If you were to try to hunt down a Scottish chip van serving traditional chippy fare, Beaverton, Oregon would probably be one of the last places you’d look, but that’s exactly where you’d find chef James King’s Frying Scotsman food cart. The Pacific Northwest seems an unlikely place to put down stakes, an ocean away from where the haddock roam, but King has carved out a niche in a place that’s saturated with food carts with his unique chip shop on blocks.
Prior to manning a food cart, King worked in the oil industry for nearly 15 years, but being away from his family around the world for months at a time prompted him to find something he loved that he could go home from at night. He’s been in the Portland area for around 12 years, but for the last ten, The Frying Scotsman has been his labor of love. King purchased a tiny cart and set up shop in Northwest Portland at a time when the now saturated food cart scene was burgeoning; eight months later, he moved to
In October of 2018, King put down proverbial stakes at BG’s Food Cartel pod in Beaverton, Oregon, which has become the largest in the Portland area by default. Some of the other Alder Street carts had relocated there with mixed success, but King has a loyal clientele that has followed him across town and has been able to maintain familiarity with those who had seen the cart featured in season one of The Cooking Channel’s Eat Street on the “Classics With A Twist” episode in 2011. While Alder Street was desig