“Don’t miss the food carts,” said pretty much everyone when I mentioned I was visiting Portland.
Having never been to a city in the US where semipermanent food cart encampments were allowed (cities in China, Korea, Malaysia, etc, sure, but not in the US) I sort of blew off this advice, figuring they meant something like a food truck gathering, which in LA is now synonymous with hordes of hipsters, $20 parking, and hour-long lines.
What they meant, it turns out, is that on random street corners throughout the city, the edges of parking lots are full of trailers, RVs, converted buses, wheel-less or wheeled trucks, or tiny houses, serving food from all over the world. They have weird hours and even weirder seating options, and look a lot like the encampments at Slab City, but their menus are overall pretty mouthwatering-looking.
There’s a lot of emphasis on Middle Eastern food, and Egyptian and Iraqi food in particular. Dinner one night was a sabich, billed as a ‘Jewish-Iraqi breakfast’ – a soft, warm pita oozing a mixture of egg, hummus, pickled mango sauce, and eggplant guts all over the potatoes inside. This was from Wolf & Bear’s, which looked like one piece of an old-timey caravan, tucked pretty permanently in a parking lot across from a bookstore. I wish I had had time to get into the nuances of the differences between Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian food, as the carts were pretty explicit about specifying their origin, but their menus looked identical: falafel, kabobs, hummus, dolmas, tabbouleh, etc.
On a different day, a failed attempt at eating at “the only Mauritian restaurant in the US” (apparently it has a ‘Closed When Out Of Food’ policy) led me to hold myself over with some Haitian meat pies and a papaya smoothie at Caribbean Kitchen next door. The pies’ dough was perfectly light and flaky, graduating slowly into a melty symbiosis with the meat filling, which felt like all its spices had been muted.
Thus over-breaded, I stole bites here and there of my companion’s vegan hiyashi ramen, an angry red cauldron of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven spice), oil, mushrooms, cabbages, and very al dente noodles. The overall effect was somewhere between that chunky red pepper paste served at dim sum restaurants and a mushroom salad dressed in oil. Not one to shy away from excessive oil, my lunch the next day was a plate of meat oil-soaked kielbasa, pierogi, and cabbage stew from a cart at the Saturday market.
Some non-food cart adventures included a vegetarian combination Ethiopian lunch plate, trendy ‘Korean-fusion restaurant‘ (I put this in quotes because there was very little Korean about my honey-anchovy encrusted potato chips, Dungeness crab seaweed noodle concoction, or the okay-I-guess-vaguely-Korean-esque scordalia pancake topped with gravlax and greens), a ramen joint that didn’t skimp on the Sichuan peppercorns (yes, Sichuan hot-pot-inspired ramen!), and an outrageously tasty goat-milk/marionberry jam/habanero ice cream. Right before leaving, I enjoyed a neat, spare, and walnut-brea-accompanied Swedish hash with trout, getting to the restaurantmere minutes before the rest of Portland.
It sounds like I had a world-traipsingly good time, and I did, in a way. If you want a the most accessible tour of the culinary surface of the world, you can’t do much better than Portland. However, my travel-scarred tastebuds tell me that it was just that: the surface. Nowhere were my preconceptions or preferences challenged, my mouth heated to more than a ‘mild’ (except for in the case of the Sichuan peppercorn ramen), or my horizons expanded. Everything I ate was well within the comfort zone of the average mildly adventurous American. Not once did I have to try and parse an unfamiliar language or a questionable translation, make an embarrassing faux-pas, or feel like a visitor to a different culture’s space.
It felt like everything was being marketed TO me -or at least the part of me that exists as a white American culinary tourist. I was the intended audience. Not the people whose culture’s food was being marketed.
I’m not knocking Portland for this, necessarily. If you want to make the most money, you obviously want to market to your biggest, well, market, and in Portland, maybe that’s the mainly white American culinary tourist. And maybe this kind of dabbling leads to more people being more open and experimental with food choices. I didn’t start out eating pork knuckles and beef tendons. First I needed to know that pork knuckles and beef tendons were food and were being served at restaurants. Others may need a larger shove than just awareness: first sausage, then blood sausage, then blood cubes, then raw goat blood pudding, for example?
Still, such extreme accessibility, no matter how convenient and at times even tasty, feels weird and a little icky. I’d rather pay a steeper price of admission into another culture’s universe.
My favorite thing about Portland was something that needed no marketing at all: the local berries! Vancouver (Washington)’s farmers market provided me with all the marionberries, tiny strawberries, and Rainier cherries that I could eat, and the flavors were so wholly different from anything available in California that they instantly made the whole trip worth it.
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