Peter de Garmo and Don Oman opened Pastaworks Twenty-five years ago. Today their role in Portland’s food revolution is clear.
By Megan Holden
Photo by Frank DiMarco
“When I moved to Portland in 1977, Southeast Hawthorne was dead,” recalls Peter de Garmo. Sure, there were some notable exceptions, like a model toy store, a Cuban market, and Nick’s Coney Island, but what mostly stays with de Garmo from those days is that there were “lots of boarded-up places, a large Latino night club, and at least one porno shop.”
That’s why his decision, in 1983, to choose Southeast Hawthorne as the place to open Pastaworks—a new food emporium featuring fresh pasta, Mediterranean delights, and ripe tomatoes at a time when a garden-fresh tomato was hard to come by in any Portland store—was a risky one. Yet 25 years later, de Garmo’s move seems downright visionary: Within a year of the shop’s opening, three other stores—Murder by the Book, a gelato shop, and Bread & Ink Café—came to life, revitalizing Hawthorne Boulevard. Moreover, with Pastaworks, de Garmo helped spark the food renaissance that Portland is now famous for.
Before becoming a shopkeeper, de Garmo was a professor of Spanish history, first at Boston College and later at Colegio Cesar Chavez in Mt. Angel, Oregon, where he met his future business partner, Don Oman, at a protest. When the college folded a few years later, de Garmo and Oman found themselves as unemployed house-husbands—cooking family meals, drinking good wines, and discussing neighborhood politics.
On a trip to Boston, de Garmo wandered into a shop that sold fresh pasta. The proprietor told him that the secret to her pasta was the water. “I’d lived in Boston long enough to know that it couldn’t be just the water,” he recalls. “I thought to myself: If she can make pasta, I bet I can.”
When he got home, he pitched the idea to Oman. “Don told me I was crazy. But a month later, he came back wanting to sell pasta.” Eventually they got in sync and took the plunge. “The rent was cheap. We had an old commercial stove that Don had bought for $450. I found some pasta machines and an old fridge we named Ruth that we still use. We borrowed money from Don’s in-laws. We had no business plan,” de Garmo recalls. “The only budget I have from that time is written in my wife’s hand—not Don’s or mine.”
Organization and financing were not their strengths. “At first we lost money on the cheese,” he confesses, “because you have to turn it. And on wine—because we drank it.” But little by little they sold more and more pasta—literally tons of it.
“Don and I were active in neighborhood politics. We knew everybody,” de Garmo explains. “Our neighbors became our first customers. Don always said that it helped that my name ended with a vowel so people thought I was Italian.” Older members of the city’s Italian community eventually found the shop, too. Frank Nudo of Nick’s Famous Coney Island would march his customers outside and point them across the street. Many became regulars—always paying in cash, sometimes wearing slippers. “We had the luck of location, timing, and hiring incredible employees,” de Garmo insists. “We did it all by the seat of our pants.”
While Pastaworks has been at the center of Portland’s flourishing food scene, de Garmo is quick to note that he and Oman truly were two of the unlikeliest guys to lead such a charge. Growing up in Los Angeles and later in Northern California, de Garmo had gone to plenty of small, ethnic markets, delis, and butchers, yet none of these inspired his idea for Pastaworks and there is little in his family’s culinary history that would have led him to a food career. Of the two, Oman, a construction millwright from Scappoose, was the one who had at least visited Italy once before, but he was Norwegian American, “where white is the predominant food color,” de Garmo jokes.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” says de Garmo. “There were two Italian old-timers who traveled up and down the West Coast working for food distributors. Once they had us taste extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany. After we swallowed, we got this flash of peppery intensity. We thought: This stuff sucks. But they kept coming back and having us try new things. Slowly they educated us.”
