People & Profiles

Adulting Tips from Kelly Williams Brown

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:32:00 -0700

In April 2011, while working as a columnist at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Kelly Williams Brown came up with the kernel of a book idea: a beginner’s guide to adulthood, from writing a condolence card to buying a used car. This month, Grand Central Publishing will release Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps. Her companion blog has already racked up more than 100,000 dedicated followers. A TV adaptation is in the works with J. J. Abrams’s famed production company, Bad Robot. And along the way, she even conquered her fear of bleach.

•••••••••

I think from the outside, my life looks pretty successful. I have a job, I have a cat that I’ve kept alive for seven years—but I’m prone to these feelings that I’m not really a grown-up. There are these things that other people know and they just do, but I don’t know them or do them, and it makes me feel like a failure. What I realized is that everybody kind of feels that way.

When I was in Mississippi at the Hattiesburg American, I had three older friends in the newsroom, and they kind of took me under their wing. One day, one of them took me aside, and was so, so kind, and said, “You know Kelly, you always look really beautiful at work, and this is a beautiful dress. But it is a little bit of a cocktail dress.” And so that was the day I learned, just because you look great in a dress does not mean it’s a work dress.

Being an adult is being really decent to people, including yourself. It’s correctly discerning the things that need to happen, and then doing them.

I’m a really anxious person. I tend to see doom and gloom and worst possibilities in everything. I attribute that to a lot of things: to having been a hard-news reporter and often surrounded by chaos; and to having the formative experience of going through Hurricane Katrina; and also just being kind of a neurotic girl.

Bleach is terrifying. I had never used it until I started the “cleaning” chapter of the book ... and then I was kind of amazed. And I went a little bleach-crazy. I had pictured it as a menacing cloud that would just get into everything, and I’d breathe it in and die. But no, it’s really useful—you just have to dilute it. That’s it.

When I met with Bad Robot in la, J. J. Abrams was saying that one of his favorite sitcoms of all time was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He just loved its humor and its optimism—and then he said that he sort of has the same feelings about this [book]. And then my head exploded.

I feel lucky to have had a book idea that directly stokes the fears of the New York Times–reading, concerned-about-millennials audience. And it just happens to be this time when comedic voice, especially of females in their 20s, is kind of a zeitgeisty deal. But I think that no matter what, growing up is a challenge. The passage of time is not easy for humans. That’s just how evolution works. I think that people grow up when they want to or when they have to.

THe audience for this book is really me—when I was 22. It’s for people for whom, up until now, the progression of life has been obvious ... and then you get to the end of that line, and all of a sudden everything opens up and you just don’t know. And also you probably have a disgusting, filthy fridge.

I’ve only ever been a millennial. I’ve only ever had the experience of right now. It would make me really happy if people who were of a different generation read the book and felt like they got some useful perspective. But I also hope that it’s something that maybe someone in their 30s or 40s or 50s could read with that little cringe of recognition, remembering what it was like.

My professional goal is that I want to write things that are funny and I want to write things that are useful. And hopefully at the same time.

Ocean Alchemy

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:56:00 -0700

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Ben Jacobsen sits atop a gleaming, 6,000-gallon food-grade tanker truck, straddling the curving metal like Major Kong riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove. The fire hose slung over his shoulder shudders as it belches hundreds of gallons of saltwater into the cavern beneath him.

Jacobsen wears his wiry strawberry blond hair tucked under a denim cap shadowing slate gray eyes and a mischievous, freckle-spattered grin hidden beneath his scruff. His truck sports its name—“Night Moves,” after the 1976 Bob Seger hit—in yellow script atop the shamrock green door. This pairing hardly seems like a partnership for delivering a gourmet condiment to some of America’s greatest chefs. But an hour later, Jacobsen shuts the valve, hops into his van, and, tailed by Night Moves, chugs to an equally unlikely third partner: an old oyster farm on the edge of Netarts Bay, its weathered hull littered with bivalve shells and blanketed in thick moss.

Today is Jacobsen’s first day working at his new salt factory. Four months before, he harvested a holding tank full of ocean when the summer sun leaves the water at its most salinated. Here at the oyster farm, he will filter, boil, and dehydrate it until all that’s left are the flaky crystals regarded by many a chef and foodie as America’s first great finishing salt.

April Bloomfield uses Jacobsen Salt at her Michelin-rated New York restaurant the Spotted Pig. So does Chris Cosentino, at his celebrated Incanto in San Francisco. The salt is a proudly listed ingredient for award-winning chocolatier Xocolatl de David. A four-ounce bag of these crystals sells in gourmet shops and more discerning supermarkets for $10.

Nine years ago, Jacobsen was happily spicing his food with bland granules of Morton. Now, at 37, he is a gourmet entrepreneur determined to become the best, biggest, and most famous artisan salt producer in the United States. The tank of ocean water, the old oyster farm, and Night Moves, engine moaning and gears grinding, are all, however shakily, part of the plan.

While hosing the salt residue off of Night Moves’ glossy exterior, a renegade spray arcs into the top hatch and plunks into the metal cavern within—seemingly just a drop in the ocean. But fearful of the fragile balance of salt, mineral, and water suspended in his precious cargo, Jacobsen covers his face in his hands. “Fuck,” he grumbles. “That’s gonna screw up everything.”

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

“Salt has become this glorified thing,” says Jacobsen, wading below in Netarts Bay. “It’s totally unapproachable.”; the flaky final product (right) divides experts, who either prize its purity or long for earthier flavors.

Jacobsen openly despises the word “foodie.” During an itinerant childhood, he grew up eating his Arkansas-born mother’s shrimp and grits, collard greens, and black-eyed peas. His path to haute cuisine was narrow: it started in 2004, when, while he was a starving MBA student in Copenhagen, his Danish girlfriend brought home a 60 kroner (about $10) sack of Scandinavian flake salt. Sticker shock quickly melted into astonishment as the briny flakes dissolved on the back of his tongue. “It was incredible to me how such a simple element—a single ingredient—could transform a whole dish,” he explains.

Jacobsen began sprinkling fleur de sel on everything he ate, from oatmeal to Frikadeller (Danish meatballs) and Flæskesteg (pork roast covered in cracklings). By 2006, as head of global marketing in Norway for Opera Software’s billion-dollar web-browsing empire, his growing obsession had him religiously packing a few ounces of good sea salt in his carry-on for his weekly flights across the globe. “The TSA never stopped me,” he recalls, “and it made the food I was eating that much better.” He even became a collector, archiving everything from coarse octagonal rocks of sel gris to paper-thin sheets of fleur de sel from South Africa, Greece, Mexico, the UK, and Canada. (For a guide to sea salts, see page 3)

In 2008, Jacobsen moved to Portland to join his future wife, Cara, and work on a mobile-app start-up that he imagined would transform Apple’s vast application market into a social media platform. As that company sucked up his savings in the Great Recession, he began taking trips to the Oregon Coast. One day in 2009, sluicing through the calm waters of Netarts Bay, a chain-linked crab pot balanced precariously on the bow of his 14-foot sky blue kayak, he got an idea. He paddled back to shore, crushed his Rainier tallboy on a rock, and waded back into the shallows, filling his three-gallon water bottle with crisp Netarts Bay water. Back home in his drafty 1917 Northwest Portland Craftsman house, Jacobsen dumped its contents into a stockpot. “How hard can this be?” he thought to himself, cranking the gas and walking away as seawater bubbled at full bore. Four hours later, the kitchen was a wreck: thick splotches of salt plastering the walls, the pot rusted and pitted, and his “salt” a bitter, amorphous blob of yellowish sludge. “Man, that was really bad salt,” Jacobsen remembers. “But I was infatuated on a primal level.... I had created something out of nothing, just fire and water—it was elemental.”

Jacobsen is not the first person to make salt on the Oregon Coast. In 1806, American pioneers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, at the end of their two-year expedition, famously returned with 28 gallons of “excellent, fine, strong, white salt” for meat preservation. (For Jacobsen, the annual Salt Makers Living History, a costumed reenactment of Lewis & Clark’s early salt experiments near Seaside, is a constant reminder of untapped potential.) Browse any gourmet market and you’ll find salts with similarly historic roots: fleur de sel from Brittany, flor de sal from Portugal, and, most famously, Maldon Sea Salt from Essex, 40 miles northeast of London, which churns out geometric pyramids prized by chefs worldwide. The Pacific Northwest and England share similar latitudes and a stormy, cool maritime climate. But Netarts Bay has an advantage: each tidal shift cleanses the bay with 85 percent new water, which is further naturally purified by millions of oysters farmed and growing wild. Just as Oregon’s early wine growers saw Burgundy in the Willamette Valley, Jacobsen saw Maldon on the Oregon Coast.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Mark Bitterman is widely considered to be America’s foremost salt expert. A self-described selmelier, his area of expertise is meroir—coined by seafood connoisseurs after wine’s “taste of the land,” or terroir, but with mer, for “sea.” A New York native, Bitterman owns the Meadow, a celebrated gourmet salt emporium with locations on N Mississippi Avenue and in Manhattan’s tony West Village. But among the 120 salts that line his shops’ shelves, there is, he notes, no great American finishing salt. Worldwide industrialization in the late 1800s, Bitterman explains, transformed a coveted resource that was once refined by countless small-batch, centuries-old salt dynasties into the leftovers of a giant economy of scale. Today an estimated 97 percent of salt is made for de-icing and chemical and industrial manufacturing. The remaining 3 percent is packaged for food. Offering an analogy, Bitterman says, “Imagine if all the cheese in the world—all those beautiful Robuchons and Tomme de Savoies and Roqueforts—became Velveeta.” It wasn’t until the 1980s, in a last-ditch effort to save their epicurean tradition, that the paludiers (salt makers) in northern France successfully pushed for government regulations to revive and protect artisan salt. It was the paludiers’ marketing strategy, selling their culturally rich, mineral-laden fleur de sel and sel gris in Paris’s hottest restaurants and to gourmet importers here, that led some American palates to get finicky about their salt, too.

