Two Oregon restaurants appear on The New York Times’ annual list of the 50 best restaurants in the country. Yardy Rum Bar is a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene “celebrating the food and drinking culture of the West Indies using seasonal ingredients from the Northwest.” The Paper Bridge is a Northern Vietnamese restaurant in Portland specializing in house-made rice noodles and chili sauces.
Isaiah Martinez is the chef and co-owner of Yardy Rum Bar. Quynh Nguyen and Carlo Reinardy are the co-chefs and co-owners of The Paper Bridge. They all join us to talk about their respective cuisines and what being included on the list means to them.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Two Oregon restaurants appear on The New York Times’ new list of the 50 best restaurants in the country. Yardy Rum Bar is in Eugene. It’s billed as a Caribbean restaurant “celebrating the food and drinking culture of the West Indies using seasonal ingredients from the Northwest.” The Paper Bridge is a Northern Vietnamese restaurant in Portland specializing in house-made rice noodles and chili sauces.
I’m joined now by the folks behind both of these restaurants. Isaiah Martinez is a chef and co-owner of Yardy Rum Bar. Quynh Nguyen and Carlo Reinardy are the co-chefs and co-owners of The Paper Bridge. Congratulations to all three of you and welcome.
Carlo Reinardy: Thank you so much.
Quynh Nguyen: Thank you.
Miller: Carlo and Quynh, it sounds like you guys are in your restaurant right now. Are there people getting ready for the dinner rush?
Reinardy: Well, we’re still in the middle of the lunch rush right now.
Miller: Lunch rush. OK, sorry, I didn’t mean to skip rushes. OK, well, we can hear all the fans and everything in the background there.
Isaiah, did you have any idea that a high profile food writer – in this case, The Times’s food editor Brian Gallagher – was in your restaurant?
Isaiah Martinez: We knew that he was in the restaurant I would say towards the end of his meal, just because we looked up his name, it popped up on the ticket. We saw that he was there and we found out towards the end, yeah.
Miller: What happens when you’re in a restaurant and you realize that some influential food scene person is there?
Martinez: I think the first thing I do is I reach out to all my local restaurant peers that are close to me and I’ll let them know that there’s a New York Times food critic or food writer in town, and to just be ready because a lot of the time they bounce around and they dine at multiple spots. That was the first thing we did.
Miller: That’s amazing. That’s such a generous thing. Before you make sure that everything that you’re giving him was perfect, you reach out to other people?
Martinez: Yeah.
Miller: And what after that?
Martinez: And then it’s just like, I don’t know if it’s just like blind confidence, but I feel like what we do is we do the same thing, we keep it pretty simple. Our service style is very simple, so we’re not necessarily worried about delivering to anyone, whether it’s a food critic or just a person that’s a customer. The way we look at it is like, OK, this is Brian Gallagher’s food, it all looks good, send it out. It isn’t really, oh, let’s make it extra nice. Just let’s treat everyone like a food critic.
Miller: Which I guess at this stage, anybody can be … anybody can be an influencer, anybody can have a trillion followers and you wouldn’t necessarily know looking at them. Carlo, did anything tip you all off?
Reinardy: You can always tell if someone’s coming in [if] there’s two people and they order enough food for about six. [Laughter]
Miller: “One of everything on the menu,” you’re thinking that there’s something more than just a super hungry person?
Reinardy: Yeah, exactly. First we were looking at the ticket and going, “this is a lot of food.” And we’re looking at how many people are eating like, “oh, that’s weird.” And it actually took up like about two tables worth just to plate all the food there. So then we started going like, this guy’s probably someone important or something, someone’s trying to check us out, a food writer or something.
So we did actually just look up his name. We’re like, “oh, OK, this is a guy from New York Times.” And yeah, that’s basically it. Just like Isaiah was saying, we just gave them the same food we give everybody else.
Miller: And then hope for the best.
Reinardy: Yeah, pretty much.
Miller: Isaiah, I’m curious to get a little bit of your background here. You spent a number of years cooking in some high-end restaurants in the Bay Area. What brought you to Eugene?
Martinez: I moved out here in the pursuit of working at a restaurant that would resemble Chez Panisse because I’m a really big fan of Chez Panisse. And that restaurant was Marché. Landed there, helped manage the restaurant there for a little bit and then ended up doing my own thing.
Miller: What was your impression of the Eugene food scene when you arrived?
Martinez: I feel like the Eugene food scene was 100% not as exciting as the Bay Area food scene.
Miller: What did you want to add to it?
Martinez: For me, I just wanted to add more culture than it currently has. Like right now, there’s all the student population that’s super diverse and there’s all these different kinds of people in different pockets of the small college town we live in, but it just feels like it’s lacking in diversity and any type of cultural representation.
Miller: And Quynh, what about you both? How did you choose Portland for your restaurant?
Nguyen: My husband, he took me for a road trip around America to tour the place that I like the most. On that trip, the Portland really stand out for me and all the trees, all the food carts, everything. So I loved it the first time I visited Portland.
Miller: Carlo, what was it about Portland that stood out to you?
