[March 11th, 2009]
Bacon, Egg and Cheese Sandwich: $5 Bacon, maybe the best you’ve ever tasted; one egg; great cheese; a perfect poppyseed hard roll. The signature breakfast sandwich at Bunk Sandwiches is basically a Bacon Breakfast Jack, only it’s twice as big, costs four times as much and tastes about six orders of magnitude better. You’ll never eat fast-food breakfast again.
Spicy Dark Drinking Chocolate: $2 It’s easy to spend far too much of your hard-earned cash at Cacao (414 SW 13th Ave., 241-0656), but this peppery shot of chocolate bliss is cheap enough for anyone’s budget.
Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Tomato Soup: $6 Available every day at Blueplate (308 SW Washington St., 295-2583), this is the perfect lunch for an Oregon winter—a warm, fatty reminder that summer is just around the corner. Another buck will get you bacon!
Cheese Pizza: $2.75 Buying pizza by the slice is a dicey venture in most parts of Portland, but never at Escape from New York, where the thin, greasy, foldable slices of cheesy heaven come fast and cheap. Just make sure you bring cash.
Superburger: $5.99 Tempeh patty, whole-wheat roll, good tomato and cheddar. This vegan special from Food Front (2375 NW Thurman St., 222-5658; 6344 SW Capitol Highway, 546-6559) is more burgery than its ingredients would suggest, and super tasty.
Nosh Box Lunch: $4.95 Order the daily box at Nosh on Seventh and you get the sandwich of the day—starting with Monday: ham, chicken, roast beef, turkey and tuna salad—plus chips, a pickle and a cookie, all for less than a footlong at Subway.
Smoked Ham Sandwich: $4.95 The first bite of this succulent heap of ham, Gruyère and aioli on Meat Cheese Bread’s house roll is astonishing. You roll the salty, cheesy wad around your mouth and think, “My God—this is living.” The next five bites will happen so quickly you won’t remember them.
14-Inch Pepperoni Pizza: $5 OK, so the pies from Moto Pizza (3103 NE 82nd Ave., 256-2700; 304 SE 10th Ave., Hillsboro, 640-2700) aren’t really good in the conventional sense, but they are suspiciously cheap and arrive with frightening speed. Roll up, place your order, and they’ll hand you a pizza before you’ve even taken out your credit card.
Jiao Zi: $4 Your average, everyday pot sticker has nothing on Lucky Strike’s huge, slippery dumplings filled with dense ground pork and swimming in a dish of spicy Szechuan dressing, with a side of tangy dipping sauce.
Banh Mi Dac Biet: $2.75 The Vietnamese sandwiches at Fubonn (2850 SE 82nd Ave., 517-8855) aren’t the best in town, but you can’t beat the price—a sofa’s worth of change will get you the special: a baguette stuffed with peppers, pickled vegetables and numerous, delicious mystery meats. The less-special sandwiches are even cheaper, at $2.25 apiece.
Chorizo Burger: $5 at happy hour A patty of intensely flavorful chorizo, cheese, an egg, and pickled onions on a brioche bun. Usually $11, this extraordinary concoction on the bar menu at Ten 01 (1001 NW Couch St., 226-3463) is available for a pittance 4-6 pm weekdays.
Schnitzelwich: $6.50 The signature sandwich at Tábor (Southwest 5th Avenue and Stark Street, schnitzelwich.com) starts with a pounded-thin pork loin (or chicken breast) breaded, fried and slipped into a toothsome ciabatta roll with lettuce and piquant condiments, including paprika spread and horseradish.
Steak Bites: $2.25 The bar at RingSide Steakhouse (2165 W Burnside St., 223-1513; 14021 NE Glisan St., 255-0750) has the most underrated happy hour in town. The juicy beef morsels are just our favorite of the 11 $2.25 samplers available. Others include four oyster shooters, buffalo wings and Caesar salad.
