Portland's "Best New Vietnamese"; Bon Appétit Loves Us; Pream Reviewed

Don't drop your sesame tuile, but Willamette Week's Michael C. Zusman called the Doi Dua pop-up, which launched in March, the "best new Vietnamese restaurant" in Portland. He "made several visits" to Portland's "most ambitious Vietnamese restaurant ever," and the food always had "awe-inspiring diversity and balance of flavors, textures and colors." The lotus salad, with its "kaleidescope pattern," "rockets skyward like a multisensory starburst," for instance.

The only negatives Zusman mentions are "a nit here and there" regarding service and that owners Sarah Bui and Anna Vocaturo sometimes have a hard time making "themselves heard above the din."

Also this week, the Mercury's Andrea Damewood checked in on Nicholas Ford and Brandon Gomez's Pream wood-fired-pizza joint. Damewood appreciated Pream's "big (dough) balls" and "dive-bar edge," remarking on the juxtaposition of a framed picture of Tupac and "sparkling clean counters." Damewood was most taken with the pizzas that balance Neapolitan tradition with "Pacific Northwest bounty," but she wasn't so taken with the rest of the menu. A salad looked "like half of it had crawled back to the prep counter," and a polenta with short ribs was "small and ultimately a distraction from the pies." Seemingly as an afterthought, Damewood deemed the polenta alright for gluten-frees, ending it all like a true O.G.: Wu-tang Forever.

And Bon Appétit continues to smother Portland with love notes, listing Kachka and Milk Glass Mrkt among its 50 nominees for American's Best New Restaurants. Andrew Knowlton and Julia Kramer write that Kachka, a "homey incarnation of Moscow-on-the-Willamette," keeps feeding the "Portlandia set," and we're pretty sure Kachka isn't catering for the Portlandia show, so that must mean us. They also say that Chef Bonnie Morales erases "images of heavy gray slop," which is definitely good. As for Milk Glass Mrkt, it's a "twee (in a good way!) fantasy," where you can "put an egg onto everything."