by Jason King
The gastronomical heritage of Portland is well known, with strong cult followings in beer, wine, coffee, spirits, urban agriculture, and local/organic food. The choice of restaurants, farmer’s markets, community gardens, coffeehouses, brewpubs, and dive bars offers anything, literally, on the menu. While always a fixture of urban life, street food is definitely becoming a more common way of delivering food to urban residents. A rapidly expanding subset of this genre is the explosion of food carts – those mobile, self-contained, and thriving locally.
screenshot of Food Cart Portland website
One major resource in the search for the ultimate cart is the site Food Carts Portland, operated by the pseudonymous Dieselboi and Cuisine Bonne Femme – who offer reviews and other resources for the cart-based culinary revolution. They also offer an ode to the cart in a short essay ‘Portland Hearts Food Carts’, which I’ve reprinted from their site here in full:
“Portland has a proliferation of Food Carts and they seem to be growing in numbers and locations. Some might call them lunch wagons, taco trucks or even snack shacks, but whatever you call them, they are truly a phenomenon in Portland. Set up in parking lots, sidewalks, and even parks (sometimes in large groups and sometimes solo), one might nosh on a fresh tortilla Baja fish taco one day, a rib-sticking bowl of traditional goulash the next, have a coffee and pastry for an afternoon snack, and then take home a giant Indian combo box for dinner.
Locals from various places and committed food-loving tourists from all over know that some of the best food to be had in any city from Bangkok to Baja is to be had at small street stands, carts, and other non-restaurant restaurants. New York City, for example, a city with some great street food, holds the annual “Vendy Awards” to express their love for mobile dining. There is even a website dedicated to street food around the world, although oddly, no U.S. cities are represented. In fact, many cities in the U.S. strictly limit or outlaw food carts completely, making Portland more akin to cities in Europe than in the U.S.
Food carts are also about supporting small, locally-owned businesses and small start-ups that might not have the capital or credit to open up their own full-fledged restaurants. That said, food carts are not restaurants! With limited hours, lack of indoor (and sometimes lack of any) seating, and small menus, they complement rather than compete with full-scale restaurants. Food carts help create a vibrant downtown and central city by bringing what planning geeks call a “social fabric on the street” which is great in cultural terms, but in economic terms also attracts other spenders, retail outlets, and restaurants and cafes. Food carts also often illustrate the delicious benefits to a growing ethnically diverse community, as many immigrants own and operate them and make and serve some pretty tasty ethnic specialties.
Plus, food carts can be a fantastic bargain for office workers, students, budget travelers, and anyone looking for a cheap, quick, but delicious bargain lunch.
Regardless, food carts are part of the culinary fabric of our wonderful city and dining in Portland wouldn’t be the same without them.”
A quick glance at the site (or any aggregation of two or more carts) will yield a range of ethnic, specialty & regional variations, and a range types of cuisine. There is definitely a preponderance of Mexican and Thai represented (sometimes side-by-side), but it is easy to name a type of food and then likely match this to a cart or two. We have legendary carts, unique carts, even carts owned by rock stars (in this case, former Shins drummer Jesse Sandoval’s Neuvo Mexico) and a Portland v. NYC street food/feud. This is often the beauty, as the capital expenditure and life expectancy for a restaurant specializing in, say, regional Bavarian cuisine may be a tough go. But, for a few thousand bucks, a cart can be up and running with minimal overhead.
SW 5th Cart Hub - image via California Planning & Development Report
The FCP site is a great resource, and links to a very simple and helpful map via designer Audrey Eschright, showing locations of many area carts. Not sure the vintage of the info (there’s a few missing that I know of) but it seems reasonably up to date (also allowing folks to add and edit sites – which is key as there is a quick ebb and flow of carts moving – some purposely, on a moments notice). The map links back to the FCP site for more info, reviews, menus, etc. It’s in google maps – so it exports well into Google Earth for a bit more usability (GIS would be even better, so stay tuned).
