Remembering Chef Naomi Pomeroy

Dear Pros,

You've got Hunter here. I've been reading the beautiful tributes to 2009 F&W Best New Chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and TV personality Naomi Pomeroy that have been pouring in across the country from her peers in the hospitality industry and from her beloved Portland, Oregon community. The 49-year-old chef drowned last weekend while tubing during a family outing on the Willamette River. Today I'm sharing some of that love for Pomeroy with you, starting with a tribute penned by F&W restaurant editor Raphael Brion here.

I didn't know Pomeroy well, but I was fortunate to meet her at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine festival in 2018, where her confidence, her soulful, gutsy cooking, and her blue-eyed charm were on full display during a show-stopping collaborative lunch she cooked with fellow Francophile and 2017 F&W Best New Chef Angie Mar.

Pomeroy first made her mark when she opened the French-influenced Beast in 2007, stoking the rise of Portland's scrappy restaurant scene in the mid-'00s with a cooking style she called "refined French grandmother" and a fine dining menu punctuated with locally grown and harvested ingredients. This captivated former F&W restaurant editor Kate Krader immediately, as she shared this week on Instagram.

"The first time I went to Portland was to see Naomi Pomeroy in action on a F&W Best New Chef scouting trip. She'd already generated so much buzz for her family supper club meals, which were a revelation back then. And there she was at Beast and I had her foie gras bonbon and there it was."

In 2013 Pomeroy opened the bar Expatriate with her husband Kyle Linden Webster and next, a flower shop and cafe, Colibri. Local fame led to national prominence, and her travels and TV appearances on shows like Knife Fight and Top Chef Masters introduced her to a wider audience. Ambitious home cooks found an authoritative guide in the kitchen with Taste & Technique: Recipes to Elevate Your Home Cooking, co-written with Jamie Feldmar and published in 2016.

"We were friends for years before deciding to work together — both of us new to cookbooks, with very little knowledge of how that opaque corner of the industry worked," Feldmar posted on Instagram this week. "We figured it out together, in late-night phone calls and hotel room lock-ins and road trips to the Oregon coast, Post-Its flying everywhere, both of us high off that rarest of drugs: complete creative connectivity. Naomi had so much to say — her vision was clear from the start, which was, more or less, always the case."

Beast shuttered in 2020 when Oregon banned in-person dining during the pandemic, and Pomeroy stepped up to become one of the most vocal chef leaders for the Independent Restaurant Coalition, lobbying Congress for financial relief.

"Seeing her on hundreds of Zooms in the first year of the @indprestaurants was incredible," Andrew Zimmern wrote this week. "Her ideas, her willingness, her lack of tolerance for bullshit … she remade the Portland restaurant scene, she remade her own life several times and she was so incredibly loving to me. I hope she felt I was loving back."

In recent years, Pomeroy began planting the seeds for the next phase of her career — and perhaps another Portland renaissance as my colleague Raphael predicted yesterday — opening Cornet Custard, a frozen custard shop and selling out tickets for a series of summer dinners. A new French bistro was underway as well.

She was quick to credit her family, and especially her mom, for passing down a love for food while growing up in Corvallis, Oregon. "My whole family, all we ever did was stand around and talk about what we were going to have for lunch," she told Food & Wine several years ago.

Earlier this year for a Mother's Day story, Pomeroy shared, "My mom taught me that growing even just a little bit of your own food makes you treat it very differently — we never waste foods we've grown ourselves. We had a big garden — we were pretty poor, but rich with soil, so we grew a lot of our own food…[I have] strong memories of pulling up fresh carrots and radishes and cutting them up to use in salads, or growing spinach that we used to make soufflés with eggs, cheese, milk, and flour provided by federal assistance. My mom was very good at creating magic with very little, which made me resilient as well."

Her peers recognized her resiliency and power as a trailblazer, including her friend Lisa Donovan, the writer and chef. "She was a self taught chef, a mother, a self-made kid without a safety net, too," Donovan posted.

"You just didn't see people like us succeed in our industry — and there she was, taking no prisoners and making beautiful things, making it look easy even though I knew it wasn't."

Many in the restaurant industry are still reeling from New York City chef James Kent's untimely death last month. And now Pomeroy. They were two generational leaders relatively close in age to me whose own success opened doors for others. I'm going to stop here because I have a lot more questions than answers, and I think my kids are wondering why I keep hugging them this summer as tightly as possible. So I'll pass the mic over to my pal Zimmern to close this one out.

"Maybe that's the point of all this," he wrote on Instagram. "Being loving enough that people in your life know it. The last few months have been so hard. I'm confused and angry and sad and anxious and worried… but maybe the answer is to be more loving and take all the armor off. Not some of it. All of it. To all who knew Naomi Pomeroy, may her memory be a blessing."

Warmly,
Hunter