Pho Lena

I'd driven past Pho Lena dozens of times and always thought I had to get in there to check it out. It's a small, stand alone family restaurant located a block down Spenard Avenue from the REI/Tidal Wave strip mall.


It had all the right ingredients for a great dining experience: housed in an old, run down shack in a not quite gentrified part of town and usually busy. I finally made it in a couple months ago and I've been back a half dozen times since. Pho Lena may be my new favorite restaurant.


Pho Lena is a Laotian restaurant with a sprawling menu. The way I describe Laotian food is that it is northeastern Thai food with some Vietnamese and French influences that is the result of the years Laos was a French colony. You have thai curries, but you also have clear soups and baguettes with pate. It's fairly ecclectic, and the menu reflects that ranging complexity. I actually think they could shorten the down a bit.


My favorite item on the menu is their Lao style BBQ wings. It is the closest thing I've seen to good Southeast Asian street food in the US. The wings are and brassy and are a step above the neutered drummettes with Frank's Hot Sauce most other restaurants serve.


The curries are outstanding. All the appetizers are made in house and I've tried them all and would order any of them again. The stuffed wings are especially nice, as are the banh mi (those bagette sandwiches we can thank the French for). Their Pho can go toe to toe with any other I've tried in Anchorage.


Also pictured here are the fried spicy pork spare ribs, which are really pan fried with a bunch of fresh green beans and Thai eggplant. And please note the sticky rice. This is my favorite type of rice, common to northern Thailand and Laos but rarely available elsewhere. Pho Lena is the only place I've seen it available around town. That alone is reason enough for me to come back.

Pho Lena has delicious, interesting, authentic food for low prices. The little shack on Spenard Avenue has become my fall back setting for Anchorage dining.

Triple D Farms

We drove out to Wasilla today to visit Triple D Farms. Triple D is a small family run poultry farm that raises a range of poultry, selling chicks, whole birds, and poultry products. The 'farm' is in the suburbs of Wasilla (a bit of an oxymoron as Wasilla is all suburb) and it wasn't nearly as agricultural as I expected. There was a pen of turkeys near the front of the compound (with a few guniea hens thrown in) awaiting their Thanksgiving Day fate and a flock of ducks waddling around the back. It's a large lot with a small house, a few pens, some open pecking space, and an abbatoir.

Here's their website with all their prices:

For sale, they had half turkeys, smoked turkey parts, whole chickens, and fresh eggs. If you catch them at the right time of year they will also have several types of fresh ducks, smoked ducks, duck and goose eggs, whole geese, guniea hens, pheasant, quail, and more. Triple D Farms also sells Matanuska Creamery ice cream (we bought chocolate and blueberry, $4/pint, $8/half gallon). Triple D Farms also carries Van Wyke pork by the quarter, half, full, and whole (a couple sizes) pig. (Van Wyke is the pork farmer out in Kenny Lake I wrote about last February.)


The birds you buy experience all stages of their life in the uncrowded, clean setting of the owners' property and the folks themselves have the right attitude for this sort of thing. Currently, you have to drive out to Wasilla to buy their stuff. I asked if there was any chance of New Sagaya's or another local food place carrying their birds, but she said no.

The reason is they would have to become certified by the USDA as a processing facility, an ordeal that would cost at least a million bucks. This is one of the ways large ag corporations are able to keep small, local producers out of the market, by pressuring the USDA to require somebody like Triple D to have an office and cleaning station for their own USDA inspector. I'd like to see this get challenged in court. Is there a bored lawyer in the house?


Triple D Farms is also known as the place where Sarah Palin was interviewed while the owner slaughtered turkeys in the background.

You can't make this shit up.

Pinnacle Mountain Lodge

We were driving back to Anchorage on the Glenn Highway after a sunny weekend of not catching fish on the Klutina River when we decided to stop and walk Goatboy for a bit. We were in a caravan with my mom's RV so we needed to find a place that is relatively easy to pull on and off of but that would still be interesting. We pulled into the Pinnacle Mountain Lodge mostly because they had a long, linear driveway and a collection of what I guess might be called tractor art.


The lodge is located about 20 miles east of Palmer, in a townsite called Chickaloon. Once part of the Mat-Su agricultural region, not much happens in Chickaloon nowadays and that is sort of the case with this lodge. It's quiet, out of the way, and easily overlooked but I think the owners prefer that.


