If you’re dining out in Portland to celebrate a special occasion, there’s a good chance you might end up at Nostrana. The Italian restaurant has been in business for 20 years with six-time James Beard award nominee Cathy Whims in charge. Whims has just released her first cookbook, “The Italian Summer Kitchen,” and joins us to talk about Portland’s food scene, her role in it, and simple Italian recipes for the good life.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Chef Cathy Whims came to Portland in 1979. She started working at a restaurant the very next day, and she basically hasn’t stopped. Whims went on to work at and eventually to become a co-owner of Genoa, an upscale Italian place that was described as Portland’s ultimate special occasion restaurant. Then she changed gears. In 2005, she opened Nostrana, where she aimed to simplify her approach and, in her words, make regional Italian food the Italian way. One great recession and one terrible pandemic later, Nostrana is still standing. Whims recently published a new cookbook. It’s called “The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita.” She joins us to talk about all of this. Cathy Whims, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Cathy Whims: Thank you very much, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with one of your acknowledgments. You thank of your mother. What did you learn from food about her?
Whims: Well, my mother, when she got married, didn’t know how to cook at all, even though her mother was a very good Southern cook. I’m from North Carolina. She was from Virginia. But she threw herself into cooking and every day, even though she had a full-time job in a pharmacy as a bookkeeper, she put a hot breakfast on the table for me and my sister and father, and also a really lovely dinner. And eventually, like many people of her era, she discovered Julia Child watching her on the French Chef and experimenting with those kinds of dishes. And so I just grew up eating great food. I was very spoiled in that way. And so pretty much to this day I still insist on having delicious food and not sort of sad, not soulful fast food in my diet, so…
Miller: When did you start cooking yourself? You had this model of somebody who had a busy life in a lot of ways, and I love that you started with a hot breakfast because it’s one thing to make dinner every day, but to also make breakfast every morning. As a parent now I can say that that is actually in some ways its own gigantic challenge, but setting that aside, when did you discover that you, too, could cook and liked to cook?
Whims: Well, I actually liked to cook early on, but the real moment when I really started to cook was when I was probably 16 and I told my mother that I was going to be a vegetarian. And she was not very happy about that.
Miller: That was less common than it is now, to have a 16-year old say that to their parents?
Whims: Yes that is very much more common now. It was kind of when the era then started, I would say. And so she made dinner that night and she particularly chose this dish ‒ is a French dish called piperade ‒ and it’s softly scrambled eggs, and it was summertime, I remember, with a little stew of tomatoes and zucchini and onions and peppers. Peppers are sort of the main thing. And they were sitting on a plate. I remember I’m from North Carolina and she had fried a sort of slab of country ham, which we always had in the refrigerator, and it was sort of adjacent to the eggs and the peppers, which were vegetarian. And being the spoiled little kid that I was as a teenager, I said, “I can’t eat that. The ham is touching the eggs and the peppers,” and that made her really mad.
The next day, she came to me and she said, okay, Cathy. We have a deal here. If when you eat at home for dinner ‒ and you know at this point I was a teenager, so I was going out with friends and stuff ‒ is that you’re going to make a vegetarian dish and I’m gonna make what I want to make, and you’re going to make enough for the family, and you can choose to eat what I make or not, and that’s fine. And then she gave me four vegetarian cookbooks, of which one was Anna Thomas’s “The Vegetarian Epicure.” And I just started cooking and I made dinner every night. I made a dish every night that I was home.
Miller: Kind of subsistence vegetarian cook/
Whims: Yeah. And don’t you think that was brilliant of her?
Miller: : It seems like very wise parenting.
Whims: I know. I’m just really amazed. She was an extraordinary person.
Miller: Let’s zoom ahead a little bit. What brought you to Portland?