There is no one tried-and-true formula for making sea salt, but the ultimate goal is to capture the essence of the region through painstaking experimentation with time and temperature. Every salt maker carefully guards his own formula, but each must follow a basic blueprint, whether raked by hand off saltwater basins or scooped by machine in a factory. Step one: filtration. Ocean water is purified by allowing the organic matter to settle on the bottom of a basin, or by mechanical filtration through a system of fine-meshed sieves. Step two: pre-evaporation. Purified (typically 3.5 percent) saltwater is reduced to a 5 percent brine, with the undesirable minerals and nitrates crystallized out of the saline equation. Step three: evaporation. The brine is slowly evaporated over super-low temperatures, crystallizing into lace-edged crusts over the course of weeks in the coastal basins in Guérande, Brittany, or for hours in Jacobsen’s industrial evaporation trays on Netarts Bay.

The best salt, Bitterman explains, is one that respects food. “You would never put sel gris on a salad. It’s chunky, robust, and persistent. It would punch through the lettuce, taste too intense, last too long. Likewise, you would never put a flake salt on a steak. It would be a bright, quick spark of flavor, and then—poof—gone. You’d be chewing on unseasoned steak. Salts can be round, warm, and rich, or sweet, bright, and bold, or pungent, mineral, and oceanic. But no matter what, it’s gotta showcase the meroir.”

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Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Vats gurgle with evaporating seawater at Jacobsen’s new salt factory (left); Jacobsen’s travel tins of salt became an instant sensation among Portland chefs (right).

Over the course of two and a half years, Jacobsen made his way south from Hood Canal, Washington, to Gold Beach, Oregon, sampling seawater at every stop, in search of the purest Pacific water source. His wife, Cara, grudgingly recalls a vacation in Baja, Mexico, watching her husband fill an empty milk jug full of ocean water and sneak it into the hotel kitchen to start the salt-making process. “It was embarrassing,” she says. “People looked at us like we were crazy.”

By April 2011, Jacobsen was pretty sure he had his salt figured out. Using grease cones made for purifying deep-fry oil in restaurants, he removed most of the aquatic impurities. His carefully calibrated timetable involved evaporating the salt over scorching temperatures for four hours, causing the heavy minerals (calcium and magnesium) to scale up the sides of his stockpot. He then brought the brine down to a gentle simmer for 30 hours, before scooping the wet sheets of jagged, evaporated crystal by hand. Dozens of failed efforts resulted in salts of beige and gray. “It was beautiful,” he says of his first successful, grade-A quartz-like shimmer of clear and white.

“With the moving van permanently parked in our driveway, our neighbors were pretty sure we were running a meth lab.”

—Cara Jacobsen

That June, Cara Jacobsen spotted a flier for the New Seasons vendor fair, where hundreds of hopeful artisans gather every month with tables full of home-pickled vegetables, DIY cheese, and free-range eggs in hopes that their product will be picked up by the local chain. Jacobsen arrived with two bags labeled simply “Netarts Bay, 2011.” Ryan White, a buyer for New Seasons, tried one pinch of the flaky crystals and offered Jacobsen a deal. By that winter, Jacobsen Salt had become one of the most successful product launches in New Seasons history. “Ben couldn’t physically make it fast enough for us to sell,” White says. “We were taking special orders from more than 50 customers per store. Ben would deliver the product, and it rarely even made it to the shelf.”

To satisfy demand, Jacobsen’s kitchen experiments quickly grew into a Mad Max–style assembly line. Several times a week, he would fill a rented Penske moving truck with a few 275-gallon wine totes of Netarts’s finest and head for Portland—the bright yellow van dropping several octaves as it groaned over the Coast Range. Storage tanks and hoses festooned his yard, plus a kiddie pool for experimenting with solar salt. “Since we don’t have children,” Cara laughs, “and with the moving van permanently parked in our driveway, our neighbors were pretty sure we were running a meth lab.”

Recalling his salt-smuggling days while globe-trotting for Opera Software, Jacobsen began distributing mint-size “travel tins,” each containing a few pinches of his white flakes for salting on the go. The campaign went viral among local foodies. His salt is now de rigueur at Portland’s restaurants, called out on menus as proudly as Carlton Farms pork or Draper Valley Farms chicken. At Ox, a carnal stronghold of Argentine barbecue, chef and owner Greg Denton smokes Jacobsen’s salt and sprinkles it on each dish before it leaves the kitchen. “Just look at that sweet little packaging,” Denton says. “Pure, flaky ... like it’s full of crystal meth! I’ve tried salts all across Europe, and Jacobsen’s is one of the best. It’s super-pure, comes in beautiful, huge flakes, has a great minerality, and ends with a clean finish—no bitter aftertaste.”

At Ava Gene’s, a buzzy new Italian restaurant from coffee magnate Duane Sorenson, the entire kitchen staff wears Jacobsen’s branded denim trucker hats in lieu of chef toques, flashing a hefty endorsement to hundreds of well-heeled diners every night. You can taste Jacobsen’s prized flakes melted into 72 percent Ecuadorian chocolate bars from Xocolatl de David, churned into batches of caramel-laced sea salt ice cream from Salt & Straw, and even stirred into quirky experiments like Burnside Brewing’s “Sea Urchin Ale,” alongside heirloom tomato water and sea urchin.

The story of the Northwest’s first sea salt purveyor began to travel beyond Oregon in August 2012. A mutual friend introduced Jacobsen to April Bloomfield, one of the country’s leading food figures, when she came to town. “I felt like we had an instant connection,” says Bloomfield of Jacobsen. “It’s great that they’re an all-American company, and I love how pure and clean [the salt] is. I love it on burnt caramel ice cream and on duck fat potatoes—it gives them a more-ish quality.” The next month, San Francisco offal expert Chris Cosentino met Jacobsen at the international food festival Feast Portland. “It’s a bright, refreshing change from all the other salts, which are weighted down with the complexity of the ocean,” Cosentino says.

For all the excitement and heady endorsements, one person unwilling to fully embrace Jacobsen Salt is Mark Bitterman. The selmelier says he’s excited about the idea of a local artisan salt, and he’s happy to stock Jacobsen Salt on his shelves. (Its “bigness,” he writes in the tasting note, sets it apart from that of other salt-producing territories.) “But in Portland, we have this issue: people are enthusiastic about supporting the local, to a fault,” he says. “Ben’s salt is all about the story, our connection to where the food comes from, which I respect. But he is a guy who has been playing with salt for a few years; he could never come close to a Frenchman following a hundred-year-old tradition for making fleur de sel.”

Chef Kevin Gibson opts to cook Jacobsen Salt–free at his tiny eatery, Evoe, in Southeast Portland. New handmade comestibles and hyperlocal produce land on his chef’s counter everyday. Gibson says he is wary of any overhyped local product, given Portland’s zeitgeisty tendencies. Just because something is local, he says, “doesn’t mean it’s good. Is the appeal more about the story, or the product? With price and quality, it’s like wine: it’s cheaper to buy a French pinot than an Oregon pinot. Comparing dollar for dollar, I’d rather pick the Burgundian wine.”

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Work/life balance comes easy for Jacobsen with energetic Portuguese water dogs Lykke and Majo and a private swimming hole (that just happens to also source the water for the fledgling sea salt company).

Image: Allison Jones

By January 2013, Jacobsen had gathered investors from across the country—one of Magic Hat Brewing's early investors, Cosentino, and Portland’s own culinary incubators KitchenCru—to build a salt factory. He passed on a World War II–era blimp hangar near Tillamook Bay before settling on an old oyster farm overlooking the mucky shores of Netarts Bay. Inside the tin-lined, teal-roofed factory, everything is supersized. Tanks as large as swimming pools hold fresh Pacific water, and each of the eight evaporating stockpots stands four feet high.

The facility is just the start. Nested by a forest of Douglas firs and juniper trees, Jacobsen plans to transform the two-acre property into a farm-to-table paradise, with a chicken coop, a two-level Cape Cod–style guest quarters, and a 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden. Near a slippery shore that doubles as a boat launch, a clearing will become an outdoor dining room strung with lights, set just a few feet from a panoramic view of the bay and the greenery of Cape Lookout State Park beyond. His anti-foodie tendencies aside, Jacobsen hopes to lure top chefs and his biggest supporters to the idyllic compound, promising supper clubs loaded with Northwest clambakes, and plenty of freshly harvested salt.

But on his inaugural day working at the new factory, Jacobsen must first navigate a perilous three-mile trip with his cache of summer seawater. The tanker, untested for such a use, can’t contain the surges from the thrashing, 6,000-gallon, innerwave pool as it barrels down Whiskey Creek Road. With each jerking halt and every lurch forward, gallons of water gush from a release valve on the side. At the entrance to the new facility, Night Moves begins a hazardous backwards descent, crashing through overgrown evergreens and blocking traffic in both directions. The hulking truck’s enormous wheels spin out as it begins sliding precariously backward down a steep path toward the holding tanks. Night Moves finally stops midway, sinking defiantly into the mud. Throwing up his hands in frustration and preparing himself for the interminable wait for an adequately sized tow truck, Jacobsen walks down to the shore, just a few miles from where he got his first taste of salt fever, and focuses on his grand vision rising from a rusted-out shed littered with the sunbleached skeletons of oysters. Fingering one of the tiny salt travel tins he carries around like a lucky charm, Jacobsen gestures toward the bay, the surface still as glass. “It takes some imagination.”

A Field Guide To Artisan Sea Salts

Traditional Salt
Traditional salt is a catchall term to describe the majority of sea salts, excluding industrialized varieties that have been koshered or iodized. They are produced worldwide, from Morocco to Vietnam, and can be harvested with the help of solar power, greenhouses, wind, or fire, and later ground into one uniform texture.

