Carrie Welch, co-founder of Feast Portland (photo: Little Green Pickle)
Interview by Megan Cole
Food and drink lovers flock to food festivals like moths to a flame, but with so many out there event organizers have had to up their game to compete. In the world of food and drink events, Feast Portland goes beyond what you’ve come to expect from these types of festivals. Going into its fourth year, Feast Portland has continued to offer a unique opportunity for those who don’t just love eating and drinking, and for those who want to learn and experience everything some of North America’s best chefs have to offer. The idea for this mammoth event came from Carrie Welch and Mike Thelin who, with the help of many friends and the supportive Portland community, are taking Feast into it’s fourth year. To find out how Welch found herself involved in the festival and in Portland, we caught up with her amidst the preparation for the event in September.
You’ve found yourself in an interesting part of the culinary world. Why did you choose to pursue the public relations side of things and not end up in the kitchen, for example?
Carrie Welch: That’s a very good question with a very simple answer: I’m terrible at serving food and wine, it turns out. I was a server back in my teenaged days, at Denny’s of all places, and thought I was pretty good at it when I was 16 years old and could handle a Grand Slam Breakfast with my eyes close. After I did 10 years doing public relations at The Food Network, my wife and I decided that we were going to open a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, and we packed up and headed west. I got a job as a server in Portland at a restaurant called Wildwood, which has unfortunately closed down last year, and hopefully not because of my terrible theatrics as a server. But I found after three months of serving that I was actually really bad at it. I feel like in this life you have to recognize when you’re not good at something, and for me carrying six glasses on a tray, doing math to figure out my tips, just very simple things, didn’t come easily. I said to my wife, “I think I need to go back to that PR thing, and maybe I will freelance,” and that’s how Little Green Pickle started, and we started talking about restaurants rather than working within them. My wife is a very talented cook and she could have opened a restaurant, but now she’s my personal chef.
She might have more fun there, too.
Yeah, and luckily she’s done web design since she was 18, so she does web design for Little Green Pickle now.
Why did you choose Portland of the places to potentially start a restaurant?
We’re kind of a product of all those New York Times stories, and media coverage of Portland, Oregon. My wife Jannie [Huang] and I met when she was running the web design for Foodnetwork.com and I was running PR for the network. We met there and fell in love and we talked about how some day we needed to move out of New York City before that whole “you get too hard” thing started happening to us, and you’re contemplating pushing grandma down the subway stairs to get to your train, and you know it’s time to leave New York. We were getting to that point and I asked her what cities she’d consider moving to. She said she’d been to Portland a long time ago and her brother used to live there, and we thought maybe we should check it out. We also started hearing about it at the network. People at the Food Network were saying it’s one of the best culinary destinations in the country, and the Food Network was putting on an award show and chose Portland, Oregon as the best food destination in the US in 2007. We came out here in 2008 on vacation and ate and drank our way through the city for nine days and just totally fell in love with it. I remember taking a taxi back from the airport, and we flew in to Newark, New Jersey. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but if you haven’t, don’t go. It’s just not a nice city, unfortunately, and the cab had no air conditioning, we had the windows down, and looking down on smoke stacks, and it just wasn’t a pretty scene. In that moment I remembered the breath of air that Portland, Oregon was, and I turned to Jannie and said, “We have to move there. We just have to do that.” And she said, “I know, we’re already there.”
How long after you moved did you decide to embark on organizing Feast Portland?
It took about five minutes. We’re a couple New Yorkers, moving to Portland, jumping off of cliffs left and right. We just decided to go for it. We met a guy named Mike Thelin who was friends with all of our friends. We said, “Hey, Mike what’s going on with you?” and he said, “I’m thinking of starting this food festival.” And I was like, “Great, let’s do it.” But when I think if whether I would have done it again, I don’t know if I would have been so bold, because now, knowing what I know, putting on a food festival is a lot. But sometimes you’ve got to just jump in with both feet and see how it turns out.
The Feast Portland Night Market (photo: Little Green Pickle)
I’m sure there are tons, but what stands out as one of your favourite memories from over the last three years of Feast Portland?
Oh geez, it’s hard to pick one. I would say that my favourite moment so far was just walking into the festival for the first time in year one, because it was just such a crap shoot. It was myself, Jannie, Mike, and our festival director Emily Crowley, and it was a very hand-crafted festival, we like to say. We were all carrying boxes and making sure the chefs got to where they needed to be, and it’s not like we don’t do that now; now we just do it on a much larger level. It was very DIY Portland feeling that year. We were starting something from scratch and it had that startup feel. We really felt like this thing could be great, or it could fail miserably. There was this 50/50 chance that it wasn’t going to go well, but when I walked into the Sandwich Invitational, which is our Thursday night kickoff event, and I saw it, and it matched and exceeded all my expectations, I almost broke down crying just out of sheer happiness and relief, because it was actually working, and I knew it was going to be a success at that moment. That’s kind of something you never really forget.
Do you think if you had tried to do this in another city it would have had the same amount of success?
I think we could, and it’s something we do consider, but boy does it have to be stars aligning in the right way, because that’s how it was here in Portland. Portland wanted a food and drinks festival of this size and magnitude. We do over 30 events over four days with 87 chefs, that’s a lot for a small city. I feel like if there is another city that wants to put in the time, the love and the money, then, yeah, they could totally do it. But you’d have to have a confluence of events to bring it to life.
It seems like you guys have such strong support from the local chefs, producers, distillers, wineries and breweries, and I’m sure you’d find that in other places, but Portland just seems to have that infrastructure that makes it work.
You’re exactly right. If we don’t have the chefs, if we don’t have the support of the community, then it doesn’t work. Once the chefs saw what we were trying to pull off, they were like, “Okay, I’m in.” Chefs love a challenge. We were like, “Hey, do you guys want to cook for 1,200 people and do some Asian-inspired street food at the night market,” and they were like, “Hell yeah, we do.” It was kind of neat, especially in year one, when the chefs, wineries, breweries and distilleries jumped off the cliff with us. It was particularly remarkable with the wineries and the breweries, because they get asked to do a ton of events; there are so many wine and food festivals. People need another festival like they need a hole in the head, so I think for us it was they knew we were different and we were actually bringing value to their businesses.
What are you looking forward to most with this year’s event?
I’m looking forward to our new event, Smoked on Saturday night. We re-imagined our Saturday night event from High Comfort to Smoked, and I really think that this event is going to bring Feast to life even more for people, because they will feel that outdoor energy. We felt like we needed to be outdoor for these nighttime events, because Portland is so beautiful and we have that lovely Indian Summer here. When we are under the Fremont Bridge in the Pearl District, where we are going to be for Smoked, and you see campfires and as much smoking and firing as the City of Portland with allow us to do, that will feel so much more Feast-like. Seeing what the chefs come up with as “smoked” as a theme, we’re saying, “Don’t call it a cookout” because it doesn’t just have to be barbecue, so chefs are saying they’re going to smoke their flour and make baked goods, or they’re going to make smoked vegetables or fish. I’m so excited for that one because it’s brand new, no one has seen it before, and it’s already close to selling out.
Bon Appetit Presents Feast Portland: A Celebration of Oregon Bounty in Portland, Oregon takes place September 17-20.
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