Naomi Pomeroy—she of Beast, Expatriate, Ripe Cooperative, Cornet Custard, and more—drowned Saturday in a horrific tubing accident on the Willamette River. And now that she is gone, the lifeblood of this town feels thinner.
When I think of who had a hand in making Portland what it is today (and I’m not just talking about food) there are few names who rank higher. Especially if you were a 24-year-old budding food obsessive in 2009, like I was.
Naomi had already brought the DIY punk ethos into the city’s cooking scene, with her in-home pop-ups. She was making serious waves with Beast, her intimate farm-to-table phenom. An iconic photo of her, hair tied up, wearing a bright red deep v-neck shirt while carrying a piglet through a field, is seared into my memory as the definition of 2010s chef-chic.
Beast was the reservation to get. I pooled my pennies as a cub reporter and got a seat.
View this post on Instagram
It was maybe my first prix fixe meal, and certainly the first time my lips had touched foie gras. Gazing down upon her famous charcuterie plate, arranged like a clock with little nibbles of pickles, mustards, jams, a cured meat or two, and the foie gras bon bon, broke my brain a little. That plate, along with the hearty PNW French peasant food that followed, was one of the first meals that taught me how food is meant to tell a story, to convey pleasure, and even impart the very id of a great chef.
Naomi is the one who cemented Portland’s “rustic, yet refined” reputation, and Beast didn’t change format all too much—adding a pasta course and going a bit more veg heavy, for example—before it closed in 2020. Naomi then threw her clout behind legislation to help out locally-owned restaurants, and opened Ripe Cooperative, a sidewalk cafe that closed a year later.
She could be exacting and severe; the whole time I’ve known her, she's intimidated the heck out of me. But I love that for her: She elbowed her way through oh-so-many tattooed dudes to become the foundation, then the matriarch, of Portland’s incredibly influential food scene.
At 49, she still had so much more to share: Cornet Custard just opened on Southeast Division, and a new French bistro was in the works in the same building. The suddenness of her loss is going to reverberate through the streets and bridges of Naomi’s home state for some time.
But as she wrote herself last month on an Instagram post about forgiving others: “Forgive them for falling in love with someone else, for how they spoke to you or someone you loved, even for dying—forgive them—and forgive the universe for taking them.” Thank you, Naomi. For everything.