Fleur de Sel
Fleur de sel, French for “the flower of salt,” is hand-harvested with rakes from the topmost layer of open-air salt ponds, giving way to delicate, moist, fine, and irregular crystals. Guérande, Brittany, is the most famous producer: it’s where the artisan salt renaissance began in the 1980s. But fleur de sel can be found worldwide, notably in Portugal and Spain.

Sel Gris
Sel gris, or “gray salt,” comes from the same pans, lakes, and salt springs as fleur de sel, but is raked from the very bottom of the basin. It owes its steely opaque hue to the porcelain clay that comes along for the ride. Sel gris forms in rough, granular crystals that carry the heaviest minerality and retain the most moisture of any sea salt variety.

Flake Salt
Unlike fleur de sel and sel gris, flake salt can be created by heating from below as well as by solar evaporation, which explains how Jacobsen is able to make his particular brand under the Pacific Coast’s heavy cloud cover. Flake salts range in shape and size, from the industry standard Maldon, with flat, striated, geometric pyramids, to Japanese Hana with its seemingly snowflake-thin crystals.

Shio
Shio (“salt” in Japanese) is produced only in Japan, heated over a cauldron by wood fire, and agitated with paddles, giving way to tiny, almost microscopic salt crystals. Many varieties, like Shinkai salt, are sourced from underwater currents as deep as 2,000 feet below sea level, promising pure, uncontaminated flakes.

The Voracious Appetites of Chef Gregory Gourdet

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

chef gregory gourdet is stuffing his face with vegan ice cream sandwiches. Four hours ago, the mohawked beanpole was lifting weights in a chilly Northeast Portland gym; 36 hours ago he was running 12 miles up the side of Mount Tabor; 12 days ago he was trading recipes in Austin, Texas, with two dozen of the nation’s rising chefs; three weeks ago he was dancing through the Caribbean on an electronic music party cruise. “I tend to overdo things, good and bad,” he says.

But, at this moment, 48 hours before he’s slated to feed more than 300 of the city’s food world insiders at the third annual party he calls simply “Salon 3.0,” the chef de cuisine of downtown’s sky-high Asian restaurant and lounge Departure stands, however briefly, in one place. There’s the messy job at hand of cramming a melty gob of coconut–cashew brittle ice cream smooshed between two miso-butterscotch cookies into his maw. He nods thoughtfully as he chews. “Can you add more miso?” he asks one of his chefs, giving the sandwich a thumbs-up to be served at Salon before making another one disappear. “I have a huge sweet tooth,” he mumbles. “Huge. Huge.”

Gourdet, 37, wants more, constantly—blasting away his limits physically, socially, and gastronomically while freely challenging the city’s idea of what makes a Portland restaurant and chef, well, “Portland.”

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Departure's bibimbap with koshihikari, Wagyu beef, egg, kimchi, and gochujang.

When the soft-spoken New York native took over the Nines hotel’s astro-sleek 15th-floor restaurant in 2010, it was better known for its hard-partying bridge-and-tunnel singles scene than for its eats. In three years, he’s turned the dining room into a lively hub for creative, pan-Asian cuisine, a spot where Oregon’s produce, meats, and seafood are transmuted into bold yet comforting dishes that sizzle and pop with the big, bright flavors of chile, lime, and ginger. Visiting the restaurant is an expensive but giddy-making surprise: it’s as if you went into a dressing room to try on a pair of gaudy Ed Hardy jeans and came out clad in an Armani suit.

Like Roe’s micro-luxe seafood operation or Castagna’s modern experiments on the “dish” and “meal,” Gourdet’s big city–style kitchen is restlessly challenging the trope that Oregon’s bounty speaks best for itself. “I think we can do more interesting things with the amazing ingredients that we have,” he says. “I enjoy eating a roasted beet salad, but I need a little bit ... more. I want to keep pushing to make food that keeps you awake.”

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Departure's chicken adobo with soy vinegar, charred onion, kuri squash, and taro.

Beyond the food, Gourdet himself has become a Portland restaurant community touchstone. Plenty of chefs champion local farms and food-related small businesses. Gourdet is a booster for everyone else, too, the kind of guy who also organizes fitness challenges for his fellow chefs on Facebook and throws free parties to celebrate the whole scene—chefs, servers, food vendors, and other insiders. “They’re ridiculous. Nobody does that kind of thing,” says St. Jack chef-owner Aaron Barnett, who first met Gourdet in 2008. “He works his ass off.... He goes out of his way to try actively to be Julie from The Love Boat and get everybody together to hang out. He’s becoming the cruise director of Portland food.”

“I just think it’s important to connect,” says Gourdet of all his parties, farm visits, Bikram yoga dates, tweets, and Facebook posts. One of his New Year’s resolutions was to get at least six hours of sleep a night. “I’m already fucking that up,” he says.

It’s as if he is addicted to Portland. And Gregory Gourdet knows what addiction is.

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Departure's crispy pork belly with pickled cherry, ginger, and pumpkin seeds.

Charcoal hair standing in a tall, square-cut tuft with a blond wisp running through it, eyeglasses as big as a teacups, and—when he’s not clad in his chef whites—maybe a bow tie or a pair of studded motorcycle boots, Gourdet makes the average mustachioed Portland hipster look like a West Burnside hobo. And he cooks like he looks.

From 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. most days, he camps in the kitchen at Departure, orchestrating the movements of more than a dozen chefs, from a sextet of prep cooks snipping the tips off 500 chicken wings to six to 10 line cooks (depending on the season) and a pair of trusted sous-chefs. On this Friday afternoon, they are all busy preparing for dinner service and simultaneously prepping 21 separate dishes for Sunday’s Salon 3.0, from yuzu gel–laced kampachi nigiri to fiery chicken adobo. Still, his kitchen is calm and remarkably quiet, a symphony of rocking knives, clinking dishware, and clanking pots. Gourdet may never miss a party, but he’s all business during work hours.

When you go to Departure, it’s like, ‘Hey, am I on a spaceship?’ But when the food comes out you don’t really care. Because it’s all about the food. —Vitaly Paley, Paley’s Place

In between tasting cookies and holding powwows with his team, he’s whipping up an omelet for himself that’s bursting with smoky red chiles, spinach, red onions, and garlic. “I’m very much a line cook at heart,” he tells me, drizzling a puckery soy vinaigrette spiked with fish sauce and lemongrass on top. “I’ve had to learn to delegate. I have faith in my chefs.” He needs to: with 150 seats, Departure has one of the biggest dining rooms in Portland. The fast-paced kitchen serves up to 400 people a weekend night during the busy summer season—that number can skyrocket to 800 when you count bar patrons and revelers sipping cocktails and posing for photos on Departure’s mod, cruise ship–style patios.

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

With its angular architecture, glowing Tron-like entrance, and dramatic view of the city, Departure feels airlifted from Las Vegas, impossibly out of place in a town in love with wood-fired ovens, exposed beams, and casual nights out. But Gourdet grounds it firmly in Oregon ingredients, from the Carlton Farms pork belly braising in a pair of giant sous vide machines to the DeNoble’s Farm kale for the roasted squash and goji berry salad. The kitchen’s pantry shelves are packed with local nuts and seeds. Last summer, the staff juiced and froze three cases of Mountain Rose apples during the three-week window when the rare Hood River fruit was available. They used it to sweeten fall sorbets. “I have a little, secret desire to be a farmer,” Gourdet admits.

His crew revels in the kind of labor-intensive techniques and personal touches you often find at boutique, chef-driven spots around town, from making their own spicy XO sauce and Thai sausage to dehydrating Oregon shrimp for a fiery fried rice. The cooking—and, of course, his eccentric, flamboyant personal style—earned Gourdet a spot on Food Network’s loopy Extreme Chef in 2011, where he jumped hay bales and ran through a dust storm before preparing dishes for a panel of judges. He won top honors at the Great American Seafood Cook-Off in New Orleans in 2012, snatching victory from a field of 16 chefs from across the nation with a slow-cooked Oregon chinook salmon with bacon dashi and pickled porcini. This year, the Oregon Department of Agriculture named him Chef of the Year (“I was touched,” he says of the state’s somewhat nerdy honor. “I totally cried when I got the news.”). He also won Eater Portland’s “Hottest Chef 2012” award—a title that just makes him giggle.

Cooks of my generation didn’t see celebrity chefs doing crazy shit on TV and want to be cooks. We fell in love with the discipline and the art of cooking.... We learned quietly.

—Gregory Gourdet

Thus far, the James Beard nominations and New York Times stories that have vaulted some of the city’s tiny, chef-owned eateries to American dining’s top echelons have yet to “discover” Gourdet. It may take a while. Portland is a city that loves (and is beloved for) its plucky, shoestring operations and gutsy, gluttonous dishes. A glitzy hotel restaurant bankrolled by out-of-towners doesn’t fit that mold, regardless of how many meringues its chef whips up from foraged Oregon-coast seaweed. But Gourdet’s not worried. “We’re not at the top of the list for classic Portland restaurants yet. The older foodie generation references Beast and Le Pigeon and Pok Pok. I think a younger generation will reference Departure.”

Famed Pok Pok owner and James Beard Award winner Andy Ricker agrees: “I really feel like the food at Departure is some of the most undersung in the Portland milieu,” he gushes via e-mail from Thailand. “[Gregory’s] a fiercely creative chef and is making food that is as decidedly ‘un-Portland’ as the restaurant he does it in ... which of course makes the whole thing soooo Portland.”

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“I left New York chubby and kind of broken,” Gourdet says of his pre-sober days.

