Friends and colleagues remember Portland chef Sarah Pliner

Celebrity chef Sarah Pliner was killed last week while riding a bicycle in southeast Portland. A three-time James Beard Award semi-finalist, she co-founded the Portland Aviary restaurant in 2011 with chefs Jasper Shen and Kat Whitehead. Pliner herself has described Aviary’s cuisine as modern French technique with global flavors and she’s opened up to praise, winning restaurant of the year in 2012 just months after a fire nearly destroyed her. .

A seasoned chef, Pliner began cooking in Portland in the 90s at the Heathman Hotel and Giorgio’s, before returning home to New York to make a name for herself at Michelin-starred restaurants like Aquavit and Aldea. A decade after Pliner and Shen worked together in New York, they reconnected and found they were both ready to move on from town. The couple, along with fellow chef and Shen’s wife, Kat Whitehead, decided to move to Portland to open Aviary.

Like many restaurants during the pandemic, Aviary closed in 2020, but that couldn’t stop Pliner from keeping up with the culinary times. This summer, she joined Fullerton Wines, creating seasonal bi-monthly pairing dinners at their northwest Portland wine bar. She was also cooking at the recently opened Greek-inspired Bluto’s and was in the process of opening her own new restaurant.

This week, friends and colleagues shared their memories of Pliner with “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori.

Conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Andy Diaz, owner of Blackbird Wine Shop

We met on the first day of school in seventh grade. It was my first day, and I had to take a public bus across the Bronx to get to school, and the last leg of the bus ride went through her neighborhood, and she and her older sister got on. The nature of the school we were going to was really extravagant, it was a campus in the Bronx. It was a very closed and quite wealthy community and I was one of the children they had a scholarship program for. Even back then – you know how kids of color always sit together in the dining room? It was really obvious. And it wasn’t just the colored kids, it was the kids who couldn’t afford to sit together in the dining room. Sarah could sit with us, and Sarah had no problem with that, and Sarah could take the bus, and Sarah could take the train, and Sarah could be the city kid. And she was able to do this because she had, very early on, ignored these conventions of wealth.

You know, when I came back to meet Sarah as an adult, and over the years I realized that her strength was that she had been mopping the floor for someone, that she had put her hand in the drain and she wasn’t afraid to pull nasty stuff out of it. It was she who could do anything. She also, as a restaurateur, learned to get the best out of people and to communicate that she trusted them. By being the person in the middle who constantly took the most heat, making sure it was exactly how she wanted it. [She was] so present that everyone around her was willing to put in more than I think anywhere else, where they would get a little more frustrated with the circumstances of the job. She was completely absorbed in the business and made it perfect so that when people walked in they felt special and they felt the food was delicious and when they ate it they smiled.

Everything that has been written about her will make her seem constantly driven or constantly working, and quite serious. But I would also include that she could have a great sense of humor. She had her head down working all the time, but when she stopped, it was always with great satisfaction for a job well done at the end of the day,

Lauren Hill, former Aviary server

My first job in Portland was working in the catering at Heathman, that’s kind of how Sarah and I met. I was hired at Aviary [as part of their] opening crew, brought in as a server and my eyes were wide open to what they were up to with all of these innovative dishes from the Midwest that I had never seen or heard of before. Things like monkfish and duck tongue and chicken skins that breed… She had some really nice creations and I’ve never worked anywhere where I’ve seen so many people cry, you know have tears [in their eyes] because the dish was so good.

I left Aviary in 2017 but Sarah and I maintained our friendship, so she was doing these pop-ups at Fullerton Wines every other Thursday and she knew I was between jobs and she asked me to come over. ‘to help. And it was great fun working with Sarah again, I think after the first dinner I had this anxious rush of like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m serving Sarah Pliner’s food again. “

In my life, it’s kind of like Sarah Pliner’s Six Degrees, everyone in my life is somehow connected to her. She was my mentor and she is still my mentor. And I’ve just been trying to figure out what it’s like to not have that mentor in my life, but kind of think about what his legacy is…and that’s huge and I don’t know really how to say how gigantic her legacy is that she is gone.

Michael Zusman, freelance food critic

Aviary opened in early 2011 and I first met Sarah when I interviewed her and her then business partners Jasper Shen and Kat Whitehead. And I’m still amazed, because in 2011 there weren’t many chefs who took Asian ingredients and mixed them with the classic European technique. She was one of the first, and she did an amazing job with that. She was without a doubt one of the best cooks of her time. I’ve always considered her one of the top five chefs in Portland. You know, the biggest problem she had with gaining notoriety, even locally, was her personality. She was shy, she was introverted, she was incredibly egoless. She just wanted to cook good food, and she accomplished all of that.

Most people will tell you that the crispy pig’s ear dish she had on her menu from day one and until the last day Aviary opened – crispy pig’s ear, coconut rice , avocado and Chinese sausage – was the most memorable dish. And it was fantastic, don’t get me wrong. But she also made a dish, and in fact, it was one of the last I got to taste of hers, which was spaghetti with lobster fat. The lobster fat, or tomalli, is a little-used ingredient, but it added a richness to the spaghetti, to which it…I guess you could say “golden the lily” with trout roe. It was the most wonderful dish.

She had plans to open a new place, and it was going to be as idiosyncratic as it is. I think she wanted it to be maybe [600] or 800 square feet, and maybe 20 seats, maybe 15 seats. It was going to be a one-woman show. And when I learned the news, beyond the simple fact of her death, I was saddened that this dream she had of getting back into the business on her own did not come true.