Our first clue came after we texted Ken Forkish, and Portland’s preeminent baker replied with, “1 p.m. PST?” But it wasn’t fully obvious that something was up until he answered the phone with birdsong in the background.
That’s right. The man who until recently owned Portland’s best bakery (Ken’s Artisan Bakery) and one of its best pizzerias (Ken’s Artisan Pizza) has left the city after more than two decades and is in the middle of moving to a new house on the big island of Hawaii.
“Retirement couldn’t have come at a better time,” he says.
Forkish, whose “Flour Water Salt Yeast” became America’s top-selling baking book during the pandemic, is putting the finishing touches on a new bread book with 10 Speed Press. His bakery, which opened in 2001, is now owned by a pair of longtime employees, general manager Theo Taylor and pastry chef Randy Dorkin. Peter Kost, whose former restaurant Lucy’s Table was a favorite post-work hangout for Forkish during the bakery’s first decade, has taken over the pizzeria.
“It’s a funny word, retirement,” says Forkish, 63. “I’m retired as a pizzeria and bakery owner, but I’ll still be engaged in other ways.”
In a recent 20th anniversary post on Facebook, Forkish wrote that he opened Ken’s Artisan Bakery (338 N.W. 21st Ave.) in 2001, as “a dream to have my own bakery that would hopefully remind me and others of the great bakeries I loved in Paris.”
“I wanted to make big round boules of country bread, crusty and airy baguettes, brioches, butter and ham sandwiches, croissants that shatter when you bite into them, caneles, palmiers, tarts and macarons,” he wrote
In 2006, a Monday night pizza pop-up at the bakery evolved into Ken’s Artisan Pizza (304 S.E. 28th Ave.), a wood-fired restaurant that, along with Apizza Scholls, put Portland’s pizza scene on the map. Just two weeks ago, we argued that the restaurant’s pandemic-time 18-inch pies, a variation on the New York-style pizzas from Forkish’s superlative downtown slice shop Checkerboard, only here given a crackling char in Ken’s wood-fired oven and sold through the restaurant’s big sliding windows, had been Portland’s best pizza, period, during its temporary run.
(Quality seems to be holding. A classic 12-inch tomato pie pulled from the oven last month and topped, still steaming, with creamy bits of fresh-shredded burrata, basil and olive oil showed that the restaurant, run by Kost with ongoing chef Vince Krone since the dining room reopened in July, remains in good hands.)
In hindsight, it looks like Forkish was winding down his Portland ventures for years, though COVID provided the final catalyst. He closed Trifecta, his ambitious Southeast Portland tavern and bakery, in late 2019. Last fall, Forkish sold Checkerboard Pizza, his superlative downtown slice shop, to Sizzle Pie’s Matt Jacobson, who plans two new locations, including a standalone restaurant in Sellwood-Moreland. Talks to sell the bakery and pizzeria have been in the works for about a year, Forkish says.
One constant through the years: Even as Portland bakers followed a heartier, whole-grain path, Ken’s Artisan Bakery (and, briefly, its sister Trifecta) remained the city’s best bakery. And if you ever went out in search of the best of something (croissants, pizza by the slice), chances are your road would take you to Ken.
We spoke with Forkish over the phone Tuesday about his reasons for selling his namesake restaurants, how he has stayed on top for two decades and the chances he’ll open a new bakery in Hawaii (hint: they’re low). Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Have you had a chance to reflect on your time in Portland?
A: It’s too soon after the event to really get my head around it. It was something I knew I needed to do, going back to when I sold Trifecta and that wasn’t really enough. I needed to understand, after I was relieved of that, if that was going to buy me what I needed in terms of mental space. But I realized this was the right time. And the right situation to hand off to people who would continue the tradition.
Q: Speaking of Trifecta, at the time you said the closure was about finding a more sustainable size for your businesses. Now it looks more like the beginning of the end. What changed?
A: Immediately after Trifecta closed, I had a couple of weeks to unwind, and then COVID hit and then I’m back in the wringer. And all of a sudden I have to tell another 70 people that they’ve lost their jobs, and I have no idea when we’re going to reopen. God, that was awful.
Q: What has the last two years been like for you and your businesses?
A: The bakery was only closed for two months in 2020, then we reopened with a really slimmed-down takeout model and a small staff handing product out across the door. It was all about survival. Then we reopened both the bakery and the pizzeria for dine-in within a couple of days of each other in July and it was like opening two whole new restaurants. The front-of-house staff at both was almost all new people.
Q: Talking with Vitaly and Kimberly Paley before the Paley’s Place closure, they talked about feeling like “flight attendants,” worrying, essentially, that COVID had killed the kind of hospitality that first attracted them to the restaurant work. Do you feel that way?
A: Not in that way. I mean, some of it’s age. I’m in my 60s now. And the mental energy that’s required to run a restaurant is not to be underestimated. If the implication is it’s harder to hire staff to do things now, yeah, it is. But I look at the hospitality that we deliver at my pizzeria and I think it’s really strong. It’s a lot better than I thought it was going to be when we first reopened. The tip pool — we now offer a generous tip out to the kitchen that’s a lot better than we used to do, and I thought that was going to prevent us from hiring top quality servers. But it hasn’t turned out that way. There just aren’t a lot of applicants, especially for skill positions. Maybe it’s temporary. But we’re making do.
Q: You’re still using the present tense.
A: Yeah. It will take me a while to get in the past tense. I’ve only been in Hawaii for a few days.
Best in show: A croissant from Ken Forkish's Trifecta, which closed in 2019.Mark Graves
Q: How has Portland changed since the bakery opened in 2001?
A: The industry has evolved a lot. Portland as a city has changed a lot. When I opened the bakery in 2001, and even when the pizzeria opened in 2006, most of the employees lived pretty close. And now that’s not so affordable. When things get more expensive, a lot of things change with it.
Q: With all the rain here, I’m not sure I need to ask this question, but why Hawaii?
A: I’ve been coming here for about 12 years. It’s always been my getaway, the happy place where I could go and feel restored when I come back home. I wanted to feel restored all the time.
Q: Whenever we would do one of our best dish roundups, you typically ended up at or near the top. How did you keep quality so high?
A: I think it’s about understanding what the pinnacle is: How good can a chocolate croissant be, and can I recognize it when it’s not? And then it’s about doing it. If you’re a jazz trumpet player, you can listen to Chet Baker and Miles (Davis) and Freddie Hubbard and while it’s not so easy to blow like those cats, I think once you have that reference point, it’s possible to recognize when things aren’t right, and put in a plan to make it better. And then you have to communicate well with your staff, so they understand exactly what you want. The gray area is that after you codify everything, the cut size on the dough, or how much the raw dough should weigh for a croissant — 90 grams — then there’s variability too. But after a while, (making those adjustments) becomes part of the DNA of a place.
Q: You’ve said the bakery and pizzeria are in good hands, but that won’t stop fans from being nervous.
A: I’ve worked real hard to make sure that the quality will not dip. Theo has been there since 2002, the bread team is now reporting to him. He’s the guy who’s been delivering the bread, making sandwiches with it and on and on, so he can recognize when it’s not right. We’ve done a lot of coaching, and we have a team of bread makers devoted to doing it well. These guys are going to continue to make bread at the quality that Portland is used to.
Q: From zero to 100, what are the chances that you open a bakery in Hawaii?
A: Zero is a good number.
What I don’t want to do anymore is personnel management, and you can’t operate a bakery or restaurant without hiring staff. And any time you open a new place, you’re going to be in for a lot of money just for it to be set up. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And even if you’re profitable, it’s going to take you years to get back to zero.
— Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell