Start with the crispy chicken wings at OK Chicken Khao Soi. | Christine Dong/Eater The past 12 months have been a trying time for the restaurant and bar community, and it’s followed a string of challenging years that have started to feel less like an unusually bad environment for the hosp itality industry and more like a norm. We won’t pretend that scrappiness can overcome every challenge, but Portland’s restaurant scene is innovative and resilient, and the 2026 Eater Award winners, presented by Capital One, reflect that ethos. In a year when prices were raising eyebrows across the country, a Thai restaurant proves that complex, thrilling food doesn’t have to come with an exorbitant price tag. A longtime local chef got a charming new space to thrive and innovate, and an exacting new bakery reminds us that even straightforward bagels can reveal true craftsmanship. Jewish tradition is just one influence at play at the compelling Dream Deli, while rotisserie chicken continues to have its moment courtesy of a stellar Tex-Mex rendition in Woodlawn. Without further delay, here are the 2026 Eater Award winners for Portland. — Brenna Houck, dining editorial manager, and Missy Frederick, dining editorial director Best New Restaurant: OK Chicken Khao Soi Take the former location of Portland’s — if not North America’s — most famous Northern Thai restaurant, combine it with the city’s most prolific and highly decorated Thai chef and restaurateur in Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom, and pepper in an elite local bar manager — co-owner Eric Nelson. Mix it all together, and you get OK Chicken Khao Soi. Those familiar with its predecessor, Pok Pok, will find the space uncannily similar: a covered patio and downstairs service at a small bar, upstairs seating at oilcloth-wrapped tables. Now customers order on paper tabs. It’s casual and intimate, with just the right level of noise to feel like you stumbled into a really good dinner party.  OK Chicken’s menu leans into the flavors of Chiang Mai, starting with crispy chicken wings and two styles of khao soi — one with chicken and another richly prepared with beef. Plates of smoky nam prik makheua (eggplant dip) come with crisp and waxy long beans, green cabbage leaves, and cucumber. A memorable dish of yum moo yang — tender grilled pork shoulder tossed with snappish chunks of celery stalk and leaves as well as sliced onion — relaxes in a funky fish sauce with Thai chiles that sneakily build in your system until your lips hum. An herbal tea slushie refreshes even when mixed with a shot of infused Scotch. Close the meal with longan sticky rice speckled with perilla seeds, showered with crispy coconut and bathed in salted coconut milk that balances the sweetness of the pale lychee fruit and tangy mango ice cream on top. Each bite or sip at OK Chicken is surprising and pleasurable in equal measure. — BH Chef of the Year: Althea Grey Potter, Bar Nouveau Althea Grey Potter is Portland’s culinary comeback kid. She spent years popping around Portland kitchens — Ned Ludd, Lincoln — before landing at Oui, the wine bar holding court in the front room of Division’s SE Wine Collective. When the winery closed in 2020, so did the kitchen, and that was it. Grey Potter was done with the restaurant industry. She worked in cannabis, she sold chile crisp, she catered. But by 2025, she realized she missed wearing the whites.  Those who knew Grey Potter as a chef before she opened Bar Nouveau last fall will find an evolved version of her culinary style at the charmingly DIY, Julia Child-meets-cottagecore restaurant in St. Johns. The kaleidoscopic salads with crunchy bits and zippy dressings and handfuls of fresh herbs remain, but a new round of understated plates will live on in your memory, too, long after any given visit: a gravity-defying deviled egg, not at all sulphuric, with a bouffant of gribiche-imbued yolks and a crowning cornichon; a rye sablé topped with chicken (or sometimes rabbit) liver mousse, plus whichever jam Grey Potter has whipped up using seasonal fruit. A favorite dish from the summer paired a slice of pluot galette with a fudgy bleu d’Auvergne cheese, candied pecans, and an understated frisée salad. Roast chicken is as simple as can be, with gargantuan cloves of confit garlic grown at Sauvie Island’s