Making handmade pasta is a feat in itself, but rolling out sheets of dough, cutting noodles, and stuffing ravioli all while inside a little food cart is quite another matter. Not only does Nice Time serve the best pasta you’ll find from a food cart, it’s also some of the best pasta in town—and there’s nothing else in Portland quite like it.
It’s not immediately obvious when you look at the cart, but Nice Time serves Italian-style dishes alongside Korean-influenced Italian fare, all with fresh pasta. It’s a style that’s popular in Korea and in Korean American enclaves like Los Angeles; you’ll also find recipes for gochujang pasta or carbonara tteokbokki in NYT Cooking. But Korean-Italian food hasn’t really taken root in restaurants in Portland yet.
“At pasta places, lots of people want meatballs, or carbonara, or alfredo. But I want to open the perspective that there’s a bunch of different kinds of dishes,” says Christopher Kim, who owns Nice Time with his wife, Saki.
Alongside Italian and Italian American staples like fresh tomato, basil, and burrata spaghettini drizzled with bright olive oil, you’ll find Korean-inflected dishes like gochujang ragu ravioli and perilla mushroom pasta. The gochujang ragu combines beef, pork, and tomato with spicy Korean pepper paste, while the ravioli are stuffed with fluffy ricotta. The perilla mushroom fresh fettuccine melds seasonal Oregon mushrooms, from chanterelles to cremini to porcini, with deeply umami mushroom stock, slow-cooked chicken stock, a little cream, and ground perilla seeds for a touch of nuttiness that complements the mushrooms. It’s topped off with crispy enoki mushrooms for textural interest.
Perilla mushroom pasta. Courtesy Nice Time
Nice Time originally opened in fall 2025 at the Carts on Foster pod, then moved to its current location at the pod behind Steeplejack Brewing’s Hawthorne location in February of this year. The Portland cart is actually the third eatery to bear the Nice Time name—the two original Nice Time restaurants are located in Korea. The restaurants abroad are owned by chef Noah Han, who consulted on the menu for Portland’s Nice Time location, traveling from Korea for multi-day recipe development sessions. “We’d work from 8 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the morning,” says Chris.
Han worked with Daniel Humm, the co-founding chef of Michelin-starred restaurant The NoMad (now closed) and three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York City. The name Nice Time takes inspiration from Humm’s hospitality group name, Make It Nice, as does the cart’s slogan, “Have a Nice Pasta at Nice Time.”
Chris Kim at work at Nice Time. Courtesy Nice Time
Fresh pasta made in the cart. Courtesy Nice Time
Beyond the Korean-Italian fusion dishes, the seafood options on the menu are well worth exploring. To make the shrimp bisque oil spaghettini, the Kims sautée shrimp heads and shells in olive oil to create a potent shrimp oil, then layers that flavor with shallots, torched cherry tomatoes, and garlic butter. The pasta gets topped with a few tomatoes, breadcrumbs, a handful of arugula, and perfectly poached shrimp.
Saki, who grew up in Japan, had the idea to garnish the lemon butter crab pasta with shiso for a touch of Japanese influence. “It’s refreshing but earthy, so it can really change the flavor,” she says. “In Japan, Japanese food is often blended with Italian cooking, so we’re thinking about having more Japanese ingredients as well.”
Right now, there are only two pasta shapes on the menu—the fettuccine and the spaghettini—plus the ravioli. The pasta is made with just a few ingredients: Caputo 00 flour, extra virgin olive oil, egg yolks, salt, and water. The Kims match the type of pasta to the sauce, pairing lighter sauces with spaghettini and heavier flavors with the fettuccine. They’re working on a fresh squid ink spaghetti that they plan to launch soon. Each batch of fresh noodles takes up to five hours to make, the Kims say, not including an overnight rest.
“A lot of people like fresh pasta, and the texture, you can’t really beat it,” says Chris. “Even though it’s challenging, I prefer to have the better flavor for the customers.”
Nice Time, 3757 SE Hawthorne, Thurs-Sun noon-6:30 pm, @nicetime.pdx
Dining and Cooking