In normal times, a secret Portland restaurant opening from a nationally respected chef would be cause for intrigue, if not elation.

Yet the recent under-the-radar opening of Fuku, Momofuku restaurateur and Netflix host David Chang’s fried-chicken chain, felt less like an Easter egg hunt and more like a slap in the face, Portland chefs and restaurant industry advocates said.

On Thursday, food cart consultant Steven Shomler took to Facebook to call on Portland to “say no” to the restaurant, which opened this month through a partnership with a delivery-only operator of “ghost kitchens." By Friday, the call for a temporary boycott had been shared by more than a dozen people in the Portland restaurant industry.

Their frustration stems from both the timing and manner of Fuku’s Portland launch, coming one month after Gov. Kate Brown banned on-premises dining at restaurants and bars across the state. The majority of Oregon’s 155,000 service industry employees were laid off in the days following that March 17 executive order.

“I love David Chang, I just think this is in really poor form,” Shomler said. “I have too many friends who are food cart owners that are struggling, and some of them may never open again. The population only has so much income, most people are only going to do takeout and delivery as a treat, and I’d rather see them spend that money with a local business.”

A little more than a week ago, Fuku unexpectedly appeared on a handful of delivery apps, including Doordash, GrubHub and UberEats, drawing confusion and excitement from fast-food-savvy Portlanders curious to test out the up-and-coming brand. A few placed orders, and one curious customer biked down to see where the food was being prepared, finding two trailers, one plastered with the logos of a half-dozen virtual restaurant brands, the other with “Reef Kitchens” written in large letters on the side. Other addresses appeared to correspond to other trailers operated by Reef Kitchens, an offshoot of a Miami-based parking lot company that sets up virtual restaurants in container-style “vessels,” selling food exclusively through delivery apps.

Ok, so, I placed and order then hopped on my bike to do some recon!!!



I can confirm, as I suspected, this food is coming from one of these two REEF KITCHEN white label food trucks!?!



🤔 pic.twitter.com/IIvDvKbi4m — Cabel (@cabel) April 11, 2020

At first, there was skepticism over whether this Fuku was the same one that garnered major media headlines after its 2015 launch, eventually drawing private investment backing from RSE Ventures. The restaurant currently lists just five brick-and-mortar locations on its website, in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, plus about 10 kiosks at stadiums across America, including Washington, D.C., Miami and Ann Arbor, Michigan. And Reef Kitchens had previously drawn criticism after one of its white-label restaurants appeared on delivery apps as a highly respected (and Michelin-starred) San Francisco Thai restaurant, Kin Khao. (Reef Kitchens says the confusion in the Bay Area was due to a mistake on the delivery apps’ part, not theirs.)

Adding to the intrigue, for the first five days after the launch, Fuku declined to respond to questions from The Oregonian/OregonLive seeking confirmation of the expansion. The only sign that the restaurant might be legit? A trio of emojis — a wink, sunglasses and fried chicken — posted by the company’s Instagram account in response to the question, “Is this real?”

By mid-week, the mystery was solved.

“It is us, yes,” Fuku CEO Alex Muñoz-Suárez confirmed in a phone interview Wednesday. “We as a team at Fuku have been seeing the impact to delivery on our everyday operations, from something that was in the low single digits a year ago, it’s ballooned in some stores to over 30 percent of sales.”

Muñoz-Suárez said he met with four ghost kitchen outfits — Kitchen United, CloudKitchens, Zuul and Reef Kitchens — before awarding a three-month contract to Reef, citing the company’s ability to quickly and inexpensively build their vessels and manage multiple brands within them.

“The advantage Reef has,” Muñoz-Suárez said, “is if you build this kitchen in a certain neighborhood and there’s no business, they can physically move it a couple of blocks away and reestablish themselves in order to drive further sales.”

According to Muñoz-Suárez, Fuku looked to Portland for a number of reasons. His team was aware of Portland’s cart-loving reputation and wanted to test delivery in a city where Fuku didn’t already have a brick-and-mortar. And the larger Momofuku group already had an affinity for the Northwest — Chang met with several Portland chefs for the second season of his Netflix Show, “Ugly Delicious.”

