Lunch by Anthony Dao at Maurice

reviewing a new Portland pop-up

It was refreshing to cross the threshold of the doorway at Maurice and see whole fruits and heads of fresh produce rather than the usual pastry case. Not that the pastry case ever looks anything less than perfect — I suppose I’m just a sucker for puntarelle behind glass.

Until November 9th, you can try chef Tony Dao’s food at Maurice, and I strongly encourage you to do so. He is running his pop-up during lunch hours every Thurs, Fri, & Sat from 11am - 3pm.

I met Tony when he was still working at Hiyu Wine Farm in the gorge, just outside of Hood River. I remember a very simple but perfectly executed nettle lasagna he served to me there in the month of May. At Hiyu, a lot of the produce used in the tasting menu experience is also grown on the farm. The plates are very simple, showcasing whatever is growing in that moment.

Going to a place like Hiyu is a precious thing. With a dinner reservation price tag of $250, the experience is truly rarified. What Tony is offering us here in Portland is something much more approachable and there is no sacrifice of freshness.

Tony grew up in Seattle. He is the son of two Vietnamese refugees who fled to the states within the same week prior to the fall of Saigon in 1975. In his own words, Tony strives “to create experiences which mimic the conviviality of [his] family’s celebrations and gatherings.” He is always chasing that specific feeling of home. To flee home and then go on to create “home” wherever you land is a specific skill which can only be cultivated through circumstance. It is one Tony grew up on.

Tony brings years of kitchen experience from around the world to his menus. Having cut his teeth between Seattle, NYC, and even Australia, Tony has probably seen it all. His food has flare and reflects the things he himself loves to eat. Tony cooks classics, sometimes pattern clashing two or more on one plate.

Tony’s @dao_deli instagram bio curtly reads “nostalgia meets new.” Bit of an oxymoron, no? As a chef, it can be challenging to convey the feeling and flavor of comfort-food when you’re also concerned with innovation. Most of the time, comfort-food is no longer comforting once it’s been reinvented on the plate. I am tempted to say that Tony’s food is an exception to this rule but upon closer inspection, I would challenge anyone claiming his food to be reinvention. It’s not that what he’s serving isn’t original — his dishes taste totally new, even though the warmth they convey is nostalgic. It’s more that he is a blooming master of both cultural alchemy and culinary technique. Tony’s food is a personal synthesis of dishes his palate remembers from his upbringing, the far flung places he has worked & visited, and the ephemerality of seasonal availability. He thinks of himself as pouring “timeless classics through a sieve lined with a lifetime of lived experiences.” Those timeless classics are thus filtered through his daily living. The result is food which tastes like clarity and feels like home.

Since Hiyu, Tony has committed himself to his own project. He has been popping up with his food around Hood River and is now gracing us with some of his dishes here in Portland. I want to introduce you to a few of the things I tried last week, in the hopes of persuading you to go and eat his food.

Oeufs Mayonnaise

Oeufs Mayonnaise, what is it? The phrase literally means, “mayonnaise eggs” — the dish is up for interpretation. Here the eggs were hard boiled and plated with incredibly fresh lettuces (like maybe they were harvested that day or the day before), mayo, green onions, and a generous blanket of grated bottarga. I remember hard boiled quail eggs I had in a bowl of chicken soup when I visited Hanoi in 2019. Tony introduced me to the Vietnamese dish Thit Kho Tau wherein eggs are hardboiled and then further braised with pork so that the sauce dyes the eggs. This dish is nostalgia for him and helped him to appreciate the fortified texture of a hard boiled egg. In his rendition of oeufs mayonnaise, he introduces the hard boiled egg to purposefully counterbalance the richness in the mayonnaise and bottarga. The dish feels unconventional, but everything hangs in sturdy balance.

Rump Roast with Puntarelle & Tomatillo Nuoc Cham

On Instagram, I saw fellow Portland pop-up chef, Becca (@plasticities_) refer to this dish as a spin on the traditional Vietnamese Bò Tái Chanh., a thinly sliced rare beef & lime juice salad from Northern Vietnam. Whether Tony had this dish in his mind when he was putting this rump roast set together is unclear — but whatever he was scheming had to do with Vietnamese flavor profiles he’s familiar with. The dressing was super bright, salty, and laden with fish sauce. The crispy shallots were a necessary textural flourish. Any good chef in the NW knows that chicories require a lot of salt in order to counterbalance their bitterness. Puntarelle is especially bitter and this dressing complimented it extremely well. The beef he served was not raw, but rather “reverse seared” — which refers to a technique wherein proteins are cooked low and slow until the desired interior temperature is reached (in this case, probably about 130F or so…) and then seared over high heat to seal in flavor and develop exterior texture. This beef was then stored cold and sliced super thin on the slicer. The dish was both delicate and punchy. It was something I could and would eat every day.

Soupe au Pistou

When was the last time you had beef tongue outside of eating a lengua taco? It’s not something we see very often on restaurant menus, which is a shame because of how delicious it can be. I think most chefs either don’t know how to prepare it, or are afraid their clientele will balk. Beef tongue is a tight, muscular organ which is rich in vitamins and minerals. It benefits from slow cooking, braising, and even pickling. In this application, the tongue was braised or “corned” as Tony referred to it on the menu. This process rendered extremely tender morsels in the stew. Oftentimes, comfort foods sport generic cuts of meat — things our grandparents would have eaten. But with the benefit of slow cooking and a rich, warm broth, Tony transformed tongue into the most comforting of proteins.

I would also like to add that humble beans are very difficult to cook. Consistency in texture is very important, but this requires a compound understanding of freshness, cooking time, temperature control, and salt. I personally would prefer for beans to be a little on the softer side than undercooked, especially in the context of a stew. I expected a few of the beans to be broken, having languished in the warmth and flavor of the stew. They were yielding, while still holding their shape, and tasted delicious.

Desserts: Kiwi Berry Pavlova and A Fig & Almond Tart

I tried one bite of the fig & almond tart before offering it to my table mates, who were less mates than people in town I knew who were generous enough to share courses with me. I was very full by this moment in the meal and tasting conservatively. The tart crust was both flaky and firm and the figs were lovingly dried inside its shell. I thought the addition of the créme anglaise was perhaps too liberal, but anyone who knows me knows I will never complain about having too much sauce.

Earlier in the day, I had been down to Silverton to help my friend Alyssa with her kiwi berry harvest. By now, most kiwi berry vines in our region are beginning to taper off. Most of their best fruit has been picked, while about 20% is still ripening on the vine for the last stage of harvest. On this particular Saturday, I helped Alyssa and her family to harvest about 30 pints of kiwi berries from 10 or so vines. It was a banger harvest day. The berries hung neatly on their leafless vines, offsetting stormy skies behind them. When I walked into Maurice for lunch, I was delighted to see a brimming bowl of them behind glass. They are Oregon’s last berry of the season. Tony’s food sings of the field. He has a keen sense of ripeness, something many chefs don’t have enough agricultural experience to hone. The pavlova itself was nothing special beyond its service as a blank canvas for the kiwi berries — but that alone made it spectacular.