Every recent year some new thing descends upon us here in Portland — luxury condos, kayaks for rent, people from Brooklyn, Subaru Crosstreks. Like biblical horsemen, they portend the coming (cultural/political/environmental) apocalypse. But the most recent and telling sign of end-times may b…

Not so long ago, we Americans were empty shells distinguished merely by our tastes in consumption — in music, cuisine, film, clothes etc. But the descent continued. Increasingly we like the same things: the multi-ethnic high-low mashup, prestige TV and prestige podcasts, Mueller-suspense-tin…

2018 is already more than halfway in the books, and it’s been yet another year of explosive growth for the Portland dining scene. While there’s no shortage of splurge-worthy area meals to sink one’s teeth into, the hunt for cheap eats is as challenging as ever.

“Where should I go for a lobster roll?”

On the morning of Friday, June 8, I woke up in a shitty hotel room in Ellsworth, Maine with a pounding headache from the previous evening’s excess. I was on the road filming two episodes of my web series, Food Coma TV, and it hadn’t taken long for things to plow off the rails. I rolled over …

Thanks to demographic shifts driven by rising housing prices, it's no longer odd to head to the suburbs for the best pho or tacos. In these cities, as Stanford’s Bruce Cain explains, wealthy whites are “pushing disadvantaged populations out of old neighborhoods and into far-flung exurbs.” In…

Loyalty goes a long way in a town with as much restaurant turnover as Portland, and the food truck-to-restaurant transition is becoming more common amongst mobile kitchens. Small Axe, a well-loved food truck, started the trend when they took over East Ender. More recently, C.N. Shawarma beca…

Walk into a Rosemont Market today, and it'd be difficult to imagine a time not long ago that farm-fresh vegetables and local meats and cheeses were the exclusive domain of farmers' markets.

Humans used to fail in the pursuit of virtue because it was difficult. Nowadays we don’t even try — virtue it is not demanding so much as it is unfathomable. What would a virtuous life even look like? What would virtue’s rewards be? Thus we are denied the meaningful struggle that once lent d…

Of all the cuisines to have emerged, developed and propagated throughout the world, it is the French that most often get associated with culinary arts. Chalk it up to stereotypes, countless televised hours of Julia Child on The French Chef, groupthink or any combination of the above — we are…

Pete Sueltenfuss is the owner of the Other Side Delicatessen and the first thing he wants you to know is that his Deli is not a Jewish Deli. Not that he has anything against Jewish delis, this just isn’t one of them. Pete and I sat down for coffee at Yordprom Coffee Co. and he told me exactl…

With over 600 food establishments in greater Portland, deciding where to eat can be daunting. To get an idea of folks' true opinions, I canvassed five knowledgeable and respectable individuals in the food industry and asked them a number of questions about dining out.

Success ruins every city eventually. Some industry flourishes and the town gentrifies. It gets its good coffee and ramen, sees the rents go up, and the spendy bastards take over.