Besides the tractor art, there was also all sorts of animals walking around: goats, alpacas, llamas, ducks, and geese. Inside, on the specials board, was an announcement that today one of the specials was a goat burger. Goat is a common meat in most parts of the world, but I rarely see it outside of some specific neighborhoods in Honolulu and the Southwest. I asked the lodge owner where her goat was from and she pointed out the window. It turns out this lodge produces much of the food they sell, including the goat, pork and bacon, poultry, and eggs. They also buy all their seasonal produce from people who live up the road from the lodge.


The burger was really good, and the bacon was definitly not mass-produced. They also bake excellent pies (we tried the key lime), and if you get there early they sell both chicken and duck eggs by the dozen, but they sell out quick. Everything far exceeded my expectations and I always like to frequent local food sources, and these folks seemed well connected and deliberate about what they are doing.


If you are heading out the Glenn Highway be sure to stop here. Next time I'm going to order breakfast; their biggest sellers is a hashbrown scramble called "The Valley Trash".

Thai Village

For some reason (I have my theories) Fairbanks has a disproportionate number of Thai restaurants for its size, and they are by and large good places to eat. Thai food is one of the areas in which Anchorage falls short.

We've been to several Thai places and all have their relative strengths and weaknesses. This past week we dined at a Thai restaurant in the the low rent neighborhood of Muldoon.


Housed, like so many ethnic restaurants in Alaska, in a former fastfood restaurant (likely a Pizza Hut in the pipeline days), Thai Village does a couple things really well, and some others just acceptably.


The service was great in the way a true family run restaurant can be; multi-generational, joking, and very slow. I like that, though.


The larb (beef salad) was average. It had a tang to it and crisp lettuce to wrap it with, but it wasn't dusted with rice flour the way I like. I would order it again, though. The pad thai was hot, which was a first in Anchorage, but it was also too sweet for my preferences. Where Thai Village scored was with the panang curry. It was the best I've had in a while, and makes Thai Village worth a stop if you want Thai food on the east side of town.

Downtown Weekend Market

I love street food and think it is the best way to experience a culture's food. Unfortunately, like most US cities, the street food scene in Anchorage is sparse. Besides some reindeer dog carts in downtown and the various coffee 'huts' along the commuter routes there really isn't much to sample around the city.


A bright spot is the Weekend Market held during the summer here in Anchorage. Each Saturday and Sunday the market emerges on a large parking lot that overlooks Ship Creek. The market is mostly for tourists with trinket sellers galore, but there are also some food sellers (local vegetables and seafood) and most importantly with the dozens of vendor trucks, trailors, and carts, this market is the nadir for Anchorage street food.


Some of the highlights are the relatively affordable Alaskan seafood served dozens of ways, good ethnic food such as Hawaiian and Russian, and traditional carnival food in all it's fried and sugar coated glory.

Road Trip: Kodiak and Mill Bay Coffee Roasters

We went to Kodiak for the King Crab Festival a couple weeks ago. The festival itself was a bit underwhelming but Kodiak is an interesting and beautiful place.


There is a coffee shop on the road north out of town called Mill Bay Coffee Roasters. It's in a nondescript strip mall and we actually missed it on our drive out.


The owner is a master pastry chef from France who was the pastry chef for the French president early in his career. He later moved to the US and worked on the East Coast and at this point he began to visit Kodiak regularly to hunt and fish. He fell in love with the place and decided to retire there. Mill Bay is that retirement.


We ate there a couple times and everything was outstanding. There is a limited breakfast and lunch menu (crepes, eggs, waffles, quiches) that is very reasonable priced, especially for Kodiak. Pictured above is the king crab quiche and the seafood pie. The real draw here, though, is the baked goods. They include things like croissants, cinnamon rolls, tarts, eclairs, and a slew of cakes and pies. The pastries at Mill Bay beats the pants off of anything I've come across in recent memory, and it is a true gem on those cold, rainy mornings when you are touring about Kodiak.

Yamaya's Seafood

This is the best Japanese food I've had in a long time. It is very simple, but it is always excellent. The family who own this place are nice people too, and don't be surprised if they bring random stuff out for you to try. This is a favorite spot for the international air crews, so it's not unusual to have the place filled with native Japanese speakers.


The restaurant is in an old house off 6th Ave. in downtown Anchorage. It is very informal and the menus are written on the walls, so be sure and look around everywhere before you order. The prices are good, too, especially considering their focus on fresh seafood.

We had:

shrimp tempura udon soup
fish cake
grilled whole squid
gyoza
fried idiot fish

and some dried king salmon fin sake...

...which was as nasty as it sounds.