By Will Grunewald
Photos by Nicole Wolf
From our May 2025 issue
Oun Lido’s chef and co-owner Bounahcree Kim, who goes by “Bones,” has a strong Portland pedigree. He cooked for several years at Cong Tu Bot, chef Vien Dobui’s lauded Vietnamese restaurant, and most recently worked at Miyake, the most venerable of the city’s sushi counters, and its sister noodle bar, Pai Men Miyake. At Miyake, where his brother is head chef, Kim was training to be sous chef when Dobui approached him about partnering to run his own kitchen in the city. Kim, whose parents immigrated from Cambodia, decided he was ready to build a restaurant around food he feels a personal connection to.
So I had no doubts, prior to visiting Oun Lido’s, that the meal would be very good. Still, I wondered if it might fall short of expectations, because the bar was set high after Esquire ranked Oun Lido’s among the best new restaurants in the country last year. That magazine certainly has reach and resources, but national “best” lists are pretty much always premised on an absurd degree of arbitrariness. (Esquire did not, one can safely assume, dispatch tasters to all 50 states to eat their way through many thousands of new establishments.)
Well, expectations were met and exceeded. The oyster mushrooms were probably what first convinced me that something special indeed goes on in the kitchen at Oun Lido’s. They don’t really look like much, just pieces of mushroom stacked on skewers, but appearances deceive. The texture is key — almost meaty, the result of roasting on a high heat and then quickly charring on the grill — to making the mushrooms a sturdy vehicle for a burst of bright flavors developed by a lively marinade with notes of lemongrass, turmeric, ginger, garlic, lime leaf, and honey, which plays nicely with an herbaceous sauce and slivers of pickled green papaya. Or maybe it was the pork potstickers, their perfectly tender wrappers rolled into cigar-like tubes rather than folded into the usual little pouches, delicately bound together by a lacelike crispy skirt (accomplished by adding water, corn starch, flour, and vinegar to the pan). After many memorable bites, memory fails as to which wowed me first.
Oun Lido’s occupies a roomy three-story space in the Old Port, in what used to be a Pat’s Pizza. Kim had hoped to open in the fall of 2023, but he hit a number of snags: redoing the kitchen floor, remediating mold, replacing the heating system. By the following spring, he needed to start selling food, so Oun Lido’s debuted as a takeout-only operation, and Kim resolved to keep plugging away at creating a fully realized restaurant. That summer, the dining room became available to counter-service guests who wanted to eat in, and it wasn’t until months later that Oun Lido’s started offering weekend-only table service. For this coming summer, Kim is optimistic they’ll have both a liquor license and daily table service squared away. He’s also continuing to tinker with the menu (he’d especially like to add more local seafood to the repertoire) and chipping away at improving the space (fixing the lighting to create a more inviting atmosphere was high on the agenda this spring). Among other, longer-term goals: turning the unused third floor into a lounge and events space.
Suffice to say, Oun Lido’s has been a work in progress. But credit where credit is due: someone at Esquire saw past the unfinished nature of the restaurant and realized that Kim’s cooking was worth touting to a national audience anyway. And honestly, if Kim decided that the current form of Oun Lido’s was its final form, I wouldn’t mind, as long as he keeps whipping up batches of peppy lemon-herb sauce (with basil, mint, cilantro, scallion, garlic, bird’s-eye chili, and fish-sauce caramel) for dipping vegetable fresh rolls and keeps serving up generous plates of sweet, crunchy twice-fried chicken and hearty noodle dishes.
In the latter category, the mi goreng has become my favorite main course at Oun Lido’s, with long, al dente noodles tossed in a subtly sweet soy-curry sauce and loaded with tender pieces of onion, crunchy bok choy, pickled shiitake, and Chinese sausage (an optional add-on). Bites that combine the sweet-savoriness of the sausage with the acidity of the pickled mushrooms are tough to beat. Now, after having been back to Oun Lido’s several times, I won’t venture whether it’s one of the best new restaurants in the country, but I certainly won’t say it isn’t.
