Hannah Wallace, Author at Sunnyside Neighborhood Association

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

Q&A with Emily Bixler and Jeremy Larter, the owners of Old Pal

If you still haven’t been to Old Pal, the 3-year-old seafood-forward restaurant on the corner of 34th and Morrison, it’s time to go. Owners Emily Bixler and Jeremy Larter re-opened in February with a small food market offering local fare, including eggs and butter, Ken’s Artisan breads, and Hot Mama salsa and tortilla chips. There’s also tinned fish, Italian pasta, French chocolates, and Cowbell cheeses—with more items being added weekly. (Cowbell is a local importer and distributor of specialty cheeses.) Old Pal has always had a popular oyster happy hour but they’re now open for lunch, too, and also have a “little hours” menu in the afternoon.

Sunnyside is a special place for the couple. They first met 23 years ago at a friend’s condo in the brick building across from Old Pal. Bixler, who attended Pacific Northwest College of Art and now runs the sculpture and accessory line BOET, grew up in Sacramento and Southern Oregon. Larter is from Rochester, New York, and attended Johnson & Wales culinary school in Providence. He moved to Portland in the fall of 2001; the couple met soon thereafter. In 2020, when the pandemic hit, Larter’s catering company, Field Day, lost most of its business in two weeks. Old Pal rose from the ashes. We spoke to them about the allure of Sunnyside, how their menu has evolved, and how they hope to become a go-to source for picnic supplies.

How did you choose Sunnyside for Old Pal?

Jeremy: When I got out of the lease for my commissary kitchen, I put everything in storage, and then sat there and looked at the world for a while. We decided catering wasn’t coming back. I looked at a bunch of spaces, and this one came available.

It used to be the Hob Knob, a sports bar that was beloved within the community. It was the first place we looked at that Emily didn’t have to come in and squint too hard to see what she could do. We had a really good partnership with Owen Gabbert, a small design-build team, and they worked with us to bring Emily’s ideas into being.

Are you still running your catering company?

Jeremy: The catering has come raging back. And I’m luckily able to do all of that out of here.

You’ve been in the food world for a while, right, Jeremy?

Jeremy: Yeah, I was part of the opening team at Ken’s Artisan Pizza. I also worked at D.O.C. when Timothy Wastell was the chef. [Wastell is currently a finalist for the James Beard Award for his food at Antica Terra.]

When I worked at D.O.C. with Tim, I was a server there. And I was in the front-of-the-house when I was at Ken’s. I went to culinary school in Providence 30 years ago. I started in kitchens, and then got into catering. Through catering, I was like, “I could be on the floor, I could bartend.” So the catering kind of brought it all together and expanded my horizons.

Why did you decide to add the market?

Jeremy: We’ve become good friends with a lot of the neighbors here, and we had that space over there. [Gestures to the space by the front door.] They were like “All we have is H-Mart and the corner store just closed.” I felt like Sunnyside—and every micro-neighborhood in Portland—could support a well-appointed grocery.

I love your wine list.

Jeremy: We’re not a natural wine place, by any means. But I love low-intervention wines. Most of the stuff that I get is on that end of the spectrum. We also work closely with local cider and beer makers. We’re actually good friends with the couple at Away Days—Nicky and Pete.

We’re hoping to position ourselves as the gateway to Laurelhurst Park—and picnics! Going into summer, our offerings in the market are going to reflect that. The Shemanski Farmers Market opens next week, and we aim to start offering select fruits and berries throughout the summer and fall.

How are the tariffs going to affect what you sell in the market?

Emily: We just found a company that has a lot of awesome French stuff. But I haven’t called them yet since the tariffs—and it changes every four days. But I’m definitely trying to get local. There’s a gal that just started making nut butters and jam that we love, Green Dream. And we carry this Dutch licorice that these awesome sisters that live here source from where their grandfather used to sell in Amsterdam, Cleban & Daughters. I like products that have a sweet story behind them.

So what do you love about Sunnyside, other than its great people?

