Food Trucks

by Heather Shouse

  This liberal mecca becoming synonymous with street food was no accident. Encouraged and supported by the local powers that be, the number of food carts in Portland has hovered in the high three hundreds since the early 2000s. When 2009 saw a spike of nearly a hundred new carts hitting the streets, it was pretty clear that Portlanders considered this industry integral to their experience. So much so that when the Portland Plan launched in 2010, the twenty-five-year city plan included food carts among topics like economic development, historic resources, and sustainability. Through surveys, community workshops, and public hearings with the Portland City Planning Commission, the organization committed to supporting and growing Portland’s green-and-hip reputation.

  In the past few years Portland’s food carts have settled into spots alongside one another, joining forces to become a dining destination as opposed to splitting up throughout the city and decreasing their foot traffic. Environmental health supervisor Jon Kawaguchi points to the downtown parking lot at Southwest 5th and Stark as the first cluster of carts, with records showing Saigon To Go and King Burrito operating there in 1997. Brett Burmeister of the exhaustive blog www.FoodCartsPortland.com agrees, citing that intersection as one of the first to really grow from one or two carts to more than a dozen. “Downtown you’ve always had the taco carts, hot dog carts, the small push carts, and the Asian carts, but within the past six years it really took off,” Burmeister says. “Now Portland has started to embrace these pods, where a private investor rents out spaces in his parking lot so that instead of having one or two of these carts on the edge, you have ten to fifteen all together, and in all sorts of different neighborhoods, not just downtown.” Roger Goldingay is one of those investors. A self-described “real estate rehabilitator” for nearly thirty years, Goldingay bought a plot of land on the corner of North Mississippi and Skidmore a few years ago, tore down the dilapidated building sitting on the property, paved it with permeable asphalt, added tables and chairs, and invited ten food carts to the pod he dubbed Mississippi Marketplace. “I was looking at the food cart scene in Portland, which isn’t always user-friendly because you buy food and you stand on the sidewalk where people jostle you. There’s no place to get out of the weather, no restroom facilities where you could wash your hands,” Goldingay says. “I just thought the whole scene was not as nice as it could be, so I wanted to develop a community gathering place, make a positive impact, and draw people to the neighborhood. And people seem to have really taken to it. We’ve got food carts, beer from the adjacent bar on the lot, the outdoors. This … is totally Portland right here.”

  Potato Champion

  FIND IT: SE 12th Ave. and Hawthorne Blvd., Portland, Oregon

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.potatochampion.com

  Must be last call. Every few minutes another crew of buzzed hipsters staggers into the Portland food truck “pod” known affectionately as Cartopia, claiming a spot at a picnic table after making the rounds to the seven mobile eateries ringing the lot. Raven-haired roller derby girls weave through the crowd on skates, earning the attention of a gang of bike messenger types, the kind that wear heavy chain-link locks as belts and leave their pant legs rolled up long after they’ve hopped off their fixed-gear bikes. Scoping goes hand in hand with eating here, and for the under-forty set that prefers whiskey to wine, Johnny Cash to Coldplay, and DIY to ING, there’s no better place for either.

  Among this hourly wage crowd of waitresses, thrift store cashiers, and record shop stockers, local musicians and artists blend in seamlessly. The mop-topped drummer for the electro-rock trio Reporter seems to know at least half of the hundred or so in this weekend-night crowd, but not just because of the band’s growing popularity. Mike McKinnon is the fry guy, the owner of the Potato Champion trailer, and the driving force behind turning a parking lot on Portland’s Southeast Side into the most happening hotspot in the city’s rowdy late-night scene.

  “Ever since I spent some time in Holland and Belgium in 2001, I[’ve been] obsessed with late-night frites places,” Mike says, keeping one eye on his growing line and one on the Amélie lookalike manning his fryer. “I always bitched about it with my friends, ‘Why doesn’t Portland have a fry place?’ It’s stupid, because there are so many bars, so we obviously really needed a fry place.”

