Francis Lam, food journalist and host of The Splendid Table, on chef Greg Higgins:

This was far and away the best restaurant I’d worked in terms of attention, care, thoughtfulness: the craft of food. I say “the craft of food” because I think Greg might argue that most of the work in the restaurant is how they find and work with their farmers, helping them to raise and harvest and have a market for just the absolute best ingredients they can.

Every time you talk to Greg, he just will casually drop the most insane knowledge you could imagine. Obviously, he’s famous for charcuterie. When I was there it was merely extraordinary. Now, it’s otherworldly. The level of intention and execution and skill.… He’s never stopped trying to learn more, and he’s never stopped trying to put forth that knowledge onto a plate. Higgins is a treasure, not just for what it did in the past, but for the fact that it still exists in the present.
—as told to Alex Frane

Gabriel Rucker, chef and co-owner of Le Pigeon and Canard, on chef Vitaly Paley:

I moved to Portland in 2002 but didn’t end up at Paley’s right away—I got a job right down the street. Probably two months into living in Portland, I knocked on the door, and Vito answers carrying a 12-quart Cambro of soaking marrow bones. They were hiring, so he had me come back and stage. I was way underqualified, but whatever I did during the stage landed me the job. It’s the hardest kitchen I’ve ever worked, but I was absolutely in love. It was the kitchen I had read about in all the books, my culinary boot camp. I had found my place.

A generation of cooks passed through Paley’s: Doug Adams, Ben Bettinger, Jason Barwikowski, Patrick McKee, Scott Ketterman, Jason French. When you spend time in a kitchen with Vito, you’re spending time with someone who cares deeply about and respects cooking. And Vito was doing it before social media—it was literally just about, How good can we cook these excellent ingredients? What can we do to them to enhance them but not fuck them up? There was reverence and respect. There’s certain people that you watch cook, taste, and compose food, and they have the “it” thing, whether it’s a lemon vinaigrette with three ingredients or the most complex terrine. Vito had that “it” thing. He knew how to respect the food, enhance it, and make it really, really delicious. That’s something I try to pass on to the younger generation, because he passed that on to me, and that’s our job as custodians of cooking. The culinary tradition in America is to pass on a respect for the ingredient, a respect for the art of cooking, and a respect for creating. —as told to Alex Frane

1999 After leaving Zefiro, the quintessential ’90s restaurant she cofounded, Monique Siu hired chef Kevin Gibson and set up Castagna across the river, serving French and Italian countryside dishes with an Oregonian lilt, like butter lettuces in vinaigrette royale and chubby ricotta agnolotti. Dreamy. Café Castagna, famous for its burger, soon opened next door, though Gibson left a few years later and settled at Davenport, where he still cooks with that refined eye.

2007 Cook turned executive chef Elias Cairo carried on the philosophy alongside GM Nate Tilden, who would go on to found Clyde Common and help Cairo set up Olympia Provisions, Oregon’s first USDA-certified salumeria.

2009 Steering into the recession, Siu hired Matthew Lightner, a modernist chef who’d just left the Spanish avant-garde culinary laboratory Mugaritz, and Castagna blossomed into the only ultra-modern kitchen Portland had ever really seen. “Foams,” “ashes,” and multilayered studies of single ingredients: Food was a medium of expression, sometimes willing itself past deliciousness to articulate a thought. Lightner was a Food & Wine Best New Chef and a James Beard Awards semifinalist within a year, though after another year he moved to New York and won Atera two Michelin stars.

2011 Pastry chef Justin Woodward, who’d landed at Castagna after a stint at Wylie Dufresne’s kooky-mod New York restaurant, WD-50, took over the test tubes. The menu grew to 20 courses, with edible terrariums and potato ice cream with russet-colored meringue “skin.” With sommelier Brent Braun, Woodward and Siu reworked Café Castagna into the reticently named OK Omens in 2018: la technique, but in an à la carte wine bar. A sign of the times, the omen survived the pandemic while Castagna closed. Woodward died of liver failure in fall 2025, months after leaving the restaurant.

Postscript Though the original Castagna is gone, its sibling-turned-only-child has circled back to understated cuisine. In fact, Joseph Papas, who took over when Woodward left in 2024, once worked for founding chef Kevin Gibson—he recommended him for the job. —Matthew Trueherz

Thomas Lauderdale, Pink Martini bandleader, bon vivant, and Bluehour regular:

In 2000, Portland was by far the cheapest of the four major cities on the West Coast, so it was cool and artsy. Gus Van Sant’s films Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho were the city’s calling cards. Artists, writers, activists, musicians, and freaks moved here because they could live well and make stuff. Zefiro was the cultural epicenter, but it closed and everybody migrated to Bluehour, located on the ground floor of the spectacular world headquarters of Wieden & Kennedy. Both were breathtakingly sexy. 

My favorite place to hang out was the outside deck, where you could watch the parade of glitterati go in for dinner. The food was still relatively inexpensive, so there was a great mix of artists and matrons, businesspeople and members of Congress. The gigantic curtains made you want to peek and see who was around the corner. 

