Cheap Eats

[March 19th, 2008]

You gotta eat. While you’re at it, you might as well eat well. And when times are tight and your wallet starts to feel a bit light, you’d better eat cheap.

So this year, just like every year, we’ve collected reviews of more than 140 of our favorite places to get our daily 2,000 calories and carefully proportioned servings of the five essential food groups: meat, grains, veggies, coffee and fat. You’ll find a lot of old favorites, along with a couple dozen new ones.

We’ve shaken up the order a bit. Instead of the usual alphabetical listings, restaurants are organized by cuisine. We hope this will make the guide easier to use, but if you liked the old way better, don’t worry—we’ve included an index that lists the restaurants by name and another by neighborhood.

For the cheapest of cheap eaters, local food blogger Cuisine Bonne Femme has ravenously sought out the best carts to get chi-chi chow for chintzy prices. For nights when you’d rather eat in, we’ve rounded up a few of our favorite bakeries, delis and greengrocers. Kelly Clarke tried the most fab and fatty fast food in town, and Hanna Neuschwander writes up the city’s finest coffee houses. Finally, Saundra Sorenson seeks out the favorite cheap eats of a few of Portland’s myriad subcultures.

Don’t see your favorite restaurant here? There are a few reasons why it might be missing:

1 . It may not be cheap enough. To be “cheap,” a restaurant must offer breakfast and lunch for under $10 and a dinner for under $15.

2. We may have promoted it to Restaurant Guide, our annual compendium of our favorite 100 restaurants, printed every October. That’s where you’ll find Pok Pok, Podnah’s Pit and Apizza Scholls.

3. We may have no idea it exists! Please feel free to email your suggestions for next year’s guide to bwaterhouse@wweek.com.

Happy eating,
Ben Waterhouse

PUBLISHER: Shawna McKeown

EDITOR: Ben Waterhouse

COPY EDITORS: Kat Hyatt, Matt Buckingham, Leigh van der Werff, Sarah Smith

CONTRIBUTORS: Laura Atkinson, Byron Beck, Kelly Clarke, Liz Crain, Jeremy Gillick, Ian Gillingham, Ashley Griffin, Lillian Hogan, Kat Hyatt, Nigel Jaquiss, Casey Jarman, Lance Kramer, AP Kryza, Shefali Kulkarni, Amy G. McCullough, Aaron A. Mesh, Michael Mannheimer, Joanna Miller, John K. Minervini, Brian Panganiban, Corey Pein, James Pitkin, Deeda Schroeder, Beth Slovic, Ethan Smith, Saundra Sorenson, Hank Stern, Leigh van der Werff

ART DIRECTOR: Tom Humphrey

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Jaclyn Campanaro, Missy Prince, Jason Quigley, Faulkner Short, Jeff Walls

ILLUSTRATION & LETTERING: Eben Dickinson