Champs Burgers Opens at Portland’s Away Days Brewing Co.

At long last, one of Portland’s buzziest burger pop-up outfits is opening its first food cart. Champs Burger will open to the public on Saturday, March 15. Owners Sterling Houghton and Travis Wilshire linked with the team at Away Days Brewing Co. for this big-time Brooklyn neighborhood debut. Fans already know Champs for its smash burgers, well-sourced ingredients, and friendly attitude. But all the rest of Portland is about to meet the duo’s “burger-inclusive” operation — fresh-baked cookies and beef tallow fries included — for the first time. “The burger culture is starting to blossom full sail,” Houghton says. “There’s been a lot of intention going into the burger we’re bringing to the city.”

The menu is burger-inclusive because Champs is not just smash burgers. The elements that construct the burger are more interesting to them than any one sandwich. Take the buns. It’s a combination of brioche and Japanese milk bread, a buttery and tastiness from the former with the lightness of the latter. They source the flour from Cairnspring Mills, an organic outfit with grains grown in Oregon. American cheese comes from New School American Cheese, a fitting name for the splashy aged dairy purveyor. It’s also a fitting partner to the salted, aged beef that goes into the burgers.

Carter Hiyama

There’ll be all kinds of burgers on the menu, including the $10 Champ burger — a straight-up pickles and onions affair — alongside rotating favorites such as the lengua pastrami burger, a heaping collection of lengua pastrami, melty Gruyere slice, and fermented jalapeño Russian dressing. Further, there are a few items that — due to the nature of their pop-ups, and pre-food cart — the two couldn’t serve. The first are beef tallow fries. The second is cookies. Drinks, of course, come by way of Away Days Brewing Co.

Regardless of where the burger culture is at, the two want to meet customers there. Houghton says as smash burgers have brought the pendulum to one end of the spectrum, already some are clamoring for pub burgers of yore, thick-cut affairs, meaty rather than disc-like. Burger inclusivity is key to pushing the culture forward. “Even in the cart right now,” Houghton says, “we’ve got a flat-top for fry, smash burgers, and we have a charbroiler for open flame, grill-based burgers.”

Houghton and Wilshire decided they wanted to strike north while working in the SoCal coffee scene. They fell in love with the service aspect, the human connection. In summer 2023 they had been living in Portland for a good while and were circling those same conversations they had back in the day: Is this the right time to make a go in the service industry with our own project? They decided yes, striking into the ever-booming world of smash burgers. The New York and Los Angeles scenes inspire them. Champs entered the world that summer and each pop-up brought more and more support. They have a vision of their own permanent space down the road, to scale up those fries and cookies, to go further than ever, to live up to their namesake: to be burger champs.

Champs Burgers (1234 SE Cora Street) opens on Saturday, March 15.

Carter Hiyama

Carter Hiyama