Karen Brooks - The Mighty Gastropolis: Portland: A Journey Through the Center of Americas New Food Revolution

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE CENTER OF AMERICAS NEW FOOD REVOLUTION

Karen Brooks with Gideon Bosker and Teri Gelber

Photographs by Gideon Bosker and Karen Brooks

Text copyright 2012 by Karen Brooks.

Photographs copyright 2012 by Gideon Bosker and Karen Brooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Portions of pieces on Gabriel Rucker, Kevin Gibson, Boke Bowl, and Din Din Supper Club have been reprinted from Portland Monthly magazine with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-4521-2399-8

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

Acknowledgments

It took a village of visionaries, provocateurs, family heroes, daredevil cooks, and outrageously generous friends to bring The Mighty Gastropolis to life. My everlasting thanks to:

Gideon Bosker, my longtime collaborator, who brainstormed with me from Day One and animated Portlands food scene through his strange and wonderful photographic vision.

Teri Gelber, cook extraordinaire and my trusted sidekick, for bringing her exacting standards to recipe testing.

The Chronicle Books team, especially our fantastic editor Sarah Billingsley, the all-around wonder woman who championed this project, and Richard Pine, our long-time friend and agent.

My posse at Portland Monthly magazine, a deep well of support and inspiration. With love and gratitude to owner Nicole Vogel, irreplaceable editors Randy Gragg and Rachel Ritchie, esteemed comrade Zach Dundas, my best pal and photo assistant Ben Tepler, and the rest of my office family.

Sandy Rowe and the Oregonian, for years of journalism support.

The grand pals who scratched through drafts and shared culinary philosophy: Mike Thelin, Thomas Lauderdale, Philip Iosca, Susan Orlean, Billy Galperin, Matt Kramer, Miriam Seger, Robert Reynolds, Shawn Levy, Barry Johnson, Martha Holmberg, Carrie Welch, Trink Morimitsu, DK Holm, and Lena Lencek. Peter Leitner, ally, brother, the catalyst for this project, thank you!

To stellar friends and master cheerleaders: Victoria Frey, Julien Leitner, Joan Strouse, Rabbi Gary Schoenberg, Shirley Kishiyama, Edward Taub, Tracy and Dan Oseran, Paul and Lauren Schneider, Susan Hoffman, Josie Mosely, Marty Hughley, Jeff Conti, Paige Powell, Joe Soprani, Iris Wolf, Carol Conrades, and Michael Sills. Jon Gramsted, you are a prince. Brett, Jodi and Gavin Fleishman, I love you. Big thanks to Tanya Supina and Christopher and Theo Gelber. We miss you, Dorka.

Finally, to all the Portland cooks and food creatives who generously shared untold stories and the recipes that changed everything.

For Mom, who doggedly chewed over every word, and my brother, Craig, massive in every way, unrelenting in generosity. From my deepest corners, with love and thanks for always believing in me.

A band of meat slayers carve out a world of pure, audacious delights. Welcome to Porklandia.

Four chefs reset the homegrown table with strange beauty and extreme pleasures.

From ramen shops to animated whiskey lounges, Portland rethinks hawker cuisine for a new generation.

Communal tables are never-ending dinner parties with some of the best food to be found: boisterous, bountiful, and barely legal.

Portlands pavement gourmets create food malls and town squares of the future.

Small-batch coffee roasters, salumi fanatics, and daring entrepreneurs detour away from corporate models to blaze fresh trails.

Two years before he became the poster boy for Portlands rise to the national food stage, Le Pigeons Gabriel Rucker struck the scene like a lightning storm. He was twenty-five and a virtual unknown, a fast-rapping hired gun with a flock of tattooed birds swooping up his arm, brought in to reinvent a failing cult restaurant on a forgotten street.

Almost overnight, he defined the playful attitude and affordable artisan cuisine that firmly planted a place called Stumptown on the gastronomic map. Ruckers burger set the tone, served with an elegant bistro knife plunged through the heart of its tall-boy bun. Soon, food lovers and discerning critics from the New York Times were drooling over other creations: brazen beef cheek bourguignon and foie gras profiteroles, a swaggering plate of foie gras ice cream, foie gras caramel, and foie gras powdered sugar. Escoffier mon dieu!

With its nonconformist cooking and punk-rock vibes, Le Pigeon embodies what Time magazines Josh Ozersky calls Americas New Food Eden, a hotbed of locavorism, food-truck living, high/low eating, and animal fever. But Le Pigeon is only the beginning.

Across town, veteran backpacker Andy Ricker is mining his twenty-year journey as a Thai food savant at Pok Pok. The signature charcoal-blasted chicken dish arrives on a bare plate, with a wad of sticky rice sheathed in plastic wrap; real-deal khao soi kai noodleshotter than brimstone fireexit a take-out window. From afar, this indoor/outdoor village of Cambodian rock music and Asian drinking foods looks like outcast cuisine, dining on the fringe. But Rickers powerful cooking and strange vision, plopped in a front yard on a local speedway, shows just how far obsession and a do-it-yourself mentality can take you: Rickers humble eatery has been lauded as Americas best Thai restaurant, as followers liken his chicken wings to crack cocaine. Now Pok Pok has invaded New York, the fooderati are tracking every move, and Ricker is a wing king, indeed.

Portland diners are leaping into action. At St. Jack, a local restaurant collective tucked into a bike-centric neighborhood, the cooking team riffs on Frances jolly, offal-loving dens of informality, the bouchons of Lyon. Boys with skinny ties shake flirty drinks, Oregon pinot flows like the mighty Columbia, and boisterous plates of fried tripe and blood sausages make the citys porky excesses, in comparison, seem worthy of the surgeon generals blessing. Even stuffed duck necksserved full steam and head onsell out routinely. Enthuses foodie financier Kurt Huffman: We had a sense our customers were adventurous, but now its Bring it on! We cant make stuff weird enough.

This book is a journey through the mighty gastropolis of Portland, Oregon, population of food lovers unknown, but game for almost anything, even when served on hand-me-down dishware. In this willfully eccentric pasture of pleasure, restaurants are good-vibe places that feel more like art projects than conventional eateries. This is where guerrilla gourmets go their own way, transforming grown in Oregon foodstuffs into gustatory experiments in spaces often hammered, sawed, and welded by hand. Throughout the city, low-budget storefronts and pop-up dining rooms barely hint at what awaits inside: candlelit intimacy, personal playlists, irrepressibly seductive food.

In these egalitarian eating enclaves, its hard to tell the waiters from the diners, and dishes come on like indie rockers: spare and unpretentious. Communal tables take center stage, as Portland practices its own brand of Bolshevik eating, an elbow-to-elbow, knife-to-knife, come-as-you-are food fest that merrily cuts through the bubble-wrap isolation of haute cuisine. Meanwhile, a grass-roots arsenal of raised, foraged, distilled, fermented, brewed, butchered, or bartered goods is the baseline for the new gastronomic luxury: 500-thread-count comfort food.