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At the end of 2020, Esquire included Southeast Portland Korean restaurant Han Oak on its list of "100 Restaurants America Can't Afford to Lose." But if all goes well, there'll be more Han Oak than ever after the pandemic. While the flagship remains all but closed for now, Peter Cho and Sun Young Park's new downtown restaurant, Toki, opened in the former Tasty n Alder space in mid-January, with an all-takeout lineup of brunch, dinner and, as of this week, beer, wine and cocktails.
At the moment, Toki is for all intents and purposes Han Oak, with most of Han Oak's cooks moving over to the new space and a menu that includes both greatest hits, including the popular "dumps and noods," and revised versions of other old favorites. But there's also food that Cho was not inclined to cook much in the past.
"What I was open to, as we moved into more of this takeout model, was doing more traditional dishes," he says. "Korean dishes that I sort of—I don't know if 'shied away from' is the right word, but basically, dishes like bibimbap, and bulgogi and japchae, all these things that are more commonly known. Finding my love for it again, I guess.
"During these times," he adds, "I've gotten over this idea that every dish has to define me in some way."
Instead, the most important question about every dish at Toki is "will it travel?" The bibimbap—a rice bowl with either vegetables ($13), bulgogi ($17) or dduk galbi ($16)—is designed to weather the trip from restaurant to home. So is the fried chicken, which is available as wings ($10) in three different flavors ("the essence of instant ramen," Korean-style dipped and dusted, or garlic soy glaze) or as a half-chicken Korean-style platter with rice cakes and ramyun noodles ($24). At brunch, led by pastry chef Lauren Breneman, the fried chicken comes in sandwich form, along with breakfast baos (pork belly egg and cheese, sausage egg and cheese), doughnuts, smoothies and Deadstock Coffee's "LeBronald Palmer," a mix of coffee, sweet tea and lemonade said to be a favorite of King James himself.
At Han Oak, any live-fire cooking took place in the outdoor courtyard. But now Cho has an indoor grill, left over from Tasty n Alder's quasi-steakhouse focus. Ultimately, Cho intends for Toki to have a bit of a Korean steakhouse feel itself, but that calls for communal seating and shared plates, if not actual at-table cooking, and that's not happening right now. In the meantime, there's char-grilled samgyupsal ($16), which is pork belly cured in shio Koji made by the vegan restaurant Fermenter, char-broiled cured mackerel ($15), and L.A.-galbi short ribs ($17).
Toki may also have the world's first reheating-friendly cheeseburger: a steamed bao burger ($8), with two dry-aged, all-beef patties with special sauce, cheese, pickles and onions in a sesame seed bun. It's as squishy and fatty and melty as your favorite fast food option, but because the steamed bao bun is sealed (and there's no lettuce or tomato), you can refresh it in the oven without too much loss of quality.
Toki's other particularly takeout-friendly items are the gimbaps: basically bibimbap in roll form, or Korea's version of onigiri. Toki's "Han'd Rolls," currently available with both Spam ($4.50) and spicy tuna ($7), make use of plastic-encased, "stay crisp" nori sheets, which come complete with their own unwrapping instructions. But the star item is the Gim-bap Supreme, which takes its inspiration from both Taco Bell and the TikTok "wrap" trend, in which a tortilla is partially cut into four quadrants, topped with four different ingredients, folded into layers, and griddled.
"I feel like over the summer every restaurant in town was doing some version of a Crunchwrap Supreme," Cho says, "so I was like, 'Yeah. That would be funny.'"
Here's how it breaks down:
The Gim-bap Supreme
Cho and his cooks were originally working on a traditional gim-bap, but it just wasn't doing it for him. Good thing those TikTok videos had been flying around in group texts with his friends and other chefs. "With our food, a lot of times, I want some feeling of like, 'Oh, hey, that's weird' or 'I saw that somewhere,'" he says. "A lot of things that we've done kind of start off as a joke and then you're like, 'That's actually kind of good!'"
What goes on the four quadrants—other than rice, of course—changes with seasonality, availability and whim. Among the winter options thus far: pickled cabbage, wild watercress, sautéed carrots, bok choy raab, mushrooms, zucchini
and ribbons of cooked egg.
Instead of being griddled like a quesadilla, the Gim-bap Supreme gets its crispiness from the inside out, with a layer of tempura-fried nori in the middle of the roll, giving some extra crunch and texture.
The roll is served with a soy mustard dipping sauce—actually tamari sauce and French's mustard—which Cho describes as "the kicker," adding both a Cajun and a "tube wasabi" note.
EAT: Toki, 580 SW 12th Ave., 503-312-3037, tokipdx.com. Dinner served 4-8 pm
Wednesday-Sunday, brunch 11 am-3 pm Friday-Sunday.