AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
If you want to understand Portland, don’t start with the music or the politics or the guy juggling fire on a unicycle downtown. Start with the restaurants.
For decades now, chefs here have taken what would pass for an ordinary dinner elsewhere and turned it into something more: a provocation, a protest, sometimes even a punchline. What they’ve done collectively is create a city where dinner comes with ideas.
Below, we’ve assembled six Portland chefs responsible for a lot of that success. Not necessarily the most famous or the most decorated, but the ones whose fingerprints are all over the city’s kitchens—and its culture. They’ve created Michelin-quality restaurants, while also mentoring an entire generation of line cooks who they sent out into the world to run kitchens of their own. Here then are the most influential chefs in Portland.
Gregory Gourdet
Restaurant: Kann
For a long time, Gregory Gourdet was Portland’s favorite chef who didn’t yet have a restaurant. He fixed that with Kann, a love letter to his Haitian heritage that’s also one of the best dining experiences in the country. It won the James Beard for Best New Restaurant in 2023 and feels like the future of Portland food: global, personal, vegetable-forward, and unapologetically ambitious. He helped redefine what a star chef can be—not just a technician, but a storyteller.
Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom
Restaurants: Eem, Langbaan, Phuket Cafe, Hat Yai
Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom is the rare chef who operates like a musician—each new restaurant feels like a new album, different in tone but unmistakably his. Langbaan is Thai fine dining in a hidden room behind a fish-sauce-scented curtain. Hat Yai does fried chicken that draws lines at lunch. Eem is a tiki-bar-meets-Texas-barbecue fever dream. And somehow, none of it feels like a gimmick. Ninsom has made it clear: Portland Thai doesn’t mean pad thai. It means power.
Vitaly Paley
Restaurants: Paley’s Place, Imperial, Headwaters
You can draw a direct line from Vitaly Paley to nearly every fine-dining kitchen in Portland today. Before everyone was sourcing from small farms and slapping trout roe on deviled eggs, Paley’s Place was doing it way back in 1995. Born in Belarus, Paley created restaurants that were elegant but never fussy, and his alumni network is now a who’s-who of Portland talent. Even in semi-retirement, Paley remains the city’s culinary godfather.
Naomi Pomeroy
Restaurants: Ripe Cooperative, Beast, L’Échelle
When Naomi Pomeroy died tragically in 2024, Portland didn’t just lose a chef—it lost one of its defining voices. Her restaurant Beast helped establish the city’s reputation for fearless, no-compromise cooking: six-course menus, no substitutions, and the kind of intensity usually reserved for confessionals and courtrooms. Later, at Ripe Cooperative, she pivoted to something looser and more communal without ever watering down her vision. Her final project, a pop-up called Le’chelle that opens in a dedicated space this week, was just getting started—a blend of Cambodian and Southern food inspired by her partner, Sokho Eath. Even gone, she remains the standard by which Portland measures its ambition.
Thomas Pisha-Duffly
Restaurants: Oma’s Hideaway, Gado Gado
If Gabriel Rucker and Naomi Pomeroy helped define Portland fine dining, Thomas Pisha-Duffly is helping to tear down its walls. He came up through Gado Gado, with a menu that wandered all over Southeast Asia, and then doubled down on the weird-and-wonderful with Oma’s Hideaway. There’s fermented sausage, durian curry, and chili crisp fried rice that’ll leave you wrecked in the best way. Pisha-Duffly cooks like someone who loves Portland but refuses to play by its rules—which might just be the most Portland thing of all.
Gabriel Rucker
Restaurants: Le Pigeon, Canard, Canard Oregon City
James Beard called him a rising star in 2011, and in the years since, Gabriel Rucker quickly became one of the elder statesmen of Portland cuisine. At Le Pigeon, he built a culinary style that’s part French bistro, part Pacific Northwest foraging expedition, and part late-night dorm-room fever dream (foie gras profiteroles, anyone?). His work at Canard is looser, more punk rock, and arguably more Portland—a place where you can chase a steam burger with duck stacks and still leave feeling like you had dinner at a temple.
