CONSULTING AND MANAGEMENT
Portland, OR, May 13, 2019 — Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education in America, announced today that David Machado Restaurants will be honored this fall with Americans for the Arts’ national Arts and Business Partnership Award.
Was my mother a fantastic cook? Did I spend time with her in the kitchen? Was food preparation an important part of my family’s life? The simple answer is far from it.
When I was growing up, the massive marketing of convenience food was at its height in America. Think canned. Think frozen. Think packaged. Time was more important than quality, and everyone seemed to enjoy the novel practice of eating in front of the television. Finally, my mother’s cooking skills ranged between acceptable and terrible.
w the rest. America was saturated with speedy and convenient food choices, but I grew up in a rich melting pot of ethnic cuisines and old-world choices.
Even as a small child, I was able to publicly dine (without adults) in places of my own choosing. Today this would be considered dangerous and irresponsible, but at 10, I was a regular at neighborhood establishments serving Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Polish, Lebanese and French-Canadian dishes.
I’m certain this real-world exposure tempered the effect of the giant food monoculture. It definitely left me with strong emotional ties to many of my childhood food favorites.
My culinary career began in the early 1980s after relocating to San Francisco from Massachusetts for the same reasons as everyone else: self-expression, freedom and to escape East Coast winters. My restaurant career began behind the bar, but I moved into a job as a restaurant manager out of financial need. I became passionate for an industry that was exploding all around me.
In the Bay Area, this was the era of culinary pioneers like Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, who were inspired by the accessibility of fresh produce and abundance of sunshine.
Equally inspired, I entered the first graduating class of the California Culinary Academy at its new, state-of-the-art San Francisco campus in 1986, right as the concept of “California cuisine” emerged.
My first restaurant in San Francisco, Bottom of the Hill Cafe, was a “rock-and-roll” self-expression concept that lasted six months. At the time, both my wife and I had night jobs and spent all our extra time at the restaurant.
During the restaurant’s brief life, we served eclectic world cuisine to San Francisco notables like Bruce Aidells and Mario Batali. While closing Bottom of the Hill, I realized a successful restaurant needs to be more inclusive of the customer.
I had to think about what they wanted to eat more than my personal passions. I’ve always been inspired by veteran New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer, who believes a successful concept is about enduring qualities like value, hospitality, cleanliness and good food. After this epiphany, I vowed to never fail again.
I moved my young family to Portland in 1991 to lead the opening team at Pazzo Ristorante as the executive chef. I honed my belief that professional management, a well-trained staff and a buzz in the dining room were just as critical as great food. As I accepted more responsibilities, my role shifted to general manager, and I went on to open six more restaurants in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco for Pazzo’s parent company, Kimpton, as a senior chef.
At that time, Portland was beginning its own food renaissance, driven by the profusion of local ingredients. Soon enough, chefs were opening small independent restaurants in every neighborhood.
Unlike the classic chef, I found myself more interested in understanding the relationship between a restaurant’s economies and consistent, high-quality cuisine. I joined a rival restaurant group in 1997 as vice president of restaurants for the Stevenson family, who owned the Heathman Restaurant.
As an independent concept within a hotel, we asked ourselves, “What if we challenge the ‘hotel food’ stigma and create something that rivals any of Portland’s boutique restaurants?” Without really realizing it at the time, this would become a guiding philosophy in how I run restaurants today.
As I embark upon opening my fifth restaurant, I remind myself how far Portland has come as a food city and how much I have enjoyed being a part of this wonderful evolution. My managers like to repeat my homespun philosophy for restaurant success: “Give a little more, charge a little less.”
David Machado is the owner of David Machado Restaurants.
Oregon Business
by David Machado
May 4, 2017
An Interview with chef & restauranteur David Machado
NW Examiner
May 2017
By Chad Walsh
“Restaurateur David Machado will open Tanner Creek Tavern at 875 NW Everett St. this summer. Machado still doesn’t know what the menu will look like, but he’s not sweating it. He said the neighborhood, nearby restaurants and the space itself, will determine what he’ll cook up.
On the rooftop deck of Altabira City Tavern, his Lloyd District restaurant next to the Hotel Eastlund, Machado talked about his 30-plus year career in restaurants.”
