A new Portland food cart pod is uplifting BIPOC and LGBTQI+ chefs

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Last summer, a pair of Portland chefs had the vision to try to detoxify the food industry from the inside out. Jasper Shen and Linh Tran from the restaurant XLB had seen years of racial inequality, poor working conditions and harassment while coming up in the industry. But the pandemic gave the duo a chance to step back and reevaluate their roles in changing things for the better.

Along with partner Catie Hannigan, the trio started the restaurant resource group Win Win with a goal to create equitable and sustainable opportunities for BIPOC and LGBTQI+ food makers in Portland. And part of that vision included a food cart pod with a diverse array of chefs and cuisines. This month, that became a reality with Lil’ America, a Southeast Portland food cart pod created in conjunction with Dos Hermanos Bakery and Fracture Brewing, and curated by the team at Win Win.

The cart pod has both established and brand-new ventures for local chefs and offers amenities that you typically don’t find in other locations, like a walk-in fridge and dry storage for each cart.

“That was our No. 1 priority,” said Shen. “Every cart we’ve talked to, their biggest issue was storage because they’re literally in a space that is 12-by-6.”

Carts pay a monthly flat fee at Lil’ America, which includes rent, electricity, water, storage and sewer, which Shen says is way under the market rate.

“We want everyone to be successful – that’s the goal,” he said. “We’re trying to get people started, we’re trying to move the community forward and help BIPOC and queer people get ownership … Trying to gouge [people] just so we can make a couple extra bucks didn’t seem right.”

The space is also plumbed directly into the city sewer line so carts have a way to get rid of waste water directly. It was a crucial element when designing the space because of newly enforceable Oregon Health Authority regulations that ban the use of on-site storage cubes for waste water.

OPB’s Crystal Ligori and Donald Orr visited Lil’ America ahead of its grand opening earlier this month and spoke with chefs at three of the seven carts in the pod.

Makulít

Mike Bautista & Xrysto Castillo

Mike Bautista: Makulít is a term that describes someone who’s being stubborn or annoying. [laughing] It was thrown at me a lot as a kid. We’ve had a couple people come and say “I’m going to tell my mom that they named a restaurant after me!” It just kind of represents the energy we want to bring, how we think creatively about what we want to do.

Xrysto Castillo: We do Filipino American fast food [and] there’s nothing like us around. We’re one of a kind. We do offer Filipino food staples such as pancit and lumpia, but also we add our spin on a burger. Our Big Bunso is our burger patty made with longanisa, which is a spiced Filipino sausage mixed with beef and it’s topped with atchara that’s pickled in-house [with] green papaya, daikon, carrots, and bell peppers. And it’s really tasty.

Bautista: The spin we take on our food is more like a reflection of our experiences growing up being first and second-generation. When we were starting out, we knew that we wanted to make Filipino food, but there’s always that thing in the back of our heads saying, like, “You don’t know how to do this properly.”

Castillo: Yeah, I feel like a lot of people can be hypercritical to other people’s Filipino food because each household is different. Everyone’s version of adobo is not the same [as] the next family. But we want to make sure that we’re sticking true to what we know and love as Filipino food, and we want to make sure that’s represented through our playfulness, like, of our menu and the names that we choose … We want to answer the questions, like, “Oh, what is a bunso? What does ‘big bunso’ mean?” It’s like, “Oh the littlest kid in the family was referred to as bunso.” We want to start these conversations and these dialogues that rarely happen in this industry.

Bautista: I think for a pod to focus on BIPOC and queer communities, for us it felt like a no-brainer: It’s a safe space in concept and then in practice, moving here and being around the other carts, everyone’s been super supportive, helpful and noncompetitive. It’s a dream for us. A big obstacle for us, even just like the idea of opening up, [was] the fact that we will be a business and we still have to make it work. So it’s a blessing to be around other people who just want to help other people.

Hawker Station

Andy Kou

In Singapore, a hawker center is like a big area with hundreds of mini food stalls, so kinda like the Portland food cart scene. One of the famous places for chicken and rice, which is called tian tian, [is] located in Hawker Center in Singapore. They’re famous; they have a Michelin star for chicken and rice.

I was born in Hong Kong, raised in Texas, and LA. I moved out to Portland about a little less than three years ago. I was actually doing corporate for 17 years in the biotech industry. Cooking has always been a big part of my life, so the pandemic happened and all the layoffs and this is simply a “why not” situation. In Portland, there’s no certain Hong Kong cuisine here like chicken and rice, braised pork belly, fried chicken with gravy, which is everywhere in LA. I saw a great opportunity to share my comfort food in Portland.

I love it here because all the people, all the carts have their own unique storyline. It’s very welcoming and we have a lot of great support from the community.

Bake on the Run

Michael Singh, Chef Bibi Singh

Bake on the Run is the only Guyanese eatery on the West Coast from Chile to Alaska. Guyana is a small little country right above Brazil, right to the east of Venezuela. It’s a little smaller than Oregon in size, just under 800,000 people. It’s part Indian, African, Chinese, Portuguese, and Amerindian – like nine tribes within the border. So all the food intermingles. That’s why we have chow mein on the menu. That’s why we have bacalhau, which is a Portuguese-style salted cod which we call salfish. That’s why we have bake— indigenous fry bread—and all the curries.

We originally intended on just selling bake, which is our semi-sweet puff bread with different fillings. But my mom being Mom started making stuff when people requested it. So the menu just elongated. [People] requested stuff that we already made at home, so it wasn’t a big deal. It’s exactly the same way we make it at home, the exact same I was raised on.

You know, the whole idea for me to come out here initially was to spread my culture on the West Coast, I’m in love with my culture. If we do this properly, we can make this the cultural epicenter of Oregon, like legitimately. We can involve all these cultures and our culture, spread to other cultures. We can bring everyone in, and we bring it in through food which is the most palatable manner possible. There’s nothing more intimate than food, you know? Than me giving you what we normally eat to give you energy and nourishment to power the rest of your day. And that’s extremely important to me. Beyond water, beyond oxygen, you need to eat.

You can visit Lil’ America at 1015 S.E. Stark St. in Portland.