In 2008, Dan Wieden gave [pianist and arts champion] Bill Crane and me the atrium space to do a 24-hour series of concerts called 24/7, commemorating the seven years we had been at war. Every hour was a new concert, over 200 musicians were part of it. It culminated with the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was incredible to see matrons from the West Hills pull up in taxis at three in the morning to go to this happening. Bruce Carey had Bluehour stay open too, serving food around the clock. Bluehour was aspirational, showing what could be as it inspired the next generation. —as told to Alex Frane

Nothing prepared us for Navarre when it opened steps off East Burnside in the early aughts. Candelabras flickered with a fury that would embarrass Liberace. Neil Young commandeered the airwaves. The cooks looked like they’d just rolled out of bed. A kind of lawlessness hung in the air. Cofounder John Taboada chopped down a tree in his parents’ yard to make the oak tables.

The house philosophy: only what we love. Navarre didn’t feel like anything in Portland. The menu came with a pencil, checklist, and a clipboard. Signature dishes were introduced without description, listed only as “bird” or “lamb.” The standard order of events went out the window. We took charge, placing checkmarks next to whatever appealed. Want dessert first? Go for it! Have one dish or 10, every table doing its own improv jazz. We ate vegetables roasted with a gnarly realism, made hay with homemade pies, and drank fantastic, adventurous wines you’d never heard of, more than 40 offered, incredibly, by the glass.

The impetus? “We were trying to realign people to eat however they wanted,” Taboada says, “to give them the power. We wanted it to be a social place where nothing was right or wrong.”

If Portland is the original DIY food city, Navarre is its unofficial godfather, the place that said it’s OK for a chef to have their own school of thought. Here it just happens to include dim sum–size plates, ugly-delicious farm vegetables, and 10 ideas about eggs Benedict, at once. Navarre gave a face to an emerging style and made diners feel that eating out could be more than sustenance. What surprises Taboada most? “In 2002, if you had told me we’d still be open in 2025, I would have said, ‘That’s impossible.’” —Karen Brooks

Family Supper unfurled in an industrial void of North Portland. No sign, no street number, only a door. Inside: a restaurant that wasn’t a restaurant. It looked like an art gallery without art, just three long tables and 40 strangers drifting about like characters in an Altman movie, sipping Cutty Sark. Steps away, Portland’s brightest new cooking light, Tommy Habetz, a New York–trained whiz kid, stirred chicken liver ragù on an open burner. No curtains, no demarcations between the kitchen and us. I remember wondering, “Should I strap on an apron?” 

A bell rang and everyone nabbed a seat. The menu was set. No choices, no waiters. You were in their world, along for the ride. With this, big platters of picture-perfect food were passed around “family style,” hand to hand, stranger to stranger. Votives twinkled, secrets were spilled across tables, and Portland’s game forever changed. Young upstarts Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy had set out to kill the restaurant. Instead, their ideas resonated: the restaurant as dinner party, social experiment, and secret handshake.

For years, a nice meal in Portland was like your parents, predictable and in bed by 9pm. Led by Hebb, Pomeroy, and co., the kids took over in the early 2000s, upending tradition. More humor, more irony. Suddenly, it was cool to cook in a T-shirt. By wit or happenstance, they saw the future: an underground party-salon. More ideas grew out of Ripe, including Clarklewis in 2004, an early pioneer of industrial chic that brandished whole animal butchery in its open kitchen, startling diners accustomed to shrink-wrapped supermarket chops. Between the two, Ripe paved the way for the likes of Le Pigeon, Langbaan, Han Oak, and Pomeroy’s own future restaurant, Beast. Family Supper’s model helped shape dining in America for years to come, well beyond the city’s boundaries. Says Mike Thelin, cofounder of Portland’s Feast festival, “You can’t underestimate its influence on a generation of chefs and diners.” —Karen Brooks

An Vuong, grandson of the late Hà VL founder Christina Luu and co-owner of Annam VL, which, after Rose VL, is the third of the family’s loosely connected restaurants: 

My grandma, my grandpa, when they opened [Hà VL], I spent a lot of my time there. Days would start around 5 in the morning. We prepped the morning of, everything but the stock; we made a lot of soups outside the restaurant, at home. So I would prep everything, as a 12-year-old, up until eight o’clock. Then I would be a waiter, busser, host—the entire front of house.

[My grandma] was very unapologetic. A lot of the stuff that she was doing is difficult to do every day, difficult to master. It showed the type of person she was, what she valued—customer service, making sure her food came out the way she needed it to come out. Portland was not as progressive as it is now. People would ask for pho, and she would tell people to go to other restaurants. Very, like, 10 toes down: “You can come on days where I’ll do that, but today I’m doing this.” Most of the time people would stay, and that would open up their palate.

