2 days ago
A Las Vegas-Rasied Chef Moves from Chicken Tenders to Tagliatelle in Portland
Chef Daniel Stramm, the force behind Portland's gluten-free fried chicken cart Your Side Chicks opened that cart in the Hawthorne Asylum pod in 2023, before relocating to the Nob Hill pod in November last year. Now he's adding a second concept just a few stalls down: Rose City Pasta, a choose-your-own-pasta-adventure conceptually anchored in affordability and customizability. The cart opened on Thursday, May 15, offering a tight menu focused on pasta shapes like mafaldine and gnocchi Napoletna, accompanied by sauces like pesto, cacio e pepe, and vodka cream. Add-ons include pork belly, whipped ricotta, and seasonal veggies.
Entrants to the Nob Hill pod must face the bold, oblongedly facaded form of Rose City Pasta — a food cart truly living its largest life— that's clad in bright white, stark red and black; part latticework, part strachiatelle stronghold. Positioned just past the six-pack of covered picnic tables, it presents a veritable trial-by-carb to the otherwise unsuspecting. Angular and slightly off-kilter in its placement, the cart juts out like a pasta watchtower — surveying the pod; adorned in its tall, spiky crown of red lattice.
Atop a crude, wooden waist-high waist high stanchion that's unmistakably hand constructed, customers find a tablet to place their orders, though Stramm insists that cash orders or customers having trouble with the tech are free to order at the window.
For all its casual approachability, Rose City Pasta's sourcing is nevertheless deliberate. It pulls pork from Carlton Farms, olive oil from Durant, and a range of flours from Bob's Red Mill. The pickled peppers come from local heavyweights Mama Lil's, while Stramm looks forward to procuring seasonal tomatoes and peppers from Sauvie Island's Douglas farm as the season rapidly approaches.
The cart's fresh red paint might compete only with the likewise bright, slightly frenetic energy Stramm brings to the table. Inside a kitchen barely the size of a middle-class closet, his multitasking is on full display as he deftly alternates between cooking, hand-cutting fresh pasta, staff training, fielding questions and taking orders — all while excitedly detailing operations and plans.
Pre-Portland, Stramm cut his teeth in Sin City kitchens, after graduating from Le Cordon Bleu, working his way through high-volume kitchens like Tao, Zine, and Bacchanal Buffet before landing at Wolfgang Puck's Bar & Grill. A stint in Seattle followed, then a return to Vegas, where he also dabbled in cannabis-focused food R&D. Eventually, he relocated to Portland, shifting from restaurants to carts — but the fine dining, large kitchen efficiency remains.
Though fully plug-and-play, Rose City Pasta's menu doesn't feel scattershot. "Since 2015 I wanted to open a pasta shop and kind of do things different," Stramm says. "Where it's a little more fast-casual." In Portland, he adds, "it's a little harder to find consistent, cheap pasta" — something he's trying to correct with a menu that emphasizes customer autonomy as its core operating principle. "Customers aren't stuck with just what's seasonal, he says. "They can make something they actually like."
Now, with Your Side Chicks opening its second location in the all-new Brooklyn Carreta pod and Rose City Pasta settling into its Nob Hill stall, Stramm is quietly expanding his footprint across Portland's vast and competitive food cart scene. If the Brooklyn pod is any clue, his street-level growth strategy is well underway. By early evening, slanted sunlight cuts through garlic and marinara steam that lugubriously lingers across the pod — subtle, but still hard to miss.
Rose City Pasta is located at the Nob Hill Food cart pod (2137 NW 23rd Place) and operates Wednesday through Sunday, from noon to 8 p.m.
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