Whims: Well, I went to school in my hometown, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I went to the University of North Carolina. And I had really wanted to go away to college because I’d lived in the same town forever. It’s a beautiful small town and a very cultured town, but so I got through my third year of being a Latin major which I started from scratch and went to a lot of summer school just to catch up on my Latin. And I was cooking and working in a natural food restaurants ‒ kind of fits in with the vegetarian thing and everything ‒ and at a certain point, I just decided I wanted to move to the West Coast and to be truthful, I was following my boyfriend. He graduated and we moved to San Francisco and that was like the dream food city for me. I mean there was just so much going on, so many restaurants, incredible food in the market, California produce, completely different from what I experienced in North Carolina. I got a job in a French restaurant starting as a dishwasher. And eventually after a couple of weeks, they realized that I knew something about cooking and they let me sort of help the chef in the kitchen in the restaurant and that was great fun.
Miller: And then the story that I have heard and that I mentioned in my intro, I hope it’s correct, is that you came with a boyfriend here to Portland, saw Produce Row Cafe that very first day, and then you were hired and you started the day after?
Whims: Yes, exactly. So, I was picked up at the airport by my boyfriend at the time and he took me straight to Produce Row Cafe even before we went back to the house that we were living in with a few other guys. I’m having a beer at the bar and it was kind of the pub in Portland at the time. It had like 250 kinds of beers from all over the world and 13 beers on tap. And one of the owners is behind the bar and he leans over the bar to my boyfriend and says, “Does your girlfriend need a job?” And he said, “Yes, she needs a job.” And I was working there the next day. And it was amazing because it was such a community of people that worked there. They were very interesting people. Most people sort of, you know, I guess it was kind of a little bit of a killing-time job between what you decide to do after college, but I immediately had like 25 friends from working there and it was a great way to enter Portland.
Miller: From there you went on to what you called your dream job at the restaurant that now no longer exists, called Genoa. What was Genoa?
Whims: Genoa at the time, it was pretty much, as you said, considered the special occasion restaurant in Portland. And what I remember about Portland ‒ this is 1979 ‒ is that there were very few really nice restaurants. There was the Horst Mager Restaurant Group that I remember, L’Omelette, a French restaurant downtown. There was L’Auberge, which was a French version of Genoa that was started by the same person that started Genoa, Michael Vidor, who was a visionary restaurant-wise for Portland. And beyond that, what I remember about Portland, and I hope this isn’t negative, but I just remember there were a lot of bars, beer bars where the windows were kind of blacked out. It was dark and smoky inside.
Miller: Blacked out just from decades of grease?
Whims: Yeah, maybe, or just like not… it wasn’t like a fern bar with like beautiful. Actually, at the Produce bar we did have ferns in the window and we could see out in Southeast Portland. But it was just kind of a little bit dreary, the restaurant scene at the time. And that has definitely changed so much, as I’m sure that you realize.
Miller: What did it mean to you then to get a job there?
Whims: To get a job at Genoa?
Miller: Yeah.
Whims: Well, I would have never ever applied. I had saved my money twice. It was pretty expensive back then. I think when it opened in ‘71, it was $7 for seven courses, which seems like nothing now. And by that time I probably saved some money and went with my girlfriends. We probably saved $17 to eat there. And I remember we did it twice and I always thought I would just die to work here. This is like the best restaurant. I would be so happy here. It’s Italian food. It’s what I love. Being a Latin major, I had this affinity for Italy, but I would never have gone because I hadn’t gone to culinary school and I thought they don’t want to talk to me. They wouldn’t be interested in me.
And then one day it was to a good friend of mine who worked at a sister restaurant that people who had worked at Genoa started on Hawthorne called the Bread and Ink Cafe. And she worked there and she heard that they were looking for a cook at Genoa, and she said, ‘well, you should call my roommate. She’s always cooking all the time and throwing dinner parties, and she has a million cookbooks.’ And so one day I’m working at Produce Row Cafe and I answered the phone and it’s Amelia Hard who owned Genoa, and she invited me to come in for an interview. I probably dropped the phone and ran into the dining room and said, ‘I can’t believe someone… the owner of Genoa called me!’ I went in and I got the job, and it really was my dream job.
Miller: What did you learn there?
Whims: Well, I started as the pasta cook. There were always seven courses. There was an antipasti, a soup course, a pasta course which was made to order, then there was a fish course where the fish was made to order. Then there was an entrée that you choose from three, desserts ‒ there were always seven different desserts ‒ and a fruit course. And so I made pasta for several months and the pasta changed every two weeks because the entire menu changed every two weeks. And so that was a great learning process to just make pasta, pasta, pasta and get it right and be able to cook it right all night long for as many as 12 orders at a time.
So that was a great experience.
I moved on to fish cook and eventually became an entrée cook and then pastry chef, and the next step was to become a menu chef because, as I said, the menu changed every two weeks. And so it was very unusual for a restaurant to do that. So, a new chef every two weeks would take charge of the menu and be the head chef for two weeks and then they would be done with that. And another chef would take over and that would be like three or four chefs rotating like all year round that way. So it was very countercultural. It was a very interesting place to work and business was viewed and not in a sort of a normal restaurant sort of static way.
Miller: So over the course of, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years, you went from a line cook, from the pasta cook, to the executive chef to co-owner.
Whims: Exactly.
Miller: And then eventually you realize you want to go in a different direction. And my understanding is that this is because of trips to Italy. What changed when you went to Italy?
Whims: I think this is a really interesting thing. The restaurant was called Genoa, but again we were a special occasion restaurant and at that time, I think there was still in people’s minds about eating out as special occasion that you expected certain things that were still called continental cuisine back then.
Miller: Just broadly continental.
Whims: Broadly continental. It’s hilarious, right? And Italian food was only considered Italian food if it was Northern Italian, which meant lots of butter and lots of rich ingredients and cream and things like that. It was… because people didn’t really understand food ‒ Italian food, the whole of Italy ‒ back then.
I started traveling to Italy when I bought the restaurant and one of my duties was to put together the wine list. So, winemakers from Italy were often coming into Portland and wanted to meet wine shop owners and restaurant owners to show their wines. And they often would say, ‘well, you should come visit me in, say, Piedmont, or you should come visit me in Tuscany. We at the winery have an apartment you can stay in, we’ll show you around and everything. And that sounded nice. I wasn’t gonna say no to that.
But then I started traveling and I realized the food that I was eating was much more stripped down in Italy than the food that we were making at the restaurant, and that was sort of the era of California cuisine. There was Wolfgang Puck, there was Alice Waters, and then this Northern Italian, sort of East Coast kind of take on Italian food, and the continental thing. All that was part of the food that we were making at Genoa. And it’s not that I didn’t love that food, but I fell in love with the purity of real Italian food and the freshness of the ingredients and the local vegetables and I just fell for it. And that’s what I wanted to do.
Miller: Is there any single dish among the things you ate in Italy that you remember from that time that was part of that revelation?
Whims: My first trip to the area of Northwest Italy called Piedmont next to France. They would have these series in the restaurants of antipasti, and you would order antipasti and then a series of at least five different vegetable-based things would come.
Like, you might start with bagna cáuda, which was actually an anchovy warm dip that we served at Genoa, back in the day, with raw vegetables to dip in it. And then it might be followed by a marinated different vegetable dish, like maybe fried zucchini in a vinegar sauce. And then that might be followed by a dish that’s called sformato, which is kind of like a little custard soufflé. It’s always vegetable based, so maybe a cauliflower sformato. And things would go on and on and to the point where you couldn’t even order the second course ‒ like what we consider an entrée ‒ because you were so full from all these delicious vegetables. It was a lovely way to eat.
Miller: So this is all what eventually led you to start Nostrana 20 years ago. What do you remember from that first year?
Whims: It was a real blur. I’ll tell you what I remember is that one of our goals at Nostrana was to buy from not as many local farmers, but be loyal to like five or six local farmers and buy from them twice a week and try and use everything they had. I was in charge of the pizza station at that time and we had, and we still do, have a huge wood burning oven. We were making the pizzas.
And just opening a restaurant, as you probably can imagine, is a lot of hard work. And I remember that summer of 2006 that Ayers Creek Farm was one of our farmers, and Anthony Boutard, the owner, would bring in the produce for us and it always included these Chester blackberries. They grew the most delicious blackberries, the Chester variety. And I would only have time to like to run, say hi to Anthony, write out a check and throw a handful of blackberries into my mouth and then go back to the pizza station working.
I just remembered tasting those Chester blackberries throughout the summer, like every two weeks. It was kind of like the way wine tastes different as it sits in the glass, but as the Chester blackberries were ripening in different parts of the summer, they would have a different quality every two weeks. That taste memory is what I have most about that first year of Nostrana.
Miller: You’d worked in restaurants for decades by that point. You had been a co-owner of one, but you hadn’t started your own restaurant ever before that, right? That was your first?
Whims: That’s true.
Miller: This is Cathy Whim’s restaurant. How did that make things different for you?
Whims: Well, there’s great things about it being your own restaurant. You get to decide what you put on the menu. You have to get people exited about ‒ your line cooks ‒ what you are putting on the menu, because if they don’t believe in it, then it’s not going to be a good dish.
Miller: I hadn’t thought about that piece of it. You have to get buy-in from the people who are actually making it?
Whims: Exactly. And actually the same farmer that I just talked about, Anthony Boutard at Ayers Creek Farm, had his own polenta. He would grow corn and then dry the corn and grind it to order for our restaurant, but this polenta takes a long time to cook. It’s very sort of not a fast food product. And you can buy polenta that you can cook in 10 minutes. And so my young line cooks – and they were very young at the time because there were two other major restaurants that were opening at the same time in Portland, and it was hard to hire cooks because everyone wanted them – they would say, “Cathy, what is this stupid polenta that takes forever to cook? There’s polenta in the grocery store done in ten minutes. I could get a lot more done.” And I had to stick my ground and then eventually, they said, “You know what? This polenta is really good.”
And then at that same time Anthony Bourard said, “Do you want to buy some wood? I have some cured wood that I’m selling.” And at Nostrana we had a wood burning oven. We had a wood burning grill that we grilled steaks and fish and all kinds of things. We needed wood and we were getting not very well-cured wood usually from somebody up on Mt. Hood. And so we had Anthony’s wood and my line cooks came to me and said, “I get it, Cathy. Even Anthony’s wood is better than anybody’s.” So, I won them over with that one.
Miller: I mentioned in my intro that your restaurant ‒ restaurants now at this point, plural ‒ survived the Great Recession and the pandemic at a time when, I mean, in 2020, 2021, 2022, so many really well respected beloved restaurants closed down. How did you survive?
Whims: Well, that’s a hard question. I mean it was very, very hard, and there were moments that, particularly during that first recession of being open that we – my husband and I owned the restaurant together – we sold off some assets that we had to keep the restaurant alive. We also bought out our partners, which is another financial difficulty. And I think that was like when we were like three years into it. But the restaurant was starting to gain recognition, and we got nominated for several James Beard Awards which helped a lot and we just, I don’t know, we just stuck at it, I guess I with say .
Miller: I want to turn to the new cookbook, “The Italian Summer Kitchen.” What was the big idea behind it?
Whims: I wanted to write a cookbook, and at first I thought it was going to be a restaurant book.
Miller: The Nostrana Cookbook?
Whims: The Nostrana Cookbook. And then actually COVID hit and we had… I’d written a proposal with Martha Holmberg who used to write for the Oregonian, and we were trying to sell it to publishers and we weren’t getting any bites. So my agent and I, Sharon Bowers, who I really enjoyed working with, she said, ‘well, let’s rethink this. What should we do? Like, what is your real passion behind this?’ And I said, I think really the food that I cook at home, the Italian food that I cook at home, might be what I’m actually most passionate about because I really want people to not be intimidated by cooking and to feel that that they can succeed with delicious dishes at home and sometimes restaurant food can be very intimidating.
