Portland Oregon Food and Drink
Throwing Ourselves On The Grenade of Bad Food to Save You
Nutshell, the once vegan, then vegetarian restaurant on NE Williams closed last night. Sign on the door. A sign of the times.
When the Portland Mercury gave them a fairly negative review a few weeks ago, I knew they were in trouble – I would think, the Merc is their target audience. Yes, Alison Hallet has closed another restaurant.
(not the most well-written post, but you get the idea, and I’m a bit hung over)
"I have a wide-range of food experience - working in the restaurant industry on both sides of the house, later in the wine industry, and finally traveling/tasting my way around the world. Whether you agree or disagree, you can always count on my unbiased opinion. I don't take free meals, and the restaurants don't know when, or if, I am coming."
Really!!! Some friends and I were in there Friday night for dinner, it was relatively busy!
Another sign of the times was when we stopped by at 8:30 on a recent Friday (Halloween, specifically — before the Merc review) and they were already closed. We couldn’t believe it. Then we had a perfectly good dinner at 5th Quadrant.
It’s hard having sympathy for a restaurant that couldn’t even keep its doors open til 9 on a Friday.
The troubles with Nutshell ran deeper than many of the other restaurants which have closed this year. It’s an absolute shame that they took an innovative, quality restaurant and ran it into the ground. I posted some of the back story on Nutshell on On Portland.
Aaron…Halloween evening isn’t necessarily a good evening to judge a restaurant on. It was fairly dead all over town and even one high-profiled establishment on the river declined to open despite it being a Friday night. As far as Nutshell is concerned…I imagine they lost their focus when their original chef left. Their current chef is a really nice guy, but hardly qualified to run a high-end restaurant. Also..I think he has worked at like 6 different restaurants over the last 15 months.
Methinks you give the Merc too much credit … it is a place where the apparently 14 year old readers/on-line reviewers give Burgerville 5 stars, the Bijou and Clyde Common 4 stars, the completely inedible pub at 17th & NE Broadway 3 stars and Kenny and Zuke’s 1 star. I don’t know that readers like these could really know the difference, would they? I believe the local restaurant business is off by half, and by the end of February we will lose more than 20 percent of our restaurants.
I, for one, do not understand all of the violent reactions to Nutshell, before and after its closing. I am not a vegan or vegetarian but I live in the neighborhood and so frequented regularly. I always found my meals delicious and reasonably priced. So at their closing I am sorry to see them go and very sorry that they had such a hard road.
From my stance they were trying to do something nice not only for the vegan community but also for North Portland. But all of the negative feedback stabbed them in the back every step of the way. Vegans wouldn’t eat there because the owner was an EMPLOYEE of Ten01 and they serve foie gras. Adam Berger never got a voice on what the chef over there put on his menu and yet Netshell took the brunt of that battle. Nutshell boasted about being local and sustainable, even putting a map on the wall saying how near the ingredients were grown. They never fell into the standard vegetarian cope-out of having “pretend meat” on the menu. They were all about good, local ingredients that just didn’t happen to be meat. I resent this idea that they “threw cheese at their problems;” they were just trying to serve the community they cared about which didn’t care about them. They were trying to appeal more to the people who were eating there (aka not vegans). And yet most things on the menu could easily be made vegan.
As for the first chef, Sean Coryell, from everything I heard, Nutshell would not have lasted 4 months under his leadership. His food was inconsistent and food prices were expensive, leaving the restaurant with heavy debts before he was FIRED.
I have met Chef Derek Hanson and you are right, he is a nice guy. But he also knows food. Since he has been at Nutshell for more than a year and before that was at Rocket since they opened, that would mean that he hasn’t worked at 6 restaurants in the last 15 months. Plus his culinary pedigree is as prestigious as many good chefs in Portland, including working at Café Azul and Wildwood for several years. I will sincerely miss his food and hope that I will get to eat again at restaurant where people will appreciate his talent and not let politics get in the way.
The new Mercury food writer is very good, perhaps the most interesting new voice in town. I don’t believe he was the one who wrote the Nutshell review, but the Merc recently has had a lot more and a lot better food writing then Willamette Week, which seems to have given up on being relevant in the food category. As far as I’m concerned, this site is still the best place for food news.
Aaron-
Halloween was a hard night for many restaurants. Lucier had only 2 covers, and shut down their dinner service completley!
I never went to Nutshell and it sounds like I didn’t miss much, if anything. I’ve read Patrick’s columns since April. To date, I think he’s been involved with less than fifteen restaurant reviews. Some he has nailed, others not so much. To say that he’s “interesting” is an understatement. In the recent issue of PM (not to be confused with Portland Monthly), he encourages us to “drink excessively” and share “good drugs.” Another contributor, Ned, suggests we have “farting, peeing and vomiting contests.” I don’t really consider that better food writing – it’s entertaining but only mildly so. More than anything, to me, it’s just a bunch of wasted ink and paper. I agree that this site, and a few others, offer a balanced approach and information for local options.
That’s too bad that another vegetarian place has shut down. At least there are lots of other delicious options in Portland. I’ve found http://www.vegportland.com/to be a great veg-friendly guide.
Brewmaster, I agree. At this point I think Patrick Coleman is the best food writer in town.