Jeremy: Honestly? It’s Portland, to me. I’ve predominantly lived in Sunnyside and Kerns for the whole time we’ve been here, until we moved out to Mill Park. So it feels like home to me. I think what I love about this little corner is that we’ve really gotten to know all of our neighbors. We have a really great rapport with them, and they’ll tell us what they want. Coming up with a program where more people have access to pantry necessities and beyond. So even if you don’t necessarily come in for a sit-down meal, you can come in and get eggs. I want to bring more to and meet more of the community.

I’m also so excited you’re open for lunch now!

Jeremy: On the weekend there are people who come in for oysters and maybe a cocktail or a glass of wine. During the week it’s people from the local businesses. We’ve got a close relationship with Propaganda, the salon, and their customers come for lunch.

Emily: We were going to just do “grab and go” and people were like, “Are you going to have oysters? Can I grab a glass of wine?” A couple of awesome artists ladies have come in to talk about their next show, or, some ladies who lunch get a bottle of wine and hang out for three hours.

Any improvements that you would ask for in Sunnyside?

Jeremy: I think Sunnyside is perfect. We’re happy to be here and we’re happy to be on this corner. We just want to continue to evolve and give people what they want.

What is your favorite thing on the menu right now?

Jeremy: Probably our albacore tataki, which is seared Oregon albacore, served chilled with mandarins and pickled chilies. And my favorite lunch item right now is our fried eggplant sandwich.

What’s your culinary philosophy?

Jeremy: Let the ingredients speak for themselves and get out of the way, highlighting the bounty that we have here in Oregon. And you know, using the highest quality ingredients while still trying to make it affordable

What farms do you source from?

Jeremy: Groundwork Organics, Gathering Together, and Eloisa. Most of the stuff I’m getting comes from the Shemanski or Hollywood Farmers Market. In the winter, I buy directly from Rubinette. They have a great wholesale program.

[Emily excuses herself to go arrange flowers.]

And I see Emily does a lot behind-the-scenes.

Jeremy: Yes, she is key to the aesthetic vibe of Old Pal. We have a good amount of fresh flowers too, but right now Emily is making these “forever flowers.” They’re a little sculpture that she makes of paper, linen, and wire—meant to save some of the water and plastic waste from changing out the flowers weekly. Those are for sale at the market, too.

Earlier, we talked about the need to get news out in innovative ways, since so many people have gotten off Instagram lately.

Jeremy: We try to stay active on Instagram and we’ve been posting for months that we’re open. And there’s this guy who walked by and he’s like, “I follow you on Instagram. I had no idea you were open until I saw the sandwich board sign on Belmont!”

Emily: I’m gonna be making these posters with a lovely oyster print and the little pull tabs with our address on them. I’ll put them all over town. I just want to go analog! That’s why the Sunnyside Newsletter is so great.

Old Pal is open Wed–Sun from 11 a.m.–9 p.m. 3350 SE Morrison St.; oldpalpdx.com

Lunch is 11 a.m.–3 p.m.; “Little Hours” is 3 –5 p.m.; and Happy Hour is 5 –6 p.m. The evening menu is available from 5 –9 p.m.

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

Q&A with Anthony Myint, Executive Director of Zero Foodprint

In the midst of the pandemic, Anthony Myint and his wife Kara Leibowitz left San Francisco’s bustling Mission District and moved to Portland with their daughter Aviva. They settled in Sunnyside to be close to family and with the hopes of starting a garden. Myint, a former chef, is passionate about local, regeneratively-farmed food. Years earlier, he and Leibowitz had two of the most talked-about restaurants in San Francisco—Mission Chinese Restaurant and The Perennial. Knowing that agriculture and the food system are responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, they strove to make The Perennial carbon neutral. They did a great job but after a few years, they realized that if they really wanted to change the food system (and they did!), they needed to incentivize farmers to change their practices. In 2015, Myint co-founded Zero Foodprint, an environmentally-focused nonprofit that makes it easier for farmers to switch to regenerative farming practices. Zero Foodprint invites restaurants, grocery stores, wineries and other businesses committed to reversing climate change to accelerate regeneration. Most businesses accomplish this at no cost, by adding an optional 1% surcharge to consumers’ bills. That money is then pooled into a ZFP coffer to be equitably distributed to farmers via grants. (It’s akin to rounding up your bill in the checkout line at the grocery store to donate to the food bank.) ZFP is active in four states, including Oregon, and has affiliates in Asia and Scandinavia.

