Walking down NE Alberta in Portland, Oregon you can’t help but turn into a kid when you see The Grilled Cheese Grill. It is just an old Airstream camper, a painted school bus and some picnic tables, but altogether it is magical. The menu reaches past any grilled cheese that you could think to invent, including The Jalapeno Popper, with roasted jalapenos, Colby, cream cheese, and corn chips on grilled white bread and the BABS, which elated some of my friends with its gourmet filling of bacon, apple and bleu cheese on grilled rye. They even offer soy cheese for the vegans; yes, grilled cheese for all!
While this in itself is exciting, to understand it’s real magic we must look at this businesses place in the greater system. For example, in Orlando, Aaron at the Vegan Hot Dog Cart is so limited by our Florida state regulations that he no longer can offer the cooked mushrooms as a topping. Yet, in Portland they embrace this middle tier of the economy, allowing carts and other creative business structures.
Carts may not have the capacity to serve what a full restaurant can, but it does create a business with lower overhead that can provide a less expensive, quick meal for the community. The markets currently provide this option one or two days a week, which is how Dandelion Communitea Café and El Coqui Mexicano got their starts, but imagine how financially strong these restaurants would be if they had been able to start as a cart and organically grow into their full restaurants. Imagine how many creative and healthy businesses would be able to open if we welcomed this middle-tier of businesses into our community. We could even have The Grilled Cheese Grill in Audubon Park.
1027 NE Alberta St. Portland, Oregon website
Just to back-up my personal conclusion, the owner of The Grilled Cheese Grill stated:
Hi Emily, just wanted to say thank you for writing about us on your site. Great review, but better that you wrote about the economics of it all. Being in the business and doing it, you lose sight of the “macro-econ” factor, but you were absolutely right that being able to start a restaurant for relatively little investment has made it waaaay easier just to get started, and will make organic growth, as you put it, that much easier down the road. Of course running a cart has its own set of problems as well, but overall, it’s been great.
Thanks again for coming out. You guys looked like you had a great time!
–Matt Breslow
By the way, we had a great time!