Cafe Olli will host a holiday market this year, featuring crepes, holiday drinks, and magic. | Thom Hilton/Eater Portland From small-scale markets at Portland restaurants and bars to a full-blown Scandinavian holiday festival Pop-up holiday markets are more than the sum of their parts. Yes, they can prove helpful when struggling to shop for loved ones, but there’s more to them than that — strolling through a festively decorated space, discovering local artists and vendors, maybe sipping hot cocoa or a glass of wine while you shop. Several Portlanders have gone all-out with their winter markets ..read more

Kann CoffeeDan Newman Plus, Son of Man ciders win international awards, and more news to know Since Gregory Gourdet’s Haitian restaurant Kann opened in 2022, diners have been finishing their meals there with dessert accompanied by coffee and Haitian coffee cocktails. Now, the restaurant’s custom blend, made in collaboration with local Black-owned coffee shop Deadstock Coffee, is available for retail purchase. Gourdet means to highlight Haiti’s global contributions by offering coffee from the Caribbean country, where half the world’s coffee supply was grown in the late 1700s. Kann’s Blue Mounta ..read more

The Houston Blacklight, Eater Portland’s bar of the year. | Lillie Allen/Molly J. Smith The best restaurant, bar, pop-up, and food cart of the year  In 2023, surprises defined Portland’s food scene. Many of its finest new restaurants and food carts emerged with very little notice, accruing attention over time. Chefs new to the city made dazzling first impressions, complete with masa madeleines and pork coppa ssam. Pop-ups continued to embed themselves within the culinary fabric of the city, accruing national recognition even without their own locations. The consistent themes among all of ..read more

A pie tattoo by Happy Fishhead. | Happy Fishhead Where to find a super stylized flash or a hyper-realistic botanical sleeve The stereotypical image of a Portlander covered in food tattoos is not exactly inaccurate: The city is seemingly as littered with tattoo shops as it is restaurants and food carts. While most artists can knock out a serviceable beet with greens or a chef’s knife, some artists in Portland are particularly well known for their food tattoos — hyper-realistic depictions of herbs and produce, surrealist bug-sushi, or smiling heads of celery. Below, we dive into just a few of th ..read more

Sweet Lorraine’s latkes, knishes, kasha varnishkes, and cucumber salad. | Brooke Jackson-Glidden/Eater Portland Sweet Lorraine’s, which started as a Portland food cart, serves year-round latkes and knishes, plus treats like black-and-white cookies, egg creams, and Hanukkah sufganiyot As a kid in Oklahoma, Aaron Tomasko didn’t grow up with much access to Jewish food. While his Ashkenazi grandmother grew up in Brooklyn and raised his mother on Long Island, he only encountered Jewish delis and bakeries on visits to family on the East Coast, or when his grandmother Lorraine and grandfather Gerry c ..read more

Crush during Pride in 2019. | Photos courtesy of Smirnoff The bar opened in 2001 and is one of the oldest standing queer bars on Portland’s east side Crush, the longest-running queer bar in East Portland, will close on New Year’s Eve with a final drag show, after more than 20 years serving the LGBTQ+ community craft cocktails and bar fare. Crush’s Meta social media pages announced the bar’s closure on December 2. “We are hoping that with this announcement, people will come out to support and help us get through December so we can go out on a high note. Let’s make a few more memories before we ..read more

The backbar at Hallway. | PDX Hype The Hallway, from father-son team Zac and Tristan Webster, lets visitors sing alongside the Grady twins, or order a drink from the surreal, glowing bar at the Overlook Hotel In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 Stephen King adaption, The Shining, Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, strolls through a crowded cocktail lounge until he arrives at a glowing bar, staffed by servers in red suits. “Hi, Lloyd,” he says. “Been away, but now I’m back.” The scene has been referenced in pop culture countless times — in an episode of Bob’s Burgers, the 2016 movie Passengers — th ..read more

A collection of cocktails from G-Love. | Sundae Cereal The Love Shack, the new cocktail bar from the perpetually buzzy G-Love team, will deliver razor clam Rockefeller and lox-topped brioche waffles via tableside cart When people think of midcentury dinner parties, many imagine elaborate, kind of gross culinary exploits: gelatin molds, mayo sculptures, beef fizzes, meats accompanied by canned fruits in increasingly upsetting ways. But there was a post-war revelry in the dining of the era. Picture Don Draper-esque figures knocking back martinis while dessert carts roll past in some ornate dinin ..read more

Chef Anthony Brown with his son, Boss, at Boss Po’boys. | Boss Po’boys Brown — the owner of the shape-shifting, cart-turned-restaurant-turned-cart Nacheaux — has settled into a new spot specializing in dialed-in carnitas and fried chicken po’boys As a restaurateur and chef, Nacheaux owner Anthony Brown’s professional strategy has been to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Over the course of the last four years, Brown opened a food cart, opened a restaurant, opened a food hall, took over a stall in a hotel’s food hall, popped up in a bar kitchen, became a caterer, and ran a mobil ..read more

Katya Suh. | Courtesy of Kaya Suh — the social media personality behind the “Kicks and Cocktails” series and wife of football player and restaurateur Ndamukong Suh — will open Kaya in the Alberta Alley building in December Over the course of her life, Katya Suh has been a college basketball player, a news anchor, a real estate agent, a sales and events coordinator, a bartender. But after she had her kids, she wasn’t sure what was next. “I was going, ‘Gosh, what am I doing?’” she says. During her courtship with her husband, NFL football player and restaurateur Ndamukong Suh, the two often trave ..read more