This week, the Mercury visited the new Prost! Marketplace food cart pod to see what its many vendors are up to. The verdict? A lotta good. Bloodbuzz is creating excellent craft cocktails, Breadbox is offering egg McMuffins, and you’ll soon get to savor tacos from a Nodoguro chef when he opens Little Conejo in the near future. Not bad, especially when you consider that the pod’s leading man, Matt’s BBQ, is bringing the boys to the yard with arguably this city’s finest barbecue.
We reported that 25 bars and tap rooms are celebrating July’s gin rickey month by donating proceeds to Not OK PDX, a group made up of Portland bartenders, social workers, and behavioral health clinicians who have been leading local workshops at local bars to train staff how to identify predatory behavior and how to safely intervene in instances where liquor is freely flowing. And that food cart owner who showed his penis to an Uber driver back in January has been sentenced to a day in jail and a year of probation. He’s also been ordered to seek mental health therapy.
The O didn’t have a lot of news to report, but it did publish the story "Raise a glass to 30 great Portland bars that are still going strong." Sure, it’s a listicle, but a lovingly crafted one that reminds us that there are plenty of longstanding spots to get your drink on in New Portland.
Willamette Week visited Fatou Ouattara’s West African-Burkino Faso restaurant Akadi, which has a whopping 40 dishes from which to choose. The takeaway? The Goat, a “molten, highly concentrated and simply named tomato-based stew” which has a “spicy-fruity complexity of myriad dried chilies, plus tender goat meat,” sounds like it’s definitely worth your time and dollars. And it also visited Strum, a newish and, from how it’s described, pretty cool and low-key beer and wine bar-slash-guitar store where you can sip suds and take in the sounds of local musicians as they do their thing.
Finally, Eater reported that Brother’s Wing & Bings is serving westernized Chinese bings way out on SW Barbur; Aybla Mediterranean Grill is open on SE Division; Georgian food cart-turned-brick-and-mortar, Kargi Gogo, is now (softly) open on Alberta; and Nella Panzanella, a delivery-only Italian bread-based salad company from Bar Casa Vale’s Jasper Smith and his wife, Ella McCallion, is launching on Caviar on July 16.
