How To Reimagine Portland

Homegrown Creativity is our Secret Ingredient

Summer Steps at the Portland Japanese Garden

During the summer, I spend most Saturday mornings on my front porch with a cappuccino, reading the print version of the Portland Business Journal, which lands in my mailbox around 10 am. This week, I was surprised (and grateful) to see myself as one of eight city business leaders on the cover, profiled as part of the ongoing series “Advancing Portland,” a series through which PBJ business and culture writer Malia Spencer has been documenting Portland’s post-pandemic rebound and the new leaders and ideas emerging after the COVID years.

What a difference a year makes.

Compared to past iterations of the series, this most recent article felt a lot more hopeful. In general, 2024 feels like the first year Portland has truly moved on to whatever comes next. As a friend asked of me last week, “Is it just me, or is 2024 the first year where 2019 doesn’t feel like last year?”

What a time we’ve lived through.

Imagine if someone had told you in the year 2000 that, in 20 years, there would be a global pandemic that would effectively shut down society, and during that time, Donald Trump would be president of the United States. Instead of daily human interactions, most people would be glued to pocket-sized personal computing devices—and at one point, a collective consciousness would mistake what happened on these tiny screens via social media applications, the two most popular owned by the 7th largest corporation on the planet, for real life. In some circles, it would become socially acceptable to berate others for not using these tiny, stupid tools to vomit out every ridiculous thought and unhinged opinion that crossed their minds.

You. Would. Not. Believe. Them.

Then there's our beloved Portland, which would become a hot spot for what felt like unresolvable unrest. To top it all off, an otherwise beautiful summer would end with the worst fire in the region’s history—so bad that we’d be stuck indoors for a week—back on our screens attacking one another.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting there wasn’t intelligent commentary happening at that time. By all measures, 2020 commenced a golden era of podcasts, satire, comedy, long-form journalism, social commentary, and some really good books. But with few exceptions, intelligent commentary was not occurring on social media platforms.

But that’s not the entire story.

One warm July evening in 2020, while low-flying news helicopters whirled overhead as they did that entire summer in Portland, I sat on my front porch with my good friend Chef Matthew Lightner, sharing the most perfect chicken he had cooked on my Big Green Egg. Matt is quiet and low-key but always the guy in the room who can frame a moment thoughtfully and perfectly, and that night was no different.

“The biggest challenge coming out of this,” Matt said, “will be reconciling the dramatically different experiences we’re all having. Some of us will be coming out of a time of pause and reflection, while many are going to be enduring the stress of navigating a traumatic hellscape.”

Matt’s statement in every way explains where we are in Portland today.

For me, COVID started off unimaginably horrible. Event-based organizations operate on long business cycles, and COVID hit at the absolute worst possible time. In a matter of weeks, everything we had created over a decade—Feast Portland and a successful, growing consulting business—was completely underwater. We weren’t alone. Every restaurant, museum, music venue, theater, most hotels, destination retailers, tourism organizations, and more were all taking a bite of the same awful shit sandwich.

But in the coming months, the storm settled. Thanks to big congressional moves like PPP loans, the ability to put your mortgage on hold, access to federal unemployment that’s usually not available to LLC business owners, and the incredible generosity of one of our longtime tourism partners (Thank you, Tom Norwalk and Ali Daniels of Visit Seattle, for your grace and empathy—I will never let anyone bash Seattle), it looked like there might be a future after all. By mid-summer 2020, as the world felt like it was on fire and every imaginable societal grievance was being publicly aired, I decided to avoid screen time and use the moment to get back in touch with myself.

I took Instagram off my phone, deleted my Facebook account completely, and committed to spending as much time in nature as I could. I started playing my guitar again, purchased all my food from CSAs and farmers' markets, and with the intent to develop a deeper understanding of what was really happening in the world, I read as much as I could. My intention wasn’t to disconnect from the world. What I sought was deeper connection.

I see my life’s work as creating projects that reconcile the needs of multiple communities—and trying to find ways to bring people together toward a common goal. Even in the best of times, this isn’t easy work, but in 2021 and 2022 in Portland, it was impossible—at least in any meaningful and lasting way. For short periods, I don’t believe this is a bad thing. There are times when individual communities need to band together for support—and that’s what’s been happening since the outset of the pandemic. But in the long run, cities will only thrive if they are united toward a common goal or a loose set of ideals—and that can only happen if we agree on what makes our city unique in the first place.

