Naomi Pomeroy, 1974-2024

Portland chef, wife, mother, and boy, could that girl hustle and cook

On a “Should we buy a house here?” recon trip to Portland in 2003, my husband and I went to Family Supper, the weekly gathering I describe in the opening of “Last Supper,” which ran in Portland Monthly in 2009 (and which I reprint below). The article came to be because, by the time I moved to Portland in 2004, the weekly gathering had blossomed into a spectacular restaurant empire that soon, and even more spectacularly, imploded, or imploded if you consider your husband purportedly splitting town in an RV with a hooker while leaving you holding the six-figure bag imploding.

It’s what happened to Naomi Pomeroy, who we yesterday learned drowned while inner tubing on the Willamette River on Sunday. Her body has yet to be recovered.

Naomi and I met when I interviewed her for “Last Supper,” and remained friendly, going out to dinner and, more often, gossiping about the food world in Portland, including in 2020, a time when staff at many establishment turned Stasi and started online lists in which they complained about coworkers and bosses, in some cases putting establishments out of business. Naomi at this point had been running her restaurant Beast for more than a decade; had given hundreds of young people an entree into the Portland food world, and, as an entrepreneur and mother, had neither the temperament nor patience to put up with nonsense, as she illustrated in a story she told me during the 2020 summer of rage and COVID closures:

Naomi Pomeroy had other things to think about besides the protests, though god knew if her restaurants were open, her employees would have been marching until three in the morning and claiming “Defund the Police!” was more important than getting to work on time. Naomi had no problem with people throwing themselves headlong into things; she’d been one of these people herself and had the crash-landing scars to prove it.

But her restaurants were not open, not since COVID. Yes, she was serving snacks and to-go cocktails from the window of one of her places, and it was going okay, mostly because she busted her ass. Twenty years earlier, young people who knew their way around a kitchen, and some who didn’t, had catapulted Portland into the national food scene. Naomi was legit one of the superstars, which meant she’d had to transcend the backbiting that comes with celebrity, people digging into your business, people saying you are not all that, people hoping your latest gambit (or the one after that) will be the one that brings you down, will cause you to lose momentum and shine.

Naomi had not lost these things as she created the next thing, and the next. Along the way she’d been happy, more than happy, to bring others with her, including the woman who’d started a fried chicken outfit and who earlier in the month, as the riots played out and businesses struggled to survive a fucking pandemic, decided that now was the time to publicly accuse Portland restaurateurs of sexism, of racism. This was apparently what some local food people did in 2020, they worked toward the ruination of others, campaigns as lunatic as leveling death threats against a couple of twenty-something non-Mexican girls for making homemade tortillas.

How a region where you could grow and cook the most beautiful foods had grown so embittered, Naomi wasn’t sure, maybe young people believing Portland would deliver on their dreams only to realize that hard work was required; that no matter how enlightened you believed your ideals, you still had to get to work at 6am. But also? Naomi sort of didn’t care, not when, per usual, she would just do what needed to be done.

It was after midnight when she picked up the phone and called the chicken lady…

Like I said, the girl knew how to hustle, and at the time of her death, had launched a new business and was set to launch another.

“Last Supper” was never properly put online. I include it here. Naomi, you were such a light xx

Last Supper

When a young, twentysomething couple managed to spin Portland its own cultural and gastronomic empire out of thin air, the national press dubbed them “the prince and princess of the Pacific Northwest food scene.” And then the empire crumbled.

On a warm spring evening in 2001 in a Northeast Portland bungalow, two dozen strangers–artists, architects, designers, copywriters and philanthropists–were seated around a long table MacGyvered together from two-by-fours and old foam-core doors. Candles flickered; guests chatted about summer plans and delighted in the acquaintances that they, perhaps not so coincidentally, had in common. But their attention mostly centered around a slender, blond-haired, blue-eyed 24-year-old, Michael Hebb, the evening’s host, who busied himself by making introductions and pouring more wine, darting in and out of the kitchen, where his girlfriend, Naomi Pomeroy, a pixieish, glitter-eyed 26-year-old, put the finishing touches on the night’s dinner: platters of local salmon baked with fleur de sel, caramelized turnips, and artichokes simmered with lemon, herbs and garlic.

Diners passed the food to one another for what seemed like hours. By 10, the party was winding down. While guests ferried dishes to the kitchen, Hebb asked them to throw $5 into the bowl by the door before they left. Despite all appearances, this was a business plan, not a party. It had begun with a home-based catering business for which, according to Pomeroy, shrimp were thawed in the bathtub and dishes were hosed on the lawn. Now it was expanding into clandestine, invitation-only dinners dubbed “Family Supper.” This had been the first.

Within a few years Michael and Naomi Hebberoy–the couple famously merged their surnames in 2002–would, with the help of some of Portland’s wealthiest citizens, build the upstart venture into what came to be known as the Ripe restaurant empire, a gastronomic supernova so bright it dazzled (some might say blinded) the city. Its gleam reached as far as New York, where the press praised Portland’s rise to culinary power; W magazine even dubbed Ripe’s creators “the prince and princess of the Pacific Northwest food scene.”

Which is perhaps why the city was so astonished last April when Ripe imploded, Michael Hebberoy disappeared, and the Hebberoys’ impending divorce received prominent headlines in the Oregonian and other local publications. What the city had perceived to be an entirely new culinary and artistic business model (some used the word “revolution”), complete with its own celebrities, had curdled into disappointment, lawsuits and schadenfreude. Portland, in some ways, had been duped. An illusionist had appeared out of nowhere, made a moderate-sized city with a sizable appetite appear to be a top-tier cultural and culinary metropolis, and then stolen away in the night…