  After about seven years of lamenting, Mike put up and shut up. He set about the first order of business: coining the name “Potato Champion” in honor of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, an eighteenth-century French chemist who managed to convince his countrymen that potatoes didn’t cause leprosy, as was widely believed, and that the spuds should be eaten instead of just tossed to hogs. With a name like that, there was no turning back; Mike found a little trailer on Craigslist and spent his days fixing it up into a frymobile and his nights perfecting the Belgian-style frites that kick-started his obsession. With only the lingering taste from his travels and a bit of pizzeria experience, he went through months of trial and error before arriving at the perfect result. Russets are his go-to potato (“they don’t brown up too much and they have the right sugar/starch content”), and he only fries in rice bran oil (“high smoke point, awesome flavor, a little expensive but lasts longer”). And in true Belgian frites fashion, the fries get a double-dip—first a quick blanch in the fryer and then a minimum twenty-minute rest, followed by a longer fry just before serving. A scoop of the perfectly crisp, golden-brown beauties overflows from a paper cone, with a small cup of dipping sauce alongside. The nine different condiments are one part nod to Belgian tradition (Dutch mayo, peanut sauce) and two parts experiments in Portlanders’ sense of adventure (tarragon-anchovy mayo, rosemary-truffle ketchup). Mike has a seemingly endless supply of creative sauces up his sleeve, but the fourteen by sixteen-foot trailer has barely enough room to hold the necessities as it is. On a Friday and Saturday night combined, about a thousand pounds of potatoes are sold out of that little truck, and thanks to Mike’s hugely popular addition of the Canadian classic poutine to the menu, those fries have to make room for electric tabletop warmers that hold ten quarts of free-range chicken gravy and ten quarts of meat-free gravy (he can’t ignore Portland’s hefty vegetarian population). A handful of fries topped with a ladle of gravy and a sprinkling of cheese curds can undo just about any damage done during the night’s double-fisted drinking adventures, or at least help counter tomorrow’s revenge.

  Catering to the night owls was always the business model of Cartopia’s oldest food truck, El Brasero, a friendly family-owned trailer that deals in Mexican standards, but when Mike rolled into the lot with Potato Champion in spring of 2008 he set up a tented eating area, complete with heat lamps to combat Portland’s cool and drizzly weather. Shortly after, Dustin Knox opened Perierra Creperie adjacent to Potato Champion and built about a dozen wooden picnic tables for the lot, which soon became home to a total of seven different food trucks, all banding together to stay open until at least three or four in the morning to lure the postbar crowd. Wood-fired pizza, N’awlins po’ boys, steak burritos, sweet or savory fried pies, gourmet crepes, and even spaghetti bolognese are up for grabs, but if the size of Potato Champion’s line is any indication, Portland’s best drinkers are a lot like Belgium’s.

  Potato Champion Poutine

  Serves 4

  FRIES

  5 Russet potatoes

  Rice bran oil, for frying

  GRAVY

  1 yellow onion, chopped

  1 small shallot, minced

  3 cloves garlic, minced

  3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

  1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

  ¼ cup unsalted butter

  ¼ cup all-purpose flour

  1 quart chicken stock

  Salt

  1 cup cheese curds or queso fresco

  To make the fries, cut the potatoes into sticks about ⅜ inch thick. Rinse with cold water to remove the excess starch, then pat dry with paper towels. Let them continue to dry while you heat enough rice bran oil to cover the fries
in a large, heavy stockpot or tabletop fryer to 325°F. Carefully drop the fries into the pot and fry for 5 minutes. Remove using a wire basket or slotted spoon, transfer to a paper towel–lined plate, and let them sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.

  To make the gravy, add the onion, shallot, garlic, vinegar, and pepper to a large stockpot and simmer, reducing until the onions are translucent, about 5 minutes.

  While the mixture is reducing, make a roux by melting the butter over medium heat in a small sauté pan and whisking in the flour until completely dissolved and the roux takes on a pale golden color.

  Add the stock to the onion and shallot mixture, bring to a boil, and then whisk in the roux. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Season with salt to taste.

  For the second potato fry, bring the oil up to 375°F and fry again until lightly browned and crisp.

