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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe guy behind the cash register at Roman Candle Baking Co. yawns, blinks, squints, and holds his hand over his eyes to block the marauding 8:15 a.m. sun. I ask for coffee. He sighs. A vegetable croissant. He flinches. Why do I demand so much? Welcome to Portland, Oregon, where the restaurants are celebrated but the servers are barely alive.\n\nWe are here because Andy Ricker's Sen Yai Noodles, just across the street, didn't open at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, when Google said it would. No surprise there. A friend and I left our car in one of the Sen Yai parking spaces, a splendid perk in a city where only bicycles are beloved. We started over, only to be confronted by a Sen Yai waitress working outside who screamed at us to move the car. I tried explaining the situation, that we had miscalculated and intended to eat at her place the moment it opened at 9 a.m. She screamed some more. I explained again. Finally, she relented, and over to Roman Candle we went.\n\nCoffee and croissant delivery is interrupted by another couple, who return to tell the somnambulist serving us that he got their order wrong. Finally, it's all mine, coffee and a cold croissant. The somewhat flaky pastry is an unappealing cross between a croissant and an everything bagel. Synergy triumphed with the cronut, but not with this. I discard it after a bite.\n\nJust as well. I don't want to fill up. My plan for the day is to eat three meals at Sen Yai, which is Andy Ricker's newest enterprise, a homage to the noodle dishes of Thailand. My old friend Paul Mones, a Portland lawyer and a serious cook, calls Sen Yai \"a Thai pasta bar.\"\n\nRicker is one of the most celebrated chefs and restaurateurs in America, creator of a Thai-food kingdom, most famously Pok Pok and its spicy chicken wings. Anything he opens in Portland eventually ends up in New York, and it's always nice to know what our latest highly publicized import will be. Not every chef can move his business from small-city America to big-city New York and be guaranteed immediate attention, but Ricker does it all the time.\n\nI like noodles, maybe not as much as Ricker does. He's serving them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Sen Yai, five different shapes and sizes, although the ones that interest me most are the fresh, wide, flat rice noodles, not by coincidence called sen yai. I see only one obstacle ahead, getting in the door. Ricker's places can be teeming, especially in Portland, where he's revered. That's why we came so early, to give ourselves a chance.\n\nNo problem, it turns out. We leave Roman Candle at 8:59 a.m., enter Sen Yai a minute later. My car is still there. The place is empty. The very same waitress walks up to our table.\u00A0 It's as though we've been friends all our lives. Maybe that's what makes Portland different from New York\u2014nobody holds a grudge.\n\nHer service methodology is odd. She stares straight over our heads and recites every dish on the breakfast menu, fast, in a monotone. Her world-weariness has to be a result of working at a Ricker restaurant, where every dish must be explained to every customer. Such a means of communicating negates the advantages of going to an ethnic restaurant where the staff speaks the same language you do.\n\nRicker, of course, is a white guy, much the same as almost every other Portland chef, except the ones who are white women. This city is far from an ethnic wonderland. But to be fair to Ricker, he is delivering authenticity in a city where almost nobody else seeks it.\n\nThai cuisine is especially popular here, for no reason I can understand, unless Ricker is personally responsible. Two years ago, a local paper, the Willamette Week, did some calculations and came up with 130 Thai restaurants and 40 Thai food carts in a metropolitan area\u00A0 with 1,757 Thai residents. It attributed the widespread interest in Thai food to the use of fresh vegetables and to the sophistication of the cuisine when compared to Chinese.\n\nThe fresh vegetable part makes sense, although Sen Yai does not have a single salad on its menu and the only noodle-free vegetable dish during my visit was Red Fire Water Spinach, a stir fry. The part about Thai food being more refined than Chinese doesn't resonate with me. I find Thai food complicated, which is not the same as sophisticated.\n\nHere's my theory: Americans like Thai food because it's fresh, it's spicy, and it's sweet. How sweet is it? Sen Yai has four bowls of condiments on each table. One of them is pure sugar, and it's not for the coffee. Our waitress explains that it's there to tame the spiciness of the food.\n\nThe breakfast segment of the menu has seven items. One is rice porridge, similar to Chinese congee in its blandness. The rice soup is no better. It contains meat accurately described as \"bouncy pork\"\u2014the chunks are spongy. They're also tasteless. The pork-bone broth that's the base of both the porridge and the soup is flavorless. The waitress keeps reminding us to use the condiments to ramp up dishes, but it's hopeless. Adding even a minimum amount of any condiment\u2014Thai chiles in fish sauce, green chiles in vinegar, or ground, dry chiles\u2014results in a dish that tastes like what you add, nothing more. As for adding sugar, no thanks.