Crepe-crafter solves restaurant riddle

Mysterious eatery with canine moniker has an offbeat origin

By Jacob Quinn Sanders

The Portland Tribune, Jul 30, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

A talking husky and a dancing Maltese. Whatever.

The important thing is that the mystery is solved.

The Southeast Portland restaurant enigma, Husky or Maltese Whatever, does indeed have a story Ñ and that story has an ending.

A discussion about the restaurant that purports to serve French and Italian food Ñ whatever Ñ yet never seems to be open began in an online journal and continued in the Tribune earlier this week. Web postings and e-mails leapt across cyberspace, attempting to land on any little nugget of information about the place.

At the risk of spoiling the fun of this imaginative guesswork, the restaurant got its name as the result of a miscommunication between the owner and her accountant Ñ and the instinct of the Vietnamese former inmate who painted the sign.

The reason it never seems to be open is because the owner, Limin Tian, who goes by the nickname Abby, only opens the eatery in the winter months. In the spring and summer, she makes more money selling crepes out of a trailer in the shadow of the Fox Tower downtown.

“Just like there’s different kinds of dogs, there’s different kinds of food,” she said, making her first crepe of the day recently at Snow White House on Southwest Ninth Avenue and Yamhill Street. “If you have good food, people all love it. Same with dogs.”

Tian signed a 15-year lease for a restaurant in the Powell Center strip mall at Southeast 36th Avenue and Powell Boulevard, not too far from where she lives, early last year. Trying to think of a name so her accountant could register it and file for a county health license, she mentioned how much she loved her dogs, Sparkler and Fluffy, and how nice it would be to include them in the name.

“Which one?” her accountant asked.

“The husky, Maltese, whatever,” she said.

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