How Portland has us licked!

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.