\n\nThe first item we like is the \"fried Thai-style small savory crullers,\"\u00A0 pretty much fried dough. They're uninteresting alone, but a delight when you order the thick, pandan-leaf-flavored coconut custard dipping sauce. Magically, they become deconstructed cream-filled donuts.\u00A0\n\nEasily the best breakfast item is a \"Thai-style\" steamed pork bun that doesn't taste Thai, although maybe the topping of fried shallots makes it that. The meat is flavorful instead of fatty, as Chinese pork buns tend to be these days. Maybe Chinese food isn't quite as perfect as I think it is.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIt's later in the day, when the lunch and dinner menus\u2014exactly the same\u2014are operational. Getting a table at lunch is effortless, but I don't become complacent. At dinner, we show up very early, which turns out to be essential. Not long after our arrival, a line forms.\n\nI'm thinking how clever I am, never having to stand and wait, but my opinion of myself declines each time I face the ego-deflating Sen Yai menu. It's impossible to pronounce anything correctly\u2014at Sen Yai, even reliable old Pad Thai is Phat Thai Thamadaa (Regular). Ricker is so devoted to authenticity he isn't going to be satisfied until his guests arrive on white elephants. When I bemoan my ineptness, our waiter says, \"We had one girl in here, she was seven and kept asking questions, she pronounced everything perfectly and she wasn't Thai. I asked her, \u2018Are they teaching Thai in schools here?'\"\n\nSpeaking of Pad Thai, the version I'm served is the worst dish of the day. I order the Phat Thai Kung Sot, which is Pad Thai with ($3 extra) fresh prawns. These turn out to be four remarkably teensy examples of the species, but that's not the primary problem. The noodles are uncooked in some places, stuck together in others, as though somebody in the kitchen got tired of stirring.\n\nI try every variety of fried Thai meatball. I admire none. For that matter, I never have. Thai meatballs, whether beef, fish, or pork, are insipid, and they emerge from the hot oil rubbery, with a thin, unpleasant coating.\n\n Three dishes save the reputation of Thai noodles.\u00A0 In the category of what's-as-friendly-as-Pad-Thai, I recommend Phat Sii Yew, which is those signature wide, flat rice noodles plus pork, Chinese broccoli, egg and black soy sauce. Here the noodles absorb the flavors of the other ingredients, a characteristic prized in Italian noodle dishes.\n\nIf you want deeply flavored broth, woefully lacking in most Thai dishes, I'd recommend the Kuaytiaw Reua \"Boat Noodles\" \u2014that's the menu description. It's the best hot liquid in the house. The\u00A0 menu accurately calls it\u00A0 \"complex dark rich.\"\u00A0\n\n By far the best rice dish, as well as the dish that arrived most perfectly spiced, was the torturously named Kai/Muu Kaphrao Khai Dao, seemingly a mix of almost everything on the shelves, including minced chicken, long beans, basil, onion, black soy (I love that stuff), fish sauce, garlic, dry chiles, and jasmine rice, plus a perfectly cooked fried egg on top. To me it had a clove-like bouquet, fascinating in a dish devoid of cloves.\n\nTwo other impressive dishes, one soothing and the other stimulating, were stir-fried jasmine rice with crabmeat and red-fire water spinach. The rice with crabmeat was an elegant play on Chinese fried rice, a quiet dish in a noisy cuisine. The spicy spinach made me sigh. What a relief, vegetables with no noodles attached.\n\nIn a city where dining rooms tend to be unconventional and often uncomfortable, Sen Yai offers a nice break: high ceilings, oilcloths covering the tables, oilcloths covering the seats (okay, that's weird). The legendary Pok Pok down the block is rather dark. Sen Yai is bright, clean, and inviting, as unintimidating as a local luncheonette.\n\nSen Yai didn't change my mind about Thai cuisine. I remain unhappy about the weakness of the broths and the substitution of spiciness for flavor. I'm not thrilled that every dish is a m\u00E9lange, and that simplicity is lacking. I dislike the repeated mincing of proteins into small bits. I suspect one of the reasons Ricker was so successful from the start is that when he opened Pok Pok, he started serving gratifying chunks of chicken: game hens cooked on an outdoor grill and those massive wings.\n\nSen Yai has a large menu, and anyone who perseveres will find a few dishes he likes. Once you've found them, stick with them. That's the definition of comfort food, and there's hardly any better way to eat.\n\nRating: One Star.\n\n  Don't Miss This... Breakfast: Salapao (Pork Bun), $3.50\n\n Soup Noodles: Kuaytiaw Reua \"Boat Noodles,\" $11\n\n Stir Fried Noodles: Phat Sii Ew, $11\n\n Rice Dishes: Kai/Muu Kaphrao Khai Dao, $12\n\n Side: Phak Bung Fai Daeng (Spinach), $9"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/alan-richman-portlands-latest-craze-thai-pasta>