Glad you agree. The Mercury is definitely juvenile, as Salmon Fly aptly notes, and some of Mr. Coleman’s earlier reviews didn’t suggest much of a knowledge of food. Knowing anything about the way a restaurant works or food in general has never been requisite for food criticism in Portland’s print media. That said, Coleman’s writing is fun and curious. Sometimes it’s more important to ask good questions than to know all the answers. The world can handle only so many Matt Kramers.
“Sometimes it’s more important to ask good questions than to know all the answers” – Absolutely!!! This is spot on.
R.I.P Nutshell.
No matter what review you read or blog you went to concerning Nutshell, one thing seemed always to be true. We stirred people up. Over the year that I worked there (4 months shy of its whole too short life) I experienced both chefs, a host of new changes and systems typical of a baby restaurant. I saw the types of hyped up, over excited and under-researched reviews that follow any flirtation with a unique eatery in the first few months; critics couldn’t wait to be the one who ‘discovered’ us and indeed, we were the go-to spot for out-of-towners and people impressing people. Unfortunately, under Sean Coryell, we just couldn’t live up to the hype. I won’t argue that a lot of his food was inspired and delicious, although many of the recipes weren’t his own, he did add flair and individuality to food that you just don’t see around town. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was everything else about Sean. When he was around (which was far too infrequently for the chef at a new restaurant) he spent most of his time out on the floor, flirting. I love it when a chef his personable, but the food should come first. He was ineffectual at best at the other things that make a chef a chef; ordering, prepping, teaching your FOH about your food, managing, and MOST importantly, teaching your crew how to prepare your food consistently and supply them with the tools they need on the frequent occasion that you’re not going to be around (which was more a unique quirk of Sean’s than a standard). Reviews or arguments that contain his name I immediately throw out the window because a) it means you haven’t been back in a year and b) your knowledge of the difference between just having good food and running a good restaurant is underdeveloped. My grandma makes good food. When you hand an idiot savant a set of knives he’s bound to ‘play restaurant’ which is all Sean did. He got a reality check and took his ball and went home. Well, he got sent home, but possibly too late. The reason the food took an hour in the beginning was that he had no idea how to execute his own menu and we could not have continued to run a restaurant like that. It was a game for Sean and we were barreling towards 50% food costs, dishes that took a half an hour to prepare individually while the rest of the poorly timed ticket went cold. I was embarrassed to serve his food, not because I didn’t like it, but because I know better.
Derek Hanson inherited a mess. And yet, if you’ve actually been there in the past year, you’ve probably had one of the best and most unique meals in recent memory if not (as was the case for 90% of my tables) your life. Yeah, it sounds like hot air, but I’ll tell you what. I was never more proud than when a skinny, pale vegan kid brought his uptight Beaverton parents in for his birthday, and you know he just begged them, and afterwords the dad in his Beavers sweat shirt would make a point to go and shake Dereks hand. Happened every night. People were blown away. The food was incredible, the recipes were his own, and while not everything worked all the time, the beauty of that restaurant was that every week we took fresh new local ingredients that were in season and made something new and beautiful out of them. For all you kids who never got to eat there because of some review, I’m sad you never got to make your own mind up. We were able to change our course, too little too late, but we just weren’t met with the same.
I sincerely hope that the foie gras argument wasn’t what killed us. The same kids who boycotted us for that I’d see eating at Vita, where their dry tofu was scrambled right next to a blistering sausage, ripped bloodily from the guts of a protesting pig and then wrapped in entrails. Pick your battles. The fact remains that we served ONLY vegan and vegetarian food. We bought local as much as we could and we loved our food. The person you really hurt with your hypocritical and fair-weather politics was me, was our dishwasher, was our line cook. It was all the people who really made that place tick, and I’ll tell you what, it wasn’t the owner and it seldom is. The people who got put out of business were the cooks and servers who would come to YOUR bar after work, and now, we can’t.
Bad reviews helped us to change our service (much needed improvement) to streamline our systems. Good reviews helped to get the word out about the amazing stuff we did. Lukewarm gossip and countless raving blogs showed us that people were impassioned about what we were doing. In the end though, it really was the food. It wasn’t the words or the politics or the owner. It was the food.
We all bawled like babies when we shut that place down, it was something special. I’ve never seen more love or a tighter family in any restaurant. And although it’s easy to sit here and bang my fist and try to set everything straight, the truth is that this town lost something and it stings a little. Maybe it was before it’s time or maybe it was too little too late, but whatever it was, it was a high-water mark and we’re all going to miss it.
Thanks to you if you were one of our friends or regulars, you have no idea how much it meant to us. And to the rest of you, we’ll blow you’re minds yet….dontcha worry about it.
Maybe the PETA folks should eat out more often
afterall, they do have plenty of corporate dollars.
anotherroadsideattrastion,
I’m with you 100%.
Pretty embarrassing and frustrating to read some of the poor reviews and sentiments towards Nutshell. Much like those who voted for Bush, both terms! Brilliant! Way to go!
If a Nutshell II opens up (with a different name), i’ll be there. And I think the harsh reality check provided by the closing of this incredible restaurant will cause many who took it for granted to be much more supportive of any future versions of Nutshell that I am hoping (begging) for.
Open it in North Portland, please!
i miss nutshell and my amazing co-workers.
Could the extremely long winded ex Nutshell employees please step down? You guys sound a little biased and…delusional.
I agree. All the self-indulgent wanking is tedious.
my kids would not eat there because they own a restaurant that serves meat and dairy products.