Reinardy: Well, I mean, it was one of five different cities we were looking at because we were originally living in … we moved back from Hanoi for a while and we were living in Milwaukee, where I’m from, and it just wasn’t the same. We couldn’t source the right ingredients since there wasn’t a large Vietnamese population.
Miller: When you say Milwaukee, you mean you mean Milwaukee, Wisconsin?
Reinardy: Yeah. So we were thinking …
Miller: So sourcing was a challenge in Milwaukee. What was the draw of Portland?
Reinardy: Well, we had a large, oversized Vietnamese population, but it was specific about the food scene here that actually attracted us too. It was the fact that it was a place where you find high quality food but without pretension. And we really didn’t want to put all our efforts into formal dining or anything like that. We just want the food to be the star.
So the food scene here seemed to be like that perfect mix between quality, without all the useless flourishes that other places might have. There’s not as much white tablecloth sort of thing. It’s kind of a place where people walk in with their street clothes on and just want to have excellent fine quality food, without all the hoops that you run through in certain fine dining scenes.
Miller: What did you think was missing in terms of Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S.?
Reinardy: Well, I mean, we both … Quynh is from Hanoi, North Vietnam – that’s where we met, where I lived. I was cooking out there too. And well, the thing that started the whole idea was the idea of fresh noodles, cause every time we’d go out to have pho or noodle dishes, it was always these dried noodles. We got so accustomed to having fresh noodles in Vietnam. It just wasn’t right. It didn’t hit the spot the same way. So that’s kind of where the inspiration for even just Northern Vietnamese food came from, just having these fresh rice noodles.
Miller: My understanding is it took you half a year before you were satisfied with your version of homemade rice noodles, different kinds of rice noodles. Just tons and tons of trial and error and new machines. Can you give us a short version of the noodle-making saga?
Reinardy: Well, so before we started this, when we were back in Vietnam, we were going around to … Quynh and her uncle had a place that made bún noodles, which are like the round ones. And so we’d go and we’d study there. Then we went to actually Ho Chi Minh City, where we actually bought the machines. We studied there for a bit. I mean, we were reading scientific papers on this stuff.
But the thing is, as soon as we moved here and started testing this stuff out, certain things like the environment’s different. It’s not as humid, the rice is different … yeah, the rice. And so, for about six months, we just kept on plugging away trying to get our machines to make it with the ingredients we could source here. Sometimes we’d make a plate of mush. Sometimes you’d put the noodle in water and it would just dissolve. It’s a lot harder than pasta because you don’t have the help of a protein, like gluten, in order to make it stick together. You’re trying to get these starches to crystallize so they’ll be non-water soluble. And you have to go through all these distinct steps in order to get this exact starch to gelatinize, and in the exact right shape and structure.
We make two different kinds of noodles here and the techniques for both of them, we make pho noodles and bún noodles, and both techniques are completely different. One’s an extruded noodle, one’s a steamed noodle. One is made, it’s pre-gelatinized. The other one we actually take cooked rice and we add it to it, so add the gelatinization process. So we understood why we’re one of the few places in America that actually makes rice noodles. They’re incredibly difficult to pull off, but once you get it right, then you can just keep going.
Miller: Isaiah, do you have any equivalent version for your own restaurant where you had to struggle to get a version of one of your dishes that you were satisfied with?
Martinez: Yeah, first I want to say that I’ve been to your guys’s restaurant and I love it so much. I love the decor. I remember sitting in a small seat in the little … it looked like a private dining area at the left side of the restaurant in the little corner. I had such a good time. It was raining and it was perfect. I just wanted to say that.
Then yeah, I would say, kind of similar to what they were saying, we’re in the Northwest, farthest from anywhere near the Caribbean. So nothing we do is necessarily super authentic because we’re not using ingredients really from the Caribbean. We’re using local ingredients.
I would say most of our food is hard to pull off, not in terms of making perfect noodles, like we don’t have that exact problem. But we just have a problem with making food spicy using local peppers and stuff like that. I think like a lot of our food is really just Caribbean food made with local ingredients, so it’s more of like the ethos of a Caribbean person and less of that authenticity. I feel like you would have to be importing curry powder and jerk seasoning, and we make all that stuff in house. So it’s just like a Northwest version of Caribbean food.
Miller: What does that word “authentic” even mean to you? And I’m curious how important it is to you to say “this is authentic?”
Martinez: OK, authentic, to define that for me personally, it would have to be like if I’m eating Neapolitan pizza in Italy and it’s the VPN certified pizza. It’s like they’re using ingredients that are either from that place or the equivalent of authenticity in flavor and quality. So it’s like if you’re using San Marzano tomatoes and you’re using Double Zero mozzarella, basil, and you’re making like a very traditional Neapolitan pizza where you’re following all the rules, that’s authentic, right?
But I think for Caribbean culture authenticity is household to household between the grandmas, the aunties. And what authentic jerk is person to person is different, but a lot of the time, it comes from using allspice wood, which is from the Caribbean. It’s really hard to find here in the states and it’s really expensive. It creates a carbon footprint that makes it a little bit unrealistic, but that’s like the authentic way of cooking jerk, is on pimento wood. We use all the core spices in jerk and seasonings and jerk to make authentic jerk, but we’re not using scotch bonnet peppers from Jamaica.
