Portland, Oregon, may now be world-renowned for its food scene, but before all the hype, there was Cathy Whims.
Whims has been serving classic Italian fare to Pacific Northwesterners for decades, first at the now-closed Genoa and now at Nostrana (serving seasonally-influenced dishes), Enoteca Nostrana (a wine bar next door to the restaurant), and Oven and Shaker (specializing in Italian street food and wood-fired pizza), all of which she co-owns with her husband, David West.
The chef—who has been nominated for Best Chef, Northwest by the James Beard Foundation six times—also visits Italy often to meet and eat with other chefs, restaurateurs, wine producers, distillers and artisan producers, finding inspiration in the shared experiences. There was a time, however, when she felt like she had to “relearn everything” about Italian food—which she did from one of the genre’s legendary experts.
We chatted with Whims how she fell in love with Italian cuisine, how she’s gotten Oregon farmers to grow Venetian beans, and her connection to Marcella Hazan.
What drew you to Italian cooking specifically?
I always loved Italian food, and when I moved to Portland, Oregon, I got a job at what was at the time—it’s no longer open—the best special occasion restaurant in Portland, called Genoa. I worked there starting in 1984, for 20 years, and for the last 13 of them I ended up owning the restaurant. When I became the owner, I also became the wine buyer, so I was meeting all these amazing Italian winemakers who were inviting me to come visit—which I did, for the first time, around 1988.
And what blew my mind is that I thought I’d been cooking Italian food all along, but when I got to Italy and I started eating, I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t even know what I’m doing! I’m not making Italian food, I’m making some kind of bastardization of French, Italian, California cuisine.”
Nostrana Gnocchi (ph John Valls)
So what did you do?
I had to relearn everything. By eating, and asking to stage in kitchens in Italy. Then, later on, one of our cooks at Genoa had a radio show where she interviewed cookbook authors and she was going to interview Marcella Hazan (the Italian-born, James Beard Award-winning author.) Marcella was our inspiration at Genoa—we had all of her books and we used a lot of her recipes. I asked my friend to talk her and (her husband and collaborator) Victor into coming to Genoa. But they said, “Oh no, we never eat Italian food in America.”
Later that afternoon, I picked up the phone and it was Victor on the line, and he was like, “We’ve reconsidered. We would like to come to dinner.” And so they came, and at the end of the meal, she asked me to sit down with them and she asked me a bunch of questions. Then she said, “I’m retiring from teaching, but I think you should be in one of my very last classes.” And she bumped me ahead of this line of people that had waited for years to study with her in Venice!
How did that class influence you or change your cooking?
One day we did potato gnocchi and it just blew my mind. It was like, these gnocchi are so light, I’ve never eaten gnocchi this light. I’m sure I’d probably tried to make them myself and wasn't that thrilled with the results. And the key, besides the technique, was that she didn’t believe in adding any egg to the dough because the protein in the egg made them heavier in her mind. And so I came back from that class and I was just obsessed with gnocchi and I became a potato gnocchi evangelist. To this day, every Thursday at Nostrana, since we opened 14 years ago, we take pasta off the menu and only have gnocchi, with four or five different sauces.
Nostrana
Which ingredients do you get locally and what are you sourcing from Italy?
Form Italy we get cheeses, San Marzano tomatoes, Prosciutto, olive oil. But now there are local Oregon farmers that are growing radicchio tardivo, Belgian endive, things like that. And we get porcini in the fall and the spring. We have one farmer that grows all these varieties of amazing beans. One I actually told him about; I said, “You should grow this bean called borlotto lamon, it’s from around Venice.” And he got seeds for it and started growing it and he’s been growing it for like 13 years or so. He seed selects and he’s always culling what the best producing ones are, so he renamed it to the town where his farm is, “borlotto Gaston beans,” because he feels they’ve evolved so much from the original seeds he brought back.
Since you never lived in Italy, do you think that you might spend some time there when you retire?
What I really want to do, my big dream, is to spend a few months just studying Italian in Italy. I’ve studied Italian for at least 28 years. But since I’ve never lived here, I’m just taking classes at Portland State University. So what I would really like to do is become at least partially fluent.