  To assemble, douse the hot fries in warm gravy and top with the cheese curds.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  In the pastry department of legendary Bay Area restaurant Chez Panisse, Jehnee Rains developed a crush on pristine fruits in their peak season. After transplanting to Portland, she fell in love again, only this time with a 1973 Airstream trailer parked behind a one-room A-frame restaurant called Suzette Crêperie (2921 NE Alberta St.). After taking over Suzette from the original owners in 2009, Jehnee got to work inside the Airstream-turned-kitchen and overhauled the menu, setting it to the seasons. With two crepe irons, one stand mixer, and limited storage space, batches are small and the product is fresh. Somehow Jehnee still finds the room to make multicomponent crepes that are more like composed desserts than the standard Nutella-filled jobs. Expect creations along the lines of this fall special—a lemon butter—filled crepe topped with sautéed apples, cider caramel, and a scoop of trailer-made crème fraîche ice cream. Order at the trailer, watch Jehnee at work, then take your eats inside to enjoy alongside a glass of wine or local beer.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  Eggs, bacon, and toast will be breakfast of the past once you try the preferred eye-opener of Iraqi Jews. Called sabich, this breakfast wrap combines garlicky hummus, grilled eggplant, and hard-cooked egg in a pita, and the converted camper dubbed Wolf & Bear’s (SE 20th Ave. and Morrison St.; www.myspace.com/wolfandbearskitchen) is the only place in Portland to find one. “Bear,” or Jeremy Garb, grew up eating sabich in his native Israel, and these days, with the help of girlfriend Tanna TenHoopen Dolinsky (a.k.a. “Wolf”), he recreates the specialty with raw onions, potent mango pickles, fresh parsley, crunchy cucumbers, and a perfectly pliable pita. Add a few squirts of the bright green hot sauce known as zhoug and grab a cup of Fair Trade coffee for a Middle Eastern breakfast of champions—transplanted to Portland and best enjoyed on a creaky metal loveseat swing in a gravel lot.

  Nong’s Khao Man Gai

  FIND IT: SW 10th Ave. and Alder St., Portland, Oregon

  KEEP UP WITH IT: www.khaomangai.com

  They call Thailand “the land of smiles,” which sounds great on the back of a tourism brochure. The slogan might be shtick, but not for Nong Poonsukwattana, a pint-sized twenty-nine-year-old who looks something like a squirrel storing nuts when she’s grinning—which is most of the time. She’s happy because her plan worked. Nong set out to “be kick-ass” at making one dish and one dish only, following in the footsteps of many street food vendors in her home country who do one thing and do it very well. Her thing is khao man gai, or chicken with rice. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.

  The process of making khao man gai the right way is intense. Nong’s way is beyond intense, partly because she’s doing everything from prep to service in an eight by eight-foot cart, and partly because she’s intent on being “kick-ass.”

  “I put the best that I can into this, use the best ingredients even though I have to go out of my way to get them every morning because I don’t have the storage,” Nong says. “I do this because this is me. This cart is everything I worked for, saved all my change for over the last six years since I’ve been in America.”

  Following a boy she married in Thailand who headed to Portland for college, Nong left her family home in Ratchaburi, a town about three hours from Bangkok known for its floating market of vendors in small boats. The marriage didn’t work out; Nong tells a story that goes from hilarious to horrible in which her ex-husband decides he wants to be the first famous Thai rapper, “the Thai 50 Cent,” but ends up having an affair with the MC he was working with. Nong divorced him but decided to stay in Portland, waitressing from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day in Thai restaurants. “I didn’t understand. I had pad Thai and said, ‘This is not pad Thai.’ I had yellow curry and said, ‘This is not yellow curry,’ ” Nong says. “But I was FOB, fresh off the boat. So I had to listen to the Thai people already here in America, and I had to believe them that Americans won’t understand or won’t like the Thai food, and they didn’t know where to find the ingredients anyway. Some even say if you make the food too spicy customers will sue you. But all of that changed when I went to Pok Pok.”

