mici.jpg

Mici -- ground beef rolls -- at Delicious, Portland's Transylvanian food cart.

(Michael Russell, The Oregonian)

One of the best things -- perhaps

the

best thing -- about Portland's food cart scene is how often you can find carts serving a single dish or a whole cuisine rarely or never seen before in town.

Sure, plenty of cookie-cutter carts serving Thai, Mexican or Middle Eastern dishes open each year. But over the past three years, while eating at nearly every new Portland-area food cart for our

,

and (upcoming) 2013 best new carts issues, I've been surprised by the breadth and novelty in our carts again and again.

This year is no exception.

The Delicios food cart serves Transylvanian fare at Southwest 10th Avenue and Alder Street in downtown Portland.

The Delicios cart (Romanian for ... well, you can guess) is housed inside what appears to be the former

at Southwest 10th and Alder. Here, you'll find

a menu of dishes from Transylvania, the central region of Romania,

including pastry-wrapped hot dogs, state-fair-esque chimney cakes and cabbage rolls.

The best dish I tried was the mici (pronounced

meech

, sometimes spelled mititei), a quartet of soft beef rolls, gently grilled, which came with a creamy sauce and the cart's own "potatoes salad" (see above).

But overall, I didn't fall in love with the food. The wrapped hot dog, called a covridog, could have been juicier. The cabbage rolls less soggy. And Delicios is going to have a tough time making this year's best new carts list, with competition coming from carts

serving great khinkali, kolaches, takoyaki, palmeni, dosas, empanadas, momos, (good) bagels and more

.

Covridogs, or pastry-wrapped hot dogs, at Delicios, a new Transylvanian food cart in downtown Portland.

Still, it's early days for the cart. And it's great to see another unique cuisine added to Portland, courtesy of a food cart.

Read more:

And since I've got you here, let me ask: What are you favorite food carts to open since last summer?

I've already got my list for 2013, but you'll have to wait until Aug. 9 to see it...

-- Michael Russell