Portland: New ideas

Portland started the food-truck craze and elevated distilling to an art, and you’d be hard put to name a city that’s approached DIY food and farming with as much gusto. Add the fact that farm-to-table and foraged ingredients are simply a given here, and you get a sense of Portland’s ridiculously high bar for innovation. It also doesn’t hurt to have a forward-thinking, food-loving mayor who makes barriers to entry low, like allowing “cart pods”—parking lots reserved exclusively for food carts.

Score: 10