Endorffeine

Jack Benchakul, a former biochemist and pastry chef, opened this Far East Plaza counter in summer 2015 with his cousin Ttaya Tuparangsi, working the bar himself so that every drink comes from the same hands. He draws on the Thai street vendor tradition of doing very few things extremely well, a discipline that shows in a menu with no sweeteners offered and no milk added to pour overs.

Beans rotate through a slate of outside roasters, Sey, Drop, Ilse, Prolog, April and Leaves among them, a lineup that has evolved since the shop's early days sourcing exclusively from Portland's Heart Roasters. Benchakul wants customers to understand that a person is behind every cup rather than a machine cranking them out, the kind of insistence that has kept this small counter a fixture of Chinatown's food court scene for a decade.