Born to a pair of haitian immigrants in Queens, Gourdet says spice and heat are his first food memories. “There was always a jar of pickled Scotch bonnet peppers on the table when I was a kid,” he says. Playful notes of hot, sweet, and sour remain a hallmark of his cooking, making for dishes that look modern and elegant on the plate but detonate like wild flavor pyrotechnics on contact with your tongue. The unassuming sweet mayo hiding under his crisp-edged scallop, pork, and shrimp pancakes is pumped up with puckery vinegar powder and pickled shallot juice. His standout pork belly is the product of a two-day kitchen affair: grilled, marinated in hot sugar ginger chile sauce, cooked sous vide for 24 hours, pressed into blocks overnight, and then flash-fried crispy. It’s paired with good olive oil and blush-colored orbs—addictive jalapeño-pickled cherries. Each meaty cube dissolves in your mouth, leaving the flavors of creamy fat, spicy-sweet crystallized ginger, and nutty pepitas behind. If you don’t like the burn, don’t bother sitting down—Gourdet even sneaks chiles into desserts. The spiced tapioca cup layers chewy pearls with shards of coconut ice, cilantro-mandarin sauce, and cubes of fiery Thai chile–laced pineapple, all sprinkled with Oregon’s own Jacobsen salt.

Image: Nicolle Clemetson

Gourdet honed his culinary style during six years working for Jean-Georges Vongerichten in Manhattan in the early 2000s, an era when the influential chef’s constellation of French- and Asian-tinged restaurants was setting the New York dining scene afire. But Gourdet says he gets his work ethic from his parents, who managed hospital chemistry labs while he was growing up. With the help of scholarships and financial aid, they sent their son to a Delaware boarding school. “Have you ever seen Dead Poets Society? That’s my high school,” he says. He tried on premed at NYU and wildlife biology at the University of Montana. “I realized I wasn’t that outdoorsy,” he laughs. In the Big Sky State, he caught the food bug, working at a vegetarian sandwich shop and a high-end bistro to pay rent.

After graduation (he ended up with a BA in French), he applied to the Culinary Institute of America in New York. “It just clicked,” he remembers. Two years later he was on the line at both Jean-Georges and its café Nougatine in the Trump Hotel & Tower. He steadily moved up through the ranks, station by station, until he became chef de cuisine of the restaurateur’s high-end Asian spot, Restaurant 66. He says it was 66’s staff of “real Chinese guys” who taught him how to use a wok and prepare dishes like the succulent, “extremely labor intensive” Peking duck that sells out at Departure every December.

But New York taught Gourdet much harder lessons, too.

In the mornings, before he bikes downtown to start his shift at Departure, Gourdet can be found running trails in Forest Park or heaving iron and climbing ropes at the cavernous training gym CrossFit Portland. As he strains to perform a series of complex moves with a barbell, over and over again, he still manages to look a bit the dandy, in a teal T-shirt and tall black athletic socks. “I hate lifting weights,” he admits after class, a bit preoccupied with the high number of RSVPs that are coming in for Salon (300 and counting so far). But weight lifting, along with a battery of other physical challenges, keeps him fit, lean, and, most important, centered. It wasn’t always this way. Gourdet claims Portlanders wouldn’t recognize the New York chef he once was: “They’d be, like, who is this chubby asshole smoking cigarettes and yelling at me?” he says, with a nervous titter. “I was really irresponsible and careless.”

That’s Gourdet’s shorthand for his seven-year battle with cocaine and alcohol. Born in part from late nights with his NYC kitchen crews, it’s a story that plenty of line cooks and bartenders would recognize. “I was party-party-party. Mr. Popular. I spent all my money as soon as I got my paycheck,” Gourdet says. “It led to falling-outs with friends, bad relationships.” He points to the long, faint scar between his right thumb and index finger. “I grabbed a hot pan full of hot oil,” he says. “I was half asleep.”

Gourdet went to rehab in the summer of 2007. One month later, after a move to San Diego, he started binge drinking. “I got in a car accident. I got arrested a couple of times for public drunkenness,” he lists. He moved again in 2008, this time to Portland to take a job as chef de cuisine at the then-new Nines hotel’s Urban Farmer restaurant, a few floors below Departure. He left four months later, not ready to commit to the structured lifestyle a big hotel operation demands. He ended up running the kitchen at Bruce Carey’s swanky downtown cocktail bar Saucebox instead. “I wouldn’t drink for a week, and then I’d go to my friend’s bar and we’d stay up until 8 a.m. drinking and doing coke and smoking pot,” he remembers. “I had this person in my head that I wanted to be, and this wasn’t it.” He eventually tried AA at the urging of a fellow chef. It worked. “That was four years ago in March. Done deal.”

Greg has a lot of patience. He doesn’t lose his cool. I mean, you don’t want to let the guy down. It’s an effective management strategy.

—Nick Schultz, Sous-Chef

Gourdet ran his first marathon seven months later, replacing his booze binges with workouts—and, he laughs, the occasional drag dance party in his living room. He’s still pushing his limits (still staying up all night, still overextending himself), but now it’s to train, not to attend the after-after-party. He’s competed in eight marathons since 2009 and is planning to run four more this spring, including a 50-kilometer ultramarathon in Winthrop, Washington, in May.

In 2010, Departure’s owners, Sage Restaurant Group, began scouting for a chef. The company’s corporate chef remembered Gourdet from Urban Farmer and sought him out. Offered another chance to helm his own big, New York–style hotel restaurant, this time Gourdet leapt at it. Since then, opportunities to run his own smaller operation have come up, but he’s declined. “I like excitement and things on a much grander scale,” he admits. “I want to see what Departure turns into in the years to come. I want longevity and focus. I want to be something people can count on.”

He pulls down the collar of his white chef’s jacket to reveal a wide arc of cursive letters tattooed across both of his collarbones. Borrowed from Shakespeare, it’s one of AA’s mottos: “To Thine Own Self Be True.” A big rose blooms in the middle of the inscription, right on his sternum. “I know,” he says, half embarrassed, half proud. “It’s very Portland.”

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“He can be a diva,” says Tia Vanich, Gourdet’s housemate, pictured with the chef at Salon 3.0. “Did he tell you about the time I came home from work at 3 a.m. and he had my new Phillip Lim dress on?”

Fast-forward through his morning CrossFit workout and past a full day’s worth of meetings, planning sessions, and ice cream sandwich tastings, and Gourdet is finally back doing what he considers himself best at: cooking. Departure is open for dinner, and the head chef is on the line with his team, stir-frying brussels sprouts—an addictive, zingy bit of vegetal heaven, heavy on fish sauce, lime, and mint. Gourdet loves them, and in two days he will serve a vegan version of the dish at Salon for his abstaining patrons. “They’re better with the fish sauce,” he sighs, “but making them vegan is important.”

While other chefs grumble about customers’ dietary restrictions, Gourdet has taken Portlanders’ nutritional demands as a challenge, adding extensive vegan and gluten-free menus at Departure. “From a culinary perspective, it just makes you think differently about what you can use to cook,” he says. “It’s important to feel the pulse of what’s going on here and react to it. It’s a global change. It’s about environmental consciousness. People are more concerned about cancer and allergens and, really, just feeling sick. So, they are concerned about what they eat.”

The chef himself is on the restrictive paleo diet, which cuts out dairy, grains, and legumes in order to re-create the kind of “caveman” cuisine hominids enjoyed for 2.5 million years of evolution before we started raising our own food. “I think people think I’m crazy,” he laughs. He threw Departure’s first special paleo dinner in March.

Around 8:30 p.m., a server delivers a small package for Gourdet as the chef stands eyeballing the fragrant dishes coming off the line. It’s a surprise: a bow tie from Pino, a local menswear company. The note, from Pino owner Crispin Argento, says he thought the chef might like the custom-made silk grosgrain accent to wear to Salon. Gourdet just smiles and slides over to a chatty server who has paused, hot dish in hand, to talk to a line cook. “Go,” he says softly, arching an eyebrow and jerking his head toward the dining room. “Go-go-go.”

One of his two sous-chefs, Benjamin Love, is standing at a nearby butcher block scooping balls of rice dough for date-filled sesame mochi. “He befriends them,” he says of Gourdet’s highly effective management strategy. “It’s better than yelling.”

Tidy as his restaurant kitchen, Gourdet’s Northeast Portland bungalow features a cow’s skull with gold-leaf horns in the living room and a rainbow of more than 100 pairs of Nikes and high heels in his bedroom. The paper numbers he wore during each of his marathons are tacked in a vertical line next to his bed; on the other side hangs a cheap little plastic crown emblazoned with the words “DRAMA QUEEN.” Standing at the kitchen counter, still bleary-eyed from his late night at work, the chef is trying to shove a carrot down the mouth of a shiny silver juicer. The machine groans and whines, producing a tiny trickle of orange liquid for the chef’s morning energy drink. “This is why you never buy a juicer online,” he mutters.

He got sober for a reason. when you make that decision this is what can happen. —Tia Vanich

Gourdet, who is gay, says he’s too busy to date much. Instead, he shares the house with Tia Vanich, his “sassy bestie” and one-woman cheering squad. The pair formed a deep bond after meeting in AA in 2009 and later working together at Bruce Carey Restaurants. Vanich, who produces festivals and events for the music and food world, is also a guiding force for many of Gourdet’s parties, including Electric Summer. That’s the eight-hour, DJ-fueled rager the pair threw for 400 of their food and music industry friends at Rontoms last August, complete with eats from Nong’s and Podnah’s Pit, Jell-O shots, and costumes. Vanich and Gourdet spent $5,000 of their own money to put on the event. Guests didn’t pay a penny.

“Portland’s not a city that stays sober—especially in the restaurant industry,” Vanich says, struggling to explain why she and her best friend go to such lengths to celebrate their community. “He’s a special case. Being in recovery is a huge reason why he is the way he is. You’re excited about life again ... you don’t have any fear anymore. We’ve gone to hell and back. When you’ve done that, why not throw a huge party?”

