What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Music Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
Dear Lola
When Danté Fernandez was growing up in Portland, many other Filipinos told him he wasn’t really Filipino—because he didn’t speak the language, because his family had immigrated from the Philippines too many generations ago, because the food he ate wasn’t exactly like back in the islands, or because his family was a mix of Filipino, Black, and Native American.
Try telling that to Fernandez now—he was part of the opening team at Magna Kusina, Portland’s best-known Filipino restaurant, and worked as its operations manager and chef de cuisine until last year. In December 2025, Fernandez opened his own Filipino eatery, Dear Lola, inside cocktail bar Too Soon on Northeast 28th.
Lola means grandmother in Tagalog, and Dear Lola is named in honor of his grandmother, who died a month before he opened his business. In the years before Asian supermarkets were commonplace in Portland, his lola often didn’t have access to Filipino ingredients like soy sauce or fish sauce, so she substituted other umami-heavy ingredients like tomatoes. But when Fernandez started cooking the same dishes at Magna using so-called “real” Filipino ingredients, he found that his grandmother’s flavors were spot-on.
“You adapt and you grow, and you become an embodiment of your environment and what you’re surrounded by, but you’re still at your core Filipino,” says Fernandez.
At Dear Lola, Fernandez serves what he calls diaspora Filipino cooking—sometimes sticking to widely known Filipino dishes, other times diving into regional specialties, and often cooking dishes unique to his own experience. Classics include crispy lumpiang shanghai straight from the fryer and impossibly crackly pork belly adobo. He recently made chicken piaparan skewers, a handheld take on a spicy, coconutty, herbaceous stew that originates in Muslim communities in the southern Philippines.
Then there’s that third category of dishes that only Fernandez could create. He just added fried chicken dish to the menu—something that both the Southern United States and Jollibee have in common, he notes—where the chicken is rubbed in adobo and fried, then smothered with sauce inspired by a Filipino dish called laing. Laing is traditionally made with taro leaves and coconut milk—but here, he’s keeping the coconut milk and swapping in Southern-style collards, ham hock and all.
“It’s me at my core,” says Fernandez. “The marrying of two cultures—I grew up eating like that. That’s how my grandma cooked.”
18 NE 28th, @dearlola_pdx
After Ours
There’s a Vietnamese term, nhau, that embodies what After Ours is all about: the act of eating and drinking with friends.
“It’s a gathering of elders—they sit on the floor or around the table, and it’s a bunch of Heineken and Hennessy, and different foods that you’d eat while drinking,” explains Richard Le, one of the co-owners of After Ours.
Le, the chef behind now-closed food cart Matta, opened the bar in August 2025 with Kim Danh, the owner of Vietnamese-inspired coffee shop Portland Ca Phe; they’re also part-owners of Vietnamese American brunch spot Memoire Ca Phe. The bar’s third co-owner, Mikey Nguyen, runs the sneaker shop Index. The goal was to build a bar with good food that celebrated Vietnamese American culture and acted as a gathering space not only for events, but also for just lounging around. On a recent Friday night, it was so busy that Le could barely walk past the bar.
“It’s cool to see that if you build it, they will come,” Le says.
Some of the menu draws from Matta’s Vietnamese-meets-fast-food vibe: a burger marinated in fish sauce, a fried catfish sandwich with American cheese. But the rest is built for sharing. Wings are served whole and delicately breaded—try them dusted with sweet-sour tamarind powder. Garlic noodles, which originated in the Bay Area’s Vietnamese American community where Le grew up, are the bar’s bestseller. But if you order just one thing, let it be the walnut shrimp, tossed in lime leaf aioli with fish sauce-caramelized walnuts that are so crunchy you can’t hear the person next to you talking.
On most nights, a DJ will be spinning at the booth; records are displayed on the wall, from Saigon Supersound Vol. 3 to Madvillainy. Portraits of Danh’s father, Le’s mother, and Nguyen’s father are perched above, an homage to parents that each of the owners have lost. Amidst the shelves of records, there’s the head of a lion dance costume, and behind the bar, bottles of Hennessy in Lunar New Year-themed red packaging line the shelves—memories of the bar’s not one, but three parties celebrating its first Tết, the Vietnamese new year.
“We had a line of people waiting to get in,” Le says. “Hennessy brought in an ice sculpture, we had $7 VSOP shots, we had White Lotus do a lion dance. We had the longest string of fireworks. I was like, ‘The neighbors are gonna hate us so bad.’ But we’re celebrating a cultural holiday—so hate on us if you want.”
2226 NE Broadway, afterours.toast.site, @afterours.pdx
Bangkok Belly
There’s no shortage of Thai restaurants in Portland, from noodle soup specialists to fine dining tasting menus. But what Kat Thirakomen really missed from her childhood in Bangkok was the simple things, like the moo ping skewers she’d get after school.
“Every Thai has a memory of that,” says Thirakomen. “You want it caramelized on the outside, tender on the inside, a little bit crispy and charred.”
Thirakomen and her husband, David Fiske, opened Bangkok Belly in a modest-sized storefront on SE Belmont in November 2025. The menu is a curation of fewer than a dozen dishes that the couple missed most from living in Thailand. Get a couple skewers, a salad, a main, and a side, and flit from one dish to the other to balance the sweet, the sour, the meaty, and the seriously spicy. Even the cocktails draw from Thai cuisine, incorporating tom yum spices or pandan.
“We hope to create a symphony on the table,” says Thirakomen.
The moo ping lives up to its charcoal-kissed, coconut milk-glazed promise, with jeow sauce that’s full of chiles, herbs, and tang. The chicken satay is a tier above others in town, with peanut sauce that combines housemade curry, peanuts, and coconut milk. It’s sided by grilled bread for swiping up sauce, plus pickled cucumbers. Herb salad with cilantro, mint, and watercress obscures fiery slices of Thai chile, while seasonal salads might include pomelo with dried shrimp and toasty coconut, or local snap peas with lots of lime, coconut, and herbs. Dishes like yellow curry with squid or namtok kor moo yang (grilled pork collar salad) are ideal for mains, but don’t skip the laab mac salad. The creation was born during a Labor Day potluck when Thirakomen combined her leftover laab with the remnants of a friend’s Hawaiian mac salad. The creamy mayo contrasts the tang and spice of the laab, making you want to eat more.
I stopped in one afternoon for an after-work snack: moo ping, sticky rice, and a pandan daiquiri with silky coconut-washed rums. Meanwhile, a couple kids and their dad rolled in on a cargo bike, were warmly greeted by Thirakomen with a “welcome back,” and ordered a skewer each. Maybe Bangkok Belly’s about to start a Thai street food snack revolution for all of us.
“There’s a really fantastic Thai food scene here, but there are some dishes that aren’t represented still,” says Thirakomen. “There’s room to bring that in and share it with everybody.”
3342 SE Belmont, bangkokbellypdx.com, @bangkokbellypdx