People and Food, Food and People

Experiencing Panzerotti Fritti at Walter Ferrante’s Bari Food Cart

“From the small barrel, there is good wine.”

Behind the fence of a sweltering blacktop parking lot, inside a white sardine can with room for one and a half, there’s a shaved head in a red and white t-shirt squinting out his sliding window. When we get to the truck, he jumps up to receive us, and his assistant Delphina tells me that he’s been “extremely nervous” waiting for us, a handful of students who arrived 15 minutes late because we took too long eating our compulsory Portland vegan donuts. 

Walter Ferrante landed in our collective consciousness after his June 2021 feature in foodie trendsetter Munchies’ YouTube video, where he was crowned “The Street Food Prince of Portland” to a moderately viral viewership of over 400k. Delphina walks us to the tables where I’ll be scribbling notes from our conversation while thinking about the words I’ll use that won’t be able to capture Walter in the slightest — a beaming man who uses his hands to sculpt the air in front of him while yelling at me about the circumstances that brought him from small-town Bari in Southern Italy to his current home in Portland.

The ways Walter tells his life story — the dynamic inflections in his voice, the choppy vocabulary he uses, how his eyes color the words he speaks — represent an identity deeply rooted in his Italian culture. But everything he says hints toward a wandering soul whose concept of home isn’t tied to any one geographic locale. 

His boyhood was spent waiting tables, having started at 11 years old and subsequently leaving his hometown at 16 to work at a restaurant off of the central Adriatic coast. The way he remembers it, he liked it so much that he never wanted to go back home. And even though the few-hour move wasn’t earth-shattering in scope or distance, it was made in the same adventurous spirit that Walter eventually followed to land in Davis, California where a connection begged him to work as a waiter in his Italian restaurant. When I ask him if he had ever dreamed of coming to the States before he moved, he says, “It’s the dream of every Italian: America… you see the movies, the beach, and well, it’s America my friend. It’s big and beautiful.”

“You know what’s funny?” he asks me. “Italians always dream of seeing their kids married with a big wedding. When I was a kid, I told my mom, ‘Someday, I will get married far, far away with no one who knows me!’” And three months after Walter got to Davis, he found the love of his life amidst the city’s downtown nightlife, initially communicating with no more than body language and single words. Eventually, the couple got married in Lake Tahoe and moved to Portland, the city that Walter thinks he was destined to represent as a place centered around people and food.

On the morning of June 3rd, 2021, Walter popped his cart window open to a single file line continuing onto the street in front of the lot — a sight he’d never seen in his five years of selling fresh panzerotti fritti on the streets of Portland. 

“I started thinking to myself, ‘I cannot make all of these orders — it will take me two hours to take the orders before I start to COOK the first order!’ You know what I mean? And I started panicking and asking, ‘What are you doing here? You are all for me? Oh my GOD!’” 

And just like that! In an instant, Walter’s life was changed by a video that garnered more attention than many of us will receive in our lifetimes. He hired an assistant to lighten his load, nearly sells out every day, and has room to think about what the next big adventure is. But unlike many who stumble into good fortune, Walter isn’t giving into lucrative visions of grandeur. He tells me he never thinks about franchising or starting a restaurant, because bureaucratic business decisions quash the real-life connections he can make with people by selling directly to them on the street. In response to being asked if he’s considered food delivery services, he says, “See, I took off my online orders… because every time I get an order, I get pissed because I cannot see the FACE of the customer!! I cannot say ‘HI’ and ‘thank YOU!’” As for his dream after all of this fame and recognition? A bigger food cart.

I’ve enjoyed my fair share of calzones, but the panzerotti coming out of Walter’s truck are unlike anything I’ve experienced. My first bite through the delicate, crispy skin gives way to hot, cheesy filling that’s as savory as it is rich. The sensation is almost magical — my own eyes saw this pastry submerged in the deep fat fryer, and yet it’s so light and airy that I must go back for bite after bite. Walter insists the secret’s in the dough, a recipe he’s been making and perfecting for the past five years. 

After five years, do you think you’re a chef?

“No. I am just a nice person — well, not just a nice person, I am someone who makes the panzerotti fritti and people like it and I like to make it. Let the people say what they think I am.”

Nice person, waiter, chef, dreamer, entrepreneur, newly viral internet personality. My two hours with Walter are enough to realize that all the descriptive words in the dictionary could not adequately summarize the man behind the cart. In my mind, Bari Food Cart tops the list of must-visit places in Portland, even if just for that electric smile and warm Southern Italian hospitality. The fact that Walter’s panzerotti are almost good enough to cure diseases is simply the cherry on top. 

Before we finish, he leaves me with one last thought. In a world where success and self-worth are informed by the vastness of our legacy, it’s easy to forget that the most noble endeavors in life are sometimes ones that only affect a small subset of people. Walter communicates this idea to me with an Italian proverb: “From the small barrel, there is good wine.” And outside of Bari Food Cart’s small barrel, I’m not sure I’ve tasted better wine. 

Words: David Chen

Photos: Apollonia Cuneo