PASAR
Indonesian restaurant · Concordia
3023 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211
Highlights
Indonesian street food & snacks, cocktails, vibrant decor
Indonesian street food & snacks, cocktails, vibrant decor
"This Indonesian restaurant, from the same team as Wajan on East Burnside, specializes in the snacks and dishes found in the archipelago’s morning and evening markets. Snacky options include crispy items like bala-bala, savory veggie fritters, and sate padang, Sumatran steak skewers. Vegetarian and vegan options are plentiful, and you can customize your order by adding on several types of tapioca crackers, sauces, and sambals. A highlight on the menu: lontong cap go meh, a fragrant coconut-based soup loaded with jewels of rice dumplings, pickled vegetables, fried tofu and tempeh, and a sambal-saucy hard-boiled egg. Don’t skip the menu of kue, or Indonesian sweets, including putu ayu, steamed pandan cake, and biji salak, chewy sweet potato balls in warm palm sugar broth with coconut cream." - Katherine Chew Hamilton
"A dazzling Indonesian-Chinese restaurant in Portland, Oregon, led by chef-owner Feny, was named one of the 20 Best New Restaurants of 2024 and received this year’s Best Dessert Program award for its crave-worthy, snackable Indonesian desserts. Modeled on the bustling morning and night markets of Jakarta, the space is filled with patterned sculptures, bags of snacks, and sentimental trinkets, and the menu channels push-cart kue—compact, subtly sweet, texturally diverse bites meant to be eaten throughout a meal rather than only afterward. A self-described “snack person,” Feny intentionally swaps traditional components and manipulates a range of flours and extracts to produce distinct aromas and mouthfeels. Offerings range from sticky, rose-colored cantik manis to chewy, bright-purple talam ubi made with purple sweet potato and a tapioca-coconut layer; a pandan-scented spongy cake with vanilla-like, grassy aromatics; a pudding-like mung-bean and coconut-milk dessert studded with mini tapioca pearls and jackfruit; bronzed, crisp piscok (fried lumpia-wrapped bananas with dark chocolate); and mochi-like orange-yam dough balls filled with coconut palm sugar and rolled in coconut flakes (served with a warning to eat them whole to avoid splatter). Together these desserts are designed to be integrated into a savory feast, offering a wide range of compact textures and restrained sweetness." - ByNina Moskowitz
"Everything at Indonesian snacks restaurant Pasar is big on flavor: the visually striking lontong cap goh meh, a mix of textures in a coconut broth with varying levels of crunch; the satisfying nasi goreng tek tek, a street-style fried rice. But my favorite bite here, consistently, is maybe one of the quietest dishes on the menu. The lemper ayam, essentially a square of banana-leaf-wrapped sticky rice, is wonderfully aromatic, the result of being steamed and then flash-seared on the grill, which allows the banana leaf to impart its flavor. Compared to the soy-heavy sticky rices that I grew up with (and continue to love), this one feels like pure, simple comfort." - Eater Staff
"Designed as something like a snack bar, Pasar is Feny’s Alberta Indonesian restaurant built around the single-bite treats she grew up eating in Jakarta — from sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf to crunchy fritters and springy pandan cake. Feny explicitly configured the menu so people can try one of each without being bogged down by piles of fritters, and she hopes customers feel comfortable dropping in for a single snack before a show or picking up grab-and-go items during the day. Examples called out include lemper ayam (sticky rice filled with chicken floss and wrapped in banana leaf), and market-style snacks she developed such as bala-bala (a vegetable fritter with peanut sauce) and popiah (a spring-roll–like snack filled with jicama, carrots, and shrimp powder). The restaurant opened for dinner at the end of 2023, features a massive display of Indonesian packaged crackers, chips, and candies at the entrance, and lists many snacks and desserts at around $5 or less." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden
"On Northeast Alberta, Pasar is designed to evoke a pasar malam: snacks hang from the walls and sit on shelves at the entrance, a bar awning suggests an Indonesian warung with batik fish beneath the counter, mega mendung cloud patterns mark the ceiling, and the walls shift in color from sunrise oranges to twilight purples. I found the concept focused on small, market-style bites meant for grazing — currently open for dinner with plans to expand to all-day pasar pagi snacks and pasar malam dishes — with a lineup that includes fried gorengan like risol sayur and bala-bala, lemper ayam, nasi tim, bakso with ayam kuluyuk, a soup-style lontong Cap Go Meh bolstered with sayur lodeh and terasi, and a variety of kue (putu ayu, talam ubi, cantik manis); the bar, run by Ross Grimes, offers cocktails made with arak, baijiu, or a house-made pandan-coconut liqueur." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden
