It wasn’t garage band members but journalist Lenny Kaye who was said to have birthed the term “punk rock.” When Waylon and Willie grew their hair long, sported bandanas and blue jeans, and decided to live outside the laws of the Nashville establishment, it was said to have been journalist and publicist Hazel Smith who dubbed the term “Outlaw Country.” And the same is true of other movements. There are always the makers, and there are always the storytellers. And within any creative ecosystem, you must achieve a balance where both can thrive—even if they don’t always appreciate one another. And honestly, they never really do.
I think about this a lot as a look at the current state of food media in Portland, which seems to have far fewer professional storytellers than it used to.
When I entered the Portland food world in 2007 as an accidental restaurant critic and columnist for Willamette Week, the food writing landscape was a different ballgame. There was no Instagram, Yelp was still an obscure baby start-up, and yet, Portland seemed to have the most robust food writing culture in America for a small-sized city.
At Willamette Week alone, future Portland Monthly Magazine editor Kelly Clarke led a team that included a very talented critic named Heidi Yorkshire, now-celebrated cookbook authors Ivy Manning and Liz Crain, and Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon, who penned a piece in the early aughts about Kens Artisan Bakery that nearly won a James Beard Award.
Every Friday, The Oregonian published a thick print guide to arts and culture that contained about ten pages of restaurant coverage, with reviews by future Beard-winning critic and still-captain-of-the-Portland-food-writing football team Karen Brooks, and by a Reed English professor and critic named Roger Porter who was something of a witty walking Thesaurus. With that duo, no one could more deftly praise or skewer. But if those words were positive, restaurant owners could bank on a line down the block—for months, if not longer. There was real power.
Let’s also not forget the Portland Monthly food section led by former Saveur writer and future butcher queenpin Camas Davis, and of course the popular food blog Portland Food and Drink, which in its day, under the leadership of the anonymous “Food Dude,”completely upended the order of the Portland food writing world in a way that nothing else had—or at least not until Eater Portland came along in 2009, which is a another story for another day.
There is no question that the food writing ecosystem in Portland contributed greatly to our city’s rise, but times have changed—here, there, and everywhere. And so, the point of all this is not to give a history lesson so much as to ask a question.
There may have been more food media back then, but was Portland better off?
Consider this…
Media Gatekeepers held the keys
I turned down a graduate school full-ride in 2007 to be a food critic at Willamette Week, which paid $150 per week plus another $100 in expenses. This mean I had to keep my bartending job, but that was a-okay because back then, getting your foot in the door in food media at any level meant working your way up a pecking order that could be brutal. True, there may have been more food opportunities in traditional print media back then, but there were very few people with job security, and they were not about to give that up. And who can blame them? You wouldn’t either.
Portland’s (and America’s) food narrative was one-dimensional
I kept boxes of magazines and newspapers from the late aughts—not just those that housed my own writing, but from other publications others too. There may have been more voices in print back then, but there were very few (if any) diverse voices in food writing—in Portland and beyond. Combine that with bullet point one, and you have the two main ingredients for the recipe for the 2020 media reckoning.
Just add a pandemic and stir.
There was more food media, but it was way more local
It wasn’t long ago that Portland had little-to-no national reputation in the restaurant world, and this was also case with any city not named New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and maybe New Orleans. So while there may have been more local food media back in the day, it was just that—local food media. If you were a chef from a smaller city, it was much harder to gain national notoriety until it was possible to hit the “follow” button on the Instagram profile of a chef in Nashville that your friend told you about or look up the Eater 38. And for writers or wanna-be video stars, getting discovered was like winning the lottery. There was no concept of going viral.
So what’s the point of all this rambling?
As my friend Stephen Greene recently said to me, “to understand where we are going as a city is to understand how we get our information.”
I believe Portland’s restaurant community is suffering because there isn’t enough dedicated food media to shape a narrative. That said, that narrative is not singular, not one-dimensional, and needs to include everyone who calls Portland home—and this is where we have fallen short. And… I also believe that Portland’s food media landscape is ripe for upending.
Like it or not, Instagram remains the central nervous system of the food world and the place where most people are getting information. It is the nucleus and town crier… for now. So even though our reliance on social media to form our opinions and point of views has been extremely detrimental at times (Don’t get me started on the summer of 2020), you have to take the good with the bad.
It’s ugly, but so is democracy.
Long live the storytellers.