Weird eats & drinks in Portland
Weird eats and drinks in Portland — 9 of them, from Fried Egg I'm in Love, Space Room Lounge and Genie's Too and Sushi Ichiban. Themed dining rooms, improbable specialties, and restaurants built around one strange idea and committed to it completely. They spread across Portland and Troutdale, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Fried Egg I'm in Love
The name is a mangled Cure lyric — "Friday I'm in Love" — and it sets the rules for everything downstream: the whole menu is fried-egg sandwiches named Yolko Ono (sausage patties, pesto, sourdough), Egg Zeppelin (veggie patty, cheddar, aardvark aioli) and Free-Range Against the Machine (avocado, tomato, havarti). Jace Krause and Ryan Lynch started it in 2012 as a rent-to-own food cart on about $10,000; it now runs a Hawthorne shop, a Mississippi Ave brick-and-mortar that opened in January 2024, and the downtown cart at Pioneer Courthouse Square. There is a full vegan track — vegan "egg," vegan sausage, vegan breakfast burrito, cold brew with oat milk — so the pun survives dietary negotiation. Mimosas and bloody marys are on offer, which tells you the intended hour. Every location shuts by mid-afternoon; this is a breakfast operation that has never pretended to be anything else.
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Space Room Lounge and Genie's Too
The sign says "In Orbit Since 1959," and the Space Room has never once broken character: glow-in-the-dark murals of Portland skylines sharing wall space with aliens, Godzilla and the Predator, lit so the whole room goes faintly radioactive. In 2014 the lounge fused with Genie's Cafe next door, which is why you can order all-day breakfast under the black light and chase it with a Bloody Mary built on garlic-infused vodka — a drink Willamette Week readers voted second-best in the city in 2022. There's a wall of flavored vodkas feeding the space-themed specials, pudding shots, an arcade room with pinball, and a 3,000-square-foot heated patio with TVs and rain cover for the nine damp months. Elliott Smith drank here; WW readers named it Portland's best dive bar in 2017. The kitchen and the bar both run to 1am, which makes it one of the few places in town where a plate of eggs at midnight is the intended use.
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Sushi Ichiban
Most conveyor-belt sushi runs on a rubber belt; Sushi Ichiban runs on a model train, a tiny tank engine dragging flatcars of nigiri and rolls around a circular chef's counter while you lift plates off as they pass. It opened as Sushi Takahashi 1 and became Ichiban in 2008 during the recession, and the name locals actually use — Punk Rock Sushi — comes from the loud rock and the hair colors on both sides of the counter. Plates run about a dollar or two; a server counts your stack at the end. The house oddity is the Plager Roll (fried asparagus, rice, spicy mayo), so named because the recipe was frankly plagiarized from a cook's previous job and nobody remembers which one. Portland Monthly calls it "dingy yet beloved," which is the correct amount of both.
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Pix Pâtisserie (Pix-O-Matic)
Cheryl Wakerhauser's pâtisserie has spent two decades doing precise French dessert work in a city that mostly wanted doughnuts, and its most Portland move is the Pix-O-Matic: an outdoor vending machine bolted to the East Burnside sidewalk that sells macarons, individual mousse cakes with names like Amelie and Une Fantôme, boxed chocolates, Spanish and Portuguese conservas, sourdough starter, cheese, French berets and the occasional Star Wars Pez dispenser. It's restocked several times a day, takes a contactless tap, and runs 24 hours except a brief dead window between 3 and 5am. There's a photo booth next to it that shoots stills and GIFs, and refrigerated pickup lockers for special-order cakes. The full bakery counter is in transition, but Can Bar — the indoor room and patio — opens Thursday through Saturday evenings for drinks and tinned seafood, and you're welcome to buy your dessert out of the machine and eat it inside with a glass of something. It is, functionally, a vending machine with a wine list.
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Bipartisan Cafe
Peter Emerson had been collecting American political memorabilia since 1980 when he and Hobie Bender turned an old Montavilla hardware store into a coffeehouse in the mid-2000s, and the collection went straight onto the walls: campaign buttons, pins, bumper stickers and ballots, framed posters of Buchanan, Van Buren, Nixon and JFK, portraits of Geronimo, Harriet Tubman and Dr. King, Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms, and a voting machine pulled from Palm Beach, Florida, that was actually used in the 2000 presidential election. The stated curatorial rule is to include "both flattering and unflattering reminders of who we are as a nation," which is why the Confederate material is on the wall too, arranged chronologically from the east side. The reason to come is the pie — handmade daily, with a family-recipe marionberry that AAA named one of the ten best regional dishes in the West in 2022, plus cherry, sour cream apple, banana cream, key lime and chocolate peanut butter cream. It sold to a longtime employee, Josh Pangelinan, in 2023 and kept running exactly as it was. A slice, a coffee, and a hanging chad machine three feet away.