The next evening, he does. Salon 3.0. is packed; you can’t walk two feet without brushing up against a person who has grown, distilled, baked, or cooked something you’ve eaten in the past two months. Gatherings like this happen elsewhere, but usually with well-heeled foodies paying top dollar to attend and the chefs serving samples. Here, everything is free, and the guests who spend their lives serving food have the night off. Sage Restaurant Group closed Departure to the public for the night, agreeing with Gourdet that it was an opportunity to give back to the community—and to show off the restaurant’s chops.

The chef is sporting that Pino bow tie and a silver lion’s head belt buckle as big as a coaster. Later on tonight, he’ll be at an “insta-dance party” at Dig A Pony, singing and bouncing along to TLC’s “What About Your Friends” with 60 of his nearest and dearest; six days from now he’ll be charming fishermen’s wives at the Portland Seafood & Wine Festival; by next week he’ll have run another 50 miles of Portland pavement and trails.

But, for now, he’s where he’s been for most of the evening: standing near the tunnel-like entrance of Departure, greeting friends—which at this point seems like half the city—a lanky dot of calm in the middle of a music-fueled melee. A server whizzes by with a tray full of those vegan ice cream sandwiches, and Gourdet stops him. “Have you had one of these?” he asks me. “Have another,” he urges in his trademark soft mumble, a big grin splitting his face. “Just have ... more.”

TIE Oregon Fuels Portland Start-Ups

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Michael Schmitt

In 1994, Nitin Rai needed an eye checkup. To his surprise, his ophthalmologist used a Macintosh to check his history. “No one was talking about electronic medical records at the time,” Rai recalls. The then-29-year-old programmer—New Delhi native, schooled in Canada, veteran of the Bay Area tech scene and Oregon’s Mentor Graphics—launched a software start-up tailored for eye specialists.

Two decades later, Rai still leads First Insight and its 100 employees. But after shepherding the firm through several tech bubbles, he also understands the entrepreneurial soul: why people start companies, and how they succeed or fail.

“Entrepreneurs get caught up in their own technology,” he says, offering one pitfall. “They get stuck in ‘creation’ mode forever.”

Today, Rai helps guide other new ventures as president of the Oregon chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE). This global nonprofit started as a network of Indian and Pakistani tech pioneers who united to advise start-ups in the early ’90s. TIE now includes about 2,500 members. The Portland-based chapter (which will open a second incubator space in the Pearl this spring) has 40 “charter” members including established CEOs, investors, and attorneys, among them Greg Rau of Upstart Labs and Diane Fraiman of Voyager Capital.

“It’s really a give-back opportunity,” Rai says. “We have some experience to offer, and maybe some money.

“Start-ups need their feet held to the fire. we provide adult supervision.”

—Nitin Rai

As its acronym suggests, TIE laces together start-ups with money. TIE-connected investors joined other venture players to fund Chirpify, which lets people and companies buy and sell stuff via Facebook and Twitter, with $1.3 million last spring. In 2011, members steered $300,000 to Geoloqi, an app that meshes mobile users’ location with the other apps they’re using; the start-up sold to a much larger firm last year for an undisclosed amount.

In the case of a start-up called GlobeSherpa, Rai started with a reality check. “I was banging my head against the wall, trying to get funding,” recalls Nat Parker, who developed an app that lets mobile phone users buy transit tickets. “My partner and I were working 9 to 5, then being GlobeSherpa from 6 to midnight. The first thing Nitin told me is, ‘Look, you’ve got to quit your job, or no one will take you seriously.’” Parker followed the advice—and TIE members then led a $500,000 fundraising round to launch the company.

“Mentorship is great,” Rai says. “But in the end it’s advice plus money that makes a difference.”

Tom McCall's Way with Words

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:29:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Oregon Historical Society, Image #bb010260

Many hands shaped Oregon’s green image, but no voice lent that aura a more verdant glow than that of Gov. Tom McCall. Born 100 years ago this month, the Massachusetts native and maverick Republican preserved beaches, fought polluters, and curbed urban sprawl in his two terms (1967–1975) and beyond. In the process, he turned Oregon political history’s most pungent phrases. Some of his best:

“... Oregon is demure and lovely, and it oughta play a little hard to get. And I think you’ll all be just as sick as I am if you find it is nothing but a hungry hussy, throwing herself at every stinking smokestack that’s offered.”

—from a 1982 event, after critics claimed that mccall’s environmental policies hurt the economy

“Sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia ... threaten to mock Oregon’s status as an environmental model....Oregon ... must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land.”

—from a 1973 speech demanding tough new land-use law

“I sense that I’m headed for Valhalla like a bat out of hell.”

—to reporters after a hospital stay in 1982

“On some mornings, when the city should sparkle in the sun, guarded by the clean silver cone of Mount Hood, Portland is shrouded as if by the murk of some filthy twilight in a shadow world.”

—from Pollution in Paradise, a 1962 KGW documentary narrated by McCall

“Some highway engineers have a mentality ... that would run an eight-lane freeway through the Taj Mahal. That is our problem.”

—from a 1970 interview

This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.... But if the legacy we helped give Oregon ... goes, then I guess I wouldn’t want to live in Oregon anyhow.”

—From a successful 1982 campaign to save the land-use laws he championed. McCall died months later.

The Lost Art of Handwriting

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:22:00 -0800

Interviewing two of America’s greatest handwriting advocates is a fine way to invite scrutiny: specifically, over how you hold a pen.

“Sometimes people have a thumb wrap, which I think you do,” observes Inga Dubay as she and Barbara Getty eye my form. The pair, both clad in nearly identical cheerful knitwear, combine grandmotherly warmth with frontier schoolmarmishness. “You have a nice hold, but you pinch, so your arm gets tight. Put your forefinger on top and let the pen rest on your middle finger.”

“Taylor Swift uses this pen hold,” Dubay adds. “I watched a TV special on her, and it showed her signing posters. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s using that pen hold.’”

... Beyond analyzing one pop starlet’s autographic ergonomics, Getty and Dubay stand at the forefront of the campaign to promote handwriting. (Admittedly, the struggle is a lonely one.) Their quest becomes especially poignant as Valentine’s Day reveals the hamfisted scrawls of e-mailers and texters trying to get all intimate and handmade. To the two Portlanders, our fading ability to write with any flair (to say nothing of legibility) is a sign of a deeper lack.

“What we’re losing in this electronic era is the personal touch,” says Dubay, who taught calligraphy for 25 years at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. “I know people who buy cards and don’t even write their names in them, and that is so sad.”

Together, Getty and Dubay have composed 10 books on the subject. They’ve even developed a program to teach an italic script, intended to replace the oft-hated cursive loops with writing of consistent slope, height, and closed letter tops. It’s wildly popular among home-school families.

As elementary schools the nation over drop handwriting as a subject—in East Portland’s Reynolds School District, for example, kids switch to keyboards in third grade—Getty and Dubay manage to keep the cause alive. From Reed College workshops to international seminars for medical professionals, the two teach how to arch n’s and stroke e’s. (Steve Jobs famously absorbed the aesthetics he later used to create Macintosh fonts in a Reed calligraphy class; informal workshops on the subject remain very well-attended at the college.) Recent articles in the New York Times, GQ, Time, and Martha Stewart Living and appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America and CNN’s The World Today have provided the duo platforms to argue that the elemental skill of marking paper matters in ways few appreciate.

“When you type A, B, C, D, E, on the keyboard, it’s the same motion,” Getty says. “But when you write an A, it’s very different from writing a B. It affects your brain differently.”

Then, there’s the reader to consider. “Bad handwriting is like mumbling on paper,” Getty says. “If I were mumbling, it would be rude. It’s the same thing if you hand someone something and they can’t read it.”

They are kindly crusaders. Dubay’s North Portland house smells of baking and steeped tea. But the duo never miss the smallest chance to advance the cause. “People who have interviewed us have changed their handwriting,” Dubay says after a final glance at my hieroglyphics. She gestures to their instructional volume, Write Now. “We’re not even looking at yours, but we do have a book here....” handwritingsuccess.com

Casablanca 2.0

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:08:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Ingrid Pullar

Kathy Kriger drifts elegantly through her restaurant at the edge of Casablanca’s rough-and-tumble medina, surveying a room lined with arches and columns. Squat brass lamps with jaunty beaded shades glow on tables arranged around the white-and-black tiled central courtyard. The wood is dark and handsome. The piano owns pride of place.

Maybe it’s not entirely her bar: the sign out front says “Rick’s Cafe,” just like the den of gamblers and secret agents in Casablanca, the classic film that made its general-release US debut 70 years ago. With its story of World War II intrigue, the movie enshrined Humphrey Bogart (as Rick, an idealistic American mercenary–turned–bar owner) and Ingrid Bergman as stars and created an enduring image of this North African city in American minds. When the Oregon native moved to Morocco for a US consulate job in 1998, however, she found no real-life Rick’s.

“I loved Casablanca right away,” the 66-year-old Kriger says, citing the city’s art deco architecture and bustling markets. When she left government work after the September 11 attacks, she reclaimed an old house in a dense neighborhood that reminded her of New Orleans.

The medina, the historical Arab quarter that is one of the oldest parts of the ancient city, was dirty and sometimes dangerous. Her building was in horrendous disrepair, but the balcony overlooked palms and the Atlantic and hinted at the movie’s gritty romance. As she oversaw reconstruction, Kriger watched and rewatched Casablanca, translating a film shot on Hollywood backlots in 1942 into North African reality. She plucked décor, rugs, screens, and light fixtures from local souks.

Today, Rick’s enjoys a loyal following. Tourists come to bask in romance and buy a T-shirt. But locals come also—on America’s election night, a lively table of Moroccans gathered to await results. The restaurant is popular with expats grateful to find a real cocktail.

“Our street is Boulevard Sour Jdid,” Kriger says. “A friend in Lake Oswego said, ‘You’ve got to have a house cocktail called Sour Jdid.’” She concocted the drink in a corner of the bar, smashing lemon slices into a glass, followed by ice, scotch, red sweet vermouth, and Moroccan sparkling water.

