Big New Food Cart Pod Coming to Empty Lot in Southeast Portland

FOPO food carts hopes to open this January just down the street from the Portland Mercado

By Matthew Korfhage

Southeast Foster Road is getting a huge new food cart pod.

Anton and Gene Pavlenko plan to open a big new 16-cart pod called FOPO Food Carts at 7337 SE Foster Road, pretty much across the street from the eight-deep Pan-Latin-American selection at the Portland Mercado pod.

Throw in Carts on Foster at 52nd Avenue, mammoth Cartlandia just south on 82nd Ave., and the eight-cart Flipside pod planned at Southeast 93rd Avenue just south of Foster, and the FoPo corridor seems determined to become Southeast Portland's answer to Khao San—the busiest food cart stretch anywhere east of downtown.

The Pavlenkos are residential housing developers, with apartments currently planned in Sellwood-Moreland and Overlook, but when they came into this property along Foster this past month, they knew they'd be holding onto it for a while.

"We thought we'd lease it out to car dealers, or rent as storage for a tree care company," says Anton Pavlenko, "but we started getting inquiries from food cart vendors. We thought, everybody likes food carts."

The cart pod is still in the recruiting phase, he says—they but they're currently talking to a breakfast burrito cart and a beer cart.

Here's the planned layout for the pod, complete with a tented dining area.

They hope to be up and running by mid-January. They're still recruiting carts here.

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