Gastronomy

Let’s hear it for the local and unfranchised! Portland’s got no shortage of pizza joints, but we’ll always root for the little guys next to the dive bar. Cutie Pie Pizzeria recently set up their ovens next door to the Mad Hanna, our neighborhood watering hole, and

A life skill one picks up in college is surviving on pasta (or ramen, but that’s another story). Unfortunately, this has the side effect of making Italian food seem prosaic. Spaghetti with "meat" sauce becomes a culinary punchline. Eventually, you graduate to “fancier” options—chain restaurants cloaked

Mexican Food, Market Contradictions, and the Sacred Labor of Memory Mexican food in the United States has never been just one thing. It is pre-Columbian agriculture, colonial rupture, Catholic ritual, borderland invention, migrant labor, corporate abstraction. It is memory folded into masa, and it is melted cheese on a combo

We’ve lived in the neighborhood nearly a decade and have seen this corner go through many identities—brewpubs, fusion experiments—but Paqui feels like a genuine arrival. It’s not trying to dazzle with reinvention or nostalgia. Instead, it offers something more rare: memory rendered with clarity and care.

Portland’s Sweet Pocket on SE 28th SE 28th is a buffet of bars and restaurants — a two-pod food cart corridor with every global craving covered. But when it comes to dessert, your options shrink fast. With Fifty Licks sadly torched out of its Burnside anchor spot, and Cheese &

Field Notes on Queer Kitchens, Diaspora Burgers, and Edible Resistance Last autumn, I visited Helsinki for the first time. My wife had been there twice previously, and one of the eateries she frequented was Junk Y Vegan—located a stone's throw from the main railway station and a

In an era where prices float ever upward and the familiar quietly erodes, the $1.50 Costco hot dog remains a fixed point in a spinning world. It's more than just a cheap meal—it’s a cultural checksum, a tiny ritual that verifies we're still

We didn’t need to check if Mario’s was still there. Some places you trust will outlast the algorithms. Tucked at the corner of Columbus and Union, at the threshold between North Beach and Chinatown, Mario’s holds its corner like an old regular at a window booth—calm,

Just a block north of Nehalem's modest main drag sits Wanda's Cafe + Bakery, a small-town cornerstone that’s weathered its share of coastal storms, both literal and economic. Born in 1999, Wanda’s not only survived the pandemic’s chokehold on independent eateries—it’s thrived.