Two restaurants seize opportunity.

Byline: RETAIL NOTEBOOK By Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

Jim Trunnell read it somewhere in a magazine.

"It said the biggest dives have the best barbecue," Trunnell says. "Well, we qualify."

He's mostly joking - about his new Porky's Palace being a dive, anyway. But he's serious enough about the "best barbecue" thing to issue a challenge for Eugene-Springfield's other barbecue restaurants.

"I can't wait to have some kind of barbecue cook-off with those other guys," he says.

Trunnell's restaurant in located at 796 Highway 99 North - a few blocks north of Roosevelt Boulevard, at the southwest corner of Highway 99 and Royal Avenue. He's owned the building since 1999, and it had been home to the Little R Cafe & Bar for more than 40 years. But Trunnell says his intention from the beginning was to open his own restaurant at the location, and the opportunity arose when his tenant - the most recent proprietor of the Little R - closed her business on Sept. 1.

"I just got tired of paying too much money going out for dinner," Trunnell says.

"Since I got my sign up, (business) has just been going, going, going," he says.

"It's tough times, but I can keep the prices like they are because I own the building."

The new restaurant's signature dish is Porky's Platter, which goes for $8.95 and includes ribs, brisket, pulled pork, potatoes and gravy, and a vegetable. Other favorites include pulled pork, chicken or brisket sandwiches, each for $6.50.

Trunnell says he uses an augur-fed smoker with hickory pellets, and can cook as much as 300 pounds of meat at a time. He fires up the smoker at noon every day, and slow cooks the meats late into the night.

The smoker was Trunnell's biggest expense - at about $8,000 - in getting the restaurant up and running. Not counting the cost of the building, he spent a total of about $30,000 to launch Porky's - but still plans to do some painting and other sprucing-up this spring.

The restaurant seats about 65, with space for another 40 in the adjacent bar.

Porky's has eight or nine employees. It's open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, from 7 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. daily.

Permanent Blazing Chef

Haven Sundstrom has taken a different route into the restaurant business, opening a permanent version of her Blazing Chef food cart that has become a Saturday Market fixture.

"I started thinking about (a permanent site) about two years before I opened it," Sundstrom says. "But I said I'd do it only if an opportunity that was perfect presented itself to me."

It did.

She already had been donating her used fryer oil to Green Eye Automotive, which specializes in biodiesel conversions in its shop and car lot at 285 River Road, just north of the Chambers Street connector. Then the Green Eye owners invited her to locate a food cart at the front of their property.

"They had been talking about putting food in their lot, and so it became kind of a perfect symbiotic situation," Sundstrom says.

Along with coffee and espresso drinks, the new Blazing Chef cart offers the same menu - fish and chips, fish sandwiches, salmon burgers, salads and root beer floats - that Sundstrom sells from her portable booth at Eugene's Saturday Market.

Her most expensive full meal is $8.50, while sandwiches with fries sell for $7.

"People come up to me and talk about starting a business right now (in a down economy)," she says. "My comeback is that people in Eugene, when times get tough, they really want to support local people."

Sundstrom says her customers have done that, and she does the same by "local sourcing" her products as much as possible. For example, she buys her fish from the Eugene Fisherman's Market and her coffee from Wandering Goat Coffee Company in the nearby Whiteaker neighborhood.

Sundstrom began working at the Saturday Market in a friend's food booth - Helen's Roll-ups - about 12 years ago, and gradually became a partner in that business.

She acquired a deep fryer about seven years ago and added fish and chips to the menu, then her partner eventually phased out of the operation.

"Over time, the fish kind of took over," Sundstrom says. "I couldn't do the roll-ups anymore because everyone wanted fish and chips."

The booth's name was changed to the Blazing Chef, and Sundstrom doubled her cart's business from 2004 to 2008.

She also entered a yearlong business financing program through the nonprofit Lane MicroBusiness in 2005. Sundstrom received just over $5,000 in funding through the program, which went toward a total investment of about $30,000 to get the Blazing Chef's permanent location started.

She hopes to operate both the permanent cart and her portable booth when the Saturday Market reopens for the 2009 season in April, but for now the Blazing Chef is open at the River Road location from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays and from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekends.

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Title Annotation:	Business; The owner of Porky's Palace cooks up barbecue in his own building; Blazing Chef sets up permanently in offered space
Publication:	The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)
Date:	Jan 2, 2009
Words:	840
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