, Mexican breads and pastries, tortillas, tortilla flour, beans, and so on.
• One side of Srider’s India Imports is mostly clothes, while the other is mostly food. They pack in a lot of boxed, canned, and bagged Indian staples, such as curry pastes, spice mixes, grains, rice, and dal into such a small store. A few items are held in refrigerators in the back, too.
• Daxing Seafoods carries live seafood, including crab and shellfish. They also have many Vietnamese and Chinese basics, such as herbs, produce, sauces, and rice.
• I don’t know little about drinking beer, and even less about making it, but Above the Rest Homebrewing smells a bit like a brewery and seems to have a lot of contraptions that look like they should do something.
• The Decorette Shop sells cake and candy-making supplies and even offers classes.

El Porvenir Tienda Mexicana
11945 SW Pacific Hwy
Portland, OR 97223
503.746.4794

Srider’s India Imports
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 216
Portland, OR 97223
503.620.8665

Daxing Seafood
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 248
Portland, OR 97223
503.460.7434

Above the Rest Homebrewing
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 235
Portland, OR 97223
503.968.2736
abovetheresthomebrewing.net

Decorette Shop
11945 SW Pacific Hwy, Suite 109
Portland, Oregon 97223
503.620.5100
decoretteshop.com