Kachka
Eastern European restaurant · Buckman
960 SE 11th Ave, Portland, OR 97214
Highlights
Russian dumplings, infused vodkas, and herring under a fur coat.
Russian dumplings, infused vodkas, and herring under a fur coat.
"Now open in Northeast Portland after debuting the second week of July, this new seafood-driven cocktail bar—announced by owners Israel and Bonnie Morales in March—occupies the former Aimsir Distilling tasting room and centers on an eight-seat bar with additional seating throughout the space. "Imagine tinned fish but on full blast: steelhead jerky, imported and domestic caviar, scallops on the half shell with corn milk foam and buckwheat furikake." The drinks are meant to highlight the bar's own spirits, with six original martinis and vodka flights alongside nonalcoholic options and wine. The bar is open 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Thursday, Sunday, and Monday, and 4 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday; limited reservations are available on OpenTable." - Paolo Bicchieri
"A Slavic dinner hall notable enough to be singled out among Central Eastside highlights, often paired in recommendations with its adjoining market." - Dianne de Guzman
"It’s hard to understate how influential this Buckman Russian restaurant is: When Bonnie and Israel Morales opened Kachka in 2014, it ushered in the great Eastern European culinary renaissance, as restaurants around the country popped up celebrating the cuisines of the former Soviet republics. The iconic herring under a fur coat is a staple here, a colorful layered salad of pickled herring, beets, potatoes, and carrots; so are the dumplings, from beefy Siberian pelmeni to Ukrainian sour cherry vareniki with sour cream. For mains, go for tender rabbit in a clay pot, swimming in a braising liquid of cherries, porcini, and garlic. Drinkers should opt for a few pours of the restaurant’s fun vodkas infused with the likes of sea buckthorn or horseradish, available in flights or single pours. The house rassol — pickle juice — is the ultimate back to any savory vodka here." - Katherine Chew Hamilton
"Kachka is almost always a default restaurant rec given to many newcomers in Portland; oftentimes, it also serves as an extravagant introduction to Eastern European cuisine, emphasizing Russian dining of the Soviet era. The colorful, homey interior serves as an energizing backdrop to charcuterie boards covered with herring salad, pickled vegetables, and smoked fish buterbrodi. Ordering the Ruskie Zakuski Experience will incentivize the team to customize an array of these items for you, which should rightfully be served alongside one of the dozen-plus vodkas infused with spices like horseradish, caraway, and sour cherry. Other must-have items unique to Kachka include pelmeni and vareniki dumplings served with their addictively savory “fancy” broth, along with the clay pot rabbit braised in a liquid of sour cherries, porcini, and smetana." - Katrina Yentch
"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
