The Culinary World Remembers Chef Naomi Pomeroy

Celebrated chef, restaurateur, author, television personality, and 2009 F&W Best New Chef Naomi Pomeroy tragically drowned on July 13, 2024 while inner tubing on the Willamette River, which was confirmed by her family to Portland Monthly. Chefs across the country are sharing their memories and tributes. 

Pomeroy was perhaps best known for her groundbreaking, nationally celebrated fine-dining restaurant Beast in Portland, Oregon, which opened in 2007. Emblematic of the Portland indie DIY ethos, Beast was one of the early innovators in the city’s culinary revival of the mid 2000s. With communal tables, an open kitchen, and foie gras bonbons, Beast was an intimate 24-seat restaurant with graffiti on the walls, a six-course prix-fixe dinner menu, and a legendary three-course Sunday brunch.

It was a rather scrappy affair. “For the first three years of the restaurant, there also was no hood or open flame,” says the Beast website. "Everything at that time was cooked on two electric induction burners.” 

Recognition came rolling in. Writing that it offered “some of the best cooking to hit Portland in years,” The Oregonian’s Karen Brooks named Beast the Restaurant of the Year in 2008, alongside 2007 F&W Best New Chef Gabriel Rucker’s Le Pigeon. “Her soul belongs to the pig,” wrote Brooks. ”In pancetta or sausage or even Italian-style, milk-braised chunks to fill unforgettable potpies with golden crusts flaky enough to make you weep.”

In 2009, Food & Wine named Pomeroy as one of the year's class of Best New Chefs. Food & Wine restaurant editor Kate Krader explained why at the time: “Because her cooking style is what she calls ‘refined French grandmother’: simultaneously exquisite and accessible, with a major focus on local ingredients.” Following years of finalist nominations, Pomeroy won the 2014 James Beard Award in the Best Chef: Northwest category. 

“The surprise of a restaurant called Beast is the tenderness I encountered in the actual practice of it,” said Food & Wine Executive Features Editor Kat Kinsman, who dined there in 2015. “I went as a solo diner, slightly nervous to be in an unfamiliar city, locked into an hours-long prix fixe next to other diners, no place to slink away or escape to. For years after, I was invested in the online life of the pet cat belonging to the man who was seated next to me. This was by Naomi's design, these fierce micro relationships forged in a night as we walked through her wild, brilliant, delicious world. She understood the power and gravity and joy of the shared table in an uncommon and vital way.”

Beast firmly reinforced Portland as one of the major American food cities. In a 2017 review, OregonLive.com critic Michael Russell called Beast “Portland's most important contribution to American fine dining.” 

In 2013, she opened the cocktail bar and restaurant, Expatriate — right across the street from Beast. The restaurant closed in 2020 following Oregon banning in-person dining during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pomeroy — who was a vocal founding member of the Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC), a trade group of industry leaders that asked Congress for financial relief to restaurants at the height of the pandemic — transformed the space into a restaurant, wine shop, and grab-and-go market called Ripe Cooperative that closed in 2022.  

This past year, Pomeroy had been busy with multiple projects, including a brick-and-mortar scoop shop, Cornet Custard, that opened in June and a planned French bistro in the same building. Her outdoor pop-up, Garden Party, that was set for late July immediately sold out.

Pomeroy was born and raised in Corvallis, Oregon, and cooked her entire life. "I wrote my first recipe when I was five,” she told Food & Wine when she was named a Best New Chef. “It involved mixing chewed-up almonds with powdered sugar and baking it on the wood stove. I learned to make drip coffee around that time with the Danish glass drip coffee maker we had — it was so '70s. My whole family, all we ever did was stand around and talk about what we were going to have for lunch."

A self-taught chef, Pomeroy graduated from Lewis & Clark College in Portland in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Her cookbook Taste & Technique: Recipes to Elevate Your Home Cooking, written with Jamie Feldmar, was published in 2016. According to a deal report in Publishers Weekly, the original title was supposed to be Oui: Lessons From An Award-Winning Self-Taught Chef, and the book was described as combining "Julia Child’s classical aesthetic and ambition to teach the world how to cook with Pomeroy’s own unique history, style, and verve." 

In a New York Times review, writer and editor Christine Muhlke praised the cookbook as “doably aspirational” with “unabashedly complex” recipes which “would indeed make you a better cook.”

New England chef Matt Jennings told Food & Wine in a message, “She was brilliant. Warm, hilarious, so talented. But what always struck me the most was her eyes. When you spent time with her, you could tell she was listening to you. Like, *really* listening. It was her humanity. She wore it on her sleeve. A heart the size of the moon. And man, could she cook her ass off. I remember a dinner we did together in Austin and she was giving me such a hard time. Just razzing me! ‘You want to plate it like that, chef?..really?’ We were cracking up. She could cook anyone under the table, any day of the week- but do it with grace, beauty and that goddamn twinkle in her eye. Ugh. I will miss her so much."

For a Mother’s Day story in 2024, Pomeroy told Food & Wine, “My mom taught me that growing even just a little bit of your own food makes you treat it very differently — we never waste foods we’ve grown ourselves. We had a big garden — we were pretty poor, but rich with soil, so we grew a lot of our own food," 

Pomeroy continued, "[I have] strong memories of pulling up fresh carrots and radishes and cutting them up to use in salads, or growing spinach that we used to make soufflés with eggs, cheese, milk, and flour provided by federal assistance. My mom was very good at creating magic with very little, which made me resilient as well.”