Higgins Restaurant & Bar

Bread discipline, held in Portland

Bread set the rhythm before the room filled. Greg Higgins, chef at Higgins Restaurant & Bar in Portland, still works from habits formed at the Heathman, where he said, “I was baking all the Heathman’s bread as well as doing everything else.” He arrived in Portland in 1984 to open the Heathman, first as sous-chef and later as head of the kitchen, and the practice that followed joined baking, cooking, sourcing, and kitchen order inside the same frame. In 1994 he and co-owner Paul Mallory opened Higgins Restaurant & Bar, giving that discipline a permanent address in downtown Portland. The restaurant’s line is not diffuse: Northwest cuisine, close work with farmers, fishermen, ranchers, brewers, and a menu that lets the region enter by method rather than display. Higgins received the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest in 2002, recognition tied to the cookery that had already been built through repetition. The role remains current, chef and co-owner, with the same city holding the thread from the Heathman to this pass.

A menu built from growers and whole animals

The program at Higgins Restaurant & Bar was farm-to-table before the term became loose. At opening, nearly one-third of the menu was vegetarian, a practical statement in 1994, and the kitchen still reads through seasonal produce, Pacific Northwest fish, whole-animal buying, charcuterie, risotto, pasta, braises, and the burger that regulars return to by name. The lasting food memory gathers around choucroute garni, crab risotto, and the walnut dinner, each one showing a different kind of permanence: cured and fermented abundance, shellfish folded into rice, a single crop treated as the center of the table. House-made charcuterie matters here because it asks for time before service, not only heat during it. The beer program carries the same argument. Higgins was a homebrewer in the 1980s, and at the restaurant he treated beer as a pairing language alongside wine, with Warren Steenson shaping global selections and local brewers entering the work through the menu. Orval, Rodenbach, Cantillon, and beers from Hair of the Dog belonged at the table because the food could answer them.

Wood, linen, the counter, the pass

The room keeps its register low: warm wood, white linens, subtle light, a relaxed bar area close enough to feel part of the same house rather than an annex. On a hard downtown Sunday in 2024, after the restaurant spoke plainly about its struggle, reservations rose from 30 to 160; chef de cuisine Patrick Strong, who had spent over 20 years in the kitchen, described bringing in extra produce, fish from the coast, and whole cows from ranchers to meet the room. That surge did not change the craft. It revealed the structure around it: growers, cooks, servers, brewers, and guests moving toward the same pass. The plate carries the claim: house-made charcuterie at Higgins Restaurant & Bar.