So I would say that authenticity kind of has to have either equal quality to where it comes from, or somehow better. Yeah, that’s my opinion.
Miller: How did Yardy first get started? And as you noted, you came here to work at this sort of more fine dining farm-to-table kind of a restaurant, and then you started your own place. What was it like?
Martinez: I mean, it started because I was like, OK, if I moved to Portland, I feel like it would have never happened because I would have been working at a bunch of cool restaurants. But I feel like at the time, I worked at Marché and I can’t really think of another place locally I want to work at. And I don’t mean that in an insulting way, but I was like, I think it’s time for me to do my own thing.
So I started my own business and what it felt like was rewarding because a lot of people supported it and a lot of people embraced it. Eugene loved it. It happened during COVID. We were super popular and super busy as a food cart, so we expanded into the restaurant. The beginning was very quiet and then it became explosive, just like the food cart. We got some attention and some love, and constant support from the local Eugene people and people traveling from outside in.
I’m just grateful we get to cook this style of food, celebrate local ingredients, and kind of show people what Oregon food and Caribbean culture combined can be.
Miller: And I should say, it happened really quickly. I mean, you went from a food cart to a counter service restaurant just about a year-and-a-half ago, and now all of this acclaim in under two years.
Martinez: Yeah, yeah, it is.
Miller: Quynh, I’m curious what it means to you to be on this New York Times list?
Nguyen: I can’t believe that because I came to America as an immigrant just only for seven years and now with my name on a New York town. It’s just like a miracle.
Miller: Carlo, what is it going to mean for your business to be on this list? Have you already seen an uptick in customers?
Reinardy: Oh yeah, I mean, we’re pretty much booked out for the next month already. It’s kind of a tightrope now, cause we have a lot of people that come here very regularly. So a lot of local Vietnamese people, some of them are from North Vietnam and this is their favorite place cause it reminds them of home. So we’re trying to balance between bringing new people in and the increased exposure, while also making sure that we’re not pushing out the people that have been here since the start, you know what I mean?
Miller: Do you have a soft spot in your heart for those people, for your earliest customers for whom this is not just a trendy restaurant that now got this national acclaim, but they were there from the beginning. I mean, do you see them as a restaurateur differently than just the randos who come in?
Reinardy: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, a lot of them know us by now, especially Quynh. She’ll go out there and she greets the tables. She’ll make personal connections with these people, we know the names of their kids. We know that they’ll be here again and again. So it’s something that, it means more to us than people that just want to try it out once. Some people might not like it. It’s a cuisine that can be challenging to some people. It’s very fun to share that with people, but it’s the people that really get deeply into the experience and the cuisine of Northern Vietnam.
We have new specials every month and people ask us, “oh, what’s the next one?” They’ll come around every month to try the new dish, cause usually we’re picking dishes from far-flung places in Northern Vietnam, obscure dishes, and maybe they’ve never tried before. So there’s something heartwarming about those kinds of customers. And with this increased exposure, we want to make sure that there’s always room for them too.
Miller: Isaiah, we’re hearing sort of the two different pieces of this from Carlo and Quynh, the business side and the personal side. So let me start with you, for the personal side. What does it mean to you as a chef and a restaurant creator to get this acclaim?
Martinez: Oh man, it means a lot. I think just last year, a friend of mine showed me the list at a local bakery around the corner from where our restaurant is, called Noisette. They’re a great bakery and we always look at the list together. I don’t pay for The New York Times, so she sends me the version of it that gets you through the paywall. I think it’s just like a free version, like you get 10 free people or whatever. I’m looking at it and I’m like, “oh this is so cool.” And I follow half a dozen or a dozen restaurants on the list to get inspiration and motivation.
I mean, I literally never thought of myself as being a restaurant or a person that would end up on this list, so the feeling is real, and it’s confusing, and I’m grateful.
Miller: What about what Carlo and Quynh were talking about, that it’s a kind of double-edged sword because now, with this acclaim, it could change the feel of the restaurant or bring in people who are not your regulars and maybe are there for different reasons.
Martinez: Yeah, you said this is live, right?
Miller: This is live. Yes, it is.
Martinez: OK, I’m gonna say something that will help us out. I’m gonna say …
Miller: There’s also FCC rules about swearing, in case that was your …
Martinez: I won’t swear.
Miller: OK, you have one minute left. Go ahead.
Martinez: OK, I was gonna say, we talked about it yesterday with another radio station. It sucks because we can’t feed our regulars as frequently or as consistently because they build a routine. It’s unfortunate that the fake fans come out of the woodwork, because there’s people that have FOMO and want to be there, want to be at the spot. But that’s all I was going to say. I said it yesterday to KLCC and that’s how I feel. It’s a good thing, but it’s also just kind of weird.
Miller: Isaiah, Carlo and Quynh, congratulations and thanks so much.
Reinardy: Thank you so much.
Nguyen: Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Miller: Isaiah Martinez is a co-owner and chef of Yardy Rum Bar. Carlo Reinardy and Quynh Nguyen are co-owners and co-chefs at The Paper Bridge in Portland.
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