Even now, when I cook, when I do things, that inner monologue is typically her. What would she say about this? Being true to the flavors, how we cook things, being very detail-oriented. In the evening, outside of normal soup hours, I take over [Annam VL] with my brother for Annam By Night—we do Vietnamese drinking foods. Last year I had quail and these little mini crabs. People are a lot more open to things these days than they were, which shows the challenge that my grandma had, trying to convince people, “Hey, this is good. This is not pho, but this is good, right?” I can imagine how hard it was for her, the first few years, convincing people. But she never changed. Being able to do that in a city that’s receptive to these sorts of things is really fulfilling. I wish she were around now to see that. —as told to Brooke Jackson-Glidden

Mostly, we’ll remember the wings. Dear God. Sitting at Pok Pok, mouths ablaze, that hurricane of sweet and heat, fingers sticky, caramel and garlic fumes all around, combusting. They were a category unto themselves, a Last Meal dish. Ike’s Vietnamese fish sauce wings launched an empire and helped burnish Portland’s reputation as a culinary force.

Andy Ricker didn’t intend to start a food frenzy. Pok Pok was his love letter to Chiang Mai (the wings were a side crush; kismet). He found his holy grail and wanted to share it, sure and true, with no kowtowing to the West. His vision bumped in his front yard on a predevelopment SE Division Street—Cambodian rock, Christmas lights, and grill-action galore. Suddenly we were forking into yam samun phrai, an herb salad rarely seen outside of Chiang Mai. “I talk to people from Bangkok who’ve never even heard of it,” Ricker told me in 2006. That was Pok Pok.

For a generation of cooks, Pok Pok proved diners would embrace bona fide experiences and regional dishes unseen in mainstream American restaurants. A wave of other Thai spots followed, making Portland a small but mighty stronghold. “I never knew that people would accept the other, true Thai food until they opened,” Langbaan founder Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom once told The New York Times.

Over the years, Pok Pok held six Portland restaurants plus outposts in New York, LA, and Vegas. His Brooklyn joint won a Michelin star, and Ricker led Anthony Bourdain through Chiang Mai on Parts Unknown. Then came burnout and COVID. When he shuttered the company in 2020, Ricker had two James Beard medals, an esteemed cookbook, and a national reputation as a Thai food champion. But Ricker pondered the value of a famous Thai restaurant owned by a white guy, asking if the world still needed Pok Pok.

Still, when a weeklong Pok Pok pop-up took over Han Oak’s sister restaurant Jeju this March, a thousand reservations sold in a blink. One guy begged for takeout wings to propose to his girlfriend. “I didn’t anticipate how emotional people feel about Andy’s food,” says Jeju’s Sun Young Park. “There were a lot of tears in the room.” —Karen Brooks

Cathy Whims, former chef and owner of Genoa (now closed), current chef and owner of Nostrana:

At Genoa, we were a blend of Continental and California cuisine. We were all reading Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Marcella Hazan. When I became owner, I became the wine buyer as well, which got me traveling to Italy. When I got there, it was completely different. It’s all about the ingredients and not getting in the way of them. So that was the inspiration for Nostrana: I thought it could really work in Portland, with the quality of the ingredients we have. And we decided to do things in an old-fashioned way, to keep everything pared down. There was a certain spareness about everything. People come for different experiences— you can have a nice glass of wine and a pizza or salad, or you can come and put together a four-course meal. We got great reviews from the start, from Karen Brooks in particular. She said, “I think Nostrana has the possibility to be an institution.” We got Restaurant of the Year right after that. I wouldn’t say we reinvent ourselves, but we keep adding, constantly thinking of ways to improve. We’re dedicated to having a great wine list, and Enoteca [the adjoining wine bar] was a natural way to enhance that. The garden, which we started three years ago, was a natural extension of our love for Pacific Northwest produce. What hasn’t evolved is that we write the menu every day. There are standards—like Marcella’s tomato-butter sauce and the Insalata Nostrana—but everything else might change day to day. —as told to Alex Frane

October 2018. A kitchen in the bowels of the Nines hotel. I was Gabriel Rucker’s sous-chef. We were at a fundraiser sponsored by the James Beard Foundation, a real who’s who—13 chefs who had been recognized by the foundation were cooking. Earl Blumenauer gave a speech.

We made “foie gras fajitas.” Haute Chili’s. Like the pigeon leg churros, Wagyu Salisbury steaks, and French onion soup dumplings we served at the restaurant, the dish bucked every culinary tradition and social convention. We sliced torchons and warmed store-bought tortillas we’d brushed with duck fat and twirled in gold foil. While scooping ramekins of pepper jam and chile crisp, I looked up to find a conclave of culinary royalty had encircled us in a corner of the hotel kitchen. At the time, I had a sense of how “the prince of squab and foie gras” and his “nationally recognized gastronomic haven” had impacted the city’s dining culture. But that night I saw how Gabe’s spell extended past foodies and the media. Chefs couldn’t make sense of his boisterous magic tricks either.

National praise and the fancy-sounding name gave the impression of a serious French restaurant. But things were hardly sanctified back at the chapel on East Burnside. People expecting a “Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs” often caught a “What’s up, guys? Welcome to the Dirty Bird.” Yet meeting Gabe, a guy who dropped out of the culinary program at Santa Rosa Junior College as opposed to a Francophile cartoon, only seemed to add to the allure. Whether enamored, pissed off, confused, or all of the above, nobody could deny that his cooking was something genuinely original: allegiant to nothing. “I’ve never encountered anything remotely like it—and I look forward to doing so again,” was the general impression. But it was Ruth Reichl who wrote that. —Matthew Trueherz

Mika Paredes, Naomi Pomeroy’s “kitchen wife” who now runs Pomeroy’s legacy restaurant, L’Echelle, remembers Beast’s opening night, September 27, 2007: 

Our first seating was at 5pm. Beast was tiny—two tables, 24 seats, and a “kitchen” with only two induction burners and a convection oven. No flame, no range. We were still building shelves minutes before guests walked in. I remember stripping off our grease-stained prep clothes, sliding in earrings, hair back, and red lipstick on. Showtime.

Then: Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, M. Blash walked in. Local royalty. Candles glowed, Sade played, and three feet away guests watched us plate under the low lights, every move exaggerated, deliberate—and you never, ever let them see you sweat.

In true Beast fashion, irreverent and imperfect, of course something went sideways. A yellow jacket had snuck in and stung M. Blash on the hand midservice. He laughed it off, but it felt almost like the universe demanding its own cameo.

Just hours earlier the place had been a madhouse, every surface buried under raw meat, tubs of lettuce, towers of towels. We even ran next door to Yakuza to sear duck breasts over their flames, borrowing fire where we could. Scrappy, desperate, and honestly beautiful.

That night we served six courses, centered on the charcuterie board that became Beast’s signature. Foie gras bonbons on peanut shortbread with Sauternes gelée—our twisted peanut butter and jelly. Beef tartare with quail yolk. Our house saltine crowned with chicken liver mousse and a swipe of orange marmalade. Forty-two steps to build that plate, each one obsessive, excessive.

When it was finally over, we shoved pans aside, cranked the music, popped sparkling rosé, and danced—Naomi and me, our hair flying, colliding in laughter and delirium. It was chaos. It was theater. It was Beast. It was fucking fun, and in that moment my life changed. —as told to Karen Brooks

In a 2009 episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives (colloquially known as “Triple D”), host Guy Fieri rolls into Southeast Portland to hit up Bunk Sandwiches, where—in his words—“two dudes are scratch-making not-so-ordinary sandwiches.” On his show, Fieri, either a clownish Gen X relic of old food media with a Smash Mouth fashion sense or the Alexis de Tocqueville of American foodways (I’m firmly in the latter camp), explores independent restaurants across the United States in search of out-of-bounds flavors so good they’ll have you saying, “Shut the front door.” Say what you will about Fieri, but his program captured a moment when Portland’s food scene felt nationally ascendant. At the unlikely center of it all was an unexpectedly creative sandwich shop, whose founders, Nick Wood and Tommy Habetz, had culinary cred and serious local buy-in.

National media loved these guys almost immediately: They made multiple Food Network appearances (on both Triple D and The Best Thing I Ever Ate) and were featured by major newspapers and magazines (Bon Appétit loved them). Habetz and Wood spun Bunk off into multiple locations, including the still-extant Bunk Bar, which remains a haven for local Portland bands and an indie rock sensibility that once defined the city. You may even catch former mayoral candidate Liv Osthus, a.k.a. Viva Las Vegas, tending bar (she makes a mean Iceberg).

In that 2009 episode of Triple D, a very young Habetz talks salt cod, tripe, and tongue; the hungry patrons filmed digging in sport epic lip piercings and severe haircuts, as was the style at the time. “Get the funk at the Bunk,” Fieri boldly declares, as a stompin’ fiddle track plays. Habetz assembles a salt cod brandade—rehydrating the fish over several days, simmering it in milk with garlic and herbs, and whipping it into mashed potatoes—before slapping it on ciabatta with a salad of parsley, olive oil, and fried chorizo. Seriously cheffy stuff, from a time when Portland was the county seat of Flavortown. —Jordan Michelman

I can’t say exactly why I’ve held onto a tiny, racy photo that was once Tanuki’s version of a cocktail garnish. It came into my life clipped to a glass of cheap whiskey. Perhaps I’ve kept it as a memento of what the bizarre izakaya encapsulated. 

Chef Janis Martin’s capricious little bar’s first life was on NW 21st Avenue. Early  reviews often labeled it as a “Japanese restaurant” with food that went past the expected “sushi, teriyaki combos, and udon soups,” as this very magazine reported in 2009. But buzzy dishes like the rafutei ssam—Japanese pork belly in a Korean chive pancake wrap—clued that Tanuki would resist any imposed definition.

Moving from trendy Nob Hill to Montavilla gave Martin a chance to get real weird. She corrected press labels, duct-taping signs to the front door declaring Tanuki was not in fact a Japanese restaurant and that anyone saying so should be slapped. Inside, televisions screened Japanese horror erotica. A dim red light barely illuminated the pinup art and risqué pinball machines. It seemed designed to intimidate visitors, imbuing every visit with a sense of having earned your place.