And then I also said to Sharon, what if we did an illustrated book? Because I feel like in this age of Instagram and everything and so many food photographs that are so perfect looking that it can be kind of intimidating to think that I’ll never be able to make a dish to look exactly like that, so why should I even try? And so she knew a beautiful illustrator named Kate Lewis who lives near Knoxville, Tennessee, and then she introduced us and I loved her work.
Its watercolors that actually evoke the majolica pottery that you see hand painted in Italy, and I just felt like she could really express what eating in Italy would be like and what the food would be like. And we also chose summer as the season to represent Italian food, because summer is the time most Americans, for the first time, visit Italy. It’s also the most evocative season, I think, because everyone in Italy takes a good part of August off as a holiday that the government gives them. Ferragosto is August 15th and everyone has that off and I thought, well, maybe that’s what I want to write it ‒ somewhere in Italy.
Miller: There are a lot of zucchini recipes in this. A vegetable that I think is sometimes maligned, especially later in the summer when it’s just one person with a backyard garden gives their zucchinis to their neighbor…
Whims: Two or three-feet long.
Miller: … but the neighbor gives them to the other person, just exchanging these immense zucchinis. Do you like zucchinis?
Whims: You know, I didn’t think I like zucchini before I started working on the recipes for the book, but it was springtime two years ago, I would imagine, and it had been a really rough winter here in Portland. It had been cold and rainy and going to the farmer’s market, it was kind of the same thing every week. It was a lot of root vegetables, potatoes. I guess maybe they’re root vegetables. And maybe the greenest thing would be broccoli, which I like.
And all of a sudden spring happened in Portland in May and some of the farmers who were able to have covered vegetables like plastic over the top of their gardens had small zucchini. They were probably six inches long, and they were firm, and they were crunchy, and they were sweet, and they just tasted like the first taste of the summer to come that we were all waiting for, I think. And also the fresh herbs were happening. There’s basil in the market, and it just felt like I’m getting towards summer finally and I started making zucchini recipes. And I just enjoyed all of them. It think there’s probably seven or eight in the book. I would have never thought that would have happened, but it did.
Miller: So we’re talking a little bit before one o’clock now on a Friday. Do you know what you’re going to be making for dinner tonight?
Whims: Tonight’s Friday, and we always call it Fish Friday at the restaurant and my one of my chef de cuisine, Justin Carr, he loves fish as much as I do, and he loves sort of fishy tasting things like anchovies and bottarga, which is dried fish roe. And so he’s in charge on Friday, and he usually puts on at least two fish antipasti dishes, at least one fish pasta dish, a fresh fish entrée that we maybe haven’t had all week, and it’s actually my favorite night to eat at the restaurant because they’re very creative dishes and I love them.
Miller: That’s the restaurant, but what about if you were just cooking at home?
Whims: Oh at home?
Miller: Or does it ever get to be 5 o’clock and you say ‘I have no idea what I’m making’, the way that many of us live?
Whims: Oh I see what you’re saying. Well, a lot of times I turn to pasta, because I always have my pantry stocked with pasta. Actually, there’s a recipe in this book that I think I’m telling people that I think this should be the first one that you should cook because it’s very easy. It’s spaghettini with prawns. And spaghettini is means thin spaghetti. It’s very not as thin as angel hair, but spaghettini is cooked with sauteed prawns with garlic and parsley in olive oil and tossed with the spaghettini, and there’s something about the thin spaghetti that is able to soak up the flavor from the fish that it’s cooked in. And the whole dish of spaghettini ends up tasting like the flavor of the shrimp, as opposed to just the shrimp on top of plain pasta. And so I suggest that one to people.
Miller: Cathy Whims, congratulations on this new book and thank you.
Cathy Whims: Thank you. Thank you so much, Dave.
Miller: Cathy Whims is the chef behind Nostrana and Oven and Shaker and Enoteca Nostrana. Her new book is called “The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita.”
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