From 2021’s Food Cart of the Year in our Restaurant Guide to a repeat offender as Best Fried Chicken in Central Oregon, as voted on by Source readers from 2021 through 2024, The Tin Pig has been making mouths water with its down-home Southern cooking and comfort food — hush puppies, fried pickles, pork rinds, Tennessee tacos, chicken strips, burgers and the marquee fried chicken sandos — since 2018.
Over the years, the cart has called The Podski home — starting there in 2018 — before moving to Crux Fermentation Project in late 2022. It’s a new year and time for a new home for The Tin Pig, which will relocate to Ponch’s Place and reopen this week.
“We are super excited to move to an area where we can have more interaction with our locals,” says owner Jack Tate. “With all the local businesses and the kick-butt vet office next to us, we figured it would be a great change and chance for us.”
Entering its seventh year this spring, The Tin Pig is “a family affair,” Tate chuckles. He gets help from his son, brother and wife. The couple both have years of experience in the restaurant industry and moved to Bend in 2016 to open Immersion Brewing. Their families originally hail from the South — Jack’s from Tennessee and Yvonne’s from Alabama — so their food pays respect to these origins, with their own individual twists.
At Ponch’s Place, there’ll be a new schedule (open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am to 7pm), and “we will be opening for breakfast by the end of the month,” Tate says. It’s a new endeavor for The Tin Pig, so you can expect four breakfast sandwiches on “homemade, fresh drop biscuits” filled with sausage smash patties and fried chicken (obvi). He’ll also introduce his “play on chicken and waffles, which will be chicken and French toast.” To start, breakfast will be offered from 9am to 11am.
While Tate says he’ll miss Crux — “the management team and the crew there was awesome” — he’s looking forward to increased foot traffic in an area he considers to be “really the heart of town.”
This article appears in The Source Weekly January 16, 2025.
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