My current favorite Portland restaurant isn’t actually in Portland. It’s in a Happy Valley strip mall tucked away near a 24-hour WinCo and a T.J. Maxx, off SE 82nd Avenue. Inside, fluorescent lights hang from the ceiling, and cartoons of chubby fishermen and angry ladies with curlers in their hair paper the walls.

Sichuan City has been open since 2019, but it’s received little media fanfare (not counting its inclusion in our top 50 restaurants list and roundup of the best Chinese restaurants). On weekend nights, you’ll have no difficulty securing a table. Honestly, why aren’t Portlanders lining up out the door?

The grand opening of one of the newest restaurants in Portland, Pah!, drew visitors from as far away as Chicago, Las Vegas, and Minnesota. Within just a couple hours, the restaurant had sold out of its house made burger patties, and the owners had to close momentarily to catch up on prep. There are no other restaurants like it in Portland—and few other restaurants like it in the country.

Pah! is a proudly deaf, queer, and Latinx-owned restaurant at The Zed, the food court at Zoiglhaus Brewing’s taproom. Lillouie Barrios, who is deaf, and his husband Victor Covarrubias, who is hearing, teamed up to open the restaurant, which displays a Mexican flag, a bisexual pride flag, an LGBTQ+ flag, and a trans flag; a Deaf flag is coming soon. 

Portland's most exciting new food cart pod, which officially opened in April, isn’t the biggest or the flashiest. But Lil’ America is Portland’s only food cart pod that’s exclusively filled with LGBTQ and/or BIPOC-owned carts. Within seven carts, chefs express multiple aspects of their identity through food—as first-and-second-generation Americans, as queer people, as sex workers, and more. Options run the gamut from Filipino fast food to spicy seafood boils to Guyanese salt fish bakes.

“Frybaby is a reflection of myself,” says Sunny Hatch, a former bartender whose cart serves Korean fried chicken glazed in spicy-sweet sauce or dusted with cheese, plus Southern and Korean-influenced sides like curry gravy mashed potatoes and collard greens with Korean bossam pork.

The tiniest cubes of mango tickle the tongue atop crisp, carnitas-style duck tacos sweetened with guava chutney on fluffy corn tortillas, smeared with silky black beans and flanked by sharp watercress. On a charming heated patio, guests sip quirkily named cocktails like Lou Reed’s Leather Jacket or Heaven Is Whenever, a punchy-pink mezcal margarita mixing up blood orange, cinnamon, and artichoke. Inside, dimly lit with flickering candles, are simple wooden tables for spaced-out diners, the faint singing of Natalia Lafourcade in the background, and bare walls waiting for guest artists to showcase Mexican folk art.

Welcome to the world of Nightingale, which chef Luna Contreras and co-owner and bartender Chris Mateja opened on NE 28th’s restaurant row last December. It’s a personal narrative successfully told through food.

Every local has their tried and true favorites, while tourists eagerly check boxes on their must-try lists in Portland’s thriving food cart scene. There are so many carts in the city that keeping an exact count is impossible—but the number tops 500. Carts are as unique as the people who run them; you can get anything from wood-fired Mormon grandma cuisine to Chinese street-food crêpes. Part of the reason why carts are so popular here: there’s a low barrier to entry to starting one, with lower upfront costs and less regulation involved than with brick-and-mortar restaurants. But with new regulations regarding food carts and food cart pods taking effect on January 1, 2023, some cart owners are worried about their ability to keep their businesses open, and some have already made the decision to temporarily close, including Meliora Pasta and Papi Sal’s. 

In one of many sickening scenes in the HBO series The Last of Us, a professor of fungi, clad in a fully-enclosed hazmat suit with a breathing apparatus, opens a cadaver’s mouth and cautiously reaches in with her pliers. A bundle of cordyceps fungus emerges, tentacle-like and sprawling. The pliers clatter to the floor, and she dashes out of the room while the cordyceps continues to snake out of the deceased’s mouth. 

...But in the real world, cordyceps is a friend, not foe. A wild variety of cordyceps, cordyceps sinensis, has been prized in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries for its numerous possible health benefits, including reducing inflammation, helping the body utilize oxygen during workouts, slowing the growth of tumors, and even acting as an aphrodisiac. 

“In North America, we generally have a phobia of mushrooms. There are a lot of headlines about death cap mushrooms and destroying angels,” says Trevor Huebert, founder of Tigard-based mushroom cultivator Bridgetown Mushrooms. “We’re trying to rewrite that narrative.”

If you ever want to blow a restaurant hound’s mind, take them to Akadi—Akadi 2.0, that is. The restaurant reopened in May in a sleek, industrial-chic spot near Ladd’s Addition. There’s a newly built bar stocked with an impressive list of South African wines, like the Braai cabernet sauvignon designed to go with grilled meat, or the aptly named peachy sweet white from Jam Jar. Sit at charming dimly lit two-person booths while music from Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita pumps over the speakers. Already, Akadi is poised to make plenty of the city’s “best of” restaurant lists: best wings, best stews, best jollof rice, best vibes. 

The restaurant was already beloved at its old location that opened in 2017 on NE Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. At the end of 2020, chef Fatou Ouattara and husband George Faux closed Akadi, promising to bring it back better than ever. Ouattara spent about a year traveling and learning more than 50 recipes from their sources, not just in cities but in small villages. She learned from her grandmother in Burkina Faso, from neighbors in the village where she grew up in Ivory Coast, and from friends in Ghana. Now, at Akadi 2.0, the flavors are even bolder, with a new mindset to match. 

Leo Oblea, like many other restaur­anteurs, had always dreamed of owning his own business. And like many other restaurateurs, he and his brother-in-law and business partner, Victor Guzman, were just waiting for the right moment to strike out on their own.

The push to open their own business, unfortunately, came from the Trump administration. That’s because both Oblea and Guzman are DACA recipients. Under DACA, both of them secured work permits. Oblea worked as the executive chef at a retirement home in Rockridge, and Guzman was a manager at a Verizon store.

But in September 2017, the Trump administration announced plans to end DACA. Both were unable to renew their work permits, forcing them to leave their jobs. “Honestly," says Guzman, "I cried. I worked for a living in the shadows working as an undocumented young adult, and going from that to being able to actually work legally, it was such a relief. I would show up to work with pride.”

“Why would the government give us a taste, a sample, of what being an American is like, and then just take it away?”