Irreverent Insider Guide: Portland, Oregon: Eat, drink, listen, see, feel... and more

Thinking about visiting Portland, Oregon? You need to read this guidebook first. A cranky, occasionally hilarious, highly-opinionated local author skewers the popular clichés and reveals some truly under the radar local attractions.

Quotes:

On the city's growing popularity:
"...as a native of this city, I’m still a little disoriented by the relentlessly hip vibe that’s begun to permeate even the most mundane of neighborhoods around here. My inner curmudgeon yearns for those days when Portland was regarded (to the extent it merited any regard whatsoever) as merely a smaller, less interesting version of Seattle."

On Portland's famous food carts:
"There’s this Platonic food cart ideal that we all share. It involves a gloriously sunny day, a mouthwatering, no-crumbs/spillproof entrée, flatware that isn’t a spork, and a non-tippy, non-communal table overlooking something picturesque yet urban… chirping birds too, probably, and lots of white teeth. But reality seldom comes close to that happy vision, that’s what I’m saying."

On local dive bars:
"To paraphrase “Fight Club”, the first rule of dive bars is that they don’t talk about being dive bars. Therefore one faces an existential problem when attempting to identify exemplars – by so doing, do I rob them of their very dive-y essence?"

And of course, on the weather:
"Even after a lifetime of living here, at the ass end of two soggy weeks of unrelenting May rain I’m ready to get the hell out to someplace – any place – that’s dry."

The Irreverent Insider's Guide. Don't visit Portland without it!