Pipsqueak Nursery, crispy potatoes, and not much else. This is French fare through a hippie kid’s lens, with an ebullient understanding of hospitality — from the complimentary welcome cocktail to the romance novel delivered with the check. — Brooke Jackson-Glidden, contributor Best New Bakery: Pipsqueak Bagels We’re dough freaks in the Pacific Northwest, geeking out over the hydration percentages of sourdough bread or the flours in our pizza crusts. But some of us have lost the plot when it comes to the bagel. A few tenets of good bagel-making: It must be boiled, it must retain its boil marks (those little bubbles on the sides), and the dough must contain barley malt syrup, which gives the bagels the right toasty sweetness and chew. Good bagels aren’t bready, but they aren’t tough either; they have a clear snap, though not necessarily a true crust.  Madilyn Gibbons has mastered these rules over a decade of home bagel-making. So naturally, when she started selling her bagels at farmers markets and coffee shop pop-ups, the cult following grew. Lines wound around blocks and market stalls. And then she opened her shop on Gladstone in April, and all hell broke loose. Seven months later, weekends still attract hordes awaiting everything rings stacked with Pacific Northwest smoked salmon and fresh dill; rosemary sea salt haloes with scallion schmear; or French toast bagels with apricot jam and whipped cream cheese. Yes, French toast, because Pipsqueak Bagels doesn’t shy away from sweet varieties like blueberry or cinnamon. Gibbons knows her fundamentals, but she’s not a bagel puritan. — BJG Dish of the Year: Rotisserie chicken, LaVerne’s LaVerne’s seems like it’s been around forever, despite its fall 2025 opening. Beer comes in frosty mugs; Old Fashioneds are Wisconsin-style, complete with brandy and neon maraschino cherries, rather than the overserious craft cocktail sort; and the booths felt broken in before the first Woodlawn regulars even waltzed back to the bar. In the recesses, past the mounted barstools and faux-Tiffany hanging lamps, bronzed whole chickens lazily rotate in a rotisserie oven, under a decal that reads, in cursive, “When yer here… yer cooked!” The approach is Tex-Mex, so the chicken comes rubbed in an achiote-ancho marinade similar to the one slathered on pollo rostizado you find in Mexican groceries. The resulting chicken has patches of caramelized skin over a profoundly juicy bird, accompanied by all the necessary fixings: beans, rice, tortillas, salsa, and plenty of lime. Rotisserie chicken’s renewed national popularity may be a recession indicator, but these poultry platters feel luxuriously abundant, served in a satisfyingly homey space in a sea of soullessly minimalist cafes. — BJG Best New Deli: Dream Deli Portland has a history of being undeniably picky with its Jewish delis and bakeries. Purists bemoaned the new-school approach at the woefully short-lived Beetroot, but complained about the tired standards at Kornblatt’s. Now, we have exactly zero true-to-form Jewish delis (though one deserving shoutout will go to Judah’s Delicatessen, the Rose City Park food cart serving the closest I can find to a serviceable old-school pastrami on rye). Enter Division’s Dream Deli, which lives in a magical in-between at the center of a three-way Venn diagram of Jewish dairy restaurant, Italian deli, and imaginative bakery. From Ava Gene’s alum John Bissell and partner Jessie Levine, Dream Deli fills the airiest knishes with peppery cacio e pepe potatoes, tops seasonal kolaches with Rosh Hashanah apples and honey, tosses Oregon Coast sablefish with remoulade for neat-as-a-pin whitefish melts, and, in a Jewish wedding soup, pairs matzo balls (small floaters, as opposed to one honkin’ sinker) with nowhere-near-kosher but certainly tasty Italian pork meatballs. The potato salad, bolstered with schmaltz, so many herbs, and a shower of crispy bits, complements the turkey and Swiss sandwich with rhubarb mustard. Don’t call it a Jewish deli. Call it something new. — BJG Eater is partnering with select Eater Award winners to offer special dining perks now through January 31, 2027. To access these exclusive perks, create an Eater account or download and create an account on the Eater app for iOS. 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