I think we’re going back to the fundamental food,” Machado said. “We’re anxious as a society. We’re tired. We’re nervous. We’re afraid. So I think we all become a little kid when we’re afraid, so we’ve gotta have some foods that we really like. It makes us feel good, we eat, we go to bed and we feel okay, and so I think society—politics, stressors in society—dictate what the food trends are going to be.
Read Chad Walsh’s full interview here in the NW Examiner. It starts on page 16.
Hannah Wallace of the Oregon Business Magazine talks with Chef David Machado and others about the Portland dining scene and why everyone you know is eating out. Read what Chef Machado has to say below.
Oregon Business Magazine / October edition
September 23, 2016
Written by Hannah Wallace
“The Portland dining public is way more sophisticated today than it was 25 years ago,” observes longtime Portland chef David Machado, whose former restaurants Lauro Kitchen and Vindalho were the first to colonize Southeast Division (in 2003 and 2005, respectively). Today, at his two restaurants Nel Centro and Altabira City Tavern, he sees chiefly two main demographics: boomers and millennials.
“Those boomers have traveled. They’ve had that pasta that you serve on the menu — they’ve had it in Italy,” Machado notes. Many of these boomers have also taken cooking classes and watch more than one cooking show, he says. Portland millennials, too, are well traveled; they’ve been to all the latest restaurants in New York and San Francisco, and they want to stay on top of the latest spots in their hometown, too.
“They are college educated, have a good job, are married — or not. But they’re experimenting with food, ordering hand made cocktails and wines.” Add these two groups together and you get a group of curious, adventurous eaters who want to eat out all the time.
“Everyone is just so much damn smarter about food,” says Machado. On-demand and sharing economy trends are also helping fuel the frenzy; today, when people want food, they want it now. Restaurants — co-eating venues, as collaborative economists might say — fit the bill.
There’s no authoritative statistic on which demographics eat out the most in Portland. But Zach Hull, vice president of business development at Boulevard — the software company that designed Chew, Kurt Huffman’s new restaurant loyalty app — says almost 50% of Chew’s 6,000 active users are between the ages of 25 and 35 (25% are in the 35 to 45 age group).
It doesn’t hurt that the price of eating out at a nice restaurant (or food cart) is still relatively affordable in Portland, when compared to other major American cities. “The price that you pay for a meal, an entree in a restaurant today, is the same or less than you did 10 or so years ago,” says Machado. In Portland, he adds, there are certain benchmarks you can’t exceed.
“Portlanders don’t like to spend more than $30 on an entree, or $14 or $15 on an appetizer.”
You can read the entire Oregon Business Magazine article here.
Artslandia at the Performance
May / June 2015
“Other restaurants and hotels were pulling back their arts support, and arts groups were struggling,” says Machado. “I knew Nel Centro’s long-term fate would be tied to the performing arts groups downtown. We wouldn’t make it unless they made it, so we did a lot more than just feed people before and after shows. We offered restaurant patron programs, donor receptions, anything the arts groups needed.”
Serves Four
“Nel Centro” is Italian for “in the center,” and the perfect description for the restaurant David Machado opened in the heart of Portland’s theatre district at the depths of the nation’s recession. “It was a hard time to start something,” Machado notes, but what seemed like a risky business decision was actually the restaurant-business veteran and Jazz Festival board president’s calculated vote of confidence in the performing arts.
“Other restaurants and hotels were pulling back their arts support, and arts groups were struggling,” says Machado. “I knew Nel Centro’s long-term fate would be tied to the performing arts groups downtown. We wouldn’t make it unless they made it, so we did a lot more than just feed people before and after shows. We offered restaurant patron programs, donor receptions, anything the arts groups needed.” As the arts groups have revived, refilling the nearby Keller, Lincoln Hall, Portland’5 and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall with eager patrons, Nel Centro has thrived.
1/2 pound ricotta
1/2 pound large red beets
1/2 pound large gold or chiogga beets
3 large oranges, either cara cara or blood oranges, skin and pith removed, sliced into 1/4 inch rounds
1 cup baby arugula
1/4 cup citrus vinaigrette (recipe below)
1/2 cup whole hazelnuts, toasted
Salt and black pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spread hazelnuts out on a baking sheet in an even layer, place in oven, and toast until golden brown and fragrant, about 5 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool. Once cooled, lightly crush hazelnuts with the flat side of a knife.
