Was 2019 the year Feast Portland grew up? Eight years after launching as a hip, chef-obsessed alternative to an older food festival model, Feast is now the unquestioned top dog, with events running deep into Sunday night, headline-grabbing dinners scattered throughout the weekend and The Big Feast -- the big-tent event formerly known as The Grand Tasting -- moving to The Bite of Oregon’s old stomping grounds on the waterfront. Though I didn’t dive as deeply into the festival this year as last, I did stay busy for each of the festival’s four main nights, dipping my toes in just enough to get a sense of where Feast stands now, and what it might become going forward. Here are five things I learned from the the 2019 festival:
For one night, Portland was the unlikely center of the African-American cooking universe
At Thursday’s unofficially titled “Diaspora” dinner, Portland’s Gregory Gourdet was joined by three recent James Beard Award winners: Edouardo Jordan, who took home Best Chef Northwest and Best New Restaurant medals in 2018 for Seattle’s JuneBaby; Kwame Onwuachi, the 2019 Rising Star chef from Kith and Kin in Washington, D.C.; and Dolester Miles, the 2018 Outstanding Pastry Chef from Alabama’s Highlands Bar & Grill.
In other words, for one night, Portland was the unlikely epicenter of African American cooking in the United States. The dinner, in The Nightwood Society’s handsome events space, was a showcase for Gourdet’s traditional Haitian dishes, Jordan and Onwuachi’s opposite-coast Afro/Caribbean/American riffs and Miles’ beyond classic desserts. And it was some of the best -- and easily the most thought-provoking -- food I ate all weekend.
Last year, Gourdet, who also took part in Friday’s second-annual sobriety-focused Zero Proof dinner, began to think that Feast dinners should cover more important ground than “picnics and barbecues and vegetable dinners." He had cooked with Jordan before, but only at “really fluffy events.” At the Diaspora dinner, they drilled deeper, with each chef bringing their personal history to the table. For Jordan, that meant fried rockfish with black eyed peas and okra and sweet cornbread that channeled his Florida childhood. For Onwuachi, a cucumber-avocado tomato salad in a gooseberry piri piri sauce and plates of fluffy orange jollof rice reflected a childhood spent in both New York and Nigeria.
In between, Gourdet loaded the table with the kind of family-style dishes found at his occasional Haiti in my Heart dinners, from twice-cooked pork to tomato-simmered conch to roast chicken in a creole sauce you could sop up with that jollof rice or sweet cornbread weighted with buttermilk and sorghum molasses (that cornbread was so good, guests were asking for to-go containers to bring home leftover pieces). And Miles, who spent more than 30 years at the Highlands restaurant before her award last year, brought the night to a close with her justly famous coconut-pecan layer cake.
James Beard Award winning pastry chef Dolester Miles' justly famous coconut-pecan layer cake.
Jordan and Onwuachi, two of the most decorated chefs of the last two years, represented the most intriguing partnership. Though found on opposite sides of the country, their restaurants both explore the ingredients, techniques and dishes carried by slaves from West Africa to the Americas. In a happy lull just before Miles began plating her coconut-crusted cake, I spoke briefly with the duo, asking not how their restaurants overlapped, but how they differed.
“It’s the same story, just different time periods,” Onwuachi said. “You can’t talk about the history of African American people in this country without talking about West African history or Caribbean history," Onwuachi and you can’t talk about it without talking about Southern roots.”
“He uses berbere spice and jerk spice, and I do too," Onwuachi continued. "I tell the story in a way that talks about before we came to America, but I touch on things that are current in the last 500 years as well, whether it’s Veracruz, Mexico, or things that happened within the Caribbean. All of the stuff that was happening in Southern cuisine was happening in the Caribbean at the same time, because of the transatlantic slave trade. So our stories are intertwined, but our life experiences and the way that we view cuisine makes our restaurants different.”
Comparing his Junebaby to the kind of chicken-fried Southern restaurant that used to dominate the Pacific Northwest conversation, Jordan offered a different perspective.
