Montavilla's Berry Glut: Portland's Unhyped July Table

By the second week of July, every porch in Montavilla has a bowl of marionberries sitting on it with a cardboard sign that says FREE. This is not generosity — this is desperation. The canes produce so relentlessly that even the most devoted pie-bakers and jam-canners eventually surrender, leaving flats of fruit on their front steps like offerings to a god they hope will make it stop.

I showed up last July with a suitcase half-full of dirty laundry and left with it half-full of frozen berries wrapped in a Portland Mercury I grabbed off a bar counter. That's the kind of neighborhood Montavilla is in high summer: aggressively productive, unfussy about it, and more interested in feeding you than impressing you. The food scene here doesn't photograph well. It doesn't need to.

1. The berry situation, explained

Marionberries are a blackberry cultivar developed at Oregon State in the 1950s, and they taste like what you wished blackberries tasted like before you knew better — darker, more acidic, with a sweetness that actually finishes instead of just sitting on your tongue. They peak in Portland between late June and late July, and Montavilla sits close enough to the farms along Powell Valley Road that you can buy a flat for $18–$22 at the Saturday Montavilla Farmers Market on SE Stark between 76th and 78th.

Don't bother with the grocery store berries. Fred Meyer stocks them, sure, but they're picked early for shelf stability and they taste like a rumor of the real thing. The farmers market runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday through September, and if you get there after noon, the berry vendors are already packing up.

Boysenberries and tayberries show up too, usually at the table run by Unger Farms, and those are worth grabbing if you see them. But marionberries are the main event.

2. Breakfast at Coquine is not optional

Coquine sits on the second floor of a building at 6839 SE Belmont Street, and you should go for brunch, not dinner. I know that's a controversial position — their evening tasting menu gets the press — but the brunch pastry basket is one of the most honest things I've eaten in Portland, and the marionberry galette they run in July is so good it made me briefly angry at every other galette I've ever had.

The restaurant sources obsessively from local farms. You feel it in the eggs, which have yolks the color of a school bus. A brunch for two with coffee runs around $55–$70 before tip. Get there when they open at 9 a.m. on weekends. By 10:30 there's a wait.

3. What to actually drink when it's 90 degrees

Portland in July can surprise people who only know it from rain jokes. It gets hot — dry, still, 90-plus-degree hot — and the neighborhood bars respond accordingly. Bipartisan Café at 7901 SE Stark Street isn't a bar, exactly, but they pour good iced coffee and the pie case is the real draw. Get a slice of whatever berry pie is current. It'll cost you $6.50.

For actual drinks, OP Wurst on SE Stark pours steins of Heater Allen Pilsner, which is brewed in McMinnville and tastes like the platonic ideal of a hot-day beer. Academy Theater at 7818 SE Stark sells cheap beer and screens second-run movies, and on a scorching afternoon there is no better $5 spent in Portland than a cold pint in a dark theater watching a movie you only half-wanted to see.

Skip the cocktail bars on Division Street. They're fine, but they're not Montavilla, and the $16 drinks taste the same as $16 drinks everywhere else in America now.

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4. The taco window nobody's writing about

There's a truck — technically a permanent walk-up window now — called Güero on SE 82nd Avenue near the intersection with Powell. The al pastor is spit-roasted and carved to order, and a plate of four tacos with a horchata costs $14. The salsa verde is thin and ferocious.

I've seen food blogs direct people to other taco spots in the neighborhood, and those are fine, but Güero is the one I'd walk twenty minutes in the heat for. The corn tortillas are doubled and they don't fall apart, which sounds like a low bar until you've eaten twelve tacos that disintegrated in your hand across various Portland food carts.

82nd Avenue gets dismissed as an ugly commercial strip, and it is ugly — auto shops and check-cashing places and bus exhaust. But the food along it, from the Vietnamese bakeries up near Glisan to the Korean spots near Foster, is better than most of what you'll find in the neighborhoods tourists actually visit.

5. Where to buy the jam you'll wish you had in November

If you're not going to make your own — and you probably aren't, because canning in a July kitchen is a punishment — two options. First: the farmers market again, where a couple of vendors sell small-batch marionberry preserves in the $9–$12 range per jar. Second, and this is the one I actually prefer: Eb & Bean at 7907 SE Stark Street stocks locally made preserves year-round, and in July the selection expands.

Eb & Bean is technically a frozen yogurt shop, and it's a good one, but the retail shelf near the door is where I always end up spending money. They carry stuff from small Portland producers that you won't find at New Seasons.

One jar of marionberry jam in your suitcase in July will make you feel like a genius in January. Two jars and you're a hero. Ship if you must — it survives transit fine.

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6. The park nobody sits in correctly

Montavilla Park, between SE Stark and SE Washington around 82nd, has a big grassy field and mature trees that throw actual shade — which matters enormously in July when Portland's UV index goes absurd. People spread out on the south lawn. Don't do that. The north side near the community center has better tree coverage and a water fountain that works.

Bring the tacos. Bring the berries. Sit on the ground.

7. Country Cat is gone and I'm still not over it

The Country Cat Dinnerhouse closed in 2020 after thirteen years on SE Stark, and it left a hole in Montavilla's dinner landscape that hasn't been filled. Adam Sappington's fried chicken was a serious piece of cooking — brined, dredged in seasoned flour, fried in a cast-iron skillet, and served with a biscuit that weighed as much as a small brick in the best way.

I bring this up because people still recommend it online, and you should know it's gone. The building at 7937 SE Stark has a new tenant.

What's replaced it for a proper sit-down dinner? Honestly, nothing equivalent within the neighborhood. You can walk to Coquine for the evening tasting menu ($75 per person, worth it but a different mood entirely) or drive ten minutes to Langbaan on NE Prescott for extraordinary Thai. But the gap where Country Cat stood — hearty, Southern-inflected, affordable — that gap is just a gap.

8. How to spend a full July day without leaving the neighborhood

Start at Coquine at 9 a.m. Pastry basket, coffee, the galette if they're running it. Walk east on Belmont to Stark and hit the farmers market if it's Saturday — buy berries, buy whatever stone fruit looks heavy and ripe. Eat a few while you walk.

Midday, when the heat peaks, duck into Academy Theater. See whatever's playing. Drink a beer in the dark.

Afternoon: Güero for tacos. Then Eb & Bean for frozen yogurt — the marionberry swirl, if it's on — and grab a jar of jam for the trip home. End up at Montavilla Park on the north side with whatever's left of the berries. The light in Portland in July doesn't quit until nearly 9 p.m., and the temperature drops fast once it does, and you'll sit there in the grass wondering why everyone's always talking about the other neighborhoods.