Fortunately for the partners, there was one part of their inventory that didn’t depend on education: wine. “What I loved about Italian wine was the flavor and that it was considered a food product,” de Garmo explains. “Its purpose is to complement—not displace—food.” Their buying principle for wine (as well as the rest of the products they carry on their shelves) was simple: When de Garmo found something he liked, he carried it. And over the past 25 years, his palate has created one of the broadest and finest selections of Italian wines in the city and, at one time, in the country. (Don Oman left Pastaworks in 1997 and opened Casa Bruno, a wine importing business, the following year.)
Although pasta is still the shop’s number-one seller, it is not de Garmo’s passion. What excites him today is the sense of place that defines the local food scene, its incredible growth and potential, and the young people involved. He sees parallels between our region and what has occurred in Italy in the last 20 years. “The most striking thing is the number of young Italians reviving the food and wine traditions of their parents’ generation. What all of them have in common is a profound sense of place.”
That’s what draws de Garmo to Piedmont’s food, wine, and culture as well. “I think the reason I have always loved the Basques—going so far as to once convince a wine writer that I actually was Basque—is for the same reason my friends in the Piedmont are so involved in their food traditions,” he admits. “It’s wanting and nurturing a sense of place.” Despite having lived all over the country, his place is Portland.
What de Garmo sees in this new generation of artisan food producers and farmers in the Portland region are a varied group that’s firmly rooted to the soil and seasons. “They aren’t wide-eyed, but pragmatic,” he notes. “They want to succeed. They aren’t blinded and burdened by the history. They’re not reinventing the past; but using old methods for a different reason—the future.”
De Garmo and his son Kevin, who manages Pastaworks at City Market on Northwest 21st, also have their eye on the future. September marks the opening of their new store on North Mississippi, which Peter calls going “back to the future—a larger and better version of the Hawthorne store when we opened 25 years ago. Our focus will be what we do best—cheese, groceries, and pasta.”
“We can’t and don’t offer all things to all people,” is how de Garmo explains the narrow focus of goods available at Pastaworks. “We constantly debate what we put on our shelves. That discussion is framed by quality considerations, as in ‘absolute’ quality, as well as value for quality. Our shelf set is not determined or influenced by vendors. Simply put, we care about the foods that we place on the shelves. And yes, it’s nice—and sustainable—to be able to make a profit from those foods.”
The only potential downside to a business model like Pastaworks’ is that the shop isn’t big enough to corner the market on a particular product. So as supermarkets further expand into specialty food, it’s up to the Pastaworks staff to search for new producers and sources. It is a skill this team has always excelled at—Catalonian Siruana Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Prosciutto di Parma, and Jamón Serrano are just a few of the many products first introduced to Portland by the store over its 25 years. And since the shop prides itself on providing the best for its customers and its size enables it to eschew layers of management and large warehouses, the folks at Pastaworks will always welcome that kind of challenge.
Megan Holden is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.
Slow Food is Good, Clean & Fair
In 1989, Carlo Petrini founded Slow Food International in Bra, Italy. slowfood.com
In 1991, de Garmo’s former partner, Don Oman, started the first local Slow Food chapter in the United States here in Portland. “All we did was recognize what had been overlooked,” de Garmo says. “We realized it was silly to be living in this incredibly verdant valley with the last great salmon run in the world at our feet.” Slow Food, with its emphasis on quality and taste, suggested a way to highlight this lush and local edible landscape. Today, Slow Food Portland, one of the largest of the 200 local chapters, carries out the Slow Food mission on a local level by supporting projects such as Abernethy Elementary School’s Garden of Wonders and Growing Gardens’ Youth Grow. slowfoodportland.com
In 1999, the national office of Slow Food USA was established in New York City. Its mission is to support and celebrate the food traditions of North America and a food system based on good, clean and fair food. slowfoodusa.org
In 2003, de Garmo joined the Board of Directors of Slow Food USA.
In 2008, San Francisco hosted Slow Food Nation on Labor Day weekend — a celebration of American food. The event included an urban garden, farmers’ market, and outdoor food bazaar, and a speaker series featuring leading thinkers, community organizers, and journalists discussing current food issues, from policy and planning to education and climate change. slowfoodnation.org
