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 proper 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 dwell there now. However ask a dozen Portland residents what the city meals is and also you’ll get a dozen totally different solutions — or, much more doubtless, clean stares. “I’m sorry — we don’t actually have a signature dish,” says Heather Arndt Anderson, a longtime Portland meals critic and writer of Portland: A Meals Biography. “I’m not the primary individual to say this. I’m not even the ten,000th individual 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 tendencies on his well-liked 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 method discovered on road corners from Shoreditch, London to Shibuya, Tokyo. Oregon definitely has agricultural traditions that attain into the previous, together with Native American methods for getting ready salmon that doubtless predate the Roman Empire. Extra just lately (at the very least by comparability), Oregon State College meals scientists cultivated the marionberry and the maraschino cherry, each of which have change into ubiquitous on grocery store cabinets within the state and past. However there’s extra to the good regional dishes than the provenance of their elements. A Chicago canine displays the precise culinary preferences and taboos of its namesake metropolis: weird, advanced, and by no means served with ketchup. It’s ironic, possibly, 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. The town has been on the forefront of quite a few restaurant tendencies, 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 best way of common consensus: “I might nominate 200 issues that might be my alternative for a Portland dish, however they’re solely served in a single or two locations,” he says.

There are, after all, 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 could look like a steak fry on steroids, however these fried potatoes are extra advanced than the generic potato wedges they’re typically mistaken for. A correct jojo is battered, seasoned, and stress fried, ideally in the identical hissing oil after hen for a most umami endorphin rush. They match lots of the factors 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 kind of certain 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 method of utilizing potato scraps. The Chilly Conflict 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 had been invented in Oregon,” says Arndt Anderson. “But it surely took a Portland stoner to determine that Tater Tots make an amazing nacho base.”

Whereas gilding deep-fried starch with melted cheese looks like nationwide pastime, the Oregonian credit the late Jim Parker of Oaks Backside Brewing with growing the tacky Tot dish round 2006. As with most regional innovations, it’s an unorthodox dish interpretation that may be made at residence 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 lots of flash-in-the-pan meals tendencies, there have been sufficient distinctive renditions in Portland over time to advantage a complete Totcho path.

After all, a really iconic regional dish is formed by the social and cultural histories of the place that produced it. Portlandia jokes apart, the Pacific Northwest is understood for its affinity for seasonality, hyperlocal ingredient sourcing, and ideology-driven eating preferences, like veganism and vegetarianism. It’s not a brand new pattern, both. “We had a reasonably 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 at all times been a haven for eccentric outsiders, which can be why consensus on its iconic dish has been onerous 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 nearly 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 sort of regional specialty. “If there’s a Portland class of meals, it might completely be actually pleasant vegan meals,” says Oakley. His high decide 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 complete soybean that Grand Ronde, Oregon-based Butler Meals has been producing because the flip of the millennium. Butler notes that different varieties of substitute meat will be onerous 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 possibly can’t get elsewhere.”

It’s unlikely that one college 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. But it surely’s simply as doubtless that the iconoclasm that has outlined the town since its founding precludes the social alignment required for anybody sizzling canine or hamburger to bear its identify. There merely could 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 most likely will concede: It’s not a Voodoo doughnut.