In this undated photo provided by The EAST by Trap Kitchen, one of the Portland restaurant's signature pineapple dishes is displayed. The inner eastside restaurant held its grand opening on April 24, 2026.
Courtesy The EAST by Trap Kitchen
Eddie Bynum Jr., who raps professionally as Mikey Vegaz, is a very busy man.
He just released a new track called Rose City Goats with Damion Lillard and Cool Nutz. In addition, just opened a new restaurant called “The EAST by Trap Kitchen in the Central Eastside.
He’s also active in nonprofit work and community efforts, including Rose City Jam, a monthly basketball night for youth in partnership with the Blazers Boys and Girls Club.
The original Trap Kitchen was started in LA by Bynum’s brother, Malachi Jenkins. He and a former gang rival, Roberto Smith, went into business together in 2013 and later launched Trap Kitchen food carts in LA and then in Portland.
That food cart turned into The EAST by Trap Kitchen. We sit down with Bynum to talk about his restaurant, his music, and his contributions to the larger community, including Rose City Jam.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Eddie Bynum Jr. is a busy man. He raps under the name Mikey Vegaz, and has worked with Portland hip hop royalty like Cool Nutz and Dame D.O.L.L.A. He’s active in nonprofit work and community efforts, including Rose City JAM, a monthly basketball night for youth in partnership with the Blazers Boys and Girls Club. And he is a restaurateur, one of the driving forces behind the Portland Trap Kitchen food truck turned brick and mortar restaurant. It’s called The EAST by Trap Kitchen. It opened recently in inner Southeast Portland.
Eddie Bynum Jr. joins us to talk about all of this. It’s great to have you on the show.
Eddie Bynum Jr: Hey man, thank you guys for having me.
Miller: What’s it like to hear a short version of all the different things you do all mushed into 30 seconds?
Bynum: It’s crazy. I just try to stay productive, man. I’m a man of many hats, and I just throw ‘em on every day.
Miller: On the food truck that we’re gonna get to that turned recently into a brick and mortar restaurant, the words “hustle” and “motivate” were written on that. What do those words mean to you?
Bynum: It means what we stand for: take risks and prosper. Every day we gotta hustle and we gotta motivate our people to do more.
Miller: So you think about that regularly, like young people or whoever looking at you, and you think actively about motivating them? Not just doing your thing and what happens, happens. But you’re thinking about people looking at you?
Bynum: Yeah, all the time. I know I got eyes on me. I know I got my community looking at me and I just wanna motivate them to know that they can step outside of the box and be more than what’s expected of ‘em. They always say you either do music, or play basketball or football, but for us, we carved out a whole new lane just in the culinary world, showing people “look man, you can be a chef and provide for your family.” It motivated a lot of other people how we started out of our grandmother’s kitchen, and motivated other chefs to be like, “man, let me try to start a business out of my kitchen.” We grew to a food cart, and then we made the urban community, like, “man, I want to get a food cart!”
So just hustling and motivating our people every day, that’s what it’s about.
Miller: Who motivated you?
Bynum: My father has been a big motivation. He was always an entrepreneur. He always motivated me just to do whatever I wanted to do and always be a boss [laughter] He used to always tell me, like, “you’re either going to work for somebody or somebody gonna work for you.”
Miller: And you want someone to work for you.
Bynum: I felt like being a boss, a lot of people get the terms confused. They think when you’re a boss, you just get to do whatever you wanna do. But the bosses eat last. We have to sacrifice for everybody else to be able to make something happen. And I just like being in control of helping people progress and get forward in life. It’s not, “come work for me so I can make all this money.” I want to help people become bigger than what they are.
Miller: Can you tell us a quick version of how Trap Kitchen started back in LA?
Bynum: So my little brother wanted to change his life. He was heavily in the gang culture, and he wanted to change his life. And he ended up going to Le Cordon Bleu School out in Las Vegas and learned his skill, and then came back to Compton, California. He had a common friend that was a friend of one of his rival gangs that he used to have issues with. They brought them together because his rival knew how to sell stuff on social media. He was like, “Man, all that food you post, I can help you sell that. There’s this platform called Instagram, and we can come together and sell these plates.”
They ended up joining forces. It caused the neighborhoods to start coming together, because they would throw parties with this food that you can get. And then Snoop Dogg heard about it and he was like, “there’s no way it’s the Blood and the Crip working together.” He’s seen it, and it just changed the whole culture of Compton, California, Bloods and Crips coming together. And it just showed our people that were involved in gang culture that, man, it’s bigger than just like these colors. It’s about us, as a whole, moving forward.