“If you live in downtown Portland, walking to a food truck and picking up food already makes a lot of sense,” Muñoz-Suárez said.

But Reef Kitchens vessels don’t support walk-up business. And the vessels themselves tend to appear in parking lots with no advance notice, not unlike the mysterious obelisks in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Justin Hintze, operator of Southeast Portland’s Jojo food cart, which has spent the past month giving away more than 1,000 fried-chicken sandwiches to laid off service industry workers and others, was disappointed to see Chang’s name attached to the “bizarre and secretive” expansion.

“We have high expectations for him, but this seems like sort of a nameless, faceless empire,” Hintze said. “They think Portland is a good market for them to target because it’s open to food trucks, but I think what they’re missing is that we like local food trucks. I don’t think we’re very interested in having a national chain open a cart. That’s not fun or quirky.

“You don’t get the sense that they’re making these decisions on a human level.”

Food cart owners weren’t the only ones perplexed by the timing.

“This is weird to see as a restaurant that’s struggling,” said Maya Lovelace, chef at Northeast Portland’s sister southern restaurants Yonder and Mae. ”We can’t even sell fried chicken right now, because our staff isn’t comfortable leaving their houses, and here come these people swooping in with a ghost kitchen format to sell apparently really bad fried chicken sandwiches with a brand name attached to them? It’s just weird.”

Muñoz-Suárez said complaints about Fuku’s “six-months-in-the-making” rollout had some mitigating factors.

“You mentioned unemployment and layoffs,” Muñoz-Suárez told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “One thing that we could potentially be doing is providing opportunities for people to get back to work. I understand and am sensitive and super respectful to coming in as an additional competitor, but look at the other side, we’re potentially employing people in your hometown.”

But it wasn’t clear that Fuku’s new business model had actually added any Portland jobs. The restaurant’s chicken and sauces are being shipped in refrigerated trucks from New York, Muñoz-Suárez said. And the existing Reef Kitchens sites — which already sport logos for a half-dozen restaurant brands each — are operating, like all Oregon businesses, under a state-mandated requirement to separate employees by at least six feet. Reef Kitchens did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

A downtown Portland truck operated by Reef Kitchens, a Miami-based operator of "ghost kitchens," which serve food from a half dozen virtual restaurants. Last week, the parking lot company spin-off launched a Portland partnership with Fuku, a fried-chicken restaurant from celebrity chef David Chang.Michael Russell | The Oregonian

Adding to the early missteps, customer reviews on social media described Fuku’s chicken as “cold/chewy” and “dry,” with many orders featuring missing or incorrect items. Responses were similarly harsh to an Instagram post from Fuku officially announcing the launch. According to Muñoz-Suárez, Reef Kitchens cooks have undergone video training to help dial in the company’s recipes during the soft launch.

On Thursday, I ordered Fuku delivery to my house, with the food arriving 10 minutes ahead of schedule, perhaps because of the uncharacteristic lack of traffic on local highways and roads due to Gov. Brown’s stay-at-home order. The Fuku bites were oddly gritty, and the waffle fries — Fuku’s direct shot at competitor Chick-fil-A — were missing entirely (our delivery driver, who wore a mask and gloves, said the trailer was “all out”). But the spicy fried chicken sandwich was warm, crisp enough and had a sheen reminiscent of tempura batter. It wasn’t better than the fried-chicken sandwiches at local favorites Jojo, Basilisk or Yonder, but it was better than what I had seen on social media so far, and would rank ahead of most other fast-food sandwiches in its category.

Either way, Portland chefs say they’re ready to go head-to-head with Fuku once the crisis is over.

“The Portland market doesn’t shy away from competition,” Lovelace said. “But this is just kind of a kicking-us-when-we’re-down situation. If they had done a full launch with actually trained employees and a storefront, that would have been dope, I would have been excited.”

Shomler agreed.

“Once this is all cleared up, if someone else wants to move in here and open a restaurant, fantastic,” he said. “I’m all for free enterprise. This is a different time.”

Hintze said he hopes Fuku is listening to the criticism, but he’s not worried about the competition for his cart Jojo, which was among Portland’s best new food carts of 2019.

“We’re going to blow them out of the water,” he said.

-- Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell

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