I fiddled with the symbology a bit and located the carts with smaller yellow markers. Concentrations of carts on a single site (aka Cart Hubs) have a larger orange marker. You can see the density of these locations (specifically downtown and inner SE), and also the locations along typically commercial corridors.
A single cart is more than likely the sign of an opportunistic intervention (or a brave pioneer) in an under-served portion of the community. These pepper the landscape throughout the City, and probably number in the 100′s city-wide, spreading from the core out to more remote locations. The more concentrated Cart Hubs are a somewhat more recent and interesting phenomena that takes advantage of economy of scale and grouping to make a destination with a variety of choices. These are typically located on the perimeter edge of a surface parking lot, where folks pay ‘rent’ in terms of monthly parking fees, plus the cost of a vendor license + regular health inspections.
There are four of these ‘hubs’ in Downtown, and a few more emerging across the river to the east. The older downtown pockets have been around for a while serving downtown office workers, including a grouping in Pioneer Courthouse Square, a some other groupings throughout the inner city (some have been displaced through redevelopment of surface lots) .
A few popular locales in the Downtown core worth of attention:
SW Fifth, between Oak & Stark (along the Transit Mall)
SW Ninth+Tenth, between Washington & Alder
SW Fourth, between College and Hall (near Portland State)
The common denominator (aside from occupation of parking) is a heavy concentration of diners, typically serving during lunch hours. Thus proximity to office workers and students (i.e. daytime denizens) seems like a recipe for success – particular for these masses of carts. Many of these carts are only open during lunch for a couple of hours, while some have begun to stay open later to take on the dinner and even late-night crowds in specific areas. One aspect worth looking at is the inherent competition (or maybe synergy) between bricks-and-mortar retail restaurants and the wheeled mobile varieties, as they seem able to co-exist within similar space.
That is not to say there isn’t some conflict, particularly a well publicized feud from 2002, that pitted a well-known local restaurant owner against food carts – citing specifically different rules governing carts versus restaurants unfairly tipping the competition. Most folks laughed. While both provide food – the draw is totally different and satisfies very different aspects of dining experience people look for.
One Eastside example, on 12th & Hawthorne in Southeast. is a slightly different breed. On the corner of 12th and Hawthorne, this emerging ‘hub’ is located along a commercial strip, and located in a tough development corner adjacent to residential areas. This merging point of residential and commercial seems to be a key locator to broaden the range of possible customers – in this case occupying a hole where there aren’t many food options. The organic evolution of the site over time is interesting – and also representative of the neighborhood zeitgeist of Southeast Portland.
12th + Hawthorne Hub @ Night - image via Flickr / cafemama
A similar organically evolving site in a vacant lot is dubbed ‘Area 23′ on Alberta – and I’m sure a few more that will spring up literally overnight. The new hybrid model of this type of development is the Food Hub at North Mississippi, which is one of the first to be developed specifically for food carts. Via OregonLive: “Business man Roger Goldingay spent months (not to mention $900,000 in real-estate costs) to shape a new vision for North Portland: converting a dilapidated building and an abandoned lot into a food-cart center, a community gathering place and an incubator for small artisan businesses focused on food or crafts.”
Prost on Mississippi , with the carts to the left - image via PDX Eater
The project switch, even though the site is located in an emerging neighborhood, was driven by the fact that the economic slowdown caused the site development of new mixed use buildings to stall – making an interim use for the site necessary. The level of investment makes sense for these ephemeral uses, but perhaps it’s something a bit more long-lasting – offering a type of experience that is common around the world with vibrant street food identities. The locations may change, but the variety of food will continually expand and evolve, and create another possible use for the various vacant lots around town – perhaps even coupling this with the urban agriculture movements for growing food, wine grapes, or hops for local beer or other consumables in the city.
A potential for a true urban gastronomic revolution.
[For an upcoming project, I'm doing some research on the evolutionary and urban design phenomenon around these locations and groupings of Food Carts in Portland. A series of posts will outline this process, so check back for more updates as the project progresses.]
Come hear from our panel of Pacific Northwest LA professionals who have set out on their own – Jason King, Jesse Stemmler, Gavin Younie & Erin Muir…
