Kee’s #Loaded Kitchen explodes the notion of a food cart. The vibe is more food revival than lunch line, in a parking lot on MLK, four afternoons a week. Here, funny and fast-rapping pitmaster Kiauna “Kee” Nelson unleashes her dogma, best summarized as self-belief over all odds, plus skill, swagger, and two-inch nails in neon hues. The house motto is “WiNNerz Only.”  

Most carts are about selling food. Kee’s is so much more: an experience, a social hour, a food cart as barbershop, a free-flowing sanctuary that dependably fills your soul. Since it opened in 2016, customers have bartered in weed and delivered ad hoc marriage proposals. Some come for selfies and uplift, inspired by Nelson’s rise from a hard-knock life—broken home, gangbanger, ex-con—to a self-motivated community pillar who found purpose and stability in cooking. Trail Blazer Jerami Grant, who once dropped $6K on her Feed Black Portland initiative, comes by for the wings, little marvels of super-crunch showered, while piping-hot, in lemon-peppered “gold dusS.” 

Everyone cross-talks, swapping “you ain’t going be disappointed!”s and the knowing moans of eating serious soul food, Kee-style, in thunderous portions.

Regulars know the drill. The menu drops two hours before opening on the cart’s Instagram, which doubles as a peek into Nelson’s outsize life, expressed exclusively in exuberant run-on sentences, raw and uncut. “I say a lot of shit I shouldn’t say,” she confided recently. “Every day I make five people mad and 20 people happy.” Her Instagram posts flip from daily-dish teases to family feuds to the ups and downs of cart life to encouraging messages to women of color: “keep grinding, keep going, don’t ever give up.”

Come early, because sellouts are the norm, as noted on social media: “Sold out thank y’all, DAMM BOOMIN.”

At the window, you pick your “main” from the day’s short list, pay a flat fee, and watch the heavens open. All other decisions are predetermined. Think picnic tasting menu, Kee-style, potato salad to pound cake, napkins, sauces, and all ... in a takeout bag. Cost of entry: around $45. 

It pays to know the unofficial rules and house etiquette:

• Don’t ask, “What two sides do I get?” You get all the day’s sides. 

• Don’t ask for salt. Would you ask Thomas Keller for salt? 

• Don’t ask, “How many chicken wings?” Kee does not count. 

• Do WHOOTY WHOP YOUR WINGZ with sweet barbecue sauce made by Kee’s cousin. $2 extra. 

• Importantly, don’t ask for ketchup! Why? Take a tip from Kee: “Keep your weird habits at home or put it in your purse.”

Bottom line? Positivity rules. Don’t mess with the vibe. You’ve been warned. Nelson puts a punctuation mark on the point: “I’m not a loser. I’m not going to be a loser. I’m not giving up on anything. If someone is giving off that vibe, they don’t belong at Kee’s.”

Each #Loaded dinner feeds a few ravenous souls, with one main dish per order. My last haul covered two round tables, leading more than one customer to grin and shout, “Girl!” For $85, the “everything plate” is the mountaintop, an insane feast weighing roughly 20 pounds. 

The moment of clarity has arrived. Meat rules here. But there’s no arguing with the “crackfish” dinner—supremely crispy fried catfish hiding soft fluffs of white fish inside. For the full-throttle experience, alternately swoop bites in sides of vinegary hot sauce and tartar sauce.

The wise order “half crackfish and half chx.” Wings are essential to the zeitgeist here, with their hot sauce presoak and lemon-pepper buzz, the way they crackle emphatically upon engagement with the batter. 

The fried pork chop, often in rotation, isn’t a dream-haunter, at least for me. But I’m still thinking about Kee’s brisket, a mother of a slab full of chewy-crusted BBQ bark action along the edges. Nelson smokes it for 16 hours over mesquite in what looks like an old iron lung, parked on the side of the cart.  

Smoked brown sugar pork ribs perfectly encapsulate the #Loaded ethos: tender, ambrosial, and quietly complex, with exuberant sweet porky glaze dripping into the foil below, to mop up with a fresh-baked dinner roll. Of course, there’s a heap of them. 

Value is a key ingredient at Kee’s. “You go to hipster places and get tiny ribs for $5 a piece,” wailed former Willamette Week food writer Caryn Brooks (the other one), after inviting me over to her table at Kee’s recently. Truth.

Among the side pleasures: creamy potato salad bound in egg yolks whipped like the interior of deviled eggs. Good lord. The famed Mack & Kees has a secret sweet onion roux and a Tillamook cheese assault. As the guy one picnic table over said, “It’s top 11. The mac is crackin.” Plush banana pudding pie goes luxe with Pepperidge Farm cookies instead of the usual vanilla wafers. “Takes it up a notch,” whispers longtime customer Jackie Starr, whom I met on the cart’s porch, where benches are the prime seats. 

The only potholes so far: the occasional tough meat spot, soggy corn on the cob. 

Nelson tells me her food is home cooking, done right. Or as she puts it: “Old-school, authentic recipes before Gen Z gets to them.” As she talks, she punctuates her sentences with a drawn-out yeah. “They gentrify everything now. They put pickled red onions where they don’t belong. Someone came and got my banana pudding recipe and put pistachio butter on it. I got so mad I blocked him. Yeah.”

Nelson paints her town red. Red is the color of her apron, lipstick, and Gucci beanie. The cart is red. So is her monster pickup truck out front. 

Not far from this parking lot is the gang life she left behind. “I still wear red, but now as a legit business,” she told me recently, nodding to 1994–2014, the years as a gang member and drug dealer in the Woodlawn Park Bloods. Red informs everything at Kee’s. “It’s a way to turn something negative into a positive. I still have my roots. I still have myself. This is who I am.”

I asked her what she wants the world to know about her, the character she calls Big Kee, and her answer articulates her state of mind and brand, which are one and the same. “I’m kind, helpful, and fun as hell. I smoke, I drink, but I still get out of bed and handle my business.”

Her star is rising. Nelson charmed the hell out of audiences on Netflix’s
Street Food last year, and in May she took the TEDxPortland stage. Partway through her talk she froze and halted. Didn’t matter. The room stood and cheered. 

“She’s a tsunami of power, a force of nature,” says TEDx’s David Rae. 

Is a brick-and-mortar next? “I wish I knew how to get funding for that,” says Nelson. “I’d like a place that looks like the cart, but with a dining
room. I haven’t seen anyone who looks like me, who comes from where I come from, do it successfully. I believe I can.”

She’s made a believer out of me. 

Kee’s #Loaded Kitchen, 3625 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd