Gregory Gourdet amended his Haitian kitchen plan after being embroiled in citywide anger over the treatment of restaurant employees.

Gregory Gourdet enjoys Haitian-style duck dishes at Kann Winter Village, a pop-up store he opened after postponing plans to open a Haitian restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Celeste Noche for The New York Times

Portland, Oregon - In an early morning interview last February, it was still normal for strangers to meet and talk without a mask. One of Portland’s most famous chefs, Gregory Gourdet (Gregory Gourdet) ) Shared his vision for 2020. As the second contestant of "Top Chef", he plans to accomplish two long-term goals: to complete his first cookbook "Everyone's Table" and open his first restaurant Kann.

Mr. Gourdet is the son of Haitian immigrants. He knew at the time that he wanted Kann to show Haitian cuisine, as well as the healthy, paleo-friendly, dairy-free and gluten-free cooking flavours that he has accepted since his sobriety in 2009, and become his The focus of the book. He is looking forward to returning to Haiti, cooking at his aunt's house, eating stewed conch and okra.

Mr. Gourdet has been making exquisite Asian food for most of his career. He started in New York in the early 2000s, when he worked for Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and served as the executive chef of Departure restaurant and lounge in Poland in the 2010s. The Nines Hotel in Tran, he became famous in one fell swoop. (He is also the Culinary Director of Departure Restaurant in Denver, which opened from 2016 to 2019.)

A smile appeared on his face thinking of introducing his adoptive hometown to the cooking he grew up in Queens, New York. "Haiti cuisine is not well represented," he said. "This is part of me. This is what I want Portland to have."

But the pandemic quickly undermined the plan and the trip to Haiti. Then there is what the locals call "liquidation"-hotel staff's description of abuse in city restaurants. The anger that unfolded on social media and local media last summer included anonymous online accusations that Mr. Good did not take sufficient measures to stop the harassment and discrimination at the Departure restaurant, and that he did not properly praise the pastry chef for her thoughts.

He denied these allegations, pointing out that his power was limited to restaurants he did not own. But he said that he "heard everyone's opinions", contacted many of them, and hoped to help change the power dynamics in this industry that has long abused workers. Mr. Gourdet said that he has reimagined his new restaurant as a template for how to do this.

Mr. Goode stopped actively looking for space for Kang in the summer when Portland was overturned by the pandemic blockade and frequent protests against George Freud's death. With the opening time postponed to 2022, he turned to Kann Winter Village, a pop-up store that started in December and will continue into early spring.

Seven of his nine newly hired kitchen staff are people of color; six are women and one is non-binary. In order to resolve concerns about restaurant salary imbalances, all employees except the manager receive the same salary, and tips are evenly distributed between restaurant and kitchen employees.

Mr. Gourdet is far from the first chef to take such measures. But he believes that his experiment can begin to answer questions about how Portland restaurants can satisfy employees’ demands for fairness and civility. At the time, people had extremely distrusted chefs like Mr. Gordet, and he was in a system he wanted to change now. Flourish.

In an interview last month in the Winter Village kitchen in a former foundry in southeastern Portland, Gould said: "This pandemic has really destroyed our entire community, and the liquidation has really destroyed us." "I came to see it rebuild."

The uncertainty of the future is particularly troublesome in Portland. The city’s reputation in the gastronomical scene — voted the best in America in 2015 by the Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema — is out of proportion to its size, and the number of signature restaurants closed during the pandemic is staggering. These include Beast, the flagship business of award-winning chef Naomi Pomeroy, and all six iterations of the famous Thai restaurant Pok Pok by chef Andy Ricker.

This makes Mr. Gould, 45, a member of a declining industry leader, trying to build something new in a scarred city.

Although he considers himself an introvert, in the 10 years he left, he spared time to appear on TV, travel the world and host annual food and music parties. "Everyone's Table" will not be available until May, but pre-orders have put it on the top of the bestseller list at Powell's bookstore, a famous bookseller in the city.

Mr. Ricker said that Mr. Gourdet's professional experience, coupled with his belonging to many marginalized communities in the industry, make him very suitable to lead Portland restaurants through the crisis.

"In many ways, Gregory represents the historical moment we are in. He is black. He is gay. He cares about the environment. He tries to represent the food in his own culture," 57-year-old Mr. Rick in Chiang Mai, Thailand Said in a telephone interview at home in the suburbs. "He represents a lot of things in the current conflict in the United States."

Local restaurant owners said that due to the generational gap between management and the workforce, as well as the preferences of hotel staff, many of them worry about alienating future employers, making the task of repairing the fence more difficult for the distressed workforce. Social media .

"These conversations are crucial," said Ms. Pomeroy, 46, who once wrote about her regrets, saying that she imitated the masculinity of a male chef early in her career. "But when you are only interested in these online defamation activities, rather than talking face-to-face, there will be no fixes."

Brooke Jackson-Glidden, a 26-year-old editor, said that with the promotion of #MeToo and the "Black People’s Fate" movement, similar situations occurred across the country last year, but Portland’s The situation reflects the turbulent politics that has existed here for many years. Portland diners who grew up in Oregon.

“There is a natural tension between the left and the alternative right groups,” she said, “between people here and people who have just moved here, and between vegetarians and people who focus on healthy eating, and between Between people interested in healthy eating. Meat."

The restaurant commotion began in July when Maya Lovelace, the chef and co-owner of Southern restaurant Yonder and dinner club Mae, asked local restaurant workers for written statements about on-the-job abuse. The 33-year-old Ms. Lovelace posted on her Instagram account in the name of Stories a screenshot of the news over the past four days, in which the identity of the accuser was hidden, and the information disappeared automatically after 24 hours.

According to Oregonian reports, the anonymous allegations "rang from human resource errors to serious criminal charges." Their target is some of Portland's most famous food companies. Several people have issued public responses, including Olympia Provisions, a deli company that runs Portland restaurants, and Ava Gene's and Tusk restaurants. Ms. Lovelace herself eventually faced charges, including that of her only black employee, claiming that she was insensitive to her employees. (In an interview, Ms. Lovelace apologized for "making anyone uncomfortable" and added, "I also understand that my intentions cannot eliminate the effects of any actions I take to harm others. ")

She said that the allegations against Mr. Gould were “not necessarily related to his character or personal behavior” and most of the criticism was centered on Sage Hospitality, the company that owns Departure and Nines Hotel.

The New York Times asked eight people working at Departure to talk about their experiences, but only two former Denver employees agreed. One of them, Cheryl Jordan, said that while working as a pastry chef there, she endured and witnessed "objectionable sexual harassment", including threats of sexual violence. She reported the situation to Sage Hospitality's human resources department in 2016.

In her recording of the meeting, Ms. Jordan asked the manager why the company did not take disciplinary action against the male chef accused of harassment, including one who she said exposed herself to a female colleague. "I've heard rape jokes, I've heard sexual harassment jokes about making children," Ms. Jordan said in the recording. (Mr. Gould did not attend the meeting.)

After a male manager responded that the investigation was continuing, Ms. Jordan, 38, described her description of management’s unwillingness to take action against male employees who often use abusive language to refer to female colleagues and immediately fired a chef she reported A comparison was made and called Mr. Goode a racial slander. "As we all know, racism will not be tolerated here, while misogyny and sexism are," she said.

In response to this article, Sage Hospitality stated that “due to “privacy issues”, “we are unable to respond in detail to media requests for workplace complaints”.

Like others who posted on social media, Ms. Jordan said that Mr. Goodt “knows about the harassment, but did not take any action to stop it.” She added: “I hope Gregory will do something for the harm that has been done. Compensation, but he didn't." She refuted his plan for Kann Winter Village, thinking it was a "publicity stunt."

A male chef who set out to work with Ms. Jordan in Denver said that sexual harassment occurred in the kitchen, but he did not believe Mr. Goode was responsible.

The chef said: "When someone says something before he can't hear it, it can't be his fault," the chef requested anonymity because he didn't want to get involved in controversy. "I think he is a great person. He tries to show how you should behave."

Mr. Gourdet said that when he was working there, he did not know the details of Departure Denver's complaint. "I dealt with zero human resources in Denver," he said. He said that he was aware of the complaints about Departure Portland, but he "turned a blind eye" to more complaints that appeared last summer because he believed that others in Sage's management were working on these issues. "People think there are not enough solutions in these situations," he said.

He said that other dissatisfaction is not within his scope. When talking about several anonymous complaints on social media about the "objectified dresses" that female waiters must wear at the departure restaurant, he said that he pushed for a change of uniforms, but it was unsuccessful. "I don't manage the restaurant," he said. (The pastry chef said that he did not attribute her ideas to her, but declined to be interviewed, but wrote in an Instagram message that this was just one of several complaints she had about leaving Portland's workplace culture.)

Mr. Gourdet said he takes criticism at heart. "My job is to make sure that all 30 people who work in the kitchen under me feel good every day, and I didn't do that," he said.

Mr. Gourdet opposed the role of Ms. Lovelace, as he said on the Internet last summer, “as a judge, jury, executioner, and person who accepts an apology” and opposed the fact that the accuser is anonymous, thus eliminating the possibility of remedy . "I am a repairman," he said. "I want to fix things."

When Mr. Gould was sitting in the kitchen of Kann Winter Village last month, a side door opened to the outdoor "village" of 10 yurts provided by American Express as part of a national plan. Tia Vanich, the project’s director of operations and Mr. Gourdet’s business partner, is helping to update the tent before the next service. In January, Portland still banned indoor dining. (These restrictions were lifted earlier this month.)

"Without a yurt, we would have no business," Ms. Vanich said.

Mr. Gourdet is trying to create a more inclusive and harmonious working environment, which is most evident in Kann's kitchen. "I could have had a group of white men work in this place for about five minutes," he said. "But as a gay black man, and everything related to the liquidation and George Floyd, I don't want to do that."

In the kitchen, 35-year-old Varanya Geyoonsawat, as the sous chef, is the highest-level kitchen staff below Mr. Gordet. She and 27-year-old Jasmyne Romero-Clark prepared three six-course tasting menus—one fish and one fish. Vegetarian, an omnivorous animal-served five nights a week. Each menu includes a ripe plantain salad, pumpkin and cashew pickled apples, a soup and an inverted banana cake covered with warm coconut cream.

Most of Kann's food is served in polished Staub pots, which are much more rustic than the modern pan-Asian cuisine that Mr. Gordet is familiar with in Departure. He admits that this dazzling rooftop restaurant is incompatible with the unpretentious, do-it-yourself aesthetic of the restaurant owned by the chef who put Portland on the map.

He mentioned Ms. Geyoonsawat. She and Ms. Romero-Clark were working in Departure at the end of their term. As a chef, he did not fully realize her talents in Departure's busy kitchen. He said he needed to work more closely with her to test his recipes and make him realize that she is capable of leading Kann's kitchen.

Ms. Romero-Clark said that she also felt that her opportunities were limited by the male chefs who did not take her seriously when they set off, but she did not blame Mr. Good. "He went to many places," she said.

In early February, she was promoted to Kann's kitchen manager, which resulted in a salary increase-a boon for Ms. Romero-Clark, who was not entirely satisfied with the equal pay structure imposed by Mr. Gourdet. "I don't want to say that my job is more important than others," she said, "but sometimes, when I take more responsibility than others, it doesn't seem to be completely fair."

Mr. Gourdet said that he may have to adjust his progressive kitchen plan to suit the needs of employees, and it is unclear whether it is sustainable as a business model. But so far, Kann's Haitian cuisine is very popular. He said that tables in Winter Village are often sold out.

He looks forward to promoting "Everyone's Table" and his third appearance in the April premiere of "Top Chef", this time as a guest judge.

JJ Goode, who co-authored the book, said that he was initially skeptical of Mr. Gordet's idea of ​​a gluten, legumes and dairy-free cookbook. After the chef sent him "a well-thought-out catalog, a great title, and a list of 200 recipes, he changed his mind, all of which sounded great," experienced cookbook author Mr. Good Say. "Trust me, this will never happen."

This book does not include a recipe that must be Conn’s signature: a whole duck stewed in Haitian Creole sauce and spices, then cooked in oil seals. This dish is a modification of the Peking duck, which was very popular in Departure, although Mr. Gourdet was quick to point out that it was not entirely his own. Other chefs participated in its creation, and then, in Kann, Ms. Geyoonsawat "made almost all of them."

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