When it moves its North American headquarters and flagship store to NW 23rd Avenue this spring, Japanese outdoors brand Snow Peak won’t just be selling its stylish yet functional camping and backpacking gear.

The new store, which will take over the longtime Kitchen Kaboodle space this spring, will make room for a new restaurant inspired by dinners eaten around the campfire.

Takibi — Japanese for “bonfire” — aims to be Portland’s first “mountain izakaya,” with a seasonal menu cooked over binchotan coals from restaurant partner Submarine Hospitality (Ava Gene’s, Tusk) and chef Alex Kim, plus a cocktail menu from notable Portland-based bartender Jim Meehan.

Kim has an extensive history with Japanese cuisine, including time spent at the two-Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant Kajitsu in New York, the San Francisco izakaya Rintaro and even the seaweed harvester Larch Hanson in Maine. In 2017, he moved to Kyoto, where he worked at Kappo Sakamoto, a small restaurant in the Gion District, as well as Kikunoi Honten, a three-Michelin starred kaiseki spot run by chef Yoshihiro Murata.

It’s the first Portland bar project for Meehan, who moved to Portland in 2014, telling The Oregonian at the time that he wanted to “ingratiate myself with the community” before hatching a bar projects of his own. In the six years since, the founder of famed Manhattan speakeasy Please Don’t Tell has written “Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual” (his second book after “The PDT Cocktail Book,”) opened and closed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Chicago bar Prairie School and consulted on bars across the country and around the world.

Speaking with Portland Monthly, which first reported the Takibi news last week, Meehan said he had “deep reverence for the culture and rituals” of Japan, a country he has visited an estimated seven times. Still, “inspiration must come from within,” he said, “otherwise you risk appropriating something you do not fully understand and cannot faithfully recreate.”

Snow Peak’s new flagship store, which is expected to open in late spring, was designed by Portland’s Skylab Architecture, and will showcase the brand’s entire line of Japanese-designed outdoors gear. Inspiration for the space is based on the concept of “dwelling outside,” with dark wood floors, live plants and traditional Japanese timber framing century-old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a Portland-area warehouse.