That’s not to say Tanuki served only vibes. The omakase menu crowded tables with Netarts oysters with kimchi ice, udon noodles with fermented soybeans and raw quail eggs, pho-spiced bone marrow, scallops with sake-cured trout roe. The food spoke for itself; it demanded that writers and diners expand their palates. Martin’s fierce commitment to a singular vision, coupled with the passion behind her food and drink, swirled this den of provocative kitsch into a dining destination. For all its bawdy irreverence, it’s that sincerity that cemented Tanuki’s place in Portland’s culinary history. —Alex Frane

A restaurant becomes an “institution” once its popularity becomes demonstrable across decades.  Nong’s Khao Man Gai is something else. This duo of humble pickup counters—which really only serve variations on the namesake dish of poached chicken, rice, herbs, ginger sauce, and pandan-scented broth—provide what amounts to an essential public utility, something elementally crucial for the continuation of societal order in the City of Portland. Their existence is load-bearing. Without Nong’s, I’m not sure who we would be. 

Friends from out of town ask if they should really go to Nong’s—Isn’t it just chicken and rice?—and I always say yes, yes, yes. Because the rice is toasted in the chicken fat and cooked in the broth—a harmonious cycle, the byproduct of each step enriching the next. But also because the restaurant’s narrative reflects something deeper about the city itself. Founder and namesake Nong Poonsukwattana arrived in Portland from Thailand back in the aughts and started a little food cart. Her genius was to serve just one dish—khao man gai, a.k.a. Hainanese chicken and rice, a dish with broad popularity across Southeast Asia. First came the cart crowds, then the local press caught on, then came the Food Network stars. Sixteen years later, Nong’s has multiple locations, including its brick-and-mortar hub on SE Ankeny.

I’m one of countless Portlanders whose lives have been marked by Nong’s visits. An entire generation of Portlanders have reared their young on first bites of soft chicken and silky rice. I get takeout when I’m sick, or after returning home from a big trip. Nong’s is a tall glass of Bull Run watershed tap water after a journey far away. Portland is Nong’s, and Nong’s is Portland. —Jordan Michelman

We love to use “nostalgia” incorrectly. It does not mean “something cool that used to exist.” It’s from the Greek nóstos—to return home—and algos, “pain.” True nostalgia requires an ache, a complication, a whiff of something gone wrong in the palace of memory.

I feel an intense definitional nostalgia for Tasty N Sons, which was once among the hottest restaurants in Portland, and part of the major-player restaurant group that included Toro Bravo. But in 2020, owner John Gorham had a Facebook meltdown (including doxxing and threats of violence) that resulted in his ouster from the restaurant group. Gorham and his wife, Renee, now run a restaurant empire in Bend. Reminiscing on the Toro ’n’ Tasty era produces a pointed discomfort, but it is impossible to discuss Portland’s brunch culture without mention of what was once its apex. So when I glance backward, it’s with some uneasy fondness in spite of it all. In other words, nostalgia.

It’s 2011, or maybe 2012. We’re out for brunch at Tasty. Yes, there’s a line; sip some Stumptown Coffee and hang out while you wait. Everyone else waiting with us is young and cute in a scruffy Portland way, and slightly hungover, too. Finally we’re seated in the urban-yeoman, rustic-chic dining room. The server informs us that, like, all the dishes will come out whenever they’re ready, which means you might get your chocolate potato doughnut before your shakshuka, so just be chill about it, and you have to get the radicchio salad, which is studded with pork lardons and tossed with shredded parm, and the griddled bacon dates are perfect. And after two or three Bloody Marys the morning light knits together just so. Before the pain comes, before the recriminations take hold, before we’re forced to look back through jaded, sad eyes, all is briefly well and tasty. —Jordan Michelman

Stumptown Coffee mogul Duane Sorenson’s big fancy restaurant opened as a stage for Joshua McFadden, a farm-obsessed East Coast chef The New York Times heralded as inventor of the kale salad, though vegetables soon eclipsed him. Ava Gene’s “salads” spotlighted fabled crops: carrots with brined almonds, celery with dates and cashews, beets and tomatoes of exceptional provenance. Here, vegetables were glamorous and expensive. For a time in the late 2010s, at the restaurant’s zenith, it sprouted an impressive pasta operation. Even still, the most rousing dish in all of Portland was its salad flight: bowls of farro and radishes, pears and matsutake mushrooms, hard-to-pronounce cheeses and exotic vinegars. That kale salad was Caeserish, heaped with only cheese and breadcrumbs. Another icon, literal beans on toast, celebrated mythic legumes from local farm Ayers Creek.

More than any person, the restaurant revolved around a philosophy of hands-off farm proselytizing that cleverly left room for cheffy wit, and many of the city’s brightest took their turn guiding it, including Yaowarat chef Sam Smith and Cafe Olli co-owner Taylor Manning. “That place was so much about the people,” Manning says, listing off colleagues who went on to start No Saint, Bauman’s on Oak, Ruthie’s, Street Disco, and many other restaurants. Ava Gene’s is still open, though it’s often referred to by industry folk in the past tense. Some still remember the toxic workplace allegations that surfaced during 2020 reckonings, particularly those related to McFadden, and are not convinced the restaurant’s environment has meaningfully changed. Others believe that when it reopened years later under corporate ownership, it had lost its soul.

But Ava Gene’s influence on the city’s (and country’s) food scene is undeniable, and many alumni have carried on its cooking philosophy as they set out to create a more equitable restaurant model and food system—like Cafe Olli. Distilling what was, Manning points to how the restaurant bridged gaps in the local food system, especially by hosting industry spanning events. “I’ll probably never forget getting to sit around and listen to the people breeding the seeds,” he says, “to the farmers, hearing other points of view from local restaurants.” —Matthew Trueherz

For many reasons, including a thousand miles of the North Sea, there is no place called French Norway. Yet I’ve been there. It’s an entire world the size of a studio apartment, off W Burnside Street. It’s airy with high ceilings and tastefully mismatched everything, all painted a soft white. Strings of seashell pie tins run along its walls and cake stands of rosemary scones and lemon soufflés practically dance on its kitchen counter. The locals wear stripes and boatneck shirts. They eat only lunch, though there is both fine wine and good coffee, and they’re big on dessert. A googly-eyed reindeer named Sven lives in one of a handful of booths. Måurice, the namesake, was founder Kristen D. Murray’s pet rabbit. This micronation is famous for its black pepper cheesecake, a trinket-size mousse with nutty cookie crust. The black pepper is hand-chopped—Murray once told me, “Each piece is an eighth of a sphere.” That precision rings through smoked trout smørbrød and delicate market salads, with traces of Murray’s days as pastry chef of New York’s haute Nordic restaurant Aquavit. But French romance rounds the Scandi exactitude. See: the beguiling quiche. Tall and savory-sweet with tarragon, it swoons like panna cotta. Hood-shaped chocolate and lapsang Capuchin cakes are a lullaby giggling with cacao nibs. Portland is blessed with many restaurants that take you to faraway places, and others that revel in their fantasticality. Måurice is something in between, a love letter to a place too sweet for this world. One that should only be able to exist in Murray’s mind, and yet I’ve been there. —Matthew Trueherz

My longtime yardstick for judging a great restaurant: Would you take Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic and Gourmet editor? The answer came on a night at the just-opened Langbaan. This summer, I wrote her asking what she remembered. —Karen Brooks

…You were here for a talk. We met afterwards and headed to Langbaan. I bragged, nervously, that I was going to name it Restaurant of the Year. You said, “I’m not really hungry.” GULP.

We went down a hall to a bookcase. A meat grinder was bolted on one side. We pulled the crank wheel and the bookcase moved sideways, like in a Vincent Price movie. We sat at the tiny chef’s counter, herbs strewn everywhere. You didn’t say anything. I nervously crushed the miang som. Two bites in you exclaimed, “This, THIS is what I remember about Thailand!” My heart started beating again; the world returned to its axis.

You wrote a Substack on Langbaan (you scooped me … haha!). Any thoughts in retrospect? Clearly, we both saw something in it early on that was enduring: Langbaan got the James Beard Outstanding Restaurant award last year! 

Hugs,
Karen 

Hi Karen,

I think the thing that blew me away was that there was a kind of sameness to Thai restaurants in America that they completely avoided.  They were doing ambitious food—in much the same way [that New York’s Atomix] brought a whole new level of Korean food to this country. Their food was so elegant and focused. And there was a fierce pride: we want you to taste our food!

Sorry I scooped you on Langbaan. But it was before Substack and I’d be surprised if there were more than 10 people who even read that post.

xx,
r

Darra Goldstein, Russian food scholar, author of 17 books including A Taste of Russia, and founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture:

Until—maybe into—the early post–World War II era, Russian cuisine in this country was seen as something very elegant because of the influx of the aristocracy and the opening of the Russian tearooms. When the Cold War began and intensified, and the Soviet Union became more predominant than Russia in people’s minds, the haute Russian cuisine that was so influenced by French food was no longer the context. My grandmother made beef Stroganoff with ketchup—it was seen as chic, but I think it was a sign of how downhill things were going with Russian cuisine. It felt very brave to me that Bonnie [Morales] opened this restaurant. It was this embrace of Russia, and they have managed to create a community within Portland. Kachka is Russian cuisine; Russian flavors are at the core. But it embraces what was the entire territory of the Soviet Union. That’s what makes the food so exciting, is that they bring in flavors from, say, Georgian cuisine, central Asian, Uzbek, Ashkenazi Jewish, Baltic. It serves an educational purpose. Kachka showed that Russian food, writ large, is really exciting and delicious. That is the primary thing. If it’s not delicious, why eat it? But they have also shown the wide range of flavors that came out of a country that once consisted of 15 countries, basically.

I was so struck by their shuba [also known as Herring Under a Fur Coat]. Shuba is very much a Soviet dish; they prepare it with an elegance and refinement that elevates it. That dish felt transformative to me. They bring the food to another plane. —as told to Brooke Jackson-Glidden

Danny O’Malley, executive producer of the Netflix food documentary series Chef’s Table:

Before Chef's Table, I worked on rock docs. I’ve filmed the Decemberists and the National and MusicfestNW. So [chef-owner Sarah Minnick’s] story stuck with me because her trajectory was kind of aligned with the world I understand, which is the indie, doing-a-lot-with-a-little kind of ethos: putting things together little by little until she had this big, influential pizza restaurant, but never losing track of that DIY mentality.

We filmed on this farm, and she made a pizza with grapes from the farm, and I was like, “OK, grapes on a pizza, this is the weird one I’m not going to like,” and it was like the best fucking pizza I’ve ever had. She has this thing you need to have as a great artist: She can set aside something someone else thinks is great, because it’s not what she’s doing. She’s not beholden to any tradition. That’s hard to do with pizza, to find something new and personal, because it’s one of the most popular foods in the world.

Spending time on the set, listening to her stories, eating at all these other restaurants Sarah would send us to, you’d see this deeper culture of the people who set the economics of what they’re doing aside and lead with passion. At this point, around the country, that’s pretty rare. It’s this cooler, purer expression of ambition.

She is the sweetest, [most] thoughtful, cool Portland person. But she has so much ambition, so much know-how; she’s so focused, and the excellence comes out of that. She lives her values. The restaurant is solar powered, she rides an e-bike to the farmers market, cares about climate change. And the fact it’s pizza and ice cream.... It’s high and low in a way that makes it very accessible. I can’t say enough about how much I respect what she’s able to do and how holistically it ties itself together. —as told to Brooke Jackson-Glidden

The thing about Nodoguro is that it shouldn’t work. Neither Ryan or Elena Roadhouse, the husband-and-wife team behind one of Portland’s perennial best restaurants, is Japanese; Ryan cooked in Japan for many years, and Elena is originally from Russia, which is why you’ll be served cookies and tea at the end of your meal. Tickets cost $250 a person, far past most any other Portland meal. The food is Japanese, but it isn’t sushi (at least not usually), and it isn’t kaiseki (at least not really), but rather a multicourse, multimodal experience that draws on influences ranging from art and film to seasonality and sculpture.

The thing about Nodoguro is that you will be wowed by it. A dish of Oregon Chinook salmon tartare is served mounted with black caviar next to a mochiko flour blini, as if to prove connection between Japan and Portland and Russia. Other small plates revel in texture and singular flavors: bites of octopus lovingly rubbed to the point of just-tender, morsels of deeply savory smoked duck. And there are jokes. Raw Oregon albacore is presented inside a little conservas tin—but the fish is wonderfully fresh, served with a salty-sweet ponzu with flavors amplified at the highest gain. A jewel box of chirashi arrives last, its sumeshi vinegar rice gleaming with snapper, iridescent scallops, and fatty ōtoro, subtly offset by curried egg.

The thing about Nodoguro is that it’s always in flux. Few restaurants survive a move—much less several—but such is the ongoing allegiance to and admiration for the Roadhouses’ work. Nominated nine times for a James Beard Award, the restaurant, once a pop-up, moved from SE Hawthorne to SE Belmont to a hidden industrial corner of Kerns before arriving in its latest form, taking over the mezzanine of the Morgan Building downtown. Nodoguro continues to defy expectations and easy descriptions, which is its greatest point of influence: It’s proven that a combination of dedicated local clientele, curious visitors, and an uncompromising approach to ingredient sourcing can make a no-holds-barred tasting menu work here in Portland, for a decade and counting. —Jordan Michelman

Living above your restaurant conjures a storybook image of simpler times. But when Peter Cho and Sun Young Park turned a mixed-use building in Northeast Portland into both their home and restaurant, it landed as a very modern attempt at finding a work-life balance in a famously corrosive industry. Rather than impose some uncomfortably radical experiment on diners, the workaround set the restaurant’s tone. (“Mom’s kimchi” wasn’t just a family recipe; Cho’s mom made it herself.) Behind a nondescript door, the couple’s backyard served as entryway, overflow dining room, and sometime outdoor kitchen. You might have stepped over a Big Wheel, a Bop It, or a lawn chair heading through garage doors to the modern-loft dining room. You might have seen the kids, too, hanging on Cho’s hip as he cooked jajangmyeon tableside at the height of the black bean noodle dish’s Parasite hype. 

Cho was April Bloomfield’s number two in New York before he moved home to set up shop. Instantly, Han Oak became Portland’s most recognized Korean restaurant. Balancing playful K-Town classics and pours of milky rice wine with farm vegetables and butcher’s cuts, Han Oak presented Korean cuisine in a way Portland’s restaurant world hadn’t seen. But Cho’s secret was weaving online trends and convenience store gold into dishes, like ceremoniously opening instant noodle packets tableside—that and the karaoke sessions that wind down most nights.