Perhaps the most important accessory: music. “I had to have a pianist,” Kriger recalls. “A friend called and said, ‘I’ve got one. His name is Issam.’ And I said, ‘Well, I hope he can play, because he could get the job just with his name.’” As Issam—echoing the film’s famous Sam, portrayed by Dooley Wilson—plays it again, Kriger lives upstairs. Just like Bogart’s Rick.

Kriger’s book, Rick’s Café: Bringing the Film Legend to Life in Casablanca, is available now from Lyons Press.

Smelling A Story

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:51:00 -0800

Image: Michael Novak

In his Northeast Portland basement, Josh Meyer lifts a scent-drenched paper blotter to his nose and shifts from foot to foot. From a desk crowded with small jars, he often leaps away to ride his skateboard around the basement’s cement floors. He may be 32, but he exhibits the nervous energy of a teenager.

Meyer is the nose behind Imaginary Authors, a perfume brand launched in September. Blogs in the US, Italy, and Britain have heralded Meyer as a cut above most self-taught perfumers, who tend to embalm customers in unsubtle, overly musky scents. He’s also gaining notice for his intriguing branding gimmick: each of Meyer’s perfumes is based on a particular novelist, and each bottle comes with notes on how the scent within evokes the author.

The plot twist: Meyer invented all of the authors himself.

His scent Soft Lawn is described as an olfactory reflection of a book by a fictional preppy author with the winning name Claude LeCoq. A muscular concoction of rose, tobacco, and “black musk” he ascribes to a Spanish matador and calls Bull’s Blood. Meyer’s Orchidee Terrible—orchid, honey, and white musk, woven into a retro floral scent—supposedly captures a 1950s Parisian authoress named Audrey Blavot, and a novel of an ingénue’s “insatiable lust for trouble.”

“I fell in love with the idea of perfume as art.”

—Josh Meyer

Meyer sold real estate until two years ago. His desire to present a smooth-shaven face led him to an online group devoted to shaving. That led to the use of a straight razor, which led to colognes, aftershaves, and a collection of 300 different fragrances. When professional burnout hit, Meyer devoted himself to making scents of his own.

“I fell in love with the idea of perfume as art,” Meyer says. He built storyboards with colors, photos, and notes to pin down each perfume’s “vibe and tone,” and sacked his savings, ordering nearly $6,000 in raw materials. After a year and a half, he had seven unisex fragrances.

Meyer received a warm welcome. The new Institute of Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles invited him to join its board. A filmmaker staging a performance in New York City commissioned a fragrance called “Cult” to spray on participants. (Meyer developed a scent “like clean, crisp linen with BO” to both seduce and rattle the audience.) He’s custom-making scents for Portland boutiques.

Will his creative well ever run dry? “I don’t think so,” he says. “I still have so many ideas.”

25 Portlanders Who Are Changing the World

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:39:00 -0800

Portland will never have New York’s money, DC’s clout, or London’s connections. But for a new class of idealists, organizers, doers, and innovators, humble Stumptown has become its own kind of capital city for global action.

In the fields of international aid, humanitarian relief, and socially conscious business, Portland has a few bastions of expertise. MercyCorps runs relief and aid operations in 44 countries from imposing headquarters by Skidmore Fountain. Medical Teams International and the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect boast global heft and healthy budgets. But ambitious new efforts are popping up everywhere, often powered more by entrepreneurial passion than cash.

New and old, big and small, the city’s international players are creating a distinctively Portland way to attack problems on the far side of the world. The major established organizations team up with tiny start-up companies. Brand-new efforts leverage creative talent and Portland’s famed DIY spirit to present slick, professional images—even while operating from a kitchen table. A tight-knit, collaborative culture helps designers, scientists, social-capitalists, and activists launch new ideas fast.

The resulting movement doesn’t draw as much attention as the latest business news or political maneuver, but maybe it should. “It’s quite remarkable,” says Doug Stamm, who keeps an eye on Portland’s philanthropic world from his post as the head of the Meyer Memorial Trust. “We don’t attract many multinational corporations, but we attract cutting-edge international aid organizations.”

On the following pages, we introduce 25 organizations, people, projects, and ideas—some established, most on the rise—that exemplify Portland’s growing global reach.

Image: Joni Kabana

CINDY KAPLAN & SPOON FOUNDATION

A Portland mom aims to revolutionize orphans’ nutrition.
spoonfoundation.org

When Jadyn Kaplan’s mom coaxes him to tell a visiting reporter where he was born, the 7-year-old answers with mischievous nonsense: “The park.” A slight, sweet boy who avoids eye contact, Jadyn wasn’t born in a park, but in Kazakhstan. Malnourishment in the hospital where he spent his earliest days indelibly marked his cognitive and motor development.

“When we first met him, we thought, this doesn’t look like a healthy baby boy,” says Cindy Kaplan, who, with her husband, adopted Jadyn in 2006. “But we were in love. It was just part of what we were handed as parents.”

Beyond a son, Kaplan discovered an overlooked issue and unexpected calling. She wanted to work for an organization dedicated to improving nutrition in orphanages around the world. She couldn’t find one. So, along with another Portland mother of an adopted Kazakh child, she started one.

Six years later, Spoon Foundation runs nutrition training and feeding programs in orphanages in Kazakhstan, China, India, Haiti, and Tajikistan. After starting with Kaplan’s kitchen table as an office, the organization’s budget will approximately double from 2012 to 2013, to a projected $1.3 million.

Spoon works to address a distinct and nuanced problem: orphanages in developing countries often have adequate food, but their staffs may lack the training to feed infants and young children in ways that allow their bodies to metabolize nutrients properly. (For example, Kaplan says, Kazakh “baby houses” often force infants to eat too quickly.) Spoon works with in-country partners to provide both food aid and, as important, training and policy to improve feeding practices. In Kazakhstan, for example, Spoon lobbied successfully for a law raising national nutrition standards for orphanages.

“We thought it would be easy—like, we’re going to just buy vitamins and send them over,” Kaplan says. “It’s complex to explain. We can’t just say, ‘A dollar will go to a meal for this child.’”

Kaplan says that her nascent organization looks to Oregon’s cluster of international aid experts. Holt International, a highly regarded Eugene-based international adoption agency, is a partner. Executives from Portland’s MercyCorps mentored her. “The community here is more accessible than if we were in, say, DC,” Kaplan says. “The relationships come easier and feel more natural, and everybody seems to be driven by the true value of what they’re doing for other people.”

Kaplan and her husband adopted a Kazakh girl, Nevya, in 2010. Kaplan says their family feels even bigger: “People say, ‘You think you’ll have more?’ I say, ‘I think I have thousands and thousands.’” —JF

EVAN THOMAS

A complex collaboration takes Portland technology to the world.
sweetlab.org

Portland State professor Evan Thomas runs the school’s SweetLab, specializing in “sustainable water, energy, and environmental technologies.” The lab develops digital sensors to monitor water filters, cookstoves, and other equipment deployed in remote communities. “We show how international aid is actually working,” the 29-year-old NASA veteran says. “Engineers often use instruments to test programs. We bring that same rigor.” Thomas’s operation also shows how one Portland effort leverages a school, major charities, for-profit companies, and global connections. —ZD

In a cluttered lab in PSU’s engineering building, Thomas and two postgrad engineers test battery-powered monitors. “They’re low-power, but report high-quality data to the Internet over cell-phone networks,” he says. “I can sit in New York, and remotely reconfigure a sensor in India. You can be in Portland and see how well a water pump in Rwanda is working.”

money
The Gates Foundation
The mammoth foundation contributed $20,000 in grants to develop and deploy sensors.

money
Oregon BEST
A tech-development nonprofit established by the state awarded $200,000 through grants to develop and commercialize the sensor technology.

money
MercyCorps
The Portland-based international aid agency granted $80,000 for sensors in Haiti and Indonesia.

money
USAID
Thomas’s project is tied to a grant from the State Department’s development arm through a partnership with UC Berkeley.

money
The Lemelson Foundation
The Portland-based charity endowed by inventor Jerome Lemelson granted $100,000 to support sensor development.

support
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
A 114-year-old UK research institution will analyze data collected in the field.

start-ups
DelAgua
A private company is setting up a $50 million project to monitor water quality for 600,000 households in Rwanda.

support
Rwanda’s Ministry of Health
The government agency handles distribution and training.

start-ups
SWEETSense
A private company co-owned by PSU sells and implements monitors in 10 countries, including Haiti, Kenya, Indonesia, India, and South Africa.

tech
EcoZoom
A Portland company makes clean-air cookstoves and works with Thomas’s company.

tech
Stevens Water
A 101-year-old Portland water-monitoring company contributed $500,000 worth of work.

Thomas travels frequently even as he runs the lab and teaches PSU classes. Two typical flight itineraries:

PDX > Amsterdam > Kigali, Rwanda

PDX > Tokyo > Jakarta, Indonesia

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Image: Joni Kabana

JASON FILETA

A Christian activist group leverages Portland’s DIY mojo.
micahchallengeusa.org

“The Micah Challenge is a worldwide campaign to end extreme poverty. We mobilize churches and Christians to push policy makers on poverty-related issues. We’re advocates, basically. Other organizations are so good at delivering relief and aid. We try to be the political face of that aid. As one example, we mobilized conservative evangelical churches to pressure the Bush administration to keep funding developing-world AIDS relief.

We’re in about 50 countries, and have a small global staff in London. Portland is our only US office. We can be here because Portland is a culture-making city. There’s an abundance of creative genius just walking around on the street.

Earlier this year, a fundraising site called Live58.org planned to feature the Micah Challenge—a huge opportunity for us. In fact, we built money into our budget based on it. There was a mis-communication about who was making a particular video we needed that came to light just six days before we needed it.

I sent an e-mail to three people I sort of knew. It started, ‘I hate being this guy, but somehow here I am.’ A freelance art director named Daniel Palmer got back to me with an incredibly detailed list of what equipment we needed, and a very firm sense that it could be done. That was Tuesday.

