When Eater Portland Came To Town

We don't give Eater enough credit for changing the food media game--even though it kinda stopped doing that a while ago.

Nong's OG Cart in 2009

When Rolling Stone dropped its first issue in 1967, Sgt. Pepper's was six months old, Dylan had already been electric for two years, and The Rolling Stones were in the studio working on album number six. Jimi Hendrix was setting guitars on fire, The Velvet Underground’s was laying the groundwork for what writers would one day call alternative rock, and Pink Floyd still kinda sounded like a stoner surf band.

In other words, the revolution was underway.

The same could be said of food culture in 2008 and 2009—across the country in a handful of places like Portland, Oregon. For those who weren’t there, it’s impossible to fully describe the excitement of the age. Just about everything we now know, love, and understand about American food culture was being invented and reinvented—but back then, it all felt new and under the radar. That era, which (loosely) started five years earlier and continued for another five or so, was to food what the 1960s were to rock and roll. And while food in America continues to improve as a result, the genesis of an era only gets to happen once—and this was it. Food writing was still traditional and tidy—and then Eater came along and kinda changed everything.

But let’s get back to 2009.

This was a time of youthful obsession—when being into food and restaurants was cool with a certain smaller crowd, but still made you seem hedonistic and weird to most of your friends and family.

This was before agencies suggested “pop-ups” to their corporate clients in marketing plans. They were still punk rock lore when Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz launched Mission Street Food from a San Francisco food truck, inventing a genre. Meanwhile, Portland’s food cart scene exploded in 2009, fueled by a Great Recession trifecta, namely: unemployed, creative, food-loving people; the impossibility for chefs to obtain business loans; and a glut of suddenly available commercial land, because developers who wanted to build apartments couldn’t get money either.

Portland’s food carts didn’t just feed the city—they educated it, fostering a generation of diners and launching legendary careers. Poutine wasn’t on anyone’s radar until Potato Champion opened in what I remember as the city’s first food cart pad on SE 12th and Hawthorne—on a parking lot once slated to be apartments until the global economic crash had other plans. Robert Reynolds, the legendary poet-chef-teacher, would send us students to 46th and Belmont to grab lunch at the original Lardo sandwich shop—back then a food cart next to Kir Jenson’s Sugar Cube, an oasis of desserts and pastries that may still be the most creative food cart in Portland history. The real game-changer was Nong’s Khao Man Gai, which debuted on SW Alder near 11th Avenue when a former Pok Pok line cook named Nong Poonsukwattana transformed Portland street food by opening an entire concept with just one dish: her eponymous Thai chicken and rice, neatly packaged with its now-famous ginger-garlic sauce in white butcher paper and cutely secured with a blue rubber band. Soup was included—for six dollars.

This era also marked a massive shift in media.

The decline of print journalism had long been a rumor and a fear, but it really began its long death rattle as advertising revenues cratered during the Great Recession.

Before the Great Recession and even a few years into it, Portland had a robust-but-Portland-centric food journalism scene. Karen Brooks was the top dog (as she still is), and led a talented team at The Oregonian’s Friday Diner section. The Oregonian also published Food Day, a voluminous recipe-focused Tuesday supplement that had dedicated wine writers and even produced Mix Magazine—helmed by Martha Holmberg, a top cookbook author and former editor of Fine Cooking. At Portland Monthly, former Saveur editor Camas Davis oversaw food writing, while Willamette Week had five food writers.

Eater arrived in late 2009 as the seventh Eater site, joining New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, and Eater National, if I’m remembering things right. Portland’s early inclusion wasn’t so much because of its importance as a food city (Despite what many here in Portland still believe, New York publishers don’t think of Portland or small cities in that way). The real reason why Eater launched in Portland before bigger palaces like Seattle or Houston or DC was because a freelance journalist named Eva Hagberg needed a job, and knew the right people.

I was leading the Portland Monthly food section at the time, and then-Pomo editor Randy Gragg introduced me to Eva, a recent New York City transplant who had bylines in the New York Times and many national publications. Eva moved to Portland for a gap year before heading to Berkeley for grad school.

Randy assigned her and I to write the annual Portland Monthly Best Restaurant List, which was a fun experience wherein we got completely lambasted on the food blogs for including Nong’s (a food cart) on the city’s ten best. Eva and I both loved to poke the bear so to speak, and when she asked if I’d join her as co-founding editor of Eater Portland in late 2009, I was pretty excited.

Portland—then as it still is—was an incredibly spirited and creative place, but also inward-looking and self-aware—often to its own detriment. Plus, the food writing world had a weird pecking order that could be hostile to outsiders—like New York City publications.