Today, the menu rotates between family-style hot pots, wildly satisfying ssam spreads, and jipbap (a “home-cooked meal,” roughly translated), which here means inventive banchan and a choice of entrées like galbi-jjim short ribs and sticky simmered halibut jorim. Though the family moved out in 2020, eating here still feels like dining at the home of one of Portland’s best chefs, who will serve you things like smoked ikura with party-size bags of every Lay’s flavor he could find at H-Mart. —Matthew Trueherz

Transplanted from the other Portland, in Maine, Tom and Mariah Pisha-Duffly’s collective culinary imagination landed on this coast in 2017, after building a rabid fan base for their New England pop-up dinner party, Family Feast. They certainly weren’t the first to take over coffee shops and restaurants during off hours. But in its relentless eccentricity, Gado Gado may well be the quintessential pop-up turned restaurant. The food is an amalgam of everything in the couple’s curious minds and personal heritage, blending Tom’s Chinese Indonesian and Dutch ancestry with a Boston upbringing and years in New England French and Italian restaurants. They’ve served sandwiches, laksa, and handmade noodles. Their take on the Dutch Indonesian feast rijsttafel, which covers the table with plates big and small, became the eventual brick-and-mortar’s calling card.

The couple moved here for the city’s creative spirit. “People want to go to weird things,” Tom says. “People want to do weird things.” Like many visiting critics and food writers, they saw it as a place where chefs could still “take a swing and succeed.” Portland: the land of fine-dining chefs turned sandwich makers (Bunk, Lardo) where anyone can set up shop in a food cart. Instead of a food cart, they found a home in an unsexy strip mall space—how fitting, for a former pop-up to conjure a vibe in an unexpected locale. They wrapped the room in custom shellfish wallpaper, decked out the bathrooms in blacklight posters, and started serving cheung fun and rendang alongside pork blood sausage corn dogs and clams steamed in Coca-Cola. I’ve eaten apple cider doughnuts at Gado Gado, roti with curried creamed corn, grilled shrimp in guava aguachile. Not every dish has worked, but I have never, ever been bored. —Brooke Jackson-Glidden

What was Mexican food in Portland before República? The city has beloved Mexican restaurants—Güero, Nuestra Cocina—but none have pushed so hard to present Mexican cuisine in a fine-dining context and to bring delicacies and spectacular Mexican ingredients to the city like República. Under founding chef Lauro Romero, who died in 2024, a remarkable in-house tortilla program set a very high bar—simply fresher, better tortillas served with an urgency and reverence for outstanding masa, which in 2020 felt like a revelation.

As República grew and opened additional restaurants, including Lilia Comedor, it created a platform for Mexican chefs. Today, the work of executive chef Dani Morales and her team at República (including pastry chef and co-owner Olivia Bartruff) requires no hedging or qualification: This is one of the best Mexican restaurants on the West Coast, with storytelling and history proudly brought to the fore.

Morales focuses on week-by-week hyperseasonality and multiday cooking techniques. She is particularly gifted with moles, which appear in a rainbow of color and flavor throughout the restaurant’s tasting menu. A recent visit featured a memorable white mole with potato and sea bass, huitlacoche with requesón and strawberries, and a subtly savory paleta made with epazote and lime. Cocktails and wines are equally avowed to Mexico, with often startling results.

Nearly every kitchen in Portland has some connection to Mexican culture and heritage, but República now sits as the city’s most ambitious and prominent expression of both. “I don’t take this role lightly,” Morales says, “and I envision this place as a pillar for what Mexican cuisine truly is, and what it can evolve into with continued effort, progress, and intentionality.” —Jordan Michelman

Karen Brooks: For years you were the most famous chef who didn’t own a restaurant. What drove you to finally do it?

Gregory Gourdet: I started making Haitian food publicly—at pop-ups, at the James Beard house. The response galvanized me to keep going. For Haitians around the world, seeing our food on Top Chef or seeing Oprah post about it was very moving. I felt the love and appreciation. It convinced me I need to open a restaurant. 

KB: You’re a rare celebrity chef, unapologetic in your love of luxury in the People’s Republic of Portland. Kann could have opened anywhere, LA to Vegas. Why Portland?  

GG: The “go for it, you can do it” ethos we have here. Seeing my friends start projects and be successful. I wanted to add to the story. Early in the pandemic, everyone was asking for change in the industry. It became super important that we do our part—uplifting women and people of color, in positions of leadership. Kann has been led by women since the beginning. We’ve championed diversity in our staff at every level.

KB: Kann struck a nerve with so many. Damian Lillard and Ari Shapiro are practically regulars, and Miss Universe Haiti flew out for dinner. What’s your secret?   

GG: We introduced a flavor profile the city had not seen. A lot of people of color find connections in those flavors. Other things are very close to Portland—wood fire, the big thick elements of comfort food, a contemporary take on seasonal ingredients. 

KB: What do you hope its legacy will be?

GG: That we helped create a world where people are paid equally in a restaurant. That we continue to tell stories of underserved food and the cultural history that shaped it. I set out to give Haitian cooking a platform. I hope we’ve done that.