Wednesday and Thursday we called all over town to rent the gear; it came to about $300. Daniel shot the video on Friday in our offices downtown. We edited it Saturday and Sunday. Meanwhile, Daniel’s wife wrote the text that appears on screen, and they composed a musical score. We submitted it Monday.

Right away, the feedback from the site was that this was some of their best content ever. That $300 video—Daniel and his wife worked for free—helped us raise $8,000, which is 8 percent of a budget that funds our activism.

I think that’s almost an only-in-Portland thing. People here, and not just religious people, get us and want to help. And there’s just a ton of talent.” As told to Zach Dundas

Image: Joni Kabana

sahel sounds

A globetrotting Portland record label helps musicians stranded by war.
sahelsounds.com

The West African country of Mali produces musical superstars: Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, Amadou & Mariam, and others have made the leap from domestic renown to global success. Even as those artists rack up Grammy nominations, however, the small villages and towns of northern Mali conceal a wildly diverse musical universe, where musicians create everything from bluesy acoustic jams to the latest in glossy, digitally processed hip-hop.

Since 2009, Portland native Christopher Kirkley has traveled northern Mali (and neighboring countries) armed with only a recorder and a keen appetite for musical discovery. After his blogged recordings achieved some underground popularity, he launched Sahel Sounds, a tiny record label that releases a vivid array of vinyl records and downloads from off-the-grid Mali.

In the past year, however, the landlocked nation at the center of Kirkley’s effort has gone silent.

“It’s chaos,” Kirkley says. “Everyone in the northern part of the country has left. It’s a mass exodus.”

Islamist militants have seized control of northern Mali, leaving the once stable democratic nation in a state of civil war. The rebels have instituted strict Shariah law in the territory they control, banning music and displacing artists Kirkley works with.

“My friends are in refugee camps,” he says, “or they’re fighting, or they’re in a village somewhere with no electricity.” Last fall, Kirkley put together Songs for the North Country, a benefit compilation of tracks he recorded in the region. It’s a beautifully curated collection, with delicate acoustic ballads and a cappella laments melting into the sounds of a market in the city of Gao or the groan of camels recorded in the Sahara.

For Kirkley, the most important part of this download-only set (sold exclusively through online retailer Bandcamp) is that all money earned will go straight to the six featured artists. Sales had generated a modest four-figure contribution at press time, but Kirkley says even small payouts go a long way in the conflict zone.

“I don’t like to sell this idea of my friends being victims,” he says. “But I have to balance that with my own concern with their needs. That’s all they talk about. They say, ‘We don’t care how much it is, we just need something right now.’” —RH

Sseko Designs

A Portland brand’s fashion-forward East African operation
ssekodesigns.com

Image: Kate Madden

When Liz Bohannon worked in Kampala, Uganda, after college, the Kansas City transplant discovered an odd problem: a mandatory nine-month gap between high school and college often derailed qualified female students. “They’d go home to their villages, and there was no work,” Bohannon says. “So they couldn’t afford to start school.”

From Portland headquarters, she and husband Ben Bohannon now run Sseko (“say-ko”) Designs, Uganda’s largest footwear exporter. (“That says more about Uganda’s exports than about us,” Ben says.) And they employ 35 people to make sandals and bags—some as regular full-timers, others in “university-track” positions that earn tuition-matching grants.

Portland attracted the couple in 2011 partly with its apparel industry, but also because they felt at home. “Kansas City isn’t that entrepreneurial,” Liz says. “People supported us, but we were the oddballs without 401Ks. In Portland, it’s more like, ‘Oh, you too?’” —ZD

The Sandals
Sseko’s flagship product consists of a base and a separate ribbon-like strap that can be configured at least 150 ways. “How do we create variety and novelty,” Liz says, “but not have it be disposable fast-fashion?”

The Tote Bag
For its newest product line, Sseko began manufacturing in Kenya. “You can make beautiful, high-quality merchandise in East Africa,” Ben says. “I’d love to sit down with Nike or Columbia one day and say, look, this is what’s possible there. A major production facility would make a huge difference in Uganda.”

The Clutch
The company’s expansion into new products, like its line of clutches, reflects a desire to mature and employ college graduates as well as hopefuls. “Education is obviously crucial,” Liz says, “but qualified people also need an economy that’s more developed. We’d like to hire managers and designers.”

Image: Joni Kabana

Justin Zoradi

A new nonprofit links a Portland couch to Cape Town kids
thesenumbers.org

In 2004, Justin Zoradi graduated from college in Santa Barbara, burning with idealism. His mentors told him to ditch dreamy California for somewhere real. He agreed, and a stint in Belfast counseling Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution led to a trip to Cape Town, South Africa.

“I met these cool, smart South African high school students, top-10 in their graduating classes,” Zoradi says now. “And they couldn’t afford the $2,500 college costs there. I had my $40,000-a-year degree. Something gripped me.”

Today, Zoradi, 30, leads a nonprofit called These Numbers Have Faces from a brick-walled loft in Portland’s Central Eastside. Zoradi and four other Portland staffers steer about $200,000 a year in scholarships to students in South Africa and Rwanda. Recipients are starting to graduate from colleges and trade schools; each must pledge a year’s tuition for someone else once they’re working.

Zoradi’s progress says a lot about how a rising generation of no-budget organizers use Portland as a global base. His path from here will test our DIY ethic’s capacity to scale up.

Zoradi founded TNHF after landing in Portland for grad school, with the help of a how-to book he bought at Powell’s. In 2008, his first year, he scraped together about $8,000, enough to help two South African kids he already knew. “I thought that might be it,” he says now. “I had no money myself.” Then he started to hear from other students, whom he’d never met. “I was like, ‘What have I done?’”

At first, TNHF was Zoradi and his laptop, stationed on the couch in his Chinatown apartment, begging friends and relations for money. Then the attic of a rented house at SE 84th Avenue and Foster Boulevard became his offices. “That’s where my first intern showed up to work,” he says.

But from the beginning, Portland contacts helped Zoradi look good and get organized. He recruited an ad hoc board of advisers. At one point, he traded some Nike swag he’d acquired for graphic design services. “That’s this town and this time,” he says. “People from organizations elsewhere are shocked at what we spend on marketing and design: basically nothing.” The Central Eastside provides cheap rent; Skype and a popular free global-texting app provide communications.

Zoradi now faces the challenge of making scrappy success last and grow. Eighty percent of TNHF’s current money comes from individual donors—Zoradi hasn’t quite tapped the richer veins of corporate or foundation funding. The organization is relatively unknown even in local international-development circles. And expanding ambitions—TNHF plans to launch in Uganda this spring—make him just as nervous as excited.

“I live in fear every single day,” he says. “All of a sudden, I’ve got employees and dozens of kids in Africa depending on me doing my job well. Will we get funding? And is it working? The forces we’re up against are just immense.”

Still, he’s determined to sustain the spirit that got him off the Chinatown couch. “I have friends in the tech start-up world,” he says. “I take their mantra: fake it till you make it. Throw the wings on while you’re going down the runway.” —ZD

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JULIA PLOWMAN
A veteran of Nike’s Girl Effect talks about the power of branding and Portland’s global potential.

Image: Joni Kabana

You helped develop the Girl Effect, the campaign to channel aid to adolescent girls that’s become the focus of Nike’s $30 million–a–year charitable foundation. How did you get there?

I came here from New York to work at Wieden & Kennedy. I helped start WK’s Tokyo office, then went to the Amsterdam office. I thought I’d be there for six months. I met my husband there and stayed for seven years.

When we decided it was time to come back to the States, we thought Portland would be the perfect place. I left WK when I wanted to use my international experience at a major foundation.

The Swoosh carries plenty of weight. Why “The Girl Effect,” which has no overt Nike connection?

A million white papers had been written about helping adolescent girls around the world as a way to break cyclical poverty. Not much had been done. Girls were always lumped in with either “women” or “youth.” The problem is huge, way bigger than Nike. So what could we contribute? What does Nike do uniquely well? Branding.

Girl Effect, very intentionally, is not branded as Nike. Other partners can get involved with it and feel like they own it. And it’s great to see a session at Davos about girls, and Bill Clinton talking about the issue at Clinton Global Initiative. None of that used to happen. But the popular response—hearing people use the term “girl effect” as a figure of speech—has been just as amazing.

Then you left: first to World Pulse, a small, new nonprofit that gives developing-world women access to digital media. Now you’re a freelance consultant, working with Mercy Corps on its brand. What have you learned?

What’s possible, and what’s necessary. Start-ups have great passion and ideas, but struggle to make that operational. Everyone’s in scrappy, seat-of-the-pants mode. They want to do everything and talk to everyone. The challenge is to get beyond that. You need clarity and focus.

Branding is a big part of that. Small organizations or companies tend to view branding as a luxury, and that’s a mistake. A good brand helps define strategy. And strategy really needs to shape the organization. At World Pulse, the work was great and the mission was brilliant, but they needed a structure. I was hired as COO, and as I was figuring things out I realized that strategically the organization didn’t need someone in that job. So I eliminated my own position. I kind of couldn’t believe it.

Wouldn’t New York, DC, or London be better as home base for your work?

It can be good that you’re not in New York or DC. There, you’re just one of thousands. In Portland, you have to be adventurous and outward-looking. The base of the culture here is a pioneering spirit, which brings creativity and grit. We attract people who believe they can reshape the future. —ZD

2,000
Soccer cleats provided to homeless teens in Africa
by Portland’s African
Sports Outreach

$900,000
Grant to OHSU’s Peter Spencer, one of the few doctors studying the unexplained, seizure-inducing “nodding syndrome” in South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda

9,151
Tons of rubble removed from Haitian earthquake sites since 2010 by Forward Edge International disaster relief volunteers

750
Students attending a school built in Amanfro, Ghana, by Framework International volunteers

1.5–3
Hours OHSU doctors spend, as part of the Footsteps to Healing project, on a typical reconstructive pelvic surgery in rural Ethiopia, where significant numbers of women suffer postnatal physical complications now rare in developed countries

Top 5
Rank of Vietnam among countries most vulnerable to sea-level rise due to climate change. Vinh Mason of Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability has worked with the city of Hoi An to develop a climate-resilient “ecodistrict.”

