Citadel of the Spirit

Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology

By Erin Ergenbright

February 27, 2009

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Title

• Citadel of the Spirit

Author

• Matt Love

Publisher

• Nestucca Spit Press

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From the essay “The Hands That Feed You”

Triumphantly swinging a machete through the waist-high grass, Michael Hebberoy seemed to imagine himself an explorer in dangerous and uncharted territory. It was a bright Saturday morning in February 2005, and, fortified with grappa-laced coffee, we were learning to prune pinot noir vines at Cameron Winery, 30 miles south of Portland, Oregon. We were part of “The Program,” an educational work-study developed by Michael and Naomi Hebberoy, the owners of Ripe, an umbrella organization that sheltered their three restaurants — Family Supper, clarklewis, and Gotham Building Tavern.

“The Program” was meant to give us, Ripe employees, a deeper connection to the fine food we served and prepared. And in developing relationships with the farmers who grew the frisée and butter lettuce and asparagus we served, and walking on their land, seeing their chicken coops and turkey pens, made the web of interconnection tangible, and made “sustainability” (essentially the philosophical matrix behind “The Program”) something more than an overused word.

The winter sunlight illuminated the low valley beyond the vineyard as we huddled around John Paul, the winemaker and owner of Cameron, watching and listening. Pruning is done after the coldest part of winter has passed; it forces the sap back into the center of the vine, and determines the shape and yield of the plant for years to come. Every year, on every vine, you cut away everything except two fruit canes and two spurs — the ones that seem strongest. The canes grow along wires strung horizontally and produce many offshoots and many grapes. The spurs, snipped above the second buds, will be next year’s canes.

“If you make good choices, next year’s choice will be easy,” explained John Paul. He was the only one holding the clippers, which was a relief, as these were 100-year-old vines, and their roots reached deeper than 20 feet into the soil.

Paul is a founding member of the Deep Roots Coalition, a group of Willamette Valley winemakers who practice the sustainable, Old World technique of dry farming, rather than using drip irrigation. Through dry farming, vines can find water even in arid climates and through rocky soil, which affects their terroir — the total natural environment of a vineyard, including the geology of the soil, the topography, the climate, and the sunlight.

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Every bottle of wine contains its history, but we often drink it without a sense of where it came from, or of the specific people and processes involved. Similarly, most of us eat our steaks and fried chicken and sausages without thinking of the animal that lived and died, let alone the person who raised that animal and trucked it to the slaughterhouse, or the person who put a bolt into its brain.

The first time I saw our chef use a hacksaw to remove the head of a huge, hairless pig, I had just taken a bite of a pork sandwich, and, though I felt a little queasy, made myself keep chewing, keep watching. Of course I’d known pork and ham and bacon came from a pig, but now I knew it in a visceral way, and would never again be able to think about the meat without the animal.

Ripe started in 2001 as a small, underground, and possibly illegal dinner series in Naomi Pomeroy and Michael Hebb’s northeast Portland rental. Bringing together strangers from various backgrounds, the DIY dinners literally embodied gastronomy — the study of the relationship between food and culture, which encompasses everything from art to science to economics and history.

A sort of culinary pyramid scheme, wherein you could only attend after being invited by someone who’d already been, Family Supper captured Portland’s imagination, and fed its belief in itself as a city on the verge of cultural relevance. Ripe’s email list eventually ballooned to 15,000, and its near-nightly dinners filled months in advance.

John Paul leads Ripe employees on a tour of Cameron vineyards in 2005.

My first Family Supper was New Year’s Eve 2002. My date and I ate a simple, fabulous meal, served family-style — bowls of salad and pasta and platters of meat passed down long tables — with 50 people we’d just met in an industrial kitchen tucked off an unmarked alley in north Portland. The room throbbed with laughter and music and the flicker of votive candles, and near midnight, Michael climbed up on the table, his shoes near my wineglass, and gave a soaring toast.

He reminded me of an evangelist preacher at a tent revival. I don’t remember what he said, only what I felt in listening: an overwhelming hope for our future, and that we were part of something groundbreaking, something incredibly important. The beginning of a movement, perhaps, like Paris in the 1920s, San Francisco in the 1950s, or Seattle in the early 1990s. This is it, I thought, as the clock struck 12. I started working with the company a few months later.

In January 2004, the couple opened a new restaurant, clarklewis, with chef Morgan Brownlow. Clarklewis received the Oregonian’s Restaurant of the Year award within a few months of opening, which fed the already fierce media frenzy. A year later, buoyed by a staggering amount of local and national press, the couple, now married and known as the Hebberoys, opened Gotham Building Tavern to immediate recognition.

But these three restaurants were only the tip of the iceberg. Michael’s other projects included producing a line of Gotham Building Tavern gin to be launched in New York; partnering with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) to bring Family Supper to New York, Las Vegas, and Tokyo; writing a book entitled Kill the Restaurant: A Manifesto; and hosting Portland author Matthew Stadler as Ripe’s “writer-in-residence.”

Indeed, Ripe seemed the center of the zeitgeist that had put Portland on the map. In 2006, Food & Wine ran an eight-page article about the Ripe empire, in which they called Michael a “food provocateur,” and in which he took a risky potshot at Alice Waters, the revered founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, saying, “People say [she] launched a food revolution, but they’re wrong. That was only an ingredients shift.”

But the Hebberoys’ meteoric rise was only made possible by 40 years of priming by a group of visionary chefs, farmers, ranchers, and winemakers in Oregon. Michael Hebberoy spoke of Ripe as revolutionary, when it was, in fact, evolutionary, incorporating their theories and practices, and applying his own uncanny ability to generate press and hype. His ideas weren’t new, but he could talk about them in a way that made them seem groundbreaking, exciting, and important.