What’s new this week? What’s not?
First things first: Portland Dining Month is drawing to a close on Saturday, so it’s your last call for $33 three-course meals. But don’t be too sad, because we just announced the return of our $2 a slice Pizza Week and it’s right around the corner. It starts on Monday, April 16. Can’t wait that long? You can enjoy some Top Chef tacos on Tuesday, April 3, when Smokehouse Tavern’s BJ Smith, a recent Top Cheffer, welcomes his pal and Season 2 Top Chef contestant, Sam Talbot (Brooklyn’s Pretty Southern) to his barbecue joint for a night of tacos, guacamole, and margaritas.
On to the news…
On Monday, the Mercury reported that Burgerville employees were flexing their collective muscle in their effort to unionize. On Wednesday, per Eater, they filed the paperwork to do it after the corporate board at the fast food joint ignored their plea. We also had the news that StarChefs is returning to Portland after a seven-year hiatus. The takeaway? They’re celebrating our star chefs with an awards ceremony and a celebrity chef potluck. Finally, on Thursday morning, we received a tip from chef Jenny Nickoulas that her eatery, This American Local, is closing its doors on April 7. But sure enough, while we were in the editing mode, former Eater editor Mattie John Bamman scooped us all when he broke the news on his food and travel writing website, Ravenous Traveler. Don’t sleep on their burger, either. It’s a keep, and it can only be kept for the next nine days.
Speaking of Eater, that site spread a lot of new this week, reporting that 1) the wildly popular Trap Kitchen food cart is looking to expand to a second location; 2) Salem’s Bibimbap House has opened a second location in Hollywood; 3) Nong’s Khao Man Gai’s new brick-and-mortar opens this weekend in the West End; 4) Henry Higgins Boiled Bagels is now open in Sellwood; 5) popular dumpling chain Yong Kang Street is now open in Pioneer Place; 6) Pieku Pie’s coming to St. Johns; and 7) a chef with Michelin star cred, Peter Rudolph, best know for working the burners at Madera in the Bay Area, is opening his own brick and mortar, Hey Jack, in the town of Camas very, very soon. (Whew.)
Over at Portland Monthly, we learned that Greg and Gabi Denton’s new refurbished French restaurant, Bistro Agnes, will on Monday start serving lunch daily, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. It also had the news that Cocanu’s Sebastian Cisneros has opened Cloudforest, a brick-and-mortar chocolate factory/espresso bar on SE Stark that specializes in chocolate bars and drinking chocolates.
Finally, The Oregonian <a href=”http://www.oregonlive.com/dining/index.ssf/2018/03/portland_where_else_named_best.html#incart_river_index
“>reported that the City of Roses is the best food truck town in all these United States, per the US Chamber of Commerce. And waded into the whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich debate, when it reported on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cameo on The Late Show in which she weighed on the topic. She said a hot dog is a sandwich, upsetting years of precedent by comedy person John Hodgman. However, RBG is incorrect. A hot dog is, as The O’s story put it, per the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, “an exclamation of joy, a food, a verb describing one ‘showing off’ and even an emoji. It is truly a category unto its own.” THEIR TAKE IS THE CORRECT TAKE. I would even argue that a hamburger is no longer a sandwich, either, because it’s become its own iconic thing. I mean, who orders a hamburger sandwich? What, are we gong to start calling veggie burgers “veggie burger sandwiches?” No, we are not. Let’s not kid ourselves. Just as we wouldn’t roll into OP Wurst to order a hot dog sandwich. Sorry, RBG—on this important issue, you are dead wrong. Now please live forever. America needs you.