Portland’s Kachka Is Opening a Cocktail Bar at the Former Aimsir Distilling Space | Eater Portland
"The vodka-soaked elevated dining outfit from husband-and-wife team chef Bonnie Frumkin Morales and Israel Morales — a restaurant whose reputation precedes itself the world over — is expanding into a glittering bar space in Northeast Portland as a to-be-named cocktail project with a hopeful opening in early summer. “It just felt like kismet,” Frumkin Morales tells Eater Portland. “It felt like an obvious, natural expansion.” Because the move wasn’t planned for this year, details remain TBD as the couple is “spending the time to get intention from what the team wants to do and what Portland is missing.” The stated goal is to showcase vodka, with a complementary food menu emphasizing seafood (Frumkin Morales’s go-to selections) while avoiding the impression of opening “a caviar bar.” “Vodka doesn’t get attention in the spirits world,” Frumkin Morales says. “It doesn’t get appreciated for flavor and texture. A bar focus lets us talk about that more. Still, we’ll definitely serve caviar.” This expansion enables more in-house distilling of the restaurant’s famous horseradish vodka (previously produced by other distillers), and the team had already leased a 2,100-square-foot space in the Bindery Building “to begin distilling in 2023.” Their new location within the building was initially for dumpling making, and then “in January, the distilling began.” Bar manager Jamie Bones will work as beverage director for both the original restaurant and the new cocktail bar, and will also take on the role of distiller. Frumkin Morales frames the bar and distillery work as ingredient-driven rather than family-story-driven: “Caviar, you can get into varietals, types of sturgeons. Oysters can get into varietals. Tinned fish, this specific cod liver,” she says. “We’ll, no pun intended, distill down to the singular things.” Broadly, the operation is described as one of Portland’s most high-caliber examples of the city’s restaurant talent — in 2018 the restaurant took over the tremendous former Goat Blocks location, where the market outpost lives upstairs — and in a 10th-anniversary retrospective the business continues “celebrating the cuisine of Frumkin Morales’s Belarusian family, but also the broader cuisines and tangled foodways of the former Soviet republics.” “Really, what we’re about, is sharing this foodway, this sorely misrepresented cuisine,” she says." - Paolo Bicchieri
