Eat This!

Where it’s at
This food cart isn’t hard to find, since it’s not nestled between other carts in any of Portland’s pods. Instead, Eat This! is doing its own thing on Southwest 11th and Salmon Street in a parking lot. It’s likely this cart is getting a lot of the mid-day work crowd of downtown Portland, and the spacious area around the cart is rewarding compared to the sometimes over-crowded feel of cart pods. The cart itself looks metallic and robotic, with an encouraging “Eat This!!!” (yes, that’s three exclamation points) sign and a blackboard of the day’s four or five flatbread options. The enthusiasm isn’t an exaggeration, though—this one is well worth stopping for.

What to eat
Eat This! offers up pita/gyro like sandwiches made with house-made flatbread. When making an order, cart owner James Drinkward (former chef at Fratelli restaurant) takes his time rolling out flatbread by hand and grilling each ingredient while he chats it up with his customers. The flatbread options (which are titled “global flatbread” by the owner) seem to be rotating frequently, with one beef option, one chicken, one pork, one breakfast and one vegetarian.

A recent menu had a vegetarian option that was the most memorable, consisting of grilled asparagus, sundried tomato pesto, gooey mozzarella and caramelized onions. The pork option was a close second, which included a peach BBQ sauce, shredded pork and a crunchy slaw. The only complaint about this flatbread I had was that the BBQ sauce was a little sweet, causing it to taste like it wasn’t made in house.

Another option available that sounded intriguing was a breakfast flatbread: eggs, grilled bell peppers, caramelized onions and mozzarella with house bacon. The flatbread itself, which is made from wheat flour, looks like a thick tortilla. Its taste is soft and doughy, with little indents that soak up the juices of the inside ingredients nicely. The offerings can either be wrapped slightly open around your flatbread for immediate satisfaction, or completely rolled up to take to go.

What the people are saying
One man, fully engrossed in his asparagus flatbread, closed his eyes with satisfaction. “It’s definitely the mozzarella that really makes this one. It’s so melty!” His eating partner disagreed, claiming it was absolutely the sweet tanginess of the sundried tomato pesto, which was “Not at all overpowering like pesto sometimes is.”

Worth your dollar?
Oh yes. At $6.50 for every flatbread and just a dollar for a drink, you get not only high-quality ingredients, but also will likely be satisfied for the rest of the day.

Final verdict
Eat This! is a surprisingly humble food cart, considering how good its product really is. Next time you head out for lunch, I would head a couple blocks away from the regular cart pods to experience Drinkward’s flatbreads soon before the lines start to get long; this guy is doing it right.