Sustainable, small-batch, locavore, a lot like Brooklyn. Yes, those are some of the obvious, overused descriptors for Portland, Oregon’s food. And they’re valid. But let’s move on to the fun part.
Portland’s high-quality dining scene is a 12-year-old’s dream. It’s calibrated for adults who have the munchies at all hours. And it’s about chefs with mad skills, capable of making highly refined food, letting loose and getting down with fryer grease.
Consider Sunshine Tavern, the family-friendly pub run by Jenn Louis, who was named a 2012 Food & Wine Best New Chef for her work at Portland’s Lincoln eatery. Sunshine Tavern, just down the street from Andy Ricker’s Whiskey Soda Lounge and Pok Pok, has a shuffleboard table and free-play Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong machines. There’s a soft-serve ice-cream machine behind the bar. There’s fried chicken with a yeasted semolina waffle and clover honey. There’s a foot-long corn dog from famed local salumeria Olympic Provisions.
“That’s a lot of pork,” our waiter said approvingly when we ordered the pork belly sandwich and opted for the $3 upgrade that turned our side of fries into a side of gravy cheese fries. Italian sausage gravy cheese fries. Colossal.
Speaking of “a lot of pork,” this is what a friendly stranger at Cartopia, one of Portland’s many food-cart pods, volunteered after he overheard us talking about Lardo, the restaurant across the street: “That used to be a food cart. I haven’t been yet, but their specialty is they fry everything in lard.” That was only a slight exaggeration. (If you visit Lardo, get the dirty fries with pork scraps and marinated peppers.)
It’s worth noting that we were talking to this stranger while we were eating a Frito pie with brisket chili from the Bubba Bernie’s cart, which also serves bacon chili, next to a pizza cart and a cart that specializes in French fries drenched in all sorts of sauces. (What is the hipster heart-attack rate in Portland anyway?)
And the night before, we had hit Cartlandia, a food-cart cluster (with a beer garden), where we found J Mo’s Sandwich Shack and happily feasted on a Dirty Mo sandwich: fried spaghetti and meatballs on garlic cheese bread. And Cartlandia also has carts with two-pound burritos, ham/salami/pepperoni/three-cheese sandwiches and hot dogs covered in nacho-cheese sauce and jalapenos. And over at the enormous Alder Street food-cart area, we were most impressed by Nong’s Khao Man Gai’s Thai chicken over rice and Euro Trash’s chicken piri-piri sandwich, but one of our travel companions opted for fried chicken from Flogene’s Home Cookin’ after seeing that it was the only Alder Street cart with a five-star average on Yelp.
Although every food cart we visited served generous portions, Portland eaters manage to save room for heavy desserts. At Cartopia, we tried sublime, flaky-crusted peach and berry hand pies from Whiffies Fried Pies (savory pies also available) and even better walnut/honey/cardamom/coriander and avocado/sea salt milkshakes from Perierra Creperie.
Ice cream is essentially its own food group in Portland, a city that has even Brooklyn beat with its off-the-wall frozen-treat flavor combinations. At Salt & Straw, which started with a cart and now also has two storefronts, lines can stretch out the door for hours. But the sharp staff keeps things moving, giving customers tastes of whatever they want, helping them choose between fantastic flavors like goat cheese with marionberry habanero jam or almond brittle with salted ganache. And there’s truly chef-driven ice cream here. As part of a Salt & Straw collaboration with local restaurants, Naomi Pomeroy and Mika Paredes of Beast created a smoked salt with chocolate-covered feuilletine ice cream (part of a seasonal chef’s series available for mail-order purchases at shop.saltandstraw.com). And you can order a milkshake with one of Ricker’s drinking vinegars. (Get on this in Brooklyn, Blue Marble and Van Leeuwen.)
At the new What’s the Scoop shop, we loved the peanut butter curry ice cream, served with a brownie and caramel and chocolate sauces, and topped with a marshmallow that the guy behind the counter torched for us. At the 50 Licks cart, we pondered the maple bacon ice cream before ordering a Stumptown coffee ice cream and a passion fruit with Szechuan peppercorns sorbet.
All this talk about food carts and ice cream isn’t meant to diminish the bona fides of Portland’s solid restaurants. This city takes eating out seriously, all day long. At Tasty n Sons, an eatery that goes all-in and all-over-the-map for brunch (like Michael’s Genuine in Miami, DW Bistro in Las Vegas and Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore), we showed up at 10 a.m. on a random rainy Friday and were told it was a one-hour wait. After we ate the Burmese red pork stew, the North African sausage and the sweet biscuits with Oregon marionberries and whipped cream, we understood why.
And down the street from Tasty n Sons is Lincoln. Because Portland often gets compared to Brooklyn, we’ll make this easy for you. Lincoln, which Louis and husband David Welch opened in 2008, is the kind of deeply pleasing neighborhood restaurant that can easily hang with Saul, Buttermilk Channel, Colonie and Marlow & Sons. It’s the type of joint that will make you eat your vegetables (we were dazzled by a salad with zucchini and ricotta salata) and is confident enough to make the one pasta choice of the day a ricotta cavatelli with rabbit ragu (excellent).
This food is not at all fussy, but it’s fancy enough for almost any occasion, no matter how old or young you are. It’s food from a chef who can cook anything but who has no desire to make eating out intimidating, a chef who understands the importance of fun. On Aug. 15, Louis is doing a special dinner at Lincoln, five courses featuring ice cream, granita and sherbet. From Salt & Straw.
With Erin Franzman
Feast on this
Looking for a good weekend to eat in Portland? Feast Portland, a food festival presented by Bon Appetit, is on Sept. 20-23. In addition to local chefs including Jenn Louis, Naomi Pomeroy, Greg and Gabrielle Denton (Ox), Johanna Ware (Smallwares) and Patrick Fleming (Boke Bowl), events will feature Inaki Aizpitarte of Paris’ Le Chateaubriand, San Francisco offal wizard Chris Cosentino, Charleston “lardcore” enthusiast Sean Brock and Portland stars turned New York sensations Andy Ricker and Matthew Lightner. Also traveling from New York to Portland that weekend: Marco Canora, April Bloomfield, Amanda Freitag, Seamus Mullen, Eddie Huang, Anita Lo, Josh Wesson and many more. feastportland.com