Working 24 hours a day to set up a new restaurant in a long-odds business, going deeply in debt for a remodeling more extensive than he’d ever imagined, paying the staff who were rebuilding the space with free lunches, Paul Mallory never doubted the success of the project.
"I knew how good he was," Mallory says of his chef-partner. "I was sure we would make it."
DINER 2014
Coming next week -- Diner 2014, our annual Portland dining guide featuring Portland's best restaurants, Restaurant of the Year, 50 under $50 and more.
Twenty years later, a lot of people know how good Greg Higgins is. The restaurant, Higgins, is a Portland landmark, gilded by his 2002 James Beard award as Best Chef in the Northwest. His close ties to individual farmers have gone from a personal commitment to a Portland commonplace. Representing Oregon agriculture and tourism, Greg Higgins has cooked all over the world, appearing in Oregon ads in national food and travel magazines brandishing a prosciutto ham like a lightsabre.
"If there’s one person that Portland wouldn't be Portland without, it’s Greg," says Scott Dolich, who cooked at Higgins in 1996 and 1997 and later opened Park Kitchen and the Bent Brick. "Cooks who move here from New York, Chicago, San Francisco, almost all apply to Higgins. It's got that national reputation."
Locally, the restaurant has roots deeper than a Douglas fir. From his time as chef at the Heathman Hotel, Higgins brought an intense involvement with local sourcing, with farmers, ranchers and fishermen; a range of dishes not immediately recognizable on 1994 Portland menus; and a devout belief that vegetables -- local vegetables -- were entitled to full kitchen attention and meticulous presentation, even during the gray months when fresh Northwest vegetation means potatoes and kale.
When Higgins opened, about a third of the dishes were vegetarian, an unimaginable recipe for 1994. Mallory remembers that at the beginning, the restaurant underestimated just how many steak eaters there were in Portland -- although that was a given for just about every other restaurant in town in the 1990s.
"Sometimes, a waiter would come back and say that a guy just wanted a steak, no vegetables, and Greg would roll his eyes," remembers Dolich. "That was the story he wanted to tell. His vegetarian dishes were what he put the most effort into."
Doug Tunnell of Brickhouse Winery, a friend, recalls the restaurant's budding grower connections: "Back in the old days, you’d be having lunch at Higgins, and this guy would walk in with a big coat and a rain hat carrying a cardboard box of mushrooms."
Greg Higgins (center) discusses the menu with sous chef Patrick Strong (back to camera). Higgins celebrates 20 years this year.
Today, Greg Higgins says proudly that the restaurant sells more vegetarian dishes than it has vegetarian diners.
The local commitment is still the same, although the supply process is a bit more systematic -- and, fortunately, the Northwest harvest is broader. Greg Higgins talks about his suppliers the way some chefs talk about their awards or expansion plans. With a cultivator's gleam in his eye, he mentions the farmers who've been with him for years, about the one who goes down to Salem to argue about health standards, the one who grows produce for how it looks on the plate, not at the supermarket.
"What carries me most," he says about his restaurant, "is it's still really close to the vision we opened with."
Twenty years later, Higgins is still a very personal restaurant. It’s the same size it’s always been, with a sense that each table is closely watched, each monitored as closely as the dishes that appear on the tables, with ingredients arranged like individual gardens.
The vision not only shapes the menu, it means that Greg Higgins actually cooks on a regular basis, and, every Wednesday morning, spends three hours butchering a 200-pound hog. (Thursday and Friday mornings, he works on converting his pork into charcuterie.) It means that every Sunday, he has dinner with his wife in the Higgins bar, and hears her comments on the restaurant’s performance. It means he has 150 different chiles growing in raised beds at his home, some from seeds that he brought into the country somewhat, so to speak, informally.
Greg Higgins' life, and his philosophy, are simple: "I garden, I cook, I forage," he explains.
The core, of course, is cooking.
"To me, real food should come from where you live," says Higgins. "What’s really great about good food is it has roots and an identity.
"It's like classical music. You have to keep playing it. It's about execution, ingredients, repetition."