Scrub beets under cold running water to remove any dirt. Lightly coat beets with olive oil and place in a large baking dish, cover with foil and bake until beets are tender and easily pierced with a fork, about 1 hour.
Remove from oven and cool at room temperature. Slice both ends of the beets. Gently rub a damp towel over skins to remove. Cut into 2 inch pieces and set aside.
Turn oven broiler to high. Place ricotta into a small glass baking dish, season liberally with salt and fresh cracked pepper, and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.
Place under broiler until a deep, golden curst is formed and cheese is warmed through, about 5 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, combine beets, orange segments and baby arugula. Toss with citrus vinaigrette, and season to taste with salt and fresh cracked black pepper.
Mound the tossed salad in the center of a chilled plate, top with warmed arugula and garnish with toasted hazelnuts.
Makes 1 Quart
1/2 cup champagne vinegar
1/2 cup fresh squeezed orange juice
1 each large shallot, minced
1 teaspoon lemon juice
3 1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
Combine vinegar, orange and lemon juice, minced shallot and salt in a medium mixing bowl. Slowly whisk in olive oil until fully incorporated. Cover with either plastic wrap or a tight fitting lid and refrigerate. Store for up to 2 weeks.
The Portland food pro on his new Hotel Eastlund eateries, beer, and why hotels love chefs.
By Kelly Clarke
For three decades now, David Machado has been building and running large-scale food operations that strike a balance between serving as a home away from home for travelers and a destination for locals.
He’s best known as the man behind Hotel Modera’s successful pre-theater haunt Nel Centro; others trade memories of drinks at his Southpark wine bar or Italian grub at Pazzo, the venerable downtown fine diner he built and ran for Hotel Vintage Plaza in the 1990s (just one of six Kimpton properties he launched). And longtimers still get positively weepy reminiscing over the chef’s independent project, Lauro Mediterranean Kitchen, the neighborhood bistro that made SE Division Street a destination before Pok Pok charcoal-fired its first game hen.
His latest salvo is the sky-high beer-centric restaurant Altabira City Tavern and smaller Citizen Baker cafe, a double-barreled blast for the Modera team’s new Hotel Eastlund, located right across the street the Oregon Convention Center. The two eateries may help transform the rapidly changing Lloyd District from a fast food wasteland to a chic dining go-to. On the eve of Altabira’s debut, we asked the food insider about beer, bread, and why a chef can be a hotel’s best friend.
1. YOU’VE BEEN IN THE HOTEL FOOD GAME FOR YEARS. WHAT DO ALTABIRA AND CITIZEN BAKER BRING TO THE TABLE?
With Altabira, I wanted to move out of the euro-centric, wine-based Mediterranean thing I’ve been doing for years. Every time there’s beer, for the most part, it’s in a brewpub or sports bar setting—very burly or clubby. What about a real restaurant that does dinner and a nice job with the menu, creative and fresh, but that aligns with beer? We’re working with dishes from some traditional beer cultures—England, Belgium, Germany—you can’t not do that. Pork schnitzel, a rabbit pot pie, smoked brisket…homey stuff that goes with beer and has connection with beer culture. Also, charcuterie—pate and rilletes, duck liver mousse. I’ve had to caution the kitchen about sugar and salt. It’s easy to start salting and curing and brining everything and soon enough everything becomes a ham! I’m trying to strike a balance.
We’ve gone as micro as we could on our 16 taps: Commons, Coalition, Breakside….We didn’t do any national brands, didn’t even do the regional brands that made Portland famous. We tried to choose producers in NE and SE Portland; operations that are around [the hotel]. There’s some people doing incredible work in beer right now—the balance and quality of the beers, making old recipes contemporary. My model customer knows some things about food, about beer and wine, and is traveled and educated. But when it comes to these young people making beer in Portland that I have on tap, they’ll be, “I just didn’t know.”
