New Year Lunch

After a great Vietnamese dinner on Tet's New Year Day Evening, we decided to follow it up with a nice lunch the following day at Ping Restaurant in Portland's Old Town. It was a particularly rainy day and a nice bowl of spicy noodles was what we were craving. From the outside with it's frosty windows and dark frame it almost looked like Ping was closed, but once we stepped inside the warm wood and smells from the open kitchen made us so glad they weren't.

We were on the search for some noodles and ordered a dry noodle dish and a brothy noodle dish. The kuaytiaw khua kai (wide rice noodles stir-fried in rendered pork fat with chicken, cuttlefish, duck egg and green onions, served on chopped lettuce, a bangkok chinatown speciality) was charry, smokey, light and refreshing. A really nice noodle lunch choice.

We decided on the brothy laksa nonya (cocnonut curry rice noodle soup with tofu, chicken, prawns, cockles, boiled egg, house made fish cake, bean sprouts, laksa leaf, shredded cucumber and house made sambal belacan. melaka/singapore version of the famous malaysian noodle dish). In a previous post we lamented about how Portland doesn't have great Thai food and it definitely doesn't have very diverse asian food outside of your typical Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Indian. It was nice to see a Malaysian dish represented on Portland's dining scene. Ping's version was very satisfying with chewy round rice noodles we typically see in Vietnamese's Bun Bo Hue.

Ping was definitely worth the trip downtown for its cozy warming atmosphere and food. The prices were a bit high for what you get. Are duck eggs really that much different and worth a few bucks more? Packaged Thai raman brand Mama gussed up with their own fancy broth was hard to selected for $9. We are undecided, but we will be back to try their other dishes such as the Burmese salad and other SE Asian favorite so hard to find in Portland.

Ping 102 NW 4th Avenue Portland, Oregon 97209 503.229.7464 www.pingpdx.com