CHAI,The Magical Mystery Drink? With Starbucks' recent offering adding considerable steam to chai's potential popularity, it could be said that the milk-based black-tea-and-spice drink from the Far East is officially experiencing a second American invasion--not from the yoga ashrams of the '60s, where chai first made headway into the west, but from the West Coast petri dish of coffeehouse culture. Chai is the drink that's coming around again, and, as Starbucks' purloining of the jazz/Beat culture demonstrates, virtually all chai marketing clings to chai's counterculture roots, relying less on its exotic taste appeal than on the image of the fabled American era that delivered it. Reading the side of a container of chai is enough to make any ex-activist, reformed subversive or former flower child sentimental. Santa Cruz's Nub Chai offers its blend of loose tea and spices in boxes designed to resemble the psychedelic poster art of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury era. The box suggests a Jimi Hendrix experience more than a "synergistic blend which promotes health, cleansing and well-being." The writing on the back not only welcomes you on your trip, but reads as if Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, had been reincarnated as a chai copywriter: "Journey...welcome to a world of jumping and mystical herbs." Oregon Chai is a sweetened, amber-colored concentrate that comes in bright purple-and-gold boxes distinguished by slick, agency-tweaked copy. In some places, like its mixing directions, for example, the Oregon Chai package does reflect image-laden and popular social movements that earmarked the '60s and '70s: "Mix equal parts...As in equal rights, as in equal pay for equal work, as in equal opportunity...." And as for the satire? "Best results if you stand on one leg and bark like a dog." Or this: "Manufactured... without the advice or consent of the Dalai Lama, but we sent him a case with a couple of Three Stooges movies so we expect to hear from him soon." The most earnest of the chai makers is Sattwa Enterprises, run by an Eastern religion-centered farm commune in Newberg. The six owners and their families rise at dawn to meditate and pray before gathering around a wood stove in the kitchen of their 1910 farmhouse and firing up their first steaming cups of chai. On the side of Sattwa Chai's earth-toned packages, there is a description of leafy and mystical surroundings that easily could have been culled from the 1954 movie classic Elephant Walk, in which anxious newlywed Liz Taylor, thwarted by the house servant and bothered by pesky elephants, begins feeling increasingly trapped on her husband's Indian tea plantation. It's easy to imagine Liz's knowing, girlish voice reading Sattwa's narrative, deliberately and with portent, punctuated by the customary screeching of monkeys and macaws: "Mother India--Land of the Vedas. It is dawn. The melodious sound of a bamboo flute floats beneath a lush, green canopy of palm trees. At sunrise the sacred fires are ignited and the ritual brewing of chai begins, just as it has every day for the last 5,000 years...."
--Mary E. Campbell
Bento Betrayal For five years Kent Kim served Portland's classiest skewerless bento from a storefront on Southwest Morrison Street. Kim, who is Korean, was raised in Japan, where many of his relatives are also restaurant owners. He opened Kento Bento with recipes influenced by both Korean and Japanese cuisine. Employees of Kento Bento were asked to sign a document forbidding them from disclosing his original sauce recipes. Because of their personal relationship, Kim didn't ask his close friend of 15 years, Dwayne Burns, to sign the secrecy waiver when Burns began working for him at the always-packed Kento Bento. When Kim's rent doubled in August, he moved out of his location at 1022 SW Morrison St. (which re-opens Wednesday as Rustica off-shoot Pasta Veloce) and began looking for a less expensive location in the neighborhood. He thought he'd found a great spot right across the street from his old location. But during rent negotiations, the landlord informed Kim he had been outbid by another guy also opening a bento restaurant--a guy named Dwayne Burns. Burns, who has never run a restaurant, proved to be a shrewd study. He copied almost every detail of Kim's menu and opened a lunch spot that is nearly identical to Kento Bento. The resulting replica is eerie; even the furniture looks the same. Although most of the food served by the Caucasian Burns has Korean roots, he unaptly named his Kento rip-off Tokyo Bento. Kent, who is calmly disgusted, has moved on to bigger and better things. He has rented the site of the Princeton Deli--614 SW 11th Ave., right around the corner from Tokyo Bento--and will open Kent's this week. Kent's will be a huge, mostly self-serve Asian deli with make-your-own bento boxes, a salad bar, soups, noodle dishes and a sushi bar.
--Brooke DeNisco |
