Cheap Eats 2014

From the Editor

Portland is a great place to be a cheapskate. Each year, we put out our Cheap Eats guide to the best restaurants in Portland with dinners under $15 and lunches under $10, and each year there's an embarrassment of riches. (And heck, if you want to go even cheaper, we've got a gallery of 20 amazing bites for $7 and under.)

Don't get us wrong: We love a fine $100 prix-fixe meal. We also like a good hourlong foot rub. But if you've got $100 in your pocket and want to have a lot of fun, the spots in this Cheap Eats guide can keep you busy on that budget for a week.

Really, you could eat for a year among the 150-plus spots in this guide without repeating yourself once. It's an urbane version of adventure and discovery—like off-road cycling or hot-air ballooning.

Amid the strip malls and five-lane suburban highways of Beaverton's Koreatown, second-story noodle shops hide in the back of supermarkets stocked with durian candy and porcelain spoons. In Cully, a neighborhood best known for discount auto-body work, the former sous chef of a fine-dining restaurant cooks up a $10 Yucatecan soup that's stained black with chilies. In a Clackamas strip mall next to a former tanning salon, you can now get charred New Haven pizza topped with house-cured bacon.

Meanwhile, the city's food carts, spreading from the valleys of Hillsdale to the used-car lots of Southeast 82nd Avenue, serve up Georgian, Belizean, Mauritian and Ethiopian food for prices that let you make a new discovery every day of the week.

We pay tribute to the riches found at our city's food carts—essentially a giant laboratory of food—by naming our five favorite new food carts, including our 2014 Food Cart of the Year. We do so knowing that some of these, in a year or two, will have moved into brick-and-mortar restaurants, making way for a brand-new crop of streetside culinary experiments.

It is our hope that you'll treat this guide as a treasure map. But if you do happen to find something uncharted, please send us a postcard at mkorfhage@wweek.com.

Eat well.

Matthew Korfhage

Editor, 2014 Cheap Eats

Contributors

Editor Matthew Korfhage

Art Director Amy Martin

Copy chief Rob Fernas

Copy Editors Matt Buckingham, Nina Lary, Jessica Pedrosa

Editorial contributors Ruth Brown, Martin Cizmar, Ramona DeNies, Jordan Green, Jay Horton, Rebecca Jacobson, Nigel Jaquiss, Deborah Kennedy, Matthew Korfhage, AP Kryza, John Locanthi, Aaron Mesh, Lyla Rowen, Matthew Singer, Adrienne So, Alex Tomchak-Scott, Aaron Spencer, Enid Spitz, Grace Stainbeck, Savannah Wasserman, Michael C. Zusman

Photographers Natalie Behring, Emma Browne, Ronit Fahl, Jerek Hollender, Leah Nash

Production Manager Ben Kubany

Ad Designers Xel Moore, Dylan Serkin

Director of Advertising Scott Wagner

Advertising Assistant Ashley Grether

Account Executives Maria Boyer, Ginger Craft, Michael Donhowe, Kevin Friedman, Janet Norman, Kyle Owens, Sharri Miller Regan, Andrew Shenker

Marketing & Promotions Coordinator Steph Barnhart

Accounting Manager Chris Petryszak

Credit/Collections Shawn Wolf

Manager of Information Systems Brian Panganiban

Circulation Director Mark Kirchmeier

Associate Publisher Jane Smith

Publishers Richard H. Meeker, Mark L. Zusman

Willamette Week

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Send comments to: mkorfhage@wweek.com.

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