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Whiffies Fried Pies
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photo from Flickr user Dalechumbley
It’s about 10:30 on Saturday night, and there is a commotion outside Whiffies Fried Pies, the newest stand at the 12th and Hawthorne food-cart pod. A tall, lean young man is sitting at a picnic bench, and everyone is watching him. Some are in awe, mouths agape, while others giggle; some convey disgust and note that they’re about to ralph. The plugged-in Whiffies devotees are tweeting like mad. The young man at the bench finishes a pie, and the crowd erupts into applause. “This is incredible!” one of them says, “I can’t believe it!” The young man has just eaten eight fried pies in half an hour, destroying the previous record of seven pies in an hour. And he’s my friend.
Before we go further, I should perhaps back up. “What is a fried pie?” you may be wondering. And “How is it that you know someone as illustrious as the current reigning pie champ?” and “What’s the deal with Twitter?” Well, friends, it’s a good thing I’m an expert at being a twenty-something in this town, for all your questions will soon be answered.
The fried pies at Whiffies are like empanadas - crescent-shaped, deep fried yet flaky pastries stuffed with sweet and savory fillings. The BBQ brisket is phenomenal, and there’s a BBQ tofu, too, for those who don’t like chomping on meat the way I do. There are a few other savory flavors that rotate on and off the menu, like franks-n-beans and a vegan pot pie. The sweet pies are all vegan, believe it or not, and you can usually choose between several of the following: cherry, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, lemon, coconut cream, chocolate cream, and peanut butter chocolate chip (that one is awesome). The night that my friend beat the record, there was a durian pie, too. But we’ll get to that in a second. The dough is light and buttery and not too greasy, but don’t get me wrong - one pie is a pretty decent meal and almost certainly worth several hundreds of calories. The savory pies are $4, the sweet are $3. This is a good deal.
Dolores* and I knew about Whiffies before it even opened a few months ago, since we know one of the guys who helped Gregg Abbott (super nice owner and founder) get the thing going and who nows helps make and sell the pies. He occasionally lets us borrow his radio-less car, and so we bring all our friends to Whiffies and promote it whenever we can, in the hopes that he will continue to let us borrow his radio-less car. Also because we like Whiffies.
But enough! On to question two! Dolores and I knew Bootsie in college. He lived with us one summer, and it was then that we came to understand his talent for consuming food.** One night we challenged him to race against our other housemate in eating an entire Domino’s pizza. With “The Final Countdown” as the soundtrack, Bootsie devoured his pizza in about six minutes, while his competitor left four pieces untouched. We knew it would be a short jump from pizza pies to fried pies, so when he moved to Portland a few weeks ago, our mission was clear. Make Bootsie the new pie champ.
“If you can finish it off with a durian pie, I will be totally blown away!” Gregg shouts from inside the cart. Bootsie is sitting calmly at the picnic table, having already beaten the record. His face is conveying no emotion. “How do you feel?” someone asks him. “I feel...worse... Yeah,” he responds. Then he tells Gregg to bring him the durian pie.
Here’s how Gregg promotes his durian pie: “It smells like rotten bananas and old socks. It’s really gross.” Apparently Gregg put the durian pie on the menu mostly as a joke. Some people sort of like it, though. Durian, if you didn’t know, is an Asian fruit the smell of which, according to Wikipedia, “evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in southeast Asia.” Boots ate the durian pie, which did indeed emit a rather offense smell. As he was scraping up the last of the filling, which had spurted out of the pie with every bite (and which, due to its yellow liquid-y texture, made it look like it was being vomited either from the pie or from Bootsie’s mouth), Boots declared that it was “disgusting.” Needless to say, Boots is now revered to the extreme in the Whiffies circle; the durian pie was his ninth within an hour.
Which brings us to question three: Twitter. I don’t really know what the deal is with Twitter, but I admit that I recently joined, solely for the purpose of promoting this blog. Whiffies certainly knows all about Twitter, however: @Whiffies posts updates ALL THE TIME. And you can bet that there was live coverage of the amazing nine pies and that there was a downright twitterstorm of responses regarding the new pie champ. In fact, as part of his prize, Bootsie won claim to the @piechamp username. If only that excited him as much as it did everyone else who was tweeting about it. In any case, Twitter seems to be a useful tool for advertising things like fried pies and blogs, or for letting people know what you’re making for dinner. You can follow me @ali_reingold.
So now you know about fried pies, Bootsie the pie champ, and Twitter. I could write more about the other amazing food carts at 12th and Hawthorne - Potato Champion, Perriera Creperie, Yarp?! - but I won’t. I will only mention that I once witnessed a poutine-eating contest at Potato Champion where the contestants were a man, two women, and a dog named Dudley Cheeseburger. The dog spent most of the time sticking its head under the table, which was disappointing. Oh well. I have my own champion to be proud of.
With joy in my heart and pies in my stomach,
Your Portland Twenty-something
*My housemate and heterosexual life partner, whom I first introduce here.
**It was at the beginning of that summer that we nicknamed him “Bootsie,” after a character in a Hungarian movie called Kontroll, in which Bootsie is a punk kid running around the Hungarian subways wreaking havoc. Our Bootsie is actually an extremely laid-back dude with a dry sense of humor who has a minivan and likes to make hummus.
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