8,000
Urban plant species in Tehran, Iran, remotely monitored by Ali Malekghasemi at Portland’s World Forestry Center to assess stress caused by air pollution —TF

LOOPTWORKS’ TABLET CASES
looptworks.com

WHO The Portland-based “up-cycling” company, founded 2009, makes apparel and accessories out
of material discarded at overseas textile factories.

WHAT In November 2011, one of the world’s largest leather tannery companies told Looptworks founder Scott Hamlin it tossed 4,500 pounds of leather every day in Vietnam and China. Solution: turn the refuse into stitched slipcases for iPads and other digital tablets, retailing for up to $80.

WHY One Looptworks case requires 4,000 fewer gallons of water to produce than a similar product made with fresh material. So far, the company has sold several thousand.

HOW “This tannery company sells to all the big guys here,” Hamlin says. “They heard about us through the press, but had a sales agent here because of the strength of Portland’s apparel industry.” —ZD

OUR FAMILY IN AFRICA
ourfamilyadoptions.org

WHO From her base in Camas, Washington, Jilma Meneses orchestrates aid to orphans in Congo.

WHAT Founded after Meneses, now 47, visited the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2001, OFA provides housing and supplies to orphans. Recently, volunteers at a southern Congo hospital trained locals to make a nutrient-rich peanut-butter paste to address malnutrition.

WHY “These are truly beautiful, strong people who have survived the worst genocide in the world,” says Meneses, who also works as Portland State’s chief diversity officer.

HOW Meneses taps volunteers steeped in Portland’s tech scene to help adopted kids stay in touch with each other through private social media sites and blogs. —TF

WORLD PULSE
worldpulse.com

WHO This nine-year-old Portland organization provides grassroots media access and training to women in developing countries.

WHAT With an emphasis on blogging, World Pulse’s specialized social network caters to women who access the web via small-town Internet cafés and cell phones. A Portland-based editorial team picks the best user-generated content and syndicates it to major media organizations like Reuters and CNN.

WHY “We’re building a basic media infrastructure for people who don’t have it,” says founder Jensine Larsen. “How do you use Skype? What’s the most effective way to use Facebook?”

HOW World Pulse draws on volunteers from Intel and the local open-source software scene to help support its tech platform. —ZD

MEDICAL TEAMS INTERNATIONAL’S CAMBODIAN TRAINING PROGRAM
medicalteams.org

WHO Medical Teams International operates in 70 nations, but new president and former Horizon Air CEO Jeff Pinneo wants the relief org—founded in Portland in 1979 in response to the Cambodian killing fields—to stay close to its roots.

WHAT Since 2000, MTI has trained more than 700 Cambodian first responders in first aid and EMT skills.

WHY With about five people killed every day in a nation of 14 million, the country’s automotive fatality rate is one of the world’s worst.

HOW Medical Teams’ Portland supply distribution center is staffed by 250 local volunteers. —RD

QUECHUA BENEFIT
quechuabenefit.org

WHO Mike Safley founded the nonprofit based in Portland and Peru in 1996.

WHAT Quechua Benefit provides medical care, shelter, food, and social services to the Quechua, Peru’s indigenous people. This past fall, the organization opened a 16,000-square-foot village called Casa Chapi, which can house 100 children with cottages, a greenhouse, shops, a health center, and a library.

WHY “The Quechua people have largely been forgotten by their own country,” says Daryl Gohl, the organization’s current president.

HOW Northwest farms are home to 20 percent of the US population of alpacas, the Quechua’s traditional source of cashmere-like fiber, forging cultural and business links between the regions.—LL

SAGE CLASSROOM
sageclassroom.com

WHO Portland State architecture profs (and spouses) Sergio Palleroni and Margarette Leite led a student team to design a hypergreen prefab classroom.

WHAT A single unit will cost about $75,000, competitive with a standard US modular classroom. A prototype now being tested in Gervais, Oregon, will help the design team devise adaptations for different climates. Canadian manufacturers and Planned Parenthood, which wants to deploy mobile health clinics in Latin America, are interested.

WHY “Everyone wants green building, but it’s been hard to get costs down,” Leite says. “There are 350,000 modular classrooms in the US alone. The global potential is huge.”

HOW Prototyped with help from the state and destined for mass manufacture by a long-standing Oregon prefab builder, the Sage uses nontoxic materials, insulation that stores and releases heat, and steel flooring to speed installation. —ZD

PRECIVA
preciva.com

WHO In 2005, Oregon Health & Science University researcher Anais Tuepker and physicist hubby Craig Miller launched Preciva, a start-up aiming to develop rapid, cheap screening technology for cervical cancer.

WHAT After raising $11,000 via a Kickstarter-like website, the small company prototyped a portable scanning unit that maps a woman’s cervix in real time. This year, field tests start in Bangalore, India.

WHY “In India, maybe 6 percent of women get screened,” Tuepker says. “With our test, you don’t need a lab, you read results right away on a smartphone, and it’s about $2 per test.”

HOW Tuepker and Miller formed the for-profit Preciva as a B Corp-certified (think LEED for businesses) firm with support from Portland State’s Social Innovation Incubator. —RD

WARM CURRENT
warmcurrent.org

WHO Portland surfers John Koenig and Ryan Cruse founded the nonprofit in 2008.

WHAT They dispatch used surf gear to Mexico, Chile, and Morocco.

WHY While surfers flock to places like Peru’s Trujillo Province and Morocco’s Atlantic Coast, people who actually live there often can’t afford to participate in the sport.

HOW Warm Current, which gathers its donated equipment around the Northwest, also stages surf workshops for kids here who would ordinarily lack access to the sport. —GP

COUNCIL FOR RESPONSIBLE SPORT
councilforresponsiblesport.org

WHO This “virtual organization”—no office, one staff member—with an all-Portland board certifies the environmental and social practices of sporting events, including Eugene’s 2012 Olympic Trials, Britain’s Paralympic training camp, and marathons in Venezuela and Italy.

WHAT Just as LEED ratings indicate green construction, CRS’s “ReSport” program defines standards on issues ranging from waste diversion to handicapped access.

WHY “I like to cut through any vagueness or greenwashing,” says executive director Keith Peters.

HOW The CRS board was recruited from Portland’s sportswear, legal, and charitable circles; the Timbers and Spirit Mountain have ponied up grants; Wieden & Kennedy offered pro bono branding. —RD

AL JUBITZ & CYPRUS
jubitzff.org

WHO The scion of the truck stop empire fosters citizen diplomacy in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island nation split between Greek and Turkish factions.

WHAT The 68-year-old Jubitz organizes meetings of leaders from both sides of the ethnic divide (the next is scheduled for Malta in March) and a program, based on similar efforts in Northern Ireland, that brings Turkish and Greek teens to live together in the US.

WHY Jubitz’s foundation has a number of emphases, including education and the environment, but peacemaking is his personal focus.

HOW Connections made through a pair of Portland State professors—one Greek, one Turkish—have been key to Jubitz’s efforts. —ZD

HANDS TO HEARTS INTERNATIONAL
handstohearts.org

WHO Laura Peterson founded this Portland nonprofit to improve child care, parenting, and women’s social development.

WHAT HHI trains caregivers in India, Uganda, and the US on language skills, cognitive development, and other skills. (The organization has also been active in Russia and Swaziland.) About 30,000 adults have participated in its programs so far.

WHY “There’s not much training in how to take care of a child,” Peterson says. “A simple lecture on hygiene can be vitally important.”

HOW “Portland has an amazing brain trust: people who worked for the World Bank, people who worked in Pakistan for 30 years, people who literally wrote the book on women’s development. They choose to be here, and we tap into their expertise.”—LL

Interview with Oregon Symphony’s Sarah Kwak

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:36:00 -0800

Image: Photograph Courtesy The Minnesota Orchestra

You just moved from Minnesota to become the symphony’s new concertmaster. What is that? I lead the string section. Beyond that, I am kind of the right hand to Carlos Kalmar, the conductor. I make sure his ideas are getting through to the strings and the rest of the orchestra. I need to be physically demonstrative to show the others how to play.

You were a prominent player in Minneapolis, one of Portland’s arch frenemies. What’s different? Professionally, it’s definitely a step up. I was the second violin chair there, and I would step in a lot to fill this role. But being on the job all the time is much, much different. I’m one of the faces of the orchestra—meeting patrons, meeting the public. In general, the food scene here is so much better. My husband and I used to go to New York pretty regularly specifically for the food, but since we’ve been here, we’ve haven’t missed New York.

You and your husband both applied for the concertmaster’s job. You got it. He got hired as a section violinist. How did that, um, play out? We figured it gave us better odds, and we figured that if one of us got the job, the other one could sub for the orchestra or ... do something. We were so lucky that we both got full-time jobs. That is very rare.

How does Kalmar compare to other conductors? He knows exactly what he wants, and he can achieve it. It’s hard to describe. He lives and breathes music—that’s something I connected with right away.

What do you do to prepare for a show? I tend to start working three or four weeks ahead of the performance, figuring out the bowings. All the violin bows are supposed to be synchronized: down or up, all at the same time. That doesn’t just happen naturally. People might hear that we work 20 hours a week, but that’s just rehearsal and performance. It doesn’t count the individual practice time. This morning, I played on my own from 8:30 to noon, and I’ll probably go back and do some more from 4 p.m. to 7.

You must not get out much. I still don’t quite know how to get to Target without checking my phone.

The Oregon Symphony performs Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no. 2, Dec 1–3.