Portland: Where to Eat During Your Travels

This is the third post about our family's travels to Portland, Oregon. You can see the first post here. Because I blog about educational travel, I received free admission tickets, discounts, media rates, and other benefits for some of the attractions we visited throughout the trip. Many attractions we toured are free to everyone. I paid full price for the rest. This has no bearing on my reviews. Everything I'm sharing is something that I whole-heartedly recommend.

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Steve, Trevor, and I are adventurous eaters. Not in the sense of liking to try gross-out foods, but in the sense that we love to taste local specialties and will go far out of our way to avoid chains when traveling. If an area is known for a particular food, we are going to find it and try it.

Portland is a food-lover's dream. Literally everything we ate was good, from food carts to fine dining. I'm not going to detail every morsel we ate morning, noon, and night for five days, but instead I'll share the best of the best and our picks for must-try food in Portland.

Let's start with fine dining. We happened to be in town during Portland Dining Month, which is a great way to taste the best that a restaurant has to offer. Swank had two different menu options for each of the three courses, so we ordered both and split the six courses amongst the three of us.

Go to Swank. Not only was it the best food we ate in Portland, it was the best food we've eaten anywhere in a long, long time. 

We had another outstanding meal at Picnic House. Again, we shared two different 3-course meals amongst the two of us. It was delicious and just the right amount of food. 

If you like eggs, you MUST try Fried Egg I'm in Love. There are two locations; we ate at Pioneer Square. 

I got the Free-Range Against the Machine (egg, avocado, and havarti on sourdough) and it was incredible. So yummy.

My other favorite food cart was this unassuming little place called Fooshion. 

Get their bubble waffle. As soon as possible. And then get another as soon as possible after that. 

Another of our favorite meals was at Bob's Red Mill Store. Located a mile from the factory, the store sells all Bob's products and serves breakfast and lunch featuring whole grain foods. 

I would happily eat this vegetarian sandwich on multigrain bread every day for the rest of my life. The chips were amazing too. 

Of course, we couldn't come to Portland and miss Voodoo Doughnut. Why yes, I would love a coffin full of doughnuts!

Alas, we only ordered four donuts, which we brought back to our hotel room and carefully split into thirds so we could each try them all. My favorite was the Tangfastic. Yum. 

(Image from Voodoo Doughnut website)

Trevor and I are huge fans of frozen yogurt, so we had to check out TartBerry. They had a good number of flavors available, as well as the largest number of topping options I've ever seen. Trevor loved the pink dividers they had. Stick it in the cup, then add multiple flavors and they won't intermingle. Brilliant! 

So there you have it, all of our favorite places to eat in Portland!

Before wrapping up the post, I want to tell you about one more fantastic meal that we ate. It was actually on our drive home, rather than in Portland. The Creswell Bakery in Creswell, Oregon is about 120 miles south of Portland, right off I-5 and the food was amazing. It's our new favorite restaurant along I-5.

If you've never spent time in Portland, I'd definitely recommend that you go. It's a wonderful town full of neat things to do and fantastic food to eat. It's very pedestrian- and tourist-friendly. There are a bunch more things we're going to do the next time we're in Portland... and I promise you there will be a next time!