A pho restaurant in Portland, Oregon, has shuttered due to anonymous odor complaints, sparking a firestorm of backlash against the city’s smell codes, which residents and lawmakers slammed as potentially discriminatory.
After repeated anonymous odor complaints filed to the city and the threat of a hefty fine, Pho Gabo’s northeast Portland location closed its doors to customers Feb. 3. Once city officials learned about the issue in early March, they halted all subsequent investigations of odor code violations related to food establishments in order to re-examine the policy.
Pho Gabo owner Eddie Dong told NBC News that he first received notice that a neighbor had complained of the restaurant’s “cooking odors” in September 2022. The complaint caught him off guard; by then, Dong had been serving Vietnamese food at the restaurant for more than five years without incident. The sole complainer, a neighbor who lived several houses down from the restaurant, has not been identified.
“They complained to the city, and the city came down,” Dong said. “They say ‘odor,’ but it’s just food, grilling meat.”
The restaurant is one of three Pho Gabo locations Dong owns, but it is the only one in a mixed-use residential area of the city.
Portland’s odor code dictates that within certain zones, “continuous, frequent, or repetitive odors may not be produced. The odor threshold is the point at which an odor may just be detected.” In other words, an inspector evaluates it based on their own sense of smell.
Multiple inspectors have visited the restaurant in at least 10 different site visits over two years, according to public records released to NBC News by the Portland Bureau of Development Services. “The odors detected smell like a wok dish,” one inspector wrote in October 2023.
Dong tried a number of fixes, including deep cleaning the kitchen hoods and exhaust system, installing charcoal filters, and even cooking meat at his other locations and driving it to…
Read the full article here