2. WHAT ABOUT CITIZEN BAKER?
I hadn’t opened a cafe since Pazzoria in 1994 or ’95. And I felt that if we were gonna do a café, we might as well do everything from the ground up—baguette, levain, beer bread, focaccia… It’s a tight program, we’re doing five or six things really well and we’ll leave it at that. Our pastry chef Natalie Harkness’ work is incredible—the apple strudel; her strawberry rhubarb hand pie. It’s tough to kick off an artisan baking program, but we got the starters right and figured the ovens out already. A bakery is very much a live operation; it’s a whole different world.
3. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPENING A NEIGHBORHOOD AND A HOTEL RESTAURANT?
They are completely different experiences—the lifestyle, who comes in and eats there. At Lauro, we came in as fundamentalists: we cooked what we wanted, said hi to everybody, and then went home. When you get in these bigger situations, you have to think of travelers, business people, people going to shows and sporting events…it’s a different model.
When the Modera owners came to me in 2008 to open Nel Centro, they had some criteria: they wanted a local chef that could come in and operate as a draw from the community. They wanted more than a service for guests, they wanted to create a destination for the city. That’s becoming more and more common. It’s often said that a hotel is a very profitable capitalist model except for food and beverage. But we’re in a cycle where savvy hoteliers are looking for independents [chef-operators] to lure in because a hotel is enhanced by the chef. That’s a big shift.
4. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR NEW NEIGHBORHOOD?
Hotel Eastlund is in a neighborhood that’s never had any fresh or real food—just formulaic chains. Having to eat here for the last two months while overseeing restaurant construction has been brutal—it’s just Red Robin and Denny’s; remnants from the Portland’s old Highway 99 of 30 years ago. But now, the whole neighborhood is in this massive state of flux. There was no master plan, it just happened that we got in right before all this major development. I hope it all works out; that we did the right thing. That saying is true: opening a restaurant is like birthing a baby, you say you’ll never do it again. And then you do.
June 16, 2015, 10:55am PDT
Jon Bell
Portland Business Journal
And there were close to a thousand people enjoying it all.
The Hotel Eastlund, a former Red Lion hotel in the Lloyd District that underwent a $15 million remodel, officially opened its new doors last Wednesday evening with a festive grand opening party. The event included a ceremonial ribbon cutting, appetizers and drinks from chef David Machado, who has two restaurants in the new hotel, and musical entertainment from a few different acts, including U.K. soul singer Andy Abraham.
The reborn hotel is a project of Grand Ventures Hotel LLC, a subsidiary of Seattle’s Posh Ventures. The developer was also behind the Hotel Modera, a once-rundown hotel at Southwest Clay Street reborn as a modern boutique hotel, much as the Hotel Eastlund has been.
Click through the gallery for a look at the Hotel Eastlund’s grand opening soiree.
pdxEater
by Chad Walsh
June 15, 2015
The beer-centric rooftop restaurant features 16 all-Oregon-brewed beer taps and a 103-seat patio with sweeping views of downtown and the West Hills.
Altabira, the new beer-forward restaurant perched atop the Lloyd District’s newly christened Hotel Eastlund (née, the old Red Lion Hotel) officially opens for business today.
Today’s opening follows the opening of Citizen Baker, Nel Centro Chef David Machado’s artisan bakery-breakfast-and-lunch spot, which opened on the Eastlund’s ground floor on the first of the month.
Altabira’s design takes advantage of of a couple of natural amenities: a view of downtown and the West Hills and, via plenty of floor-to-ceiling windows, all the natural light a restaurateur could hope for.
If you include the bar, the dining room seats nearly 100 guests—a number that more than doubles if you consider Altabira’s 103-seat open-air rooftop patio, complete with fire pits for when the weather turns cold.
As fas as drinks and eats go, expect 16 taps, all of which are dedicated to Oregon beers, as well as dishes like beef tartare, braised rabbit and vegetable pie, pork cutlets with potato-arugula salads and sides like onion rings served with green goddess dressing.
Altabira City Tavern: 1021 NE Grand Ave., (503) 963-3600, Hours: Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Monday through Friday; Tavern, 2:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 2:30 p.m. to midnight on Fridays, 4 p.m. to midnight on Saturdays and 4 to 10 p.m. on Sundays; Dinner, 5 to 9 p.m., Monday through Thursday, 5 to 10 pm., Fridays and Saturdays, 4 to 9 p.m., on Sundays
All photos by Dina Avila