El Cheapo Burrito: $3.25 No, this tasty half-pound roll of rice, beans and cheese doesn’t fall remotely within the realm of the authentic. If you want that, go to Chilango’s. But if you’re looking for the best calorie-to-dollar ratio in Northwest Portland, Pepino’s (914 NW 23rd Ave., 226-9600; 3832 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 236-5000) is your best bet.
Bento: $6 Want a big-ass lunch for meager cash? The plastic boxes from Big Dan’s West Coast Bento (2368-A NW Thurman St., 227-1779) contain a fat skewer of your preferred meat and more than a pound of rice (we weighed it!). Chicken, beef, lamb, shrimp, curried vegetables—it’s all $6.
Cinnamon-Sugar Doughnut: $6 for five. The original owner of this plywood pastry shack has moved on, but Moody’s Donuts (2511 SE Belmont St., behind the Rocking Frog Cafe) is still serving delicious, fresh-from-the-fryer doughnuts every Saturday and Sunday. Watch the batter plop into the trough of hot oil; thrill as the pastry floats down the canal o’ coronaries; dig in, burn your mouth, and experience breakfast ecstasy.
Small Pho Tai Nam: $7 There’s nothing like a good bowl of beef broth and noodles to finish off a long day, and the broth at Pho Oregon is some of the beefiest around. Ask for the steak on the side, and tame the sriracha bite with a cool bottle of 33 lager.
One Bag Two-Bite Brownies, Half-Gallon of Milk: $4.68 Few snacks go better with a marathon video-game session than President’s Choice Two-Bite Brownies from Fred Meyer . Little, nutty, half-air and half-chocolate—these babies don’t leave crumbs, and one not need make eye contact with the snack in order to ingest it. But you are going to need some milk.
Biscuit With Egg and Cheese: $4 If there’s a better breakfast deal than the simplest breakfast sandwich on offer at Pine State Biscuits, we’ve never seen it. A killer biscuit, a thick slice of cheddar and a perfectly fried egg.
Spicy Jerk Chicken: $6 It’s not even worth trying to keep this heaping mountain of spicy chicken from Christopher’s Gourmet Grill inside its hoagie roll, even if you hold the mayo. The laws of physics just won’t allow it. When the soft hoagie soaks through and the red-meat-and-pepper gumbo spills out onto the plate, it makes an unbeatable dipping sauce for those french fries.
Cappuccino Cream Cookie: 75 cents Yeah, it’s tiny. But this sweet little thing from Two Tarts Bakery (2309 NW Kearney St., 910-6694) packs a big punch with a tablespoon of super-rich cinnamon buttercream sandwiched between a pair of espresso shortbread cookies. While you’re in the shop, grab a ginger chocolate chip. Oh, and a hazelnut baci. And a rugelach. And a double-chocolate chew.
Half Chicago Italian Beef: $3.95 The namesake Chicago delicacy at Michael’s Italian Beef Sausage is a pile of thinly sliced beef cooked in its own juices, slowly soaking an Italian roll topped with roasted peppers and onions. Yum.
Large Fries With Rosemary-Truffle Ketchup: $4.50 It’s 1 am. You’re starving. You desperately need some fried carbohydrates. And that’s why Potato Champion (Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and 12th Avenue, potatochampion.com) exists. The indie-rock fry cart (owned by Reporter drummer Mike McKinnon) serves fresh, hot Belgian-style fries 8 pm-3 am Wednesday-Saturday.
Chicken Teriyaki: $6.45 The second-speediest dinner in town (after Moto Pizza) is the delicious flame-charred chicken from Du’s Grill (5365 NE Sandy Blvd., 284-1773). Ask for extra sauce and get the salad dressing on the side. A pile of hot meat will be in your hands in five minutes or less.
Italian Sausage: $5 Oh, dear lord. Any regular of the PSU farmers market will tell you that Dundee’s Salumeria di Carlo (Saturday mornings in the South Park Blocks between Southwest Harrison and Montgomery streets) makes the juiciest spicy Italian sausage this side of Boston. In the cold dark of winter we dream of devouring these pepper-and-onion-topped delights. March 21 can’t come soon enough.
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