“I’m presenting the struggle,” Jordan said. “The happiness, the high table, the low table, the big house, the fields, the slaves, the jook joints, the fish fries. A lot of the time, all you see is fried chicken, collard greens, some candied yams, and that’s it. What about a chitlins? What about a hog maw? What about a pig ears? What about the trotters? What about all those ingredients that a lot of the restaurants don’t talk about or know about because that wasn’t cool.”
Earlier, Gourdet described how his approach intersected with his fellow chefs.
“There’s four different stories that will be on the table, but they all have a certain specific source,” Gourdet said. “The cool part is, between the three of us, there is so much represented. Edouardo, who represents Southern black American cuisine. Kwame, who has lived in the South, in New York City -- he has Jamaican roots, he has Nigerian roots. And me just wanting to explore my Haitian culture. It brings to the table a lot of different stories, and all these foodways come from one place, which is Africa.”
Northwest tomatoes make great counter programming
Two of the best bites from this year’s bigger events were built around tomatoes. A warm tart cradling halved tomatoes from Tim Healea of Little T American Baker was a personal highlight from Sunday’s Brunch Village. And at the ever-popular Smoked tasting the day before, “slightly dried” fire-roasted tomatoes from chef Jay Blackinton of the Orcas Island restaurant Hogstone’s Wood Oven made for some great counter-programming to the event’s usual meaty excess. Could sun-dried tomatoes, that 1990s dining staple famously derided by the food writer Ruth Reichl as “an example of all the worst qualities of tomatoes,” be poised for a comeback? Blackinton’s dish, with its rich, sweet and smoky flavor, makes a compelling argument they should.
Feast’s first kids event was … really well organized and fun?
This year, Feast held its first-ever event designed for kids, Saturday’s Tillamook-sponsored Melty Fest, at The Redd in Southeast Portland. The food was simple, with various cheesy fritters, ice cream, doughnuts and other sweets (including a bowl of lollipops just close enough to little fingers to cause trouble) from the likes of Peter Cho (Han Oak), Gabriel Rucker (Le Pigeon) and Tommy Habetz (Pizza Jerk). But the kids, including those of the local chefs above, had a blast eating, doing crafts, getting their faces painted and dancing to “kindie dance party band” Micah and Me, a favorite of Feast co-founder Carrie Welch and her family. “Was that the best Feast event ever?” Cho joked the next day. Wait, was it?
David Thompson can come back to Portland whenever he wants
“I know Portland is a beguiling city,” Thompson joked before his collaborative dinner with Pok Pok’s Andy Ricker Sunday night. “But I’ve been here six times, and I have not seen a thing because of people like you.” The Australian chef, whose original Nahm was the first Thai restaurant to receive a Michelin star, just might be Feast’s secret weapon, and is often responsible for some of the most enchanting dishes at the festival. This year, those included a highly praised late-night laksa and his delicious twin curries (with no lines) at this year’s Night Market. His dueling studies in fermentation and spice with Enrique Olvera (Pujol, Mexico City) and Daniela Soto-Innes (Cosme, NYC) in 2017 remains my all-time Feast high mark.
Some Portland restaurant could make a lot of money off Nashville hot chicken
It wasn’t technically a Feast event, it broke my rule about eating off-book during Feast weekend and it sits on the opposite end of the thought-provoking Southern food spectrum from the Diaspora dinner, but Saturday’s Hattie B’s hot chicken pop-up was an undeniable hit. The event, which started as a friendship between Lardo’s Rick Gencarelli and the Nashville-based team at Hattie B’s, featured beers from Bearded Iris and other Nashville breweries and Gencarelli capably manning the fryers for a line stretching from Lardo’s back lot around the corner and up Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard for a block and a half. The phrase “proof of concept” comes to mind. I’ve been harping on about this since waiting in the 100-person line for the similar Howlin’ Ray’s in Los Angeles, but the first local restaurant to go all-in on Prince’s-style Nashville hot chicken stands to do handsomely. Just make sure the chicken is good and the spice is hot.
-- Michael Russell