Press

First the restaurant, then the neighborhood

Open a small, personal place to eat, and the whole area heats up. Woodstock's Toast shows how.

Donald Kotler hustles from the open kitchen at Toast, his Southeast Portland restaurant, to the front counter to jot another name on the waiting list. Hungry customers have been waiting since he unlocked the door a half-hour earlier.

He sets down the clipboard and grabs a pot of coffee to refill cups for a couple lingering at a table near the window. On the way back to the kitchen, he grabs a precious minute to talk with his wife, Ellen, who's perched on a stool holding their 5-month-old daughter, Gretchen.

"She was born almost five months to the day after I opened Toast," says Kotler, 39. "This is my first child and my first restaurant.

"Changes in my life," he says. "New possibilities."

The same could be said about what Toast, at Southeast 52nd Avenue and Steele Street, is doing for the east side of the Woodstock neighborhood, an area hardly known for fine dining.

The casual 30-seat restaurant -- with pancakes, sandwiches, house-made baked goods and other fare featuring local products -- opened in August at the former site of Angie's Bad Ass Video, an X-rated book and video store.

"The impact on the neighborhood has been amazing," says state Sen. Kate Brown, D-Portland, a Woodstock resident since 1991. "If you'd have told me that this little restaurant would change the neighborhood, I'd have called you crazy."

Since Toast opened, people have told Kotler they feel safer. Fresh paint on Toast's building brightened the corner. The city added a bike rack and curb ramps. And the restaurant has attracted customers from all over the metro area.

Kotler was following a dream, not looking to be a pioneer. But with Toast, he's another independent restaurant owner changing a Portland neighborhood.

Urban lore used to hold that Starbucks signaled a neighborhood's arrival. The coffee giant's managers, with reams of market research, seemed to know when a neighborhood was ready to take off. Much of the growth along lower Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, for example, followed the opening in 1994 of a Starbucks near 20th Avenue.

But in recent years, a street's revival can be traced to a neighborhood restaurant. Southeast Division Street awakened around Lauro Kitchen, a Mediterranean place that opened near 34th Avenue in 2003. North Mississippi Avenue started to sizzle after the opening of the Mississippi Pizza Pub in 2001.

A restaurant -- especially in an area with few -- gives residents a gathering spot and a welcome landmark. No one, after all, wants to give directions that involve taking a left at the porn shop.

In time, the new place draws customers from elsewhere, and newcomers discover the area's special qualities -- a craft store, say, or a bakery. They make a note to come back to shop. The flow of customers spurs other businesses to invest by sprucing up or starting something new.

Before long, a once-blighted area is bustling.

"Restaurants are the kernel," says Anne Mangan, senior communications coordinator with the Portland Development Commission. "They grow with a neighborhood. Business often follows business. These people often have a vision and see opportunity where others don't."

On Mississippi Avenue, the pizza pub "literally made it safe for people to invest," says Marshall Runkle, who lives in the neighborhood and works for the city Bureau of Housing & Community Development.

"People who make loans and do commercial development didn't know their way to Mississippi. The pizza place put it on the map. There is a flock mentality, and they were the first goose to land."

Peter Finley Fry, a private planning consultant who's helped people develop restaurants throughout Portland, says "destination" restaurants are staking a claim in outer neighborhoods.

"There are two kinds of restaurants," he says. "Convenience -- like a McDonald's -- and restaurants that are destinations."

McDonald's doesn't care about the neighborhood, Fry says. "They care only about passing traffic. They want lots of cars. Destination restaurants are looking for repeats and regulars. The waiters and bartenders get to know the people.

"Destination restaurants," Fry says, "make healthy neighborhoods."

To follow the arc of Toast, first you have to step back to 2002.

David Machado, then the head chef at downtown's Southpark Seafood Grill & Wine Bar, started looking for his own place.

"It had to be on the east side," he says. "I couldn't afford rent on the west side. There's a substantial difference in rent. For a place my size, it would cost about $12,000 a year more to be on the west side. In a business where the margins are 2 to 6 percent, that's a huge deal."

Machado searched for eight months -- "I looked on Broadway, Hawthorne, Belmont" -- before turning his sights to Southeast Division. He found a vacant building at 3377 and signed a lease to open Lauro Kitchen.