Kennedy Wolfe (center), a server at Higgins who has been there since the start, says they're one big family.
Talking food, lots of chefs bring up Alice Walters. Greg Higgins mentions Thomas Jefferson and Pliny the Younger. He talks food with a rapt absorption, a sense that the evening’s menu is connected not only to the kitchen and the farm, but to centuries-long traditions, patterns that can evolve but not be discarded.
His knowledge of food is sweeping – bolstered by adventures like a three-week 2012 Mercy Corps expedition to Mongolia to teach sausage-making, in that case with yak, camel, goat and horsemeat -- and the Higgins kitchen has produced chefs like Dolich, Vito DiLullo of Ciao Vito and Rich Meyer of Trifecta.
"He was a real mentor, a cook’s cook," says Dolich. "If you wanted to learn, that was the place to be."
The tutoring includes lessons that Higgins has learned hard himself.
"I keep telling my cooks who open their own places that the one thing you won’t be able to control is who comes through that door, and what they expect of you," he says. "The best lesson a chef gets is to go to the dish room and see what comes back on the plate. If you don’t do that, you’re fooling yourself."
After 20 years and many trips to the dish room, Higgins has seen its share of evolution. The menu that started out very small -- leading to early comments that while the quality was clear, sometimes it was hard to find something you actually wanted to eat -- has expanded considerably. In a time of fewer power lunches and more food carts, the lunch menu has more sandwiches -- along with the iconic pastrami.
Twenty years ago, Higgins might not have had a bay shrimp melt sandwich at lunch. (Greg Higgins marvels that we’re in a time when focaccia is on fast-food menus.) But anyone dropping by Higgins today for the cassoulet of duck and pork confit or the winter squash samosas with curried cauliflower, the former reflecting the relentless precision of Higgins preparation, the latter his devoted attention to vegetables, would recognize the restaurant immediately.
And there are other changes from running a restaurant two decades ago, back when people didn’t come into a dining room with cell phones, to take and send photos of their entrees and chat with people who aren’t there.
"You get a table of people dining, and they’re all on their cell phones," marvels Higgins, sounding completely perplexed at how people can come to a restaurant and not focus on what they're being served, how people can be less absorbed by food than he is. "I'm not a sociologist, but you'd think there'd be repercussions to that. We've devalued food."
But other changes have had other effects. When Higgins opened, Portland diners were full of questions about what specific words on the menu meant, about ingredients and preparations they’d never encountered. Portland in 2014 is a different place.
"People know a lot more about food," says Mallory. "Now they don't ask questions about fiddlehead ferns or nettle pesto."
And when the restaurant shoots out an afternoon Twitter message that fresh razor clams have just arrived, diners are listening.
Some things don't change. From the beginning, Higgins and Mallory wanted a restaurant that would be busy all the time, which meant a vibrant bar scene. Before Oregon's craft beer explosion, Higgins had a lengthy beer list, with a particular strength in Belgians, that could make customers thirsty just reading through it. On weekday nights when downtown Portland isn't full of people seeking a Provencal seafood bourride or a plate of four different pork preparations -- all products of Greg Higgins’ butchering -- the bar, now featuring an expanded bistro menu, can be drinking-room-only.
Other aspects are even more familiar. Cooks stay longer at Higgins than in the typical comparable kitchen. To mark the restaurant’s anniversary, Higgins has commissioned mementos for 14 staff members who have been there all 20 years, an expense few restaurants would bother with for a milestone even fewer can claim.
Higgins' commitment to local growers and sourcing has not only endured, but spread like indigenous blackberries. Localism, considered quirkily precious when Greg Higgins used it to write the menus at the Heathman in the 1980s, is now pervasive – to the point where some publishers considering the cookbook Higgins is writing have worried that the approach has become too commonplace.
It is still deeply planted, and flourishing, at Southwest Broadway and Jefferson.
"In a lot of ways," says Paul Mallory, who still greets diners at the entry but no longer stays up nights on remodeling, "we’re just hitting our stride."
-- David Sarasohn