“Explore[s] the ingenious outsider cooks, the obsessive impulses, and the raging gustatory dishes behind America’s newest food capitol.” —Mike Thelin, commentator for Unique Eats and co-founder of Feast Portland

The Mighty Gastropolis goes deep behind the scenes to explore the kitchens, personal lives, and mindsets of Portland’s celebrated cooks to chronicle, with humor and panache, a people’s army of maverick chefs, artisans, obsessives, farmers, food carters, and plucky pioneers who have created a risk-taking, no rules food town unlike any other: one that is exporting its culinary ethos, innovations, and sensibilities to America’s gastronomic power zones in New York, LA, Chicago, and countless other cities that are coming under its spell: a spell and culinary imagination that, according to Bon Appétit Restaurant and Drinks Editor, Andrew Knowlton, emanates from “a city thriving with creativity, passion, and an anything-goes attitude for all things edible.”

In this book, you will learn, ingredient by ingredient, experiment by experiment, dish by dish, how Portland’s culinary cognoscenti have re-imagined and reconfigured restaurant culture for modern times and established a new paradigm for how to succeed in the fiercely competitive, no-chops-barred worlds of both hi- and lo-fi dining. The result, as Thomas Lauderdale, founder of Pink Martini, explains, “is a hilarious, heart-warming, punk-rock portrait of a daringly creative Mecca showing the rest of America a better way to eat—and live.”

This is a landmark contribution to the literature of food. And, perhaps best of all, the book’s recipes are roadmaps to rarified states of gastro-nirvana.