About Portland: Vitaly Paley Embraces the Pioneer Spirit

“Portland is a young city that still holds on to its pioneering spirit,” says Vitaly Paley as the new sinks in one of his restaurants, Imperial — located at the Hotel Lucia — that has been named the best restaurant at a hotel not just in Portland but on the whole West Coast

That was the judgment of Sunset Magazine, which also named Portland best food town in the west. As if there was any doubt.

Paley is quick to say that while it is his restaurant, it is not his alone.

“This is a team effort,” he says. “I am the chef, but I am part of a team, and it is the team that makes it successful. You can have a very talented chef but without a team to help turn dreams into reality, you will not have success.

“Imperial is a success because it is has a group of people working together. It’s a group of men and women, a partnership among people trying to accomplish the same thing — putting the best food on the plate, making the experience as enjoyable as possible

“Teamwork is crucial.”

Paley is a pioneer in this pioneer town.

When he opened Paley’s Place in February 1995, Portland was not known as a food town. An immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Paley originally headed to New York as a teen to study piano at Juilliard. His love of cooking would come later.

But when it arrived, it came strong and brought out a creativity he had not experienced.

There was study in France, and when he returned to New York he worked his way up the culinary ladder. Paley worked in some of the city’s best restaurants including Chanterelle and Union Square Cafe.

He also met his wife, Kimberly. She also had been working up the culinary ladder, though instead of working in the kitchen like Vitaly, she started as a waitress and worked her way up to managing the front of the house.

In 1994, they moved to Oregon. They were impressed by the abundance of fresh ingredients. At first they weren’t sure where they wanted to settle. Portland was a possibility. But so was Bend.

It was a dinner they had at the Heathman Hotel’s restaurant that helped seal the deal. It was one of the few true destination places in Portland, and Paley wondered about whether he would be able to fit into this city, would he one day have his own place, would it be considered in the same breath as the Heathman?

The answer started to form soon after. One night Paley went to pick up Kimberly at her job at Wildwood. Across the street was an open, available space.

In 1995, Paley’s Place was born. A decade later he was the James Beard Award Winning Best Chef in the Northwest. Then, in 2012, came Imperial. Success followed success.

“The great thing about Portland is that we are so young that people are not tied to hundreds of years of tradition,” he says. “People are not bound like they are in other places. We get to play here in ways others can’t.

“If I want to make a cilantro pesto, or a sundried tomato pesto. If I want to use hazelnuts instead of pine nuts. I can do all that here. Somewhere else, someone might say, well, that’s not pesto. But if I want to do that here and call it pesto. I can.”

Paley says that creativity, that pioneer spirit, has allowed Portland to become a food capital or, as Sunset Magazine put it, the best food city on the West Coast.

“We are a very white city,” he concedes; the actual number is close to 73 percent white. “At the same time, there is a diversity of cuisine here that you won’t find in lots of places.”

He says it is the pioneer spirit, the lack of ties to tradition that has resulted in places as diverse as his restaurants, Gabriel Rucker’s Le Pigeon, Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok.

“There is a debate in the culinary world about authenticity,” he says. “But authenticity is not just about a commitment to a recipe, it is also about an emotional commitment to a heritage. Look at Rick Bayless who operates what might be the best Mexican restaurant in the world.

“Or what Andy Ricker does with Thai food.. Portland has a diversity of cuisine because it has a diversity of imagination.”

In his more than 20 years in Portland, Paley has tried to embrace that spirit of welcoming, of help, that he first encountered when he moved out there. Chefs who have passed through his kitchens can be found through the area, the most notable of which might be Gabriel Rucker, the chef behind Le Pigeon.

Now, Paley is getting ready to work that imagination in a way that almost brings him full circle to when he first arrived in Portland — back to the Heathman Hotel.

Later this fall, Paley will be opening Headwaters, a new restaurant in the Heathman Hotel.

As the name implies, it will have a strong seafood sense on its menu. And, that’s where the creativity and imagination come to play.

“There are a lot of people in the area that believe seafood here is one of four things,” he says. “Salmon. Halibut. Chowder. Dungeness crab. The truth is the bounty of the Pacific is so much more diverse.”

Paley says that while he does enjoy expanding people's horizons — last year, he teamed with Oregon State University on a line of seaweed, something you can find on the menu at Imperial — he won’t be looking to educate people as much as just simply giving them good food that they want to eat.

“It’s not my job to educate them,” he says. “The key will be to serve people food that they want to eat. If they come, enjoy the food, enjoy the experience, want to come back, then I have done my job.”