Scoop: Your Own Private Liquor Cart

1. COCKTAILS. FROM A CART: Forget beer carts, Portland now has a cocktail cart. To promote the second annual Portland Cocktail Week (Oct. 20-23), the Oregon Bartenders Guild is operating a cocktail cart—dubbed “the Hospitality Suite”—at the Cartopia pod at Southeast 12th and Hawthorne. Bartenders from the guild will be serving up drinks like punch, boilermakers, gin and tonics, and even Jell-O shots every Friday and Saturday night from 6 pm to midnight now through Oct. 22. We have no idea how they got this approved by the OLCC, and frankly, we don’t care.

1. MANIFEST DESTINY: Tony Pereira, the Portland bike builder who won the first Oregon Manifest design competition in 2009, took first place again at the second edition of the event on Saturday, beating out 28 other designers with a bright fuchsia electric-assist roadster featuring a lockable carbon-fiber front storage trunk with a built-in stereo.

1. CART ACHE: In sadder cart news, Garden State is for sale. The four-year-old “Italian street food” cart, which currently resides at the Mississippi Marketplace pod, is for sale on Craigslist. Although the ad states that neither the business nor its recipes are for sale, it remains unclear whether Garden State will live on in a different vehicle or form. “I’ll be cooking still, but in a different capacity,” is all owner and chef Kevin Sandri told WW. Garden State was WW’s 2010 Eat Mobile festival judges’ choice award winner.

1. JAMES FRANCO AND GUS VAN SANTUNDERGROUND LIKE A WILD POTATO: “It was me trying to play Gus,” James Franco told the first of two sold-out houses at the Hollywood Theatre, where the actor-of-all-trades appeared with Gus Vant Sant to introduce My Own Private River, a meditative re-cut of River Phoenix footage from My Own Private Idaho. Van Sant, like anybody else who’s met Franco, expressed amazement at how he juggled another project, editing in one month what Van Sant’s team cut in six: “You were just burning through the night.” Franco then announced he had brought a second movie with him—Idaho, an hour-long drama about Chicano street hustlers, based on an ’80s Van Sant script. “I haven’t seen this yet,” Van Sant admitted. Franco shrugged: “I think it’s cool.”

WWeek 2015