Kei Ohdera

Early Years

Born in Ichikawa, Japan, Ohdera moved around between Japan and the United States during childhood. That early geography matters to the shape of his cooking because the places named in his career are not abstract points on a résumé; they form a route between countries, kitchens, and ways of thinking about food. The role sits early in the career arc now associated with Pasture PDX, and it puts Japan firmly inside the professional story as well as the personal one. By 2014, the path had carried him to Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Stone Barns, New York, where he worked as a cook. The move added another specific American kitchen to a life already divided between Japan and the United States, giving his career a transpacific rhythm before Portland became the place most closely tied to his name.

Making a Name

In 2019, Ohdera founded Pasture in Portland, Oregon, as a pop-up butcher shop and restaurant. His own description is exact: “I started Pasture as a Pop-up in 2019 as a butcher shop/restaurant primarily sourcing retired dairy cows from the Tillamook region.” The craft that defines the project is a European-style approach to butchery, with retired dairy cows at the center and the entire animal put to use. Rather than treating meat as a detached luxury product, the practice follows the animal through a longer life and into a more complete form of cooking and butchery. Ohdera has framed that thinking in terms of value, time, and community: “The thought is that the animal is raised to live a longer life and provides a product to the community that has value through the milk and everything else, and then the meat.” It is a practical philosophy, but also a social one, grounded in what an animal has already given before it reaches the butcher’s block.

The Present

At Pasture PDX in Portland, Oregon, Ohdera works as chef, carrying forward the same focus on retired dairy cows and whole-animal use. The restaurant connects his current role to the pop-up that began in 2019, while keeping the work rooted in the butcher-shop-and-restaurant idea that first defined Pasture. His language for the project reaches beyond technique. “Our whole project was inspired by sourcing retired dairy cows,” he has said, a sentence that makes sourcing the starting point rather than an afterthought. There is also a broader human claim inside the work: “all people, regardless of who they are and where they’re from, can connect over food.” For a chef born in Ichikawa, raised across Japan and the United States, trained through named kitchens in Tokyo and New York, and now cooking in Portland, that line reads less like decoration than biography.

Signature

Kei's signature dishes include O.G. Pastrami Sandwich.

In Their Words “The thought is that the animal is raised to live a longer life and provides a product to the community that has value through the milk and everything else, and then the meat.” “Our whole project was inspired by sourcing retired dairy cows.”