at the 36th annual James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards, announced Monday night in Chicago, Southeast Portland's Scotch Lodge claimed the award for Outstanding Bar, while Ryan Roadhouse of downtown's Nodoguro was named Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific. 

"I'm just—stage fright and shocked and stunned," said Scotch Lodge founder Tommy Klus, while accepting the award as part of a smartly dressed quartet that included Nathan Beals, Joey Bradford, and bar manager Katsumi Manabe. Bradford thanked all the people back home he hoped were "screaming at the tiny little iPad in the server station." He also issued an invitation: "To everybody that we share this category with, we'll see you at karaoke afterward. The gauntlet has been thrown down." Their fellow nominees (no word on their karaokes go-tos) were Bow & Arrow Brewing Co. in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Lovers Bar at Friday Saturday Sunday in Philadelphia; Onyx Coffee Lab in Rogers, Arkansas; and Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco.

"I think Scotch Lodge is a great reflection of Portland's cocktail community," Klus said later. "We're going to have a nationally recognized bar in Portland...and that spotlight shines a light on all the other bars around us."

Onstage accepting his award, Roadhouse recalled his first night working in a Japanese restaurant, as a bus boy when he was 17. "At the end of the night the server came over to me and gave a styrofoam cup of beer and a 20-dollar bill," he said. "I was so tired that night that I slept in my clothes, but I was hooked right away. It wasn't the beer or the twenty; it was being a part of the service, the feeling you get from creating great experiences for other people." Crediting his family, Roadhouse called his wife, Elena Roadhouse, "a genius of all trades" and described his father-in-law as "basically the Russian McGyver." Named a semifinalist in the same category in 2015, right after Nodoguro opened, he also shouted out "the mentors who came before me, like Philippe, Vitaly, and Toshi Kizaki."

Roadhouse was one of two Portland chefs nominated in the category, alongside Thomas Pisha-Duffly of Gado Gado and Oma's Hideaway. Also nominated in the region, which covers Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, and Oregon, were Seattle chefs Johnny Courtney of Atoma and Aaron Tekulve of Surrell plus Nathan Bentley of Altura Bistro in Anchorage.

While 10 Oregon chefs, restaurants, or projects were named semifinalists in January, only three had advanced to be finalists. The ceremony was hosted by Top Chef judge Gail Simmons at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, but not all the people on stage were from the food world. The awards for new bar (which went to the family-run Loma in Providence, Rhode Island) and best bartender (Kevin Diedrich of San Francisco's Pacific Cocktail Haven, who joked about the category's official name of "Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service") were announced by Killer Mike and El-P of Run the Jewels. 

Wild Crumb, a onetime farmers market stand turned brick-and-mortar in Bozeman, Montana, was named Outstanding Bakery—an award won in 2025 by Portland's JinJu Patisserie, which vacated its space in September but has plans to reopen nearby later this year.

The foundation's media awards were presented on June 13 at Chicago's Art Institute. Among the winners were National Geographic channel's Tucci in Italy in the Travel Visual Media category and Roads & Kingdoms, an Anthony Bourdain–affiliated online outlet based in New York City and Spain that began life as a Tumblr in 2011, which beat out nominee Portland Monthly (doh!) in the category of Food Coverage in a General Interest Publication. 

Karen Brooks contributed reporting for this story.