Miller: How did it go from that food cart that became a sort of celebrity caterer world, all in LA … how did that come to Portland?
Bynum: Well, a lot of people failed to realize it was happening at the same time. So as my little brother was selling plates out of his grandma’s kitchen in Compton, California, he would come up to Portland and he would sell plates out of our grandma’s kitchen up here on 11th and Ainsworth. So people would see lines coming out our grandma’s house, just like, “what’s going on?” It just was going on back and forth.
Miller: I hadn’t realized, so before there was a food truck, it literally was your grandmother’s house, just a house in a neighborhood and people would line up down the block?
Bynum: People would line up down the block.
Miller: Would they bring their own plates?
Bynum: Nah, it was like first come, first serve. We’d make batches of food and they would come get it out of the house. A lot of people think the first food truck actually opened in Los Angeles. My fiance, Carla Badon, actually opened the first food truck up here in Portland, Oregon, with my little brother.
Miller: Set the record straight [laughs].
Bynum: So she actually was the driving force behind doing the food truck. She was like, “You guys gotta get out of there cooking in your kitchen, this is what we’re gonna do.”
Miller: How did you realize it was time to go from a food cart to a brick and mortar restaurant?
Bynum: There’s only so much you could do in a food truck, and for me, I’m all about the people, man. It hurt me sometimes, people come in to try to get the food and they couldn’t because we’re sold out, because you could only do so much in a food truck. And like I told you, the whole hustle and motivate, we’re always trying to elevate the experience of what we do.
So we’re putting out cookbooks. We put out a cookbook with Snoop Dogg that’s 50 different macaroni and cheese recipes from around the world. We did a cocktail cookbook with the rapper Roddy Ricch. So we just wanted something that we can have all of this stuff in. We wanted to be able to have cocktails, our food, create an experience that we feel like people haven’t really got to get in Portland, Oregon that’s like a Black-owned restaurant for our people, that we can come, you could dress up nice. It’s an elevated experience in there.
Miller: What were the challenges of going from a food truck to a brick and mortar restaurant?
Bynum: There were a lot of challenges. We just jumped into it. We had opportunity with a great person that had the space for us to do it, and they believed so much in us. They’re like, “you guys can do this.” So we just jumped into it from our grandmother’s kitchen to where we’re at now. That’s what Trap stands for: “take risks and prosper.” We just went head on in.
It took us about two years to build out this concept. The menu, the staffing, the way we wanted people to be able to come in and experience it. So there were a lot of moving pieces to it.
Miller: You mentioned staffing. I’ve read that a lot of the people that you have hired are formerly incarcerated. Is that true?
Bynum: Yeah, that’s how our brand started. We were all about taking second chances. So people that were homeless, people that were just coming out of incarceration, people that been through all types of different ups and downs, and our stories are all about overcoming adversity, so we like to hire people from all around. We give people a chance. So it’s like we don’t do too much of an extensive background into you and say, “oh, you have this on you, you can’t work here.” We’re all about giving people a chance.
Miller: So what do you look for? How do you decide someone’s going to be a good fit to hire in general?
Bynum: Well, work ethic once you actually get in there, to see how you work with the team.
Miller: In other words, you give them a second chance, but then it’s up to them to prove themselves.
Bynum: Yeah, you have to prove yourself once you get up in here. You can’t just be a slouch.
But we look into what they’ve been through. We try to look them in the eye and see how serious they are about what they wanna do.
Miller: Do you feel like you’re a good judge of character?
Bynum: Yeah, I feel like I am. People gravitate to me, and I’m always able to be like, “OK, let’s give this guy a shot,” or “this lady a shot.” A lot of times it’s their stories that motivate me. Just like our stories motivate them to come even apply with us, it’s their stories that just motivate me, like, “man, we gotta give this guy a shot.”
Miller: You’re in an interesting part of inner Southeast Portland, or it’s an interesting time for the particular neighborhood where you are in inner Southeast Portland. What’s happening there, and how do you think it could change in the coming years?