Here’s my take…

Stewarding Culture is the Key to Our Recovery
During its nine-year run, our festival Feast Portland fostered deep partnerships with Condé Nast (Bon Appétit), Vox Media (Eater National), Phaidon Publishing, and a host of other national and global organizations within our network. Over the years, we invited and hosted more than 250 members of the national and international media from every outlet imaginable—New York Times, UK Guardian, Vogue, Vice, Cosmopolitan, you name it. We would spend the entire year leading up to our September event building relationships with literary agents, TV producers, all sorts of important food-world players, and, of course, chefs from every corner of the planet.

Creating this network for Portland was the entire motive for the existence of Feast—not for notoriety, certainly not for money (If food festivals were massively profitable businesses, then Live Nation would own hundreds of them), and even though we raised over $550,000 for hunger-relief charities, not solely for charity either. First and foremost, we created Feast because we wanted our city to feel like the center of the food universe for one weekend out of the year. We felt that Portland, which tends to default to a paralyzing state of self-analysis when left to its own inward-looking state and groupthink ways, would benefit greatly from playing in a bigger sandbox once in a while. So, Feast was our sandbox.

Having said all that, the only reason Feast was possible at all was its hometown, and specifically the immense talent, creativity, and independent spirit that exists within our chef and culinary community. This spirit is what inspired our guests to say yes and to want to come back year after year. So while I’m very confident in our team’s ability to produce a festival—if you were to drop us in Omaha or Little Rock, the result would have been very different—and that’s one example of what we all should recognize in how Portland earned its reputation in the first place.

In Portland, Oregon, the secret sauce is truly the immense imagination of the creative community—the vehicle through which we express our own unique, heartfelt, and independent beat. And while this spirit is what enabled Feast, it is not endemic to the food world alone. You’ll find it among our talented design community, our dozens of architectural firms, our unique independent retail culture, our musicians, our artists, our innovative nonprofits and community organizations—and even our largest companies. It’s what is driving some of our most ambitious projects and the reason the diehards haven’t moved to the suburbs. (**Though being separated only by a river from a growing city with a vibrant waterfront and an effective tax rate that’s almost 13 percent less than Portland’s at its highest rate should be taken more seriously than it currently is).

Even so, this spirit has not changed.

In just the last week, I’ve bought peaches at what is perhaps the most impressive farmers market in America (PSU on Saturdays), had chicken and rice two times at Nong’s Khao Man Gai—a restaurant empire uniquely born on the success of one dish—and one immensely inspiring entrepreneur. (If you have never watched Nong’s TED talk, grab a tissue first). I’ve grabbed great olive oil at Wellspent Market, enjoyed coffee at Deadstock adorned with sneaker-inspired latte art, attended a fundraiser for Urban Gleaners where I enjoyed bites by America’s most famous Haitian-inspired restaurant and Snickers-inspired ice cream bars by PDX cultural export Salt & Straw, which is about to debut two locations in New York City.

And speaking of ice cream, it occurred to me on Saturday while buying the aforementioned olive oil, that SE Division Street may well be the finest artery for the enjoyment of ice cream on the planet—with Salt & Straw, Cornet Custard, Pinolo Gelato, and Eb & Bean somehow deliciously co-existing within the same 12-block stretch. Then, on the recommendation of my friend and neighbor, who also happens to be a James Beard Award-winning writer, I bought Portland-based writer Chuck Klosterman’s latest book at Powell’s, the largest independent bookstore in the world. Then on Sunday, I hiked seven miles through Forest Park and enjoyed Khao Soi on the way home at PaaDee—Earl Ninsom’s original and least talked-about restaurant—which would be a city’s best Thai food in just about every other place in America.

We are a city that values civic engagement and is surrounded by immense natural beauty. But I believe the main ingredient to Portland’s secret sauce has always been its creative community. Accordingly, ensuring our city’s future success means making sure our creative community is seen, stewarded, valued, and upheld by our city, state, and region—and this means investing in homegrown culture, events, public spaces, and other ways that show off our biggest and brightest ideas.

When the time is right, the New York Times will come along for the ride—they always do. But until then, let’s take a moment to reconcile our points of view and recent experiences by recognizing what makes Portland great, because that hasn’t changed at all.

Our story begins from the ground up.