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.”