Favorite
Onetime Top Chef celeb, Doug Adams, is the star at Woodlark Hotel’s primo, 3,000-square-foot downtown restaurant. It’s a well-heeled Lone Star dude food magnet—San Antonio–style smoked chicken, lunchtime meat-’n’-threes, and spendy T-bone steak dinners. Meat is king here, the portal to Adams’s heart. The game changer is Bullard’s smoked pork belly—not only euphorically tender, but presented Korean ssam-style, ready to Read more...
Favorite
The brick-and-mortar home of plant-based eatery Homegrown Smoker continues its legacy of convincing vegan Southern comfort food, with sweet, pulled pork–style soy curls, crispy fried faux-fish sandos, and hefty, juicy, slow smoked seitan burgers topped with creamy, dairy-free “macnocheese.” It’s the sliced “schmeats”—deftly seasoned soy curls, tempeh, and seitan, smoked in-house for hours over applewood chips—that we can’t stop coming back for. Read more...
Favorite
Scuttled by a fire at its original Northeast Portland digs in 2017, Big’s rose again in late summer, like a phoenix slathered in Alabama White Gold barbecue sauce. The Big Family Meal brings everyone to the table at its roomier, raw-beamed new digs in downtown Beaverton. Share a char-skinned bird, singing with spice and smeared with that addictive mayo-vinegar-oregano-tanged sauce. Plus, Read more...
Favorite
This modern Southern-style joint covers barbecue classics like grits, pulled pork, and slaw while offering a few vegan and vegetarian variations to boot—think house made veggie burgers, butterbean stew, and mac n’ cheese. Read more...
Favorite
Let’s be honest: restaurant mac rarely lives up to the dish lodged in our memory banks. It’s too soggy, too bland, and lacks that processed-salt shock hardwired into our brains since grade school. That is, unless you’re hunkered over a dish of molten noodledom at Skyway Bar and Grill, a tin-ceilinged warren of wood and roaring fireplaces just 15 minutes from Read more...
Favorite
Hungry locals make a beeline for the parking lot of a pawn shop on NE MLK Boulevard all year long, thanks to this cart’s super-tender, white oak–smoked ribs and brisket. Psst: buried under Matt’s meaty slabs lurks a lesser-touted gem: a dangerously snappy jalapeño cheddar sausage, oozing saucy cheese and laced with sucker punches of fresh chile. Order it. Read more...
Favorite
The new brick-and-mortar home of plant-based eatery Homegrown Smokehouse continues its legacy of bafflingly convincing vegan Southern comfort food, with sweet, pulled pork–style soy curls; crispy fried faux-fish sandos; and hefty, juicy, slow smoked seitan burgers topped with creamy, dairy-free “macnocheese.” It’s the sliced “schmeats”—deftly seasoned soy curls, tempeh, and seitan, smoked in-house for hours over applewood chips—that we can’t stop coming Read more...
Favorite
For years, finding a decent rack of slow-smoked ribs in Southeast Portland was a problem best solved with a trip up to Northeast—the quadrant that’s been the unofficial mecca of PDX barbecue. That was before Smokehouse Tavern staked its claim as the quadrant’s premier ‘cue spot, two doors down from Nostrana. Helmed by the short-lived Top Chef contestant B. J. Smith, it has Read more...
Favorite
One taste of Pine Shed’s savory smoked meats, slow-cooked behind the eponymous wooden shack, and you’ll wonder “how did barbecue this good land in a strip mall in Lake Oswego?” One more taste, and you won’t care where you are—pitmaster Matt Ramey’s spiced pork and beef ribs, house brisket and pastrami, pulled pork sandwiches, and chicken glazed in the joint’s Read more...
Favorite
For five years Cliff Allen manned his mesquite wood grill in a cart smaller than a prison cell. Now, his “Make Every Bite Count” philosophy is found in a pair of barbecue shacks in North Portland and on East Burnside. Smoked pork shoulder and lamb summon Austin, Texas—little more than meltingly tender flesh, fatty halos, and sumptuous curls of oak-wood Read more...