It's funny to get all "back in the day" nostalgic for Portland cuisine from the 90s or earlier, because it is so obviously pure nostalgia. Food is just so, so much better here than it used to be. I wonder if any other city has made such a leap
Replies
see: Paradox Cafe.
aug 31, 2025, 5:10 pm • 1 0 • view
This. Back in the day it was bland health food and so junk food, and a few high end restaurants. We have a scenes now in some neighborhoods that out classes the whole town in the 90s.
aug 31, 2025, 6:11 am • 2 0 • view
Thai people did so much to elevate the cuisine of Spokane
aug 31, 2025, 5:57 am • 4 0 • view
Denver food is fantastic now, but we have a number of people who've lived here for 40+ years who reminisce about mediocre restaurants that have closed, while turning their noses up at a generation of new chefs making actual good food.
aug 31, 2025, 1:52 pm • 1 0 • view
portland perhaps more than average but most midsized american cities seem to have dramatically better options than they used to, especially now that most big cities are so expensive to open a business in that trying anything adventurous is super risky
aug 31, 2025, 1:49 pm • 1 0 • view
Portland in Dorset? Portland in Maine? Portland in Oregon?
aug 31, 2025, 8:20 am • 0 0 • view
Like I'm kind of nostalgic about knocking back cheap, diabetes-inducing quantities of pancakes and crappy coffee at Cameo and the 24 hour Hotcake House (which both still exist), but I remember how exciting it was when this newfangled "Thai cuisine" showed up in our neighborhood. Way better now
aug 31, 2025, 6:04 am • 7 0 • view
wait when did Thai cuisine show up? prithee, enlighten my youthful mind
aug 31, 2025, 6:07 am • 1 0 • view
I think I first heard about "pad thai" when my older sib was in high school, so probably just before the turn of the millennium. At some point the Vietnamese-Chinese place I grew up eating at got replaced by an actually pretty good Thai place, when I was in high school probably (early '00s).
aug 31, 2025, 6:11 am • 3 0 • view
girl that's whack. Thai food has been ubiquitous my whole life, which I suppose makes its mainstreaming something of a katrina moment
aug 31, 2025, 6:13 am • 1 0 • view
I was actually thinking the other day that I don't think there's been any other single cuisine that made such a swift and comprehensive move into the American culinary mainstream in my lifetime, to the extent that "Thai" just gets used as a flavor descriptor now. Korean might be the runner-up.
aug 31, 2025, 6:17 am • 3 0 • view
I might be biased, though, because I fucking love Thai food and have been eating it nonstop for two decades plus now
aug 31, 2025, 6:18 am • 3 0 • view
same!!! although more like a decade and a half for me. it helps that it's been the normative "ethnic cuisine" for as long as i can recall
aug 31, 2025, 6:31 am • 1 0 • view
I know that the Thai gov't actually funded a program to promote specific menu items, train chefs, and make certain ingredients available abroad, which probably has to do with both the speed and the coherence of it becoming a popular cuisine. Mexican cuisine has just repeatedly spread for a century.
aug 31, 2025, 6:35 am • 3 0 • view
I imagine that the sudden popularity of pizza in the postwar era might have been a similar experience for those born before and after it
aug 31, 2025, 6:35 am • 3 0 • view
I definitely know I went on some dates at that Thai place in the 2004-2005 ballpark, and it wasn't a super exotic thing to us at that point. By that point we had started getting phở, too. Other non-Chinese Vietnamese food like bánh mì was slower to get hip. Also, I was a very square white kid
aug 31, 2025, 6:13 am • 1 0 • view
It is entirely possible and likely that cool older people with more adventurous tastes who read the local restaurant reviews were eating this stuff years before I did, but I feel like I probably found out about this stuff when it was really hitting its stride here.
aug 31, 2025, 6:15 am • 2 0 • view
When people wax nostalgic about that stuff, it makes me think of the truly incomprehensible saga where Stanich's got named the best burger in America by some national writer/madman, and it almost immediately imploded the business because they suddenly had customers under 75.
aug 31, 2025, 6:07 am • 3 0 • view
I do kind of miss early Macheezemo Mouse.
aug 31, 2025, 2:26 pm • 3 0 • view
Nostalgia is never about objective quality, it’s always about someone remembering when it didn’t hurt to get up from a sitting position.
aug 31, 2025, 5:57 am • 4 0 • view