Berlu Bakery

The peanut milk espresso is the drink that explains Berlu. Roasted peanuts are blended with water and strained, sweetened and salted, poured over ice and topped with espresso, then finished with a sesame-coconut foam of toasted white sesame and coconut milk and a dusting of ground candy. It is a Vietnamese flavour memory rebuilt as a cafe drink, which is roughly what the whole counter is doing.

From tasting menu to pastry case

Berlu opened in Buckman in June 2019 as a Vietnamese tasting-menu restaurant, grown out of pop-ups, run by chef-owner Vince Nguyen after stages at Noma, Coi and Sixpenny. In January 2024 it became a bakery: shorter menu, same instincts, the precision moved from a twelve-course sequence into a pastry case.

Nguyen was nominated for the James Beard Foundation's Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific award in 2022 and won it in 2023, shortly before ending the tasting menu. The pivot was partly about family and partly about returning to the bakery idea he had been circling for years.

Not-too-sweet, in unfamiliar formats

The case is not a translation exercise. Vietnamese ingredients arrive inside Western pastry shapes: pandan honeycomb cake, mochi pandan waffle, berry-lychee tart, clove canelé, peach roll-up cake, pineapple cardamom cake, mung bean cassava canelés, and rice-flour cakes under caramelised fruit. Sweetness is kept low and texture does the work, and seasonal specials move the case along rather than holding it to a fixed list.

The coffee side grew with the 2024 shift. Beans come from the Portland roaster Extracto, pulled on a La Marzocco Linea PB that was dialled in with the roaster's help, so the drinks are built with the same intent as the bakes rather than bolted on afterwards.

What to order

Start with the bánh bò nướng, the grilled pandan honeycomb cake, which Portland Monthly named one of the city's iconic dishes. The mochi pandan waffle and the clove canelé are the other two that show what Nguyen does with texture, and the berry-lychee tart is the one to take if you want fruit.

Then order the peanut milk espresso. Weekly specials shift with the season, and pre-order boxes have offered a one-of-everything route through the case for anyone who cannot choose. Bún Berlu, from the savoury side of the kitchen, was named among The Oregonian's best dishes of 2025.