What Is Portland, Oregon’s Iconic Dish?

Philadelphia has the cheesesteak, a glistening heap of paper-thin beef slathered with shelf-stable cheese and nestled within the pillowy embrace of a hoagie roll. El Reno, Oklahoma has the griddled onion burger, a cross-state roadside attraction that’s the right synthesis of beef, onion, and flattop char. Portland, Oregon, has a … query mark.

Many cities throughout the nation appear to have a hometown dish or two that reveals one thing distinctive and tangible about their immigration patterns, histories, and the communities that reside there now. However ask a dozen Portland residents what the city meals is and also you’ll get a dozen completely different solutions — or, much more possible, clean stares. “I’m sorry — we don’t actually have a signature dish,” says Heather Arndt Anderson, a longtime Portland meals critic and creator of Portland: A Meals Biography. “I’m not the primary particular person to say this. I’m not even the ten,000th particular person to say this: There isn’t a ‘Portland’ dish,” says Invoice Oakley, the Portland-based quick meals critic (and former Simpsons showrunner) who has been documenting rising meals traits on his standard Instagram account since 2018.

There’s a distinction between an iconic dish you will get in Portland and Portland’s iconic dish. The Chicago canine, for instance, represents a extremely native confluence of South Facet stockyards and immigrant vegetable peddlers — a replicable system discovered on road corners from Shoreditch, London to Shibuya, Tokyo. Oregon actually has agricultural traditions that attain into the previous, together with Native American strategies for getting ready salmon that possible predate the Roman Empire. Extra lately (at the very least by comparability), Oregon State College meals scientists cultivated the marionberry and the maraschino cherry, each of which have grow to be ubiquitous on grocery store cabinets within the state and past. However there’s extra to the nice regional dishes than the provenance of their elements. A Chicago canine displays the particular culinary preferences and taboos of its namesake metropolis: weird, complicated, and by no means served with ketchup. It’s ironic, perhaps, that Portland, a metropolis steeped with specificity, doesn’t have a selected dish to name its personal.

It’s not as if Portland lacks for culinary renown. Town has been on the forefront of quite a few restaurant traits, from high-concept stunts just like the marrow luge — first tried throughout a boozy Cocktail Week conclave at East Burnside’s Laurelhurst Market — to extra urbane improvements like community-minded cart pods and farm-to-table eating. Nonetheless, there’s a conspicuous lack of a defining native dish that acts as a shorthand for the irreverence and depth that Portland’s eating panorama has to supply. Oakley notes that in a metropolis of iconoclasts there’s simply by no means been a lot in the way in which of normal consensus: “I might nominate 200 issues that may be my selection for a Portland dish, however they’re solely served in a single or two locations,” he says.

There are, in fact, contenders. “The closest you’re going to get is jojos and Totchos,” Oakley says. “Two issues that I by no means heard of earlier than I moved to Portland.” To the uninitiated, jojos might seem to be a steak fry on steroids, however these fried potatoes are extra complicated than the generic potato wedges they’re usually mistaken for. A correct jojo is battered, seasoned, and strain fried, ideally in the identical hissing oil after hen for a most umami endorphin rush. They match a number of the standards for regional greatness: A greasy paper bag of jojos is reasonable, filling, and will be discovered at just about each grocery retailer and gasoline station throughout the state. There’s a unusual identify nobody is sort of positive how or when to capitalize. Oakley singled out Jojo PDX and Reel M Inn because the standout jojo joints on the town, the latter of which featured prominently in Eater’s Information to the World and has garnered the eye of nationwide publications.

One other Portland hometown starch vector is the Tater Tot, which, regardless of its connection to Midwestern hotdish lore, was invented in 1953 by the Oregon-based Ore-Ida potato conglomerate as a approach of utilizing potato scraps. The Chilly Battle cafeteria staple will be discovered all over the place from Minnesota potlucks to the frozen wastes of Antarctica, however they seem with unusual frequency on Portland-area bar menus, together with the favored microchain Hearth on the Mountain and the large Japanese-style croquettes of Obon Shokudo. The Totcho, the standard Tater Tot’s cheese-and-chive-smothered cousin, feels intrinsically Portland. “The Tater Tot and the jojo have been invented in Oregon,” says Arndt Anderson. “Nevertheless it took a Portland stoner to determine that Tater Tots make an ideal nacho base.”

Whereas gilding deep-fried starch with melted cheese looks as if nationwide pastime, the Oregonian credit the late Jim Parker of Oaks Backside Brewing with creating the tacky Tot dish round 2006. As with most regional innovations, it’s an unorthodox dish interpretation that may be made at house however might be greatest loved subsequent to a pile of sticky, beer-stained coasters in a sports activities bar or dive. And in contrast to a number of flash-in-the-pan meals traits, there have been sufficient distinctive renditions in Portland over time to advantage a complete Totcho path.

In fact, a very iconic regional dish is formed by the social and cultural histories of the place that produced it. Portlandia jokes apart, the Pacific Northwest is thought for its affinity for seasonality, hyperlocal ingredient sourcing, and ideology-driven eating preferences, like veganism and vegetarianism. It’s not a brand new development, both. “We had a fairly good crop of Seventh-Day Adventists right here, early within the metropolis’s historical past, so we had a vegetarian restaurant downtown within the 1800s,” says Arndt Anderson, referring to the Protestant denomination that has advocated for vegetarianism since its founding within the 1860s. She, like Oakley, notes that the town has all the time been a haven for eccentric outsiders, which can be why consensus on its iconic dish has been arduous to come back by. Portland’s long-standing affinity for out-there philosophies could also be one other issue. “The Venn diagram between the vegetarians and rich occultists is sort of round,” Arndt Anderson says.

Brooke Jackson-Glidden

It’s not shocking, then, that some Portland residents will level to the breadth of vegan and vegetarian meals on the town as a type of regional specialty. “If there’s a Portland class of meals, it could completely be actually gratifying vegan meals,” says Oakley. His prime choose is Gnarly’s, an all-vegan burger cart on Southeast Hawthorne. Becky Leonard, the co-owner of Division’s DC Vegetarian, has one other contender in thoughts. “Soy curls are a extremely Oregon factor,” she says, referring to the crispy strips of entire soybean that Grand Ronde, Oregon-based Butler Meals has been producing for the reason that flip of the millennium. Butler notes that different kinds of alternative meat will be arduous sells for lifelong carnivores, her personal father included. Soy curls, she says, are a neater pitch: “I might be like, hey, it’s like a neighborhood specialty and it’s one thing you may’t get elsewhere.”

It’s unlikely that one faculty of thought over Portland’s iconic dish will emerge any time quickly. Frequent explanations that may be present in remark burrows throughout the web — that Portland is just too small, too new, too far West — don’t clarify counterexamples like earthy Cincinnati chili or the cream cheese-slathered Seattle canine. Maybe, a long time from now, vacationers from New York, Detroit, and Chicago will interact in heated arguments about the easiest way to take pleasure in Portland-style pizza, or line up across the block for marionberry salmon sliders in an IPA discount. Nevertheless it’s simply as possible that the iconoclasm that has outlined the town since its founding precludes the social alignment required for anybody scorching canine or hamburger to bear its identify. There merely might by no means be a time when Portlanders agree on a single dish or custom that defines the town.

However there’s one factor they in all probability will concede: It’s not a Voodoo doughnut.