Saturday Lunch: Boke Bowl

Yesterday felt like a noodle day- intermittent sun but cool temps. The kind of days when a warming lunch sounds good. Which is odd for July but I’ll take our wacky weather over the blistering heat, drought and flooding the rest of the nation is getting. 

This weekend it was J’s turn to choose a restaurant and he went with Boke Bowl on SE Water Ave. It’s a large open space with communal seating and an industrial feel. You order from the wall menu, find a seat and wait for your food. The atmosphere is family friendly and relaxed—which is fine with me except for people who think their dogs must go everywhere with them. That I don’t like and, quite honestly, I thought it was a health code violation to have dogs in a restaurant but this Portland, the dog center of the universe. Thankfully, we were leaving as she was ordering. 

Back to the food because that’s what really matters, right? J and I both went with ramen. He got the seafood miso version and I got pork. We also got friend chicken steamed buns which re the kind of comfort food I crave- a soft pillowy white bun filled with strips of fried chicken in a peppery crust and topped with pickled cucumbers, green onions and a creamy white sauce with a little kick. Delicious!

  

Our soups were good as well. Noodle soups are not for the faint of heart or delicate, polite eaters. You have chopsticks and a wide flat spoon. Negotiating the noodles from bowl to mouth is an experience. The traditional method is to use the spoon to help affix a mouthful of noodles onto your chopsticks and then slurp them up. The spoon helps with the broth and yummy bits—in my case, fresh corn, green onion, spinach. The broth had barbeque flavoring as the pork was pulled. It was interesting but a bit overpowering. I’d try something different next time.