Portland’s Kachka Is Opening a Cocktail Bar at the Former Aimsir Distilling Space

One of Portland’s restaurants whose reputation precedes itself the world over will take over a glittering bar space in Northeast Portland. Kachka, the vodka-soaked fine dining outfit from husband-and-wife team chef Bonnie Frumkin Morales and Israel Morales, is expanding into the former Aimsir Distilling’s the Emerald Room at 2117 NE Oregon Street. The Portland Business Journal reports the hopeful opening date for the to-be-named project is early summer. “It just felt like kismet,” Frumkin Morales tells Eater Portland. “It felt like an obvious, natural expansion.”

Because this wasn’t a planned move this year, Frumkin Morales says it’s all still TBD. The couple is spending the time to get intention from what the team wants to do and what Portland is missing. No matter what, the goal is to showcase vodka, and the food menu will be complementary. Think seafood, Frumkin Morales’s go-to selections — though she doesn’t want to give the impression she’s opening a caviar bar. “Vodka doesn’t get attention in the spirits world,” Frumkin Morales says. “It doesn’t get appreciated for flavor and texture. A bar focus lets us talk about that more. Still, we’ll definitely serve caviar.”

This move means Kachka indeed can expand its in-house vodka distilling, namely its famous horseradish vodka. That product, sold at the business’s grab-and-go outpost Kachka Lavka alongside frozen dumplings and other items, had been licensed by other distillers in the past. The Moraleses had already leased a 2,100-square-foot space in the Aimsir building to begin distilling in 2023. It was already in use for dumpling making, then in January, the distilling began. One of Aimsir’s owners reached out to the Moraleses to offer this second space, including all the equipment. “It was not on our bingo card for this year,” Frumkin Morales told the Journal, “but it was such a great opportunity to take on.”

Bill Addison/Eater

This move also means Aimsir’s 1,500-square-foot Emerald Room, and the hopeful vegan dim sum Jade Rabbit collab, have gone the way of the dinosaur for good. The tasting room closed earlier in 2025, following financial issues at the company, and Jade Rabbit found a new home on Belmont Street. Jamie Bones, one of Aimsir’s distillers, will become the beverage director for Kachka in this new space; he is also the bar manager for the original Kachka. The distillery, and this bar, will work to highlight ingredients, rather than, say, what Frumkin Morales says the restaurant is all about: her family’s story. “Caviar, you can get into varietals, types of sturgeons. Oysters can get into varietals. Tinned fish, this specific cod liver,” she says. “We’ll, no pun intended, distill down to the singular things.”

Broadly, Kachka is considered one of Portland’s most high-caliber examples of the city’s restaurant talent. In 2018 the restaurant took over the tremendous former Goat Blocks location, where the market outpost lives upstairs. In a retrospective on Kachka’s 10th anniversary, the restaurant continues “celebrating the cuisine of Frumkin Morales’s Belarusian family, but also the broader cuisines and tangled foodways of the former Soviet republics.” Frumkin Morales says this new part of the business is just as exciting to her as the restaurant. “Really, what we’re about, is sharing this foodway, this sorely misrepresented cuisine,” she says. “This is exciting to communicate more facets of this.”