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Stepping Stone Cafe
The motto is not a joke a blogger made up — "You Eat Here Because We Let You" is printed across the top of the menu with a registered-trademark symbol after it, which is its own kind of commitment. The griddle turns out mancakes the size of the plate they arrive on, sold as a single for $9, a short stack for $11, or three for $13, with the menu noting only that "they are plate-sized!" as if that settles the matter. The other headliner is the Smothered Bad Ass: an omelet stuffed with diced chicken fried steak, hashbrowns, onions, jalapeños and cheddar, then buried in sausage gravy. Both carry an "as seen on Man v. Food" tag, from the Portland episode that aired back in February 2009 and put the 13-inch pancakes on television. It's a small room a few blocks off the NW 23rd shopping crush, and it closes at 3 p.m. every day, so the whole operation is a daylight enterprise.
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Sugarpine Drive-In
The building went up in the 1920s as a gas station on the Historic Columbia River Highway, serving the first generation of Gorge road-trippers, and spent the decades since as a fish-and-tackle shop and then a riverside concession stand before the current owners took it over in 2018. You order at a walk-up window and eat outside, on picnic tables or on the bank itself, at the point in Glenn Otto Park where the Sandy River delivers a steady supply of sunburned inner-tube floaters coming ashore. The sundaes are the reason to make the drive — tall, engineered soft-serve constructions swirled with house sauces and broken pastry, which Eater has described as built for the Instagram generation and which once moved a thousand units in a single Mother's Day. The savory half of the menu is smoked-meat sandwiches and vegetable bowls sourced from West Gorge and Willamette Valley farms, and it changes with the season; the current board is the Summer 2026 menu. The whole thing shuts at 5 p.m., which is the one detail people get wrong.
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Otto's Sausage Kitchen
Otto Eichentopf left Germany in 1911, landed in Aberdeen, Washington, and by 1922 had a meat market on SE Woodstock Boulevard; the current building went up in 1936–37 with a smokehouse that ran two full stories, and the shop has passed child to child ever since — three generations of Eichentopfs are involved today. The reason to come is not the retail case of forty-plus house sausages but the grill they run on the sidewalk out front, which their own site advertises as operating through "rain, sleet, ice, wind, snow, and even sunshine." The menu at the grill is deliberately tiny: old-fashioned wiener, smoked pork link, chicken sausage, then a condiment table of Beaver mustards, sauerkraut, onions and relish that you load yourself. Roadfood's Michael Stern ranked those old-fashioned wieners third in the country, and the Sterns put Otto's on their national top-ten hot dog list, which is a strange thing to be reading about while standing on a sidewalk in Woodstock. Everything is cooked to order in front of you, so the queue moves at the speed of the grill, not the register.
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Huber's Cafe
Huber's has been pouring since 1879 and has occupied this room in the Oregon Pioneer Building since 1910, under arched Povey Brothers stained-glass skylights, mahogany paneling and terrazzo floor, with brass fixtures and spittoons still in place. The Spanish Coffee is comparatively recent — Jim Louie brought the idea over from the Fernwood Inn in Milwaukie a few decades back — but the presentation is what made it: rum, triple sec, Kahlúa and coffee assembled at your table, lit, and poured flaming from an alarming height, whipped cream and grated nutmeg landing on top. Willamette Week's line is that the fanciest bartenders like to light the pour while it's still in mid-air, scarily, tableside. By 1990 the restaurant was the largest independent user of Kahlúa in the United States, and there are plaques to prove it. The kitchen still runs about 100 pounds of turkey a day across a dozen preparations, a holdover from when every drink at the bar came with a turkey sandwich; Jim Louie died in July 2025 and his three sons, the fourth generation, run it now.
Weird eats & drinks in Portland — FAQ
Which weird eats & drinks in Portland are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Fried Egg I'm in Love, Space Room Lounge and Genie's Too and Otto's Sausage Kitchen. Fried Egg I'm in Love — The name is a mangled Cure lyric — "Friday I'm in Love" — and it sets the rules for everything downstream: the whole menu is fried-egg sandwiches named Yolko Ono (sausage patties, pesto, sourdough), Egg Zeppelin (veggie patty, cheddar, aardvark aioli) and Free-Range Against the Machine (avocado, tomato, havarti).
Where in Portland are they?
Across Portland and Troutdale. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Is this a good weird date in Portland?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Fried Egg I'm in Love, for instance: This is a morning move, not a night one. Set an alarm, walk into the Hawthorne shop at 3549 SE Hawthorne around 9am on a Saturday, order one Yolko Ono and one Free-Range Against the Machine so you can trade halves, add a bloody mary each, then carry the caffeine four blocks east and browse Hawthorne's record and book shops until the sandwiches wear off.
How were these weird eats & drinks chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Portland guide.