What Is Portland, Oregon’s Iconic Dish?

Philadelphia has the cheesesteak, a glistening heap of paper-thin beef slathered with shelf-stable cheese and nestled in the pillowy embrace of a hoagie roll. El Reno, Oklahoma has the griddled onion burger, a cross-state roadside attraction that’s the perfect synthesis of beef, onion, and flattop char. Portland, Oregon, has a … question mark.

Many cities across the country seem to have a hometown dish or two that reveals something distinctive and tangible about their immigration patterns, histories, and the communities that live there now. But ask a dozen Portland residents what the town food is and you’ll get a dozen different answers — or, even more likely, blank stares. “I’m sorry — we don’t really have a signature dish,” says Heather Arndt Anderson, a longtime Portland food critic and author of Portland: A Food Biography. “I’m not the first person to say this. I’m not even the 10,000th person to say this: There isn’t a ‘Portland’ dish,” says Bill Oakley, the Portland-based fast food critic (and former Simpsons showrunner) who has been documenting emerging food trends on his popular Instagram account since 2018.

There’s a difference between an iconic dish you can get in Portland and Portland’s iconic dish. The Chicago dog, for example, represents a highly local confluence of South Side stockyards and immigrant vegetable peddlers — a replicable formula found on street corners from Shoreditch, London to Shibuya, Tokyo. Oregon certainly has agricultural traditions that reach into the past, including Native American techniques for preparing salmon that likely predate the Roman Empire. More recently (at least by comparison), Oregon State University food scientists cultivated the marionberry and the maraschino cherry, both of which have become ubiquitous on supermarket shelves in the state and beyond. But there’s more to the great regional dishes than the provenance of their ingredients. A Chicago dog reflects the specific culinary preferences and taboos of its namesake city: bizarre, complex, and never served with ketchup. It is ironic, maybe, that Portland, a city steeped with specificity, does not have a specific dish to call its own.

It’s not as though Portland lacks for culinary renown. The city has been at the forefront of numerous restaurant trends, from high-concept stunts like the marrow luge — first attempted during a boozy Cocktail Week conclave at East Burnside’s Laurelhurst Market — to more urbane innovations like community-minded cart pods and farm-to-table dining. Still, there is a conspicuous lack of a defining local dish that acts as a shorthand for the irreverence and depth that Portland’s dining landscape has to offer. Oakley notes that in a city of iconoclasts there’s just never been much in the way of general consensus: “I could nominate 200 things that would be my choice for a Portland dish, but they’re only served in one or two places,” he says.

There are, of course, contenders. “The closest you’re going to get is jojos and Totchos,” Oakley says. “Two things that I never heard of before I moved to Portland.” To the uninitiated, jojos may seem like a steak fry on steroids, but these fried potatoes are more complex than the generic potato wedges they’re often mistaken for. A proper jojo is battered, seasoned, and pressure fried, ideally in the same hissing oil after chicken for a maximum umami endorphin rush. They fit a lot of the criteria for regional greatness: A greasy paper bag of jojos is cheap, filling, and can be found at pretty much every grocery store and gas station across the state. There’s a quirky name no one is quite sure how or when to capitalize. Oakley singled out Jojo PDX and Reel M Inn as the standout jojo joints in town, the latter of which featured prominently in Eater’s Guide to the World and has garnered the attention of national publications.

Another Portland hometown starch vector is the Tater Tot, which, despite its connection to Midwestern hotdish lore, was invented in 1953 by the Oregon-based Ore-Ida potato conglomerate as a way of using potato scraps. The Cold War cafeteria staple can be found everywhere from Minnesota potlucks to the frozen wastes of Antarctica, but they appear with uncommon frequency on Portland-area bar menus, including the popular microchain Fire on the Mountain and the giant Japanese-style croquettes of Obon Shokudo. The Totcho, the humble Tater Tot’s cheese-and-chive-smothered cousin, feels intrinsically Portland. “The Tater Tot and the jojo were invented in Oregon,” says Arndt Anderson. “But it took a Portland stoner to figure out that Tater Tots make a great nacho base.”

While gilding deep-fried starch with melted cheese seems like national pastime, the Oregonian credits the late Jim Parker of Oaks Bottom Brewing with developing the cheesy Tot dish around 2006. As with most regional inventions, it’s an unorthodox dish interpretation that can be made at home but is probably best enjoyed next to a pile of sticky, beer-stained coasters in a sports bar or dive. And unlike a lot of flash-in-the-pan food trends, there have been enough unique renditions in Portland over the years to merit a comprehensive Totcho trail.

Of course, a truly iconic regional dish is shaped by the social and cultural histories of the place that produced it. Portlandia jokes aside, the Pacific Northwest is known for its affinity for seasonality, hyperlocal ingredient sourcing, and ideology-driven dining preferences, like veganism and vegetarianism. It’s not a new trend, either. “We had a pretty good crop of Seventh-Day Adventists here, early in the city’s history, so we had a vegetarian restaurant downtown in the 1800s,” says Arndt Anderson, referring to the Protestant denomination that has advocated for vegetarianism since its founding in the 1860s. She, like Oakley, notes that the city has always been a haven for eccentric outsiders, which may be why consensus on its iconic dish has been hard to come by. Portland’s long-standing affinity for out-there philosophies may be another factor. “The Venn diagram between the vegetarians and wealthy occultists is almost circular,” Arndt Anderson says.

It’s not surprising, then, that some Portland residents will point to the breadth of vegan and vegetarian food in town as a kind of regional specialty. “If there’s a Portland category of food, it would absolutely be really enjoyable vegan food,” says Oakley. His top pick is Gnarly’s, an all-vegan burger cart on Southeast Hawthorne. Becky Leonard, the co-owner of Division’s DC Vegetarian, has another contender in mind. “Soy curls are a really Oregon thing,” she says, referring to the crispy strips of whole soybean that Grand Ronde, Oregon-based Butler Foods has been producing since the turn of the millennium. Butler notes that other types of replacement meat can be hard sells for lifelong carnivores, her own father included. Soy curls, she says, are an easier pitch: “I could be like, hey, it’s like a local specialty and it’s something you can’t get elsewhere.”

It’s unlikely that one school of thought over Portland’s iconic dish will emerge any time soon. Common explanations that can be found in comment burrows across the internet — that Portland is too small, too new, too far West — don’t explain counterexamples like earthy Cincinnati chili or the cream cheese-slathered Seattle dog. Perhaps, decades from now, travelers from New York, Detroit, and Chicago will engage in heated arguments about the best way to enjoy Portland-style pizza, or line up around the block for marionberry salmon sliders in an IPA reduction. But it’s just as likely that the iconoclasm that has defined the city since its founding precludes the social alignment required for any one hot dog or hamburger to bear its name. There simply may never be a time when Portlanders agree on a single dish or tradition that defines the city.

But there is one thing they probably will concede: It’s not a Voodoo doughnut.