Year 3: Midnight Diner Edition
Join us from January 19 to February 1, 2022 at restaurants around Portland, Oregon to celebrate cross-Pacific collaborations around food! We are highlighting the spirit of reverence and creativity around food that Kobe and Portland share!
For two weeks, you can get a one-of-a-kind meal we’re called the Umi Kobe Combo, a Happy Meal for the late-night crowd featuring singular Umi Ramen Spirit served as an ice cold Kobe-style highball with a yakisoba-pan: yakisoba noodles tucked into a tender milk bun. Each restaurant will bring their own unique spin on this classic Japanese after-school snack!
Participating Restaurants:
Expatriate, 5424 NE 30th Avenue, Portland
Oma’s Hideaway, 3131 SE Division Street, Portland
Obon Shokudo, 720 SE Grand Avenue, Portland
Sunrice at Deadshot, 2133 SE 11th Avenue, Portland
A few spots will run just yakisoba-pan without the highball:
Oyatsupan, 16025 SW Regatta Lane, Beaverton
Shizuku, 1235 SW Jefferson Street, Portland
Find just the Umi Ramen Spirit at:
Zilla Sake, 1806 NE Alberta Street, Portland
The Kobe + Portland Project began when two friends, Kyoko Shinohara and Lola Milholland, realized how much spirit their home cities, Portland and Kobe, share around food. With support from the City of Kobe and a host of collaborators, they dream up (almost) annual events to bring contemporary riffs on yakisoba into people’s lives. Each year, artist Jillian Barthold creates zines and illustrations to bring their ideas to life and our Japanese and Japanese American friends share recipes and stories. This ongoing project takes a lot of connectivity to bring into being.
Umi Ramen Spirit has a remarkable story of its own! In 2015 and 2016, distiller Andy Garrison of Stone Barn Brandyworks reached out to Lola to see if she had any ramen noodles she couldn’t sell. He wanted to try to make a whiskey-like spirit using Lola’s excess noodles. Umi was a brand new company, and as Lola was learning the ins and outs of managing her inventory, she was overjoyed to find a home for her soon-to-expire product. Zero waste—a win-win. Over 1,000 days of barrel aging later, they had Umi Ramen Spirit presented by Stone Barn Brandyworks. The flavor? Omoshiroi.
Both Andy and Lola are massive fans of the Japanese sitcom Midnight Diner. In one episode, a character orders yakisoba-pan. In a dreamy state, Andy linked this unusual carb-on-carb snack to the unusual whiskey begun long ago. And so the Umi Kobe Combo was born.
*SPECIAL EVENT: Kobe and Portland Food Artisans Talk Yakisoba and Whiskey*
Join us on January 19, 6-7 pm to kick off our two week project with an instagram live event featuring food artisans from Kobe and Portland! Stone Barns distiller Andy Garrison will describe the making of Umi Ramen Spirit, bartender Reika Ono from Le Bateau in Kobe will demo a Kobe-style highball recipe, and food organizers in Kobe and Portland will share their inspirations behind this project.
Year 2: Doro Sauce and a Cook-at-Home Kit!
After the fun of year one, Kyoko and Lola decided to make this an annual transpacific collaboration between food artisans from Kobe and Portland to showcase the magic of yakisoba!
In February 2021, year two of the pandemic had arrived with vaccines on the horizon but not fully in sight. People were cooking more from home and getting comfortable trying out new recipes, so we partnered with some of our favorite grocery home delivery businesses around Portland to offer cook-at-home yakisoba kits with a zine designed by artist Jillian Barthold. We wanted to share the history of yakisoba sauce, and specifically Doro Sauce, a singular product made by the Oliver Company in Kobe since the 1930s.
Our friend Naomi Molstrom shared her adaptable recipe for yakisoba. We sold over a hundred kits in a matter of days, thanks to partnerships with Fulamingo, MilkRun, Well Spent Market, and Milk Glass Mrkt!
Year 1: Noodles and bread together? Yes! It’s twice as good!
Food artisans from Kobe and Portland came together to make the greatest after-school food of all time, Yakisoba-Pan! Served up around Portland from September 25 to October 2, 2019.
Locations:
Uwajimaya, 10500 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy, Beaverton, OR 97005
Giraffe, inside Cargo at 81 SE Yamhill St, Portland, OR 97214
Oyatsupan Bakers, 16025 SW Regatta Ln, Beaverton, OR 97006
Our amazing friend Jane Hashimawari also shared her recipe for yakisoba-pan with us—yakisoba tucked into a milk bun shaped like a hotdog bun—and served it during one of her beloved Ippai PDX pop-ups.
This was our first year using food to tell a story about the linkages between Kobe and Portland. A few years earlier, Umi CEO Lola Milholland had traveled in a Portland delegation to Japan led by farmer Stacey Givens and Kobe cultural ambassador Kyoko Shinohara. She spent significant time in Kobe where the resonance was palpable (read about her trip here). Here was another city with a passion for local food, a community-driven farmers market, and young people eager to share their creativity. When she learned that Kobe was also the birthplace of yakisoba sauce, she and Kyoko began scheming an annual event to bring food artisans from both cities into collaborative effort. They partnered with the City of Kobe, local businesses, and talented artist Jillian Barthold who created a visual world to help tell their story.
This first year, their focus was on the story of the Kobe sauce industry. They introduced eaters to Portland-made yakisoba and Kobe-made Oliver Doro Sauce through a simple delicacy, and one of their favorite snacks: Yakisoba-pan!