Aaron Barnett isn’t the kind of chef/owner who comes in once a week to yell at his staff. He does that every day, while working the line at his hit Francophile establishments St. Jack and La Moule. As Portland has boomed, he’s seen the rise of a rustic-sophisticate palate—we’re now a city where “kidneys sell like crack.” But Barnett says there’s a reckoning coming for restaurants like his: an “unsexy” stew of population growth, rising costs, cook shortages, and new competition from the pop-up revolution.

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Audio production by Samala Coffey