For years, chef Kari Shaughnessy dreamed of cooking a Sopranos dinner. Beyond baked ziti and Carmela’s lasagna, she wanted to channel how the show positioned food as a common ground. She marveled at the sandwich shop good enough to count both FBI agents and the mobsters they’re investigating as regulars. How could she emulate Vesuvio, the restaurant that brought family—genetic and mafioso—together? And then there’s the way Tony takes solace in food, stabbing his pasta “like he’s murdering someone,” as she says, and eating cold cuts off the paper when murderous nightmares pull him out of bed. Shaughnessy didn’t yet have a plan, but she collected odds and ends throughout this past year, the first for her McMinnville restaurant, Hayward. She preserved last September’s tomatoes with Sunday gravy in mind, salted some gabagool in November. 

Eventually, it took shape as one third of a dinner series inspired by TV shows, planned to kick off in February 2024. Sopranos would be first, followed by Tokyo Vice and Twin Peaks. Each would run for two weeks, to help bring diners in during slow winter months. 

Then, at the end of January, the restaurant was nominated for a James Beard Award. Eighty percent of reservations were first-time customers. Meanwhile, Shaughnessy’s hyperlocal, fermentation-happy restaurant in the corner of a warehouse-turned-market hall was dressed up like Vesuvio. The show had informed her ideas about hospitality, but she never planned to present herself to the greater culinary world as wine country’s Artie Bucco. Shaughnessy faced a particular challenge: How do you balance allusion and creativity? How do you show someone who you are while wearing a costume?

There are countless movies about dinners, and, in Portland, there have been quite a few dinners about movies. Restaurants and bars throw them on holidays and anniversaries, to drum up business, or as a send-up of the Barbie movie. A 2021 Feast series paired drive-in screenings of Eat Drink Man Woman and Ratatouille with meals to match. These “food movies,” comedy-dramas like Tampopo and Babette’s Feast, are the most straightforward jumping-off point. But surreal art house features, complex crime dramas, and party flicks with big feelings are just as ripe for adaptation. As your own favorites might have informed your personality, a restaurant’s taste in film is often telling of its core identity. Usually, it’s helped shape it, whether the chef knows it or not. 

In their omakase restaurant Nodoguro’s early days, Ryan and Elena Roadhouse
exclusively served theme dinners, switching each month. They went all in: dinner as immersive art installation, including poetic decorations. Meals distilled Haruki Murakami novels, Alice in Wonderland, Spirited Away, and Twin Peaks—they even wound up cooking a dinner for David Lynch, the show’s cocreator. Ryan, the chef, says he enjoyed the “cross-genre, cross-modality” of those early dinners, responding to films and novels in his artistic medium, through food. It changed his general approach to cooking. “Creatively, it did force me to go deeper,” he says. “You can take that thinking and invest it into other dishes—to add layers and a connection to memory.” 

While the Roadhouses still approach menus with a wide range of creative inspirations, Nodoguro eventually moved away from the themes after a few years to make room for other ideas. They started to feel more like a bit than an art show. One Twin Peaks diner asked of the doughnut and coffee pot decorations, “Are we supposed to pretend we’re cops?” 

For some restaurants, committing to the bit is the point. Like elaborate cosplay, it’s an approach best suited to those with big personalities, for whom every day feels—charmingly—like a performance. Like Gabbiano’s, the Northeast Portland red sauce joint that serves tongue-in-cheek chicken parm and calamari fritti with finesse. Every New Year’s Eve, Gabbiano’s transforms into the set of 1996’s Big Night, about two brothers’ last-ditch effort to save their struggling Jersey Shore restaurant in the 1950s. The restaurant serves the movie’s central meal with Louis Prima singing through the stereo: “Buona sera, signorina, kiss me goodnight.” The star, of both the dinner and the movie, is a timpano, a gigantic Calabrian pastry stuffed with noodles, meatballs, and boiled eggs—lasagna turned up to 11. It’s a good time, a party that, for one night each year, amps up Gabbiano’s regular, beautiful shtick, in turn forcing the place to reflect on every detail of its daily costume. “Every restaurant has its own performance,” co-owner David Sigal told me. “And we felt like the Big Night reflected our usual performance.” 

If Gabbiano’s and Nodoguro were two points on a spectrum, Hayward’s dinner series landed somewhere in between. For the Sopranos antipasti platter, Shaughnessy paired gabagool, some house rigott, and mortadella with fermented pickles, not unlike those on Hayward’s oft-changing seasonal pickle plate. She based a spicy baked rigatoni—no ziti extruder—on Adriana’s recipe and served Sunday gravy without pasta, as Tony intended. 

Some facets of the dinner series left their mark on the restaurant in unexpected ways. While the Tokyo Vice ramen and yakitori were unlikely to directly impact the regular menu, the sake service, complete with Japanese flasks and cups, was so well received that Hayward never stopped offering it.

Still, themes are inherently impermanent: you can’t walk around pretending to be Tony Soprano every day. Where movies are frozen in time, etched into film, a restaurant is an ongoing performance, a durational artwork. The cult-classic show Twin Peaks was a natural segue back to Hayward’s regular menu, with its Pacific Northwest setting, small-town feel that echoed McMinnville’s, and particularly interpretable food references. But, bending its focus for the third time, Shaughnessy also felt more assured of her restaurant’s spirit. The savory sourdough doughnut with house lardo and an extra-salty martini named Leland’s Tears directly referenced the show, but other dishes digested the influence further, melding it with Hayward’s evolving style. Most iconic, and surreal, was the “burger”: two rounds of sesame toast sandwiching a neat circle of beef tartare, which had an uncanny, smoky flavor, like a chargrilled burger, despite being totally raw. People ordered it after seeing it “walking through the dining room,” Shaughnessy says. Fermented corn–stuffed pasta, served in a ramen bowl of dashi broth, hinted at the show’s recurring creamed corn motif, but also seemed to blend elements of all three shows without directly referencing any of them. This wasn’t Twin Peaks fan fiction; it was a Hayward dish. The TV was just playing in the background.