Takibi

Takibi — the word means bonfire in Japanese — is a wood-fired Japanese restaurant at 2275 NW Flanders Street in the Northwest District, built inside the United States headquarters of Snow Peak, the Japanese outdoor-lifestyle brand with more than sixty years of heritage behind it. The room was designed by Skylab Architecture around traditional Japanese timber framing and century-old Douglas fir beams reclaimed from a Portland-area warehouse, with dark wood floors, an open kitchen, a bar and patio seating arranged around fire pits. The restaurant closed temporarily during 2024 and Snow Peak announced its return that October, welcoming the community back with a relaunched kitchen; ramen is now led by Yoshimitsu Seki, who comes from Niigata prefecture, the birthplace of Snow Peak. By day Takibi runs a ramen lunch built on long-simmered broths and snow-aged noodles, and by night it becomes a chef-driven dining room of wood-fired plates, sushi, sashimi, tempura and a rotating omakase with a vegan version alongside it. It has been named to Esquire's top 25 bars in the United States and Portland Monthly's top 50 restaurants, both in 2022.

The bar keeps one of the city's deepest sake selections, sourced from Niigata, and gives non-alcoholic drinks their own menu section headed simply "N/A". All four are built with the same seasonal logic as the kitchen. Natsu Gori ($13) is a shaved-ice drink using Dr. Zero Zero amaro with watermelon, lime and a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk. Swizzle Me This ($12) combines Ghia with peach shrub, mint and a salted lime soda. Early Bird ($11) uses Seedlip with lemon, coconut cream, poppyseed, demerara and nutmeg. Chura-Sun ($10) is Wilderton Earthen with caramelised pineapple, lime and demerara. A non-alcoholic beer is listed at $6, though the menu does not name the brand. Travel Oregon, surveying the city for non-drinkers in November 2022, wrote that earthy zero-proof drinks are the perfect complement to the restaurant's Japanese-inspired, season-centred fare. Takibi serves Wednesday through Monday and closes Tuesdays, with lunch from 11.30am and the last dinner seating at 8.30pm; reservations run through Resy.