Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Ryan Roadhouse, the chef and owner of Nodoguro, one of Portland’s most lauded Japanese restaurants, would draw inspiration from Haruki Murakami’s novels. Both Roadhouse and Murakami are rooted in Japanese traditions—the chef by training, the writer by birth—yet express American individualism, creating art that, as Roadhouse puts it, “is its own unique thing that’s neither here nor there.”
And so, in his tasting-menu tribute to Murakami, Roadhouse’s dishes ranged from the subtly creative (raw oysters with uni and ginger blossom, inspired by Murakami’s short story “Hotel Lobby Oysters”) to the fantastical (shiso-poached peaches, maple-buttered rice crackers, and a drizzle of cola syrup, a riff on a canned peaches, pancakes, and Coca Cola combination from the short story “Hear the Wind Sing”).
“People come in with different expectations and different levels of understanding of Japanese food, but none of that really matters because it’s about connecting people in a very visceral, emotional way,” says chef Ryan Roadhouse, pictured below.
You won’t, unfortunately, be able to taste these dishes, for Nodoguro’s menus change monthly. And it’s only with planning and a bit of luck that you’ll have the chance to dine at Nodoguro at all: In the spare, minimalist space, there are only 16 seats, which flank the U-shaped bar behind which the chefs work, and they are reserved almost immediately when they are released on the restaurant’s website a month in advance. There is only one menu each night: the inventive tasting menu (13 courses), the restaurant’s standard Hardcore omakase (19 courses), or its Supahardcore omakase (25 courses). The short tasting menu unfolds in the Japanese kappo tradition, a carefully choreographed progression of dishes emphasizing visual, textural, and seasonal elements, though the themes of Nodoguro’s tasting menus are not necessarily Japanese. Inspirations in the past have included Twin Peaks, (a menu Roadhouse served to the series’ creator David Lynch himself), which started with Cod in the Dashi Percolator, a composition of flash-fried black cod and dashi with vaporized sake; and Salvador Dalí’s cookbook, which inspired a menu dubbed “Dinner for Gala” that included a pairing of sake-poached eel and rice with curry-spiced bacon. Where the shorter tasting menu emphasizes creativity, the omakase dinners are more traditional, focused on raw seafood and exquisite sushi and sashimi, such as scallops sliced to resemble somen noodles, tender abalone simmered in sake, and a shimmery-skinned kohada nigiri.
Of Nodoguro’s beginnings, Roadhouse says, “I feel like what we did probably could only have happened in Portland.” He grew up in Sterling, Illinois. “I really wanted to be a server, but I was too young for that. So I ended up in the kitchen, and it happened to be a Japanese chef [there]. I never got around to being anything else.” From there, he helmed Sushi Den in Denver, and then trained in Japan, before making his way to Portland’s Masu Sushi. “Early in my career, the goal was pretty much what any other Japanese chef’s goal would be: exact replicas (of what you learned). There’s not much flexibility for what we would call creativity. But in any craft, you want to create originals, not replicas.” After working for others, Roadhouse was ready to create something of his own. Unwilling to take on financial partners and compromise his vision, he and his wife, Elena, a lawyer by day and the restaurant’s hostess at night, began Nodoguro as a pop-up restaurant in 2014.
Each night, in a borrowed space, they reinvented the restaurant, from the menu to the actual plates to the decor. After a few iterations, it was Elena’s idea to try a Haruki Murakami theme. She had introduced Roadhouse to the writer; her first gift to him was Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart. When they started flipping through his novels, Roadhouse discovered how much food was woven into the stories.
From there, the ideas “spun out of control, just like the books” into something uncategorizable, something for which the descriptor “Japanese” seems restrictive and inadequate. “People come in with different expectations and different levels of understanding of Japanese food, but none of that really matters because it’s about connecting people in a very visceral, emotional way,” Roadhouse says. Certainly, something resonated with diners, whether it was the intimacy of the space or the carefully crafted flavors. After two years as a pop-up, buoyed by sold-out dinners, Nodoguro moved into its own space.”
Now, the Roadhouses have instigated another pop-up, this time in their own restaurant. Called Peter Cat, it appears in Nodoguro’s back room, which they transform into a lounge-like bar on weekend nights as a nod to the jazz vinyl lounge Murakami started before he became a novelist. With about a dozen seats, which you’ll also need to reserve in advance, it is more cozy and casual than the main dining room. Its menu matches the ambience: a set $45 bento box that comes with a cocktail.
The flavors at Peter Cat may venture even further from the boundaries of Japanese food. “Japan has a certain aesthetic and understanding of craft,” Roadhouse says. “I can take what I learned from that process and apply it to anything I choose.” These days, he pulls inspiration from small moments in Portland, like picking strawberries in the summer and noticing that the edges of the field are overrun with chamomile. It seems like an unorthodox pairing, strawberry and chamomile, “but in the here and now,” he says, “it makes perfect sense to me, at this moment in Portland.”