A Ledgered Meal: Cheese & Crack, Portland
Filed under: Gastronomy, Companion Tables, Dessert Devotionals
Location: SE Belmont Street, Portland, Oregon
Date: May 2025
Companions: Soft serve, indoor light, and Dolly’s watchful gaze
We used to go for the cheese plates.
Slices of Brie and aged cheddar laid beside cornichons and chocolate ganache like a mise en scène for the senses. A communion plate, if you like your communion with wine and pickle.
Cheese & Crack is a hybrid—part cheese bar, part sundae lab, part shrine to things sweet and strange. The Dolly Parton iconography reminds you immediately: this isn’t about minimalism. This is about flair with a wink.
They weathered the pandemic storm with ingenuity, building out sidewalk service and staying afloat with frosé slushies and sunshine cones. Now they’re back inside—dusty stools, blonde wood crates, and that glorious, oversized soft-serve sculpture reminding you what you’re really here for.
The Order:
- Soft serve cones dusted like relics:
- Strawberry dust on one, sparkling like freeze-dried joy
- Espresso dust on the other, grounded and grown-up
- Both ended with a secret: a ganache plug in the cone’s core, dark and rich, a final chord of sweetness played in minor key
- No cowboy hats this time, but the option remains, like a flourish for the unrepentant
Transformation Observed:
You don’t leave Cheese & Crack hungry. You leave remembered.
By the dog named General Manager.
By Dolly.
By the ganache at the bottom of the cone that whispers, “This, too, is a finale worth waiting for.”
Final Note:
This place reminds you that elegance doesn’t always whisper. Sometimes it sings in rhinestones.
We’ll return. For the cheese, sure. For the sundae, maybe. But mostly for the spirit:
Part Southern gospel, part freezer burn, all joy.
