Sachi Asian Bistro

So on our initial walkabout M pointed out Sachi Asian Bistro as a place that I might like. It's on the slightly more expensive side, but the restaurant staff has an excellent pedigree. With chefs Andy Yang and Pichet Ong at the helm, I was expecting pretty good things. For this first go around I ended up getting their Grilled Lemongrass Chicken Bento Box.

The bento box came with a breast piece with attached wing, black rice pilaf, miso soup, a salad, and I was able to choose the chicken shu mai and a California roll. The other options you're given are a mushroom spring roll instead of shu mai and an avocado and cucumber roll instead of California roll. I'll break up this review into each component that I ate in order. First up, the salad.

So this is advertised as a "Green Salad". It's a a mixed green salad with some thin slices of cucumber, a grape tomato sliced in half, and some weird yellow dressing. I think it was supposed to be some sort of carrot ginger dressing, but it was sort of creamy and rather flavorless. Overall it was mildly uninspired, but I wasn't expecting a ton from a simple bento box salad. Next up was the miso soup.

This was a really nice miso soup. It was light and had great miso flavor while not being overly salty. It had a good amount of seaweed and scallions and also more tofu than I'd had in most other miso soups. They also added in some enoki mushrooms which was a really nice surprise. This was one of the better miso soups I had ever had in my life, and it's something I'd like to get again. After the soup I moved on to the bento box, and my first target was the chicken shu mai.

These were also really tasty. They were basically chicken and shiitake mushroom meatballs wrapped in the dumpling/shu mai skin topped with one single soy bean. They had a good flavor to them and weren't too salty. The shu mai also came with a dipping sauce that was similar to a sweet thai chili sauce. I used it to try it out, but I found that the sauce really wasn't that necessary. After finishing up with the shu mai I went on to the California roll.

This was really a disappointment. First things first, there was no tobiko on the outside of the roll. The avocado was nice and creamy, but the krab meat had no flavor. The ginger was nice, but that really wasn't enough to save this. Maybe next time I'll get the avocado and cucumber roll, but who knows. With this disappointment fresh in my mind, I moved on to the final piece of the bento box, the lemongrass chicken and black rice pilaf.

I was really excited for this dish mostly because of the black rice. I love black rice, and this was good black rice. It was flavorful, it was nutty, and it was sweet. Unfortunately, the chicken was dry. The menu talks about galangal and "Asian herbs", but the skin and the chicken meat both were fairly bland. The skin did have a nice crisp to it, but at the end of the day, bland and dry chicken just doesn't cut it.

Overall this is a lot of food. Sure, you pay a bit more, but for the sheer amount of food, it's a great value. There were definitely some highlights (miso soup, chicken shu mai, and black rice), but the rest of the meal was so lackluster that I doubt I'd ever get this specific bento box again. Maybe I'll get some of the other options, but at this point I can't justify spending that much with the risk that it's not going to be that good.

Ocean City

We love dim sum. We don't go very often because the lines/waits at so many places in NYC are horrendous. So when A's parents said we were going to dim sum straight from the airport, we had no complaints.

They took us to Ocean City Seafood Restaurant in Southeast Portland, which has dim sum from the roving carts. The carts kept coming and the plates kept landing on the table. We got all sorts of dumplings - shrimp, beef, pork and vegetables, and shrimp and chives. These were fairly standard dumpling renditions, and our favorite of these 4 was probably the shrimp and chives.

We also got curry chicken puffs (which tasted more like BBQ chicken pastries with not much curry), sticky rice (pretty good), chicken feet (good as always for A), peppers stuffed with shrimp cake (very tasty and M was very happy for some green vegetables), fried taro puffs (soft, stick to your ribs, and tasty), and eggplant (fine but nothing special).

And there was even more. Tofu pudding, egg tarts (fairly standard), shrimp rice rolls (also standard), and turnip cakes (always a favorite). A is always a fan of the tofu pudding as it's one of his favorite desserts. It came with the traditional ginger-sugar syrup-y soup. The nice thing about this soup was that it wasn't overly sweet like so many of them can be.

The dim sum was pretty good, but the brief taste of dim sum we had in Los Angeles earlier that year was still better (we are almost up to that in the LA recaps). Our best bets are probably SF, LA or Canada if we're looking for really delicious dim sum (outside of Asia).

We went back to Ocean City for a second dim sum meal later in the week with even more family members. Sadly our part of the group got held up at the gas station and arrived to a table full of partially eaten plates, so you will be deprived of close-up photos of most of the dishes we got. A lot of them were the same, except the majority of the dishes were beef and pork this time. There was also congee but we didn't get any of that, so can't comment on whether it was any good.

We did manage to get a few close-ups on the shrimp dumplings, taro cakes, fried sesame balls with lotus paste, and the pork buns.

Many of the dishes we got were similar to our first visit, except with meat instead. One dish that we got this time that we didn't get the first time that M really liked were the taro cakes. We ended up with both taro and turnip cakes on the table, which made us really happy.

We also got a plate of dry beef chow fun for the table, which was excellent. M is a big fan of chow fun and this is probably on par with some of the better ones she's had. Lots of scallions and bean sprouts, and the flavor was just right.

If we were to pick our three favorite things that we ate during our 2 meals at Ocean City, they would be:

For A - taro puff, chicken feet, pepper with shrimp cake.

For M - chow fun (without the meat), taro cake, pepper stuffed with shrimp cake.

We don't do much research before going out to Portland since we're visiting family and we don't really have much self-directed food time (if any), so we don't know where Ocean City ranks in the Portland dim sum hierarchy. (We visited a different place over four years ago that was excellent, but don't know how good it is now.) But we were really glad we got to fill up on some dim sum. Twice!

Ocean City Seafood Restaurant is located at 3016 SE 82nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon.