Six years ago, Bluehour alumni John Pickett and Doug Weiler took over the former Fenrir space to open Willow, their pop-up-turned-restaurant serving a six-course tasting menu. Weiler and Pickett pitched Willow as a true “Cascadian” restaurant, highlighting hyper-local Pacific Northwestern ingredients in an oft-changing tasting menu. Last week, the restaurant quietly closed for good, according to the restaurant’s recorded voicemail message and a small sign posted in the window of the restaurant’s front door. The note, dated March 9, notes that the restaurant “has permanently closed its doors to the public,” with no specific explanation for the closure.
Willow opened in Southeast Portland in the spring of 2016, starting with three-course dinners before scaling up to the full six-course prix fixe. Dishes ranged from poached salmon with cucumber and dill to a steak tartare mimicking the flavors of a cheeseburger. The restaurant itself was meant to feel like someone’s apartment, intimate and homey, with fewer than 20 seats.
And, like a friend’s dinner party, Willow became an under-the-radar affair: It cultivated a loyal roster of regulars, who returned for the innovative and relatively inexpensive tasting menu. The restaurant regularly scored highly on user-reviewed sites: OpenTable ranked Willow as one of its Top 100 Restaurants of 2019, and Yelp called Willow one of its “Top 100 Places to Treat Yourself.” However, Weiler and Pickett struggled to garner the attention of the city’s critics, as they publicly discussed. “Something was lost in translation when we spoke with PR and they communicated our story,” Weiler said in 2017.
When the pandemic struck, Willow was in a difficult position, as a tasting menu restaurant in a small space without outdoor dining areas. It hibernated for several months, eventually launching a takeout program in the summer of 2020. The restaurant reopened for dine-in in 2021, but announced another hiatus in December. “As the first weeks of the pandemic have stretched into months and years, we are still scrambling to offer meals that feed, nourish, and enrich. While we re-opened with excitement and trepidation six months ago, we are finding it harder and harder to create the experience that we have always offered,” an Instagram announcement reads. “Unfortunately, we are at the point where we need to take time away from Willow to re-focus and prioritize.”
Willow isn’t the only tasting menu restaurant to succumb to the pandemic: Holdfast Dining closed in 2020, and the space once home to Beast has transformed into the more casual Ripe Cooperative (owner Naomi Pomeroy has mentioned, on numerous occasions, interest in reopening Beast in a new location). Castagna has yet to reopen for dine-in service, and Le Pigeon cut its a la carte options as it returned to regular service. It’s unclear how — or if — Portland will continue to keep its tasting menu restaurants afloat, as the pandemic continues to trickle forward.
Eater Portland has reached out to the Willow team for comment.
• Willow [Official]
• All previous Willow coverage [EPDX]
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March 15, 2022 at 05:41AM
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Cult Favorite Tasting Menu Spot Willow Has Closed Permanently - Eater Portland
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