Greg Higgins

The Path

At The Heathman, bread was part of the foundation rather than a side line, and that approach carried into the rest of the work: a kitchen practice built on more than one task at a time, with baking and cooking sitting inside the same professional frame. Today, Greg is chef and co-owner of Higgins Restaurant (since 1994), a role that marks continuity as much as authorship in the city that became the center of his career.

The Work Today

Since 1994, Higgins has been chef and co-owner at the Portland restaurant that bears his name. Its identity sits in Northwest cuisine, but the point is less slogan than working relationship: close ties to Pacific Northwest farmers and menus described as pioneering in that connection between kitchen and region. The cooking reads as place-based without leaning on theater; the landscape is present because the sourcing and the menu logic keep bringing it back in. Certain dishes continue to define the work nearly 30 years on. Choucroute garni remains part of the restaurant’s food memory, a dish with the weight of permanence, as does crab risotto, each tied to the long-running kitchen in Portland. A walnut dinner created by Chef Greg Higgins adds another marker of how specific products and producers enter the cooking as more than background; they become part of the restaurant’s language, part of its way of speaking about flavor, season, and craft. What gives the current work its force is the continuity: the chef who arrived to open the Heathman in 1984 is the same one who, a decade later, established a long-running home for Northwest cuisine in Portland. The story does not scatter across multiple cities or eras. It tightens, instead, into a focused line through Portland, through named dishes and a restaurant role held across decades, through a kitchen practice that has remained remarkably legible over time.

Signature

Greg's signature dishes include choucroute garni, crab risotto, and walnut dinner.

In Their Words “I was baking all the Heathman’s bread as well as doing everything else.” “I came here in ’84 to open the Heathman.”

Acclaim

Greg's honors include James Beard Award, Best Chef: Northwest (2002).