Bynum: There’s a lot of stuff coming over there, new venues opening. But you still have the houseless stuff going on over there. With us, we always like to stay deeply rooted to the community. Our approach, like when we first were building the restaurant, there would be tent city over there, and there’d be a lot of stuff going on. And then as we’re building it, we’re building a rapport with them, like, “hey man, we’re opening a restaurant, this is what we do.” And a lot of them knew us from when we were downtown because they’re like, “they do the feed the community event during Thanksgiving,” and that’s where we bring them actually inside of our restaurant and feed them a holiday meal. So they’re like, “these are our people.”
So since we’ve been open, they’ve been migrating elsewhere or just trying to be respectful of us, as well as us being respectful of them.
Miller: I mentioned that food is only one part of your life. You’re a musician as well. I want to play part of a recent song that you put out just about two months ago or so, latest track with the legendary Portland rapper Cool Nutz and Dame D.O.L.L.A, otherwise known as Damian Lillard – folks may have heard of him. This is called “Rose City Goats.”
[“Rose City Goats” by Mikey Vegaz (Eddie Bynum Jr.), featuring Dame D.O.L.L.A (Damian Lillard) and Cool Nutz, playing]
[Mikey Vegaz] Relli with the factory bezel, that boy clean
Only the family the winning team
The streets love us ‘cause we give ‘em hope
I’m signing off, Mikey Vegaz, Rose City Goats
[Dame D.O.L.L.A] They plotting on me, to my left a soldier
A different breed, [beep] I’m head and shoulders over
Tailored suit, a pair of Louis loafers
Talk about a Rip City legend, I’m the poster
Pull my card, you find an ace of spades
My daddy schooled me, I’m an ace in grades
I’m in the P, I [beep] with Tay for fades
Back in the motor, it’s the later phase
Like fine wine, [beep] I age in grapes
The city love me, it’s the saving grace
Who you know that represented like me?
Who gave you sneakers in your honor that ain’t been with Nike?
Who [beep] with neighborhoods and blend in nicely?
I hold the city up and grip it tightly
If I’m wrong, let’s hear a [beep] write me
[Cool Nutz] It’s money getting, subs slapping
Gorilla in the trunk and some D-Boy madness
Pain, politics, sorrow and sadness
Profit and loss and some dead stock pandas
Lil bruh and the chain showing out
Diddy bopping up the strip with the brains blowing out
[Music fades out]
Miller: What was it like putting this together?
Bynum: It was a dope moment just to be able to put all of us on that record, cause I feel like all of us have contributed a lot to the city. Even TOPE that produced the song, it was an organic moment. I’ve seen Dame, I’m like, “Dame, bro, we need to get one.” And he was like, “bro, it’s love Mikey, I got you.”
Miller: When you work on a song with Dame, do you give him the beat and then he just sends you his bars? Or you actually are in the same studio working it out?
Bynum: With that one, we just sent him the song. You know, he’s training…
Miller: He’s a busy person.
Bynum: He’s busy. All of us were busy, you know. Cool Nutz is always on the road and touring. It was one of those things where we all just had to collaborate, send our verses together. We knew what we wanted the song to be about, the energy for it, so we just all just were able to put our pieces together.
Miller: Can you describe Rose City JAM, this monthly event that you take part in?
Bynum: Rose City JAM is our contribution back to the community. It’s all about the youth. My brother Christopher Lambert, he was given clemency from the governor. He served 20 years in prison, and when he came home, he just wanted to really have impact in our community. He didn’t want mothers to go through what his mother had to go through, missing him for 20 years. So he just pours into the kids like crazy.
So we do a monthly basketball event at the Blazers Boys and Girls Club. But it’s for all kids, all ages. We do a cooking class. We’ve had chef Edwin Redway of the Portland Trail Blazers. He’s their executive chef, [and] he comes and does a cooking class. We do free haircuts, free food, financial literacy classes. We have a girls’ room for all the girls where they do all types of amazing stuff for the young women. We’ve had Pooh Jeter, one of the coaches of the Portland Trail Blazers … he comes and runs the basketball clinic every night for us.
We did the last one out in Southeast Portland at the Eastport because some kids can’t get to Northeast Portland. So we did it out there. We opened up the pool for ‘em. It’s a dope event. Kids love it.
Miller: Eddie Bynum Jr., it was a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much.
Bynum: Thank you, man.
Miller: Eddie Bynum Jr, co-founder of The EAST by Trap Kitchen. He’s also known as Mickey Vegaz. Co-founder of Rose City JAM – that is what he was just describing – a monthly youth sports night at the Blazer’s Boys and Girls Club.
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