The first time I saw Naomi Pomeroy in person, it wasn’t at her restaurant. I was at a dinner in Joshua McFadden’s old apartment, brand-new to Portland, surrounded by names I knew from the pages of Mix and Bon Appetit—Andy Ricker, Jason French. From the corner of the living room, I watched her approach the doorway, flanked by two other chefs. With a quick scan of the scene, she said, “No,” and she and her posse turned and left. I don't know if it was the semiformal nature of the dinner, the guest list, or the soundtrack, but she was clearly not on board.

Naomi Pomeroy wasn’t someone who settled. Every ingredient was obsessively sourced, whether it came from Southern France or Southeast Portland. She expected brilliance from her employees, and championed them both in the press and in her dining room. Perhaps Portland’s most influential chef—both in the kitchen and outside it—Pomeroy applied her impressively (and sometimes intimidatingly) high standards to every facet of her life, particularly her restaurants: her “Family Supper” series, her perpetually lauded tasting menu destination Beast, and her ambitious market-bistro Ripe Cooperative. They applied to the scoops of frozen custard she served out of her former flower shop. They applied to the legislation she helped develop on behalf of restaurant workers. They applied to the journalists who covered her.

Pomeroy drowned during an inner tubing accident last weekend; her body has not been recovered. When I heard the news of her death, for the first time in my life, I encountered the denial that often accompanies grief. “Naomi Pomeroy isn’t someone who just dies,” I told my partner. She wouldn’t settle for that. She wasn’t done. She had just opened her frozen custard shop with her longtime collaborator and pastry chef, Mika Paredes; she was about to open her next restaurant on Division. Any time Naomi closed a restaurant, you knew she wasn’t done, not forever; she still had more to say. 

Growing up in Corvallis, Pomeroy started cooking when she was 4 years old and never stopped for long. She learned how to make a soufflé using her family’s food stamp rations three years later, and cooked out of her family's garden throughout her childhood. She started working for an Ashland catering company in college, eventually creating her own with her ex, Michael Hebb, called Ripe. The catering company was the seedling of Portland’s most foundational restaurant group. Soon after the birth of their daughter, August, in 2000, she and Hebb started serving dinners out of their house at a makeshift table made from hollow core doors. People brought their own chairs. Diners scored invites from an email list. Family Supper was a pop-up before pop-ups became ubiquitous, and like so many others in Portland, it eventually moved into its own space. Ripe became a restaurant group, and the two opened other restaurants, places like Clarklewis and Gotham Tavern. Countless Portland culinary legends made their way through those restaurants, people like Le Pigeon’s Gabriel Rucker, Bollywood Theater’s Troy MacLarty, and Pizza Jerk’s Tommy Habetz. 

After the closing of all three restaurants and filing for bankruptcy, Pomeroy started over. She and Paredes served dinners in Pomeroy’s backyard, the beginnings of what became her most famous restaurant, Beast. Beast opened in 2007, something of a supper club with a tasting menu and communal seating. When it opened, Beast accepted no substitutions. It was nose-to-tail before that became a cliche, serving extraordinary in-house charcuterie and foie gras with abandon. She received waves upon waves of national praise, and was nominated for James Beard Awards consistently until she won in 2014. Over time, Beast softened—not just in terms of its no-substitutions edge, but in terms of Pomeroy’s approach to management. In a piece for Eater in 2018, following the initial wave of the #MeToo movement, Pomeroy acknowledged her adjacency to the toxic workplace culture that became rampant within the restaurant world. “When I felt like I needed to, I yelled at my staff,” she wrote. “Sometimes I threw things. Everyone on my team knew I had the power in my kitchen. I got angry when people would criticize my management style. Men yelled and screamed and got fawning profiles. Why shouldn’t I behave the way I saw worked for them? I was one of them, I thought."

“I look back on that time with real sadness. What were we saying when we told cooks that they needed to be willing to sacrifice family time and work 70-plus hours a week, all while paying paltry wages and belittling them when they made mistakes?”

She translated that self-reflection into significant changes to how she ran her businesses, and how she advocated for the industry. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down restaurants around the country, Pomeroy quickly began working with other chefs and policymakers to develop relief programs, both locally and nationally, as a founding member of the Independent Restaurant Coalition. She was instrumental in developing the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, providing grants to restaurant owners impacted by COVID-19. 

After Beast closed during the pandemic, she opened Ripe Cooperative in that space, a far more casual restaurant and market. She served handmade pastas to take home or eat there, pints and scoops of luscious frozen custard. She offered her employees paid time off, profit-sharing options, and benefits, and specifically sought out products from companies that paid their workers a living wage. “The model of a restaurant in the past was, on some level, exploitation—even on the part of owners, self-exploitation,” Pomeroy told me in the fall of 2020. “Every time that food is inexpensive, people are getting exploited, whether that’s on a farmer level or a cook level.”

Ultimately, running that restaurant became too expensive for Pomeroy, and she closed it as opposed to compromising her values. “I want to live in a world of small beautiful things, but what I see out there is a big race to the middle,” she wrote in a closing announcement at the time. “Ripe is simply not cut out to make the necessary compromises and still be what we want it to be.” But Pomeroy never seemed to give up. After a few years consulting and selling her frozen custard as yet another pop-up, she was ready to try again. 

Naomi Pomeroy never served me bad food, or even mediocre food; it didn’t matter if it was a piece of focaccia or a tasting menu bowl of chawanmushi. Choosing not to settle wasn’t about stubbornness for Naomi; it was about an ever-present, borderline dogmatic dedication to the pursuit of excellence, acknowledging and learning from failures, knowing when to walk away and when to begin again. In some ways, I wonder if I’ll ever stop waiting for another comeback, another plate served in a nondescript house, in a backyard garden. Against my better judgment, I’m keeping my eye on the door.