This wasn’t just a food thing, btw. Once the great Canadian chef Vikram Vij explained the interconnectedness of the three Pacific Northwest cities to me as such: “Seattle is obsessed with Vancouver, Vancouver is obsessed with Portland, and Portland is obsessed with itself.”

Eva knew Eater co-founder Lockhart Steele from her New York City days, and looking back, I believe it was Lockhart, Ben Levanthal, and the early Eater crew that were the first to figure out what Condé Nast and Meredith could not: How to make compelling food content on the Internet.

The problem with all of the print magazines back then is that they generationally did not understand that the Internet was a conversation. Digital strategy to most editors was simply writing shorter print-style stories and crapping them into a CMS to appear on their website—usually with far lower priority than the long-form print stories published adjacent. Meanwhile, almost universally, editors saw the food blogs as nuisances, and paid no attention to the massive shift they represented. That they still believed the old rules of print journalism still applied to the Internet was their undoing.

Many publications were adrift at a time when Eater knew exactly what it was.

I wish I had saved the emails that Lockhart would send us describing the Eater voice—an often snarky, at times reverential, always insider-y point of view that somehow managed to be all-knowing yet approachable. I remember one off the cuff email describing the Eater voice as of someone who is at all the restaurant industry parties and events—but they weren’t invited—they came with a friend. They were food-obsessed and knew every detail of every chef in the room—whether that chef knew who they were or not. In other words, they understood their audience and the growing number of people who saw restaurants as the new rock stars.

And Eater took bear-poking to a new level in Portland.

The week that Eater launched, we knew we needed to make a splash—and much to the absolute disapproval of just about everyone in the aforementioned pecking order, Eva decided that one of our first posts should include a photo of the anonymous Portland Mercury restaurant reviewer. (Incidentally, that photo was provided to us enthusiastically by the Willamette Week special sections editor.)

More below….

Outing an anonymous food critic definitely got everyone’s attention, and among the emails blowing up my inbox in response to our little publicity stunt was one from my Portland Monthly publisher, who wondered why I was playing for another team.

To be fair, I was a freelancer, and like most freelancers then and now, I wasn’t making enough money to allow my client—who wasn’t offering me benefits—to call my career shots. However, as a peacemaker who generally likes to avoid too much conflict and drama, I decided after about a month that I wasn’t really Eater editor material anyway—especially as the Eater launch occurred while I was also in charge of planning a big culinary conference designed to unite Portland’s culinary world the following year. But even though it didn’t last long, launching Eater in Portland was a great experience.

Despite its rocky entry into the market, Eva won everyone over—and Eater changed how Portland was viewed and how Portland viewed itself. Suddenly, because of a friendship, Portland was one of the early inclusions in a growing media brand that legendary food writer Josh Ozersky, back then, would call “the central nervous system of the food world.”

At that time, Eater was as much a content aggregator as it was a media source. When Karen Brooks reviewed a hot restaurant, it was recapped on Eater. When Food & Wine announced its Best New Chefs, they would appear first on Eater. When the James Beard Awards were handed out (back then in New York City), the roster of winners was posted on Eater before it would appear anywhere else. Whether there was an industry scandal, a menu change at an important restaurant, or a new sous chef at Beast, it would appear on Eater. And because Eater was the de facto insider food world publication to the New York media, suddenly Portland had a direct pipeline to the mothership. Oh, and the comment section was very juicy.

Over the next couple of years, every large city added its own Eater site—and then, a couple of years later, everyone in food was on Instagram. Sometimes we forget today how difficult it was to know what was happening in the culinary worlds of other cities. Back then, it was a brave new world—and one that Eater changed for all of us.

I think comparing Eater to Rolling Stone is fair when considering the eras—but unless you were working in food at that time, it probably seems like a strange analogy.

These days, it’s hard to imagine today’s extremely useful but usually edgeless Eater playing that type of role—with its endless listicles and very self-aware “think pieces.” Eater has become the most essential service journalism tool in the food world—the thing that everyone uses and likes, but it’s no longer defining an era.

The restaurant landscape is much more evolved these days and better than ever, but rarely do you see or experience something that you haven’t seen or experienced before—and social media stole the fire from online food media even before the pandemic accelerated the process.

I would never say that today’s food world isn’t exciting. There is more original and interesting food being enjoyed in cities today than ever before—and this very punk rock era of American restaurants has influenced the entire world.

But the Genesis era passed a couple of years before COVID.

So I guess you could say we’ve moved on to the 1970s—a great era for music.

I love Steely Dan.

But Aja is not the White Album.