“When you can look out your window and see Mount Hood and the Columbia River, people feel connected to the land,” says Schreiber, now a cooking instructor with the International Culinary School at the Art Institute of Portland. “The pioneering spirit is still alive and well,” says Paley, whose empire has grown to three places to eat plus a once-a-month Russian pop-up.Įvery chef I spoke with credited an open and appreciative audience, diners with a keen interest in knowing where their food comes from, for spurring them on. “People here channel the traditions they love, often European or Asian, and make them their own.” Enter Bollywood Theater, a celebration of Indian street food Langbaan, a speak-easy of a restaurant whose tasting menu transports diners to Thailand and Nodoguru, a pop-up turned permanent Japanese feast - in a grocery store. “We’re the Wild West of food,” says Brooks. Unlike their previous locales, says the chef, Portland seemed like a blank canvas: “There are no real restrictions, no cuisine you need to stick by.” (By way of example, the commonplace pad Thai is intentionally absent from the list at Pok Pok.) “We’ve never felt as settled as we do in Portland,” Denton says. The couple moved on to Hawaii but traded island life for the Pacific Northwest, where they opened the Argentine-inspired Ox in 2012. Jose Chesa, the Barcelona native behind two-year-old Ataula, one of the best Spanish kitchens on the West Coast, says he was drawn to Portland from Puerto Rico by a “small-town feeling” where “everyone takes care of everyone” and his profession is “all about the farmers, the ingredients.” Greg Denton met his wife and co-chef, Gabrielle, while the two were cooking at the destination Terra in Napa Valley. (Like its residents, restaurant interiors here tend not to be flashy. Or simply across the dining room, as at Pok Pok, where my cab driver at PDX dropped me off for a reunion with smoky, succulent game hen and funky, fiery ground duck liver - Thai food by enthusiast Andy Ricker that’s every bit as exciting as I remember it from my first meal at the outsize shack five years ago. So do low rents, cheap liquor licenses and loose regulations, says Marc Hinton, author of “A History of Pacific Northwest Cuisine: Mastodons to Molecular Gastronomy.” The Portland-based blogger says, “You can be really small and make a whole lot of noise across the country.” World-class ingredients draw chefs to the area and keep them there. Witness Tommy Habetz (Bunk Sandwiches), Troy MacLarty (Bollywood Theater), Gabriel Rucker (the nose-to-tail Le Pigeon, followed by Little Bird). The bench deepened a decade or so ago, when another wave of talent emerged, including Naomi Pomeroy - best known for her supper-clubby Beast and later appearance on Bravo TV’s “Top Chef Masters” - and a slew of proteges who went on to open restaurants that lured food critics onto planes to taste them. (A Portland chef has won that honor over one from Washington state in three of the past five years.)Īlong with Greg Higgins of Higgins restaurant, Schreiber and Paley “set the table” for the area by establishing a grower-connected network and forming strong relationships with farmers, foragers and fishermen, says Brooks, also the author of the captivating “The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland.” Ten years later, its headliner received a James Beard award for Best Chef Northwest. Paley’s Place opened to wide acclaim in 1995. So impressed was Paley by the promise of such edible gems that when he returned to the States, he ended up settling in Portland instead of Manhattan, where he had cooked at such hits as Union Square Cafe, Remi and Chanterelle. In France, onetime New York chef Vitaly Paley was cooking at the two-star Michelin restaurant Au Moulin de la Gorce near Limoges when he noticed the origin of the sumptuous morels his employer was using: Oregon. (The establishment closed last year after a 20-year run.) “I had amnesia for 12 years!” he says now of his work before Wildwood, the proudly Pacific Northwestern restaurant he opened in 1994 with two wood-fired ovens. Chef Cory Schreiber, a veteran of the restaurant scenes in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, returned to his native Oregon, where his family owned an oyster bar dating to 1907, in part to reacquaint himself with the prime ingredients of his youth. Soon, other artists followed, eager to return to their roots or plant themselves in a more relaxed environment.
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