"I took it because it was the lowest (rent) on the east side," he says. "I had no grand plan, but I liked the corner location. I built the restaurant using savings and a small business loan. I pledged my house for collateral. I had no investors."

He's been busy ever since.

"My food was sophisticated," he says. "I took what I was doing downtown and put it in a neighborhood. In the 1990s, downtown was the heart of the restaurant scene. It was the big-box restaurant with seating for 200 people. That's all changed. Now it's smaller, more neighborhood-based."

Lisa Stevens, who has lived just off of Division for 14 years, says Lauro has made a big difference.

"For a long time, it was a neighborhood with no color, character or personality," she says. "Lauro came along when people were ready to go out and not have to drive to Northwest Portland for dinner. It was a restaurant that had aspirations to exist on the level of the great restaurants in the city."

She used to tell people she lived in Southeast Portland. Now she says near Lauro. "People from the West Hills know where that's at," she says.

Lauro's success spawned others on Division, such as Pix Patisserie, Nuestra Cocina and Genie's Cafe. "By my count," Machado says, "there've been 12 other restaurants that have opened in this corridor."

Toast, too, can trace its roots to Machado.

Kotler used to live on Southeast 52nd Avenue and remembers walking past Angie's -- "an ugly old building," he says.

He thought about his dream of opening a restaurant, remembering his childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he and his grandfather had breakfast every Saturday at a little neighborhood place.

Kotler was trying to get a small wholesale bakery off the ground and worked as a waiter at Giorgio's Restaurant in the Pearl District and as a bartender at Vindalho, another inner-Southeast restaurant that Machado opened after Lauro. The men had been friends since working together at Southpark.

Friends told Kotler his idea for Angie's would flop. But after watching Machado succeed at Lauro and Vindalho, he turned to him for advice.

"David was a wealth of information," Kotler says. "He sees transformation before it happens. He thought it could happen in Woodstock."

Kotler looked in his neighborhood for practical reasons, too: much lower rents. "I wondered who was going to stop here to eat," he says. "But at some point, if everything about it seems wrong, it must be right."

Kotler, who came up with the name after he burned a piece of toast at home, saved money by doing much of the work -- pulling permits, digging up the floor for plumbing, putting up drywall.

Within days, neighbors took notice.

"One woman told me the bookstore had been there for nearly 24 years," he says. "She said her daughter was 20, and they'd never walked on this side of the street to go to the park."

Kotler and his chef painted the outside, covering a dark gray that hadn't been freshened in more than a decade.

"I painted my section beige, and the awning over my place farmhouse red," he says. "I wanted to make a statement that something new was happening here. Right after I did it, I got a call from the landlord. She liked it so much that she painted the entire building to match what I'd done. She said I was changing the face of the neighborhood."

When he saw how many customers arrived by bike, he asked the city to put in a bike rack. It did. Now it's often full. Months later, city workers returned to put ramp cuts in the sidewalks. That makes it easier, Kotler says, for people pushing strollers to walk to nearby Woodstock Park.

Business began to build, first by word of mouth. "People would say something when they were walking the dog. . . . Those people then turned on friends who came from other neighborhoods."

Fry, the restaurant consultant, says Portland has a chance to develop the kind of restaurant culture found in San Francisco, where he grew up. While large chains depend on volume and uniformity, Portland's close-knit neighborhoods favor small restaurants that reflect their distinct identities, he says.

"The destination restaurant fits in the neighborhood," he says. "In San Francisco, you can walk down residential streets and find all kinds of restaurants. That's what's happening here."

Along those lines, Kotler opened Toast with a nod to its predecessor -- the menu has a "Bad Ass Sandwich" and "Angie's Filthy Martini" -- and warm reviews.

"Two guys who lived nearby told me they never imagined they could get food like this on 52nd," he says. "We're ahead of projections already. Our clientele is diverse. In here, you can see people who've lived in the neighborhood for 45 years and people who've never been to Southeast Portland.

"Last week," Kotler says, "we had people from Lake Oswego, Northwest Portland, Southwest Portland and Forest Grove coming here."

Recently, a late-model Cadillac from Washington was parked out front.

Toast has become a destination restaurant.

"Woodstock is in its infancy," Kotler says. "The restaurant is a part of it."