As the youngest and first female sous chef at Gramercy Tavern in New York, Sarah Schafer knows a few things about breaking barriers. A Boston native, she graduated from Culinary Institute of America in 1993 and counts Ken Oringer, Tom Colicchio, and restaurateur Danny Meyer as mentors.
After cutting her teeth on the East Coast, Schafer moved west, eventually opening Irving Street Kitchen in Portland, Oregon, in 2010, with business partner Anna Caporael. Now, the two are plotting an ambitious project: a 5,000-square-foot food hall and market inspired by Mercato Centrale in Florence. Called La Cooperativa, the space will include a Roman-style pizza counter and pasta station with a variety of pastas and sauces, both overseen by Schafer, a bar with Italian cocktails and wines by Irving Street Kitchen’s bar manager Joel Schmeck, coffee by a first-generation Italian-American, a gelato cart, a salumi stall by someone who breeds their own Berkshire pigs, a flower vendor, and a small market with fresh produce from area farmers.
Anna Caporael and Sarah Schafer
Here, Schafer chats with us about her new project, what it’s like to be a female chef and owner, and how fine dining is evolving.
How will La Cooperativa combine your passion for Italian food and the city of Portland?
Italian food has always been a passion project for me. I’ve worked with a lot of French chefs and did that style of cooking for so long, but the only kind of food that I wanted to eat was Italian (outside of foie gras!). I’ve been traveling back and forth to Italy for years and I have friends who live in Florence that took me to the Mercato Centrale in Florence. My friend Kate had to go to the specific butcher who sold the chicken that is perfect for chicken soup and she needed this one type of tortellini that was just the best she’d ever had in Florence, and that’s what she wanted in the soup.
It struck me, walking through there, that this is really what cooking should be about. It should be about the community and that it’s a foundation of daily life and you’re meeting your friends there and you see a neighbor reaching over for some beets or something, or you meet you loved ones for a cocktail upstairs. I started thinking, I’ve lived a life of such fine dining that I kind of want to get back to just—this is the most beautiful filled ravioli or rigatoni and I’m going to have it with this basil that’s in season. I like that idea of picking and choosing based on how I felt, what I wanted to eat that day.
Why did you decide to open a non-traditional eatery now, as opposed to a fine dining restaurant?
I’ve worked in restaurants for 30 years and most of them fine dining and most of them with really amazing, talented, acclaimed chefs. I’ve lived that life. With this project, I feel like it’s more about recreating community, getting back to that beautiful pasta that’s made with my own hands, or the Roman street style pizza with a beautiful tomato just sort of painted on it.
Anna and I both come from fine dining restaurants. We kind of feel like the model’s kind of broken a little bit for restaurants, and it kind of has been for like 15, 20 years. We want to rethink it because we love food and restaurants so much, and how we create that community and that thing, that service that we love so much. So, it’s less about how many butts we can put in the seats and more about how many people we can get walking through the marketplace to sort of enjoy and create that buzz.
Do you see yourself ever going back to other types of food or is it really just Italian now and you can’t imagine anything else now?
I feel like Italian is my next step, it’s my thing right now. But I’m fascinated by food and the technique and what’s behind it and what makes different cultures do things different ways. I’m fascinated by tomatoes. I grow my grandfather’s organic, heirloom tomatoes that he brought over from Germany years ago in my yard every year. And I was talking to Fabio Picchi about heirloom tomatoes in his shop in Florence. And then I was walking down the street and I heard someone yelling behind me, and I turned around and he had actually had one of his guys run to me with a piece of paper, and on the piece of paper he had literally taken a tomato and just squashed it into the pages so I could have all the seeds. So, I got on the plane with a piece of paper with all these tomato seeds smashed into it and lo and behold, I’ve planted them for the last three years. So, there are those things that I’m learning that just fascinate me about Italian food right now.
Have you taken any cooking classes in Italy?
For a while I was like, I’m that chef who doesn’t need to go to a class. And now I’m like, no, there’s so much more that I could learn in a class. About two and half years ago I went to a cooking school in Bologna for a couple classes on just pasta. That class in Bologna opened up my eyes. I spent a little time with Fabio Picchi, but that was more of just watching from a quiet distance. I am fascinated by his passion, it’s a real raw passion for cooking. I have spent some time in Florence with a friend of mine, and there’s this local deli shop that she goes to, and I spent time with the gentleman who owns it and his nonna. She taught me how to make lasagna and a few other things.
As a woman, do you feel like things are changing in the industry, in terms of gender equality and respect?
You could say I grew up working in New York, male-dominated restaurants. Even though I worked in a really amazingly forward thinking, for its time—working for Danny [Meyer] at Eleven Madison Park—it’s hard as a woman. You need to play everything super close to the vest and not tell anyone anything really about you because it was cutthroat. Everyone wanted your job. If you called out sick there was someone else in the line who wanted to jump in your spot. You know, it’s a very hard question to answer actually, because times have changed so much and I’m not the kind of chef who will hire you just because you’re a woman or think that men cook better than woman. It can be a very misogynistic world, it was much more so than it is today.
Do you think Portland is more forgiving or accepting of women, or is it more just like the times have changed everywhere?
Yes, I think Portland is much more accepting and there’s much more of a community. There’s actually a lot of men in this town who will see me at an event or I’ll see them at an event and they’re very friendly, they’re very kind, they’re very welcoming. It’s like you’re a part of the buddy crew and that’s something I’ve never had before. And then there’s those situations where you’re in cities like New York or in San Francisco where you might see another woman at an event and they’ll sort of not really acknowledge you just because they’re in their world and you’re not a part of their crew. So, I kind of feel like it comes from both sides. I do wish I had figured out a way to take a slightly different path so that I could have worked for one female chef, but it just didn’t play out that way. And I wouldn’t exchange any of the people I worked for.
How was it for you and Anna, as two women, getting the space for La Cooperativa and getting people to believe in the idea?
I think it was more about us finding our voice than how many people we could get to listen to us. I think we could and we did get people to listen to us, but it was more about us figuring out that we don’t have to be the shy girl in the corner. We can be more aggressive and be willing to walk away if it just doesn’t seem right. And I think a lot of women have a hard time with that because they think it’s the only opportunity they’re going to get. If you don’t ask the question then you don’t get the answer, right? Then you’re just left with, Oh, they wouldn’t have given it to me anyway.
Let’s finish with an easy one. What is your favorite kind of pasta and sauce combination that you’re most excited to do at La Cooperativa?
That’s actually a tough one, especially since you’re quoting me on it! Because there’s one I’m in love with but I don’t know if I can actually do it. I want to try and do a fagottini filled with a mortadella and bread mixture, because the French make a roasted bread sauce. And I want to fold some mortadella into that and fill it into the little fagottini purses. But I would totally serve that with a walnut-parmesan butter.