  Pok Pok is the brainchild of chef Andy Ricker, an American obsessed with Thai food who returned to Portland from travels in Asia intent on recreating the dishes he fell in love with. Pok Pok started as a small shack of sorts but has grown into a multiroom restaurant and a Portland destination; Ricker was even nominated for a 2010 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest. “Andy wants to make the food he ate when he was in Thailand, and he believes that other Americans want to eat that too, so Pok Pok is a different reflection of Thai restaurants, from the other side,” Nong says. “That’s why they get all the media coverage, why they won The Oregonian’s Restaurant of the Year, and I thought, ‘I can work in any of the kitchens I was in before, but I don’t want to. I want to work at the best.’ ”

  And so she did. Nong already had about ten grand saved with the idea of opening her own place, and she intended to work at Pok Pok for three months to pick up some pointers. She wound up staying for a year, until a kettle-corn cart pretty much dropped in her lap, and with the Pok Pok crew’s blessing and connections, she converted the tiny wooden box into Nong’s Khao Man Gai, opening in April of 2009. She knew she was limited by the size of her cart, so she did what many Bangkok street vendors do and focused on one dish, her favorite: khao man gai. Running through her mental Rolodex of her aunt’s recipe, versions she’d had in Thailand, and information she found online, Nong “practiced, practiced, practiced” before selling her first dish. The result is a $6 lunch you’ll never forget. Wrapped in a neat little origami-like bundle of white butcher paper, the chicken on rice is presented like a gift, with a small bowl of squash-studded chicken broth alongside for sipping in between bites. Nong starts with the chicken, trimming the excess bits and tossing them into a skillet to render the fat with banana leaves for aroma. Meanwhile, the whole chicken (small birds Nong gets from nearby Draper Valley Farms) is simmered with garlic, ginger, and more banana leaves for about thirty-five minutes, while the little bits of chicken fat that rise to the top are skimmed off and later mixed with sugar and salt for a rub that coats the chicken after it’s cooked. And the fat rendered in the beginning of the process gets added to shallots, garlic, and ginger for a mix that Nong stirs into the rice while it’s cooking, using the simmering broth from the chicken rather than water for the rice. (She says the rice is the hardest part, requiring constant attention and stirring to take on the right consistency.)

  Seeing as how she makes only one dish, Nong is hesitant to give up the exact recipe her entire business depends on, but she will share the soup recipe, as well as break down what goes into the nam jim, the sauce people pour over the khao man gai as if their life depended on it. Fermented soybean paste, fresh ginger, garlic, pickled garlic, thin soy sauce, Thai vinegar, black sweet soy, and a simple syrup made from palm sugar and water. “But the key is everything in the sauce, the paste, the vinegar, even the soy, is the best quality. If you want to be kick-ass, you use the best to be the best.”


  Nong’s Winter Squash Soup

  Serves 4 as a starter

  4 white peppercorns, plus ½ teaspoon ground white pepper

  3 sprigs fresh cilantro, chopped, plus 8 cilantro leaves

  1 cup chicken stock

  2 cups water

  4 cloves garlic, minced

  2 cups peeled and diced winter squash

  3 tablespoons thin Thai soy sauce (preferably Healthy Boy brand)

  2 tablespoons dark Thai soy sauce

  Using a mortar and pestle, crush the whole white peppercorns with the cilantro sprigs.

  In a soup pot over medium-high heat, bring the chicken stock and water to a boil, then add the white pepper mixture, garlic, and squash.

  Return the mixture to a boil and add the soy sauces. Cover and let cook until the squash is fork-tender, about 7 minutes.

  Turn off the heat, garnish with the cilantro leaves and a sprinkle of white pepper, and serve.

  ( SIDE DISH )

  City regulations might stand between you and your beer truck dreams, but you can still enjoy a cold one with your street food. When Roger Goldingay built the lot known as Mississippi Marketplace (North Mississippi Ave. and Skidmore St.) in 2009, he made room for ten food carts and the German-style bar Prost. Aside from Bavarian-style beers (tough to find in a town that loves its hoppy microbrews), the real draw of this Teutonic pub is the spacious back deck and a flexible policy that allows you to raid adjacent food carts for Nuevo Mexico’s sopaipillas or Ruby Dragon’s veggie curry, then bring the haul back to Prost to wash it down with a proper hefeweizen. Now that’s fusion.