Zero Foodprint, which has so far given away $7.5 million to over 500 regenerative farming projects, won the James Beard Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2020. We talked with Myint about the importance of accelerating regenerative agriculture, the cool Oregon projects that are underway, and why “voting with your fork” is not enough. And what about that garden? It’s flourishing with decorative plants, euphorbia volunteers, and, in summer, cherry tomatoes and berries.

How long have you lived in Sunnyside?

Anthony: Three and a half-years.

What do you love about Sunnyside?

Anthony: I love the community vibes. We came from the Mission District and our reason for moving was to garden, and to be more involved in the community. In San Francisco, we had a tiny backyard, and it was pretty shady.

Tell me about Zero Foodprint. In a nutshell, what is it doing?

Anthony: It’s a nonprofit that enables every citizen, business, and government to accelerate regeneration. We’re doing that by making it possible for contributions to fund projects at farms & ranches like planting cover crops, switching from fertilizer to compost, reducing tillage, planting trees and perennials, and installing fencing for managed grazing.

New Seasons, Organically Grown, and Bob’s Red Mill have gotten involved?

Anthony: Yes and also Tillamook. They all have made and are making various contributions—New Seasons is going big on regeneration. They’re each funding regenerative ag projects in different ways. We have already funded eight projects and we just started the final phases of the next grant; another four or five will be funded. Two restaurants are contributing 1%: Hayward (in wine country) and Astera (Aaron Adams’ new restaurant).

Tell me about some of these projects.

Anthony: There are three projects with Tillamook producers that are implementing riparian restoration—planting new trees and willows along a creek that will provide shade. We are funding a compost application project with a producer in the Bob’s Red Mill supply chain. And Muddy Ranch, which is a part of the New Season supply chain, used the grant to implement a grazing technology that uses a radio collar on the cows so you don’t need a lot of physical fencing. (It beeps if they go too far.) That’s a really great project because it’s around 20,000 acres.

You mentioned that some wineries in California have signed on—Mariah vineyards in Mendocino and Massican in Napa. Are they donating a percentage of sales?

Anthony: Those two are sending 1% of sales. There is also a winery in Colorado called Carboy, and they are participating with 1% from their tasting rooms.

Have any Oregon wineries signed on?

Anthony: Not yet. But I think there’s a lot of room for growth in the wine industry.

Overall there still may be a disconnect where the food system, the public and consumers don’t know that they can make a direct intervention in agriculture. A lot of us, me included, have been trained to make better choices and then hope that farming will change—we’ve been trying to make the change happen by changing eating. But it’s too slow. The whole organic movement is just 1% of acreage after 50 years. So I think part of our mission and our message is: We can change farming directly. We don’t have to change our eating and hope that things will change someday. We can just change it now.

Not enough of us are “voting with our forks.”

Anthony: And also, that wouldn’t actually help a farmer make the transition to more regenerative practices.

I’m surprised that more Portland-area restaurants haven’t signed up to participate. Especially at PDX!

Anthony: What you’re getting at is fundamental; capitalism and business-as-usual is to not pay anything for the environment. So for any individual to make that decision, “I’m gonna raise my prices and give that money away” is a pretty radical act, even though it is very do-able. I think the airport would be the perfect organizing structure. They could do it and it could be part of their marketing and messaging. In a way, it should be central to tourism and hospitality anyway to benefit the community—even just slightly.

If you want to give to Zero Foodprint, go to www.zerofoodprint.org or visit Hayward (www.haywardrestaurant.com) or Astera (1407 SE Belmont) for dinner.

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

Q&A with Dresden de Vera, SNA Board Member-At-Large

If you’ve attended a Board meeting recently or stopped by our booth at the Belmont Street Fair, you’ve likely met Dresden de Vera. De Vera, 35, joined the SNA Board last May. He moved to Portland in 2015 and eventually landed in Sunnyside, which he chose, in part, because he leads his Throw Snakes Tours bar crawl along Hawthorne. Dresden is known for his gregarious personality and positive energy. And he’s already assumed some important roles on the Board. He runs both of the SNA’s social media channels (Facebook and Instagram, where you should follow us at @Sunnysidepdxna) and he’s also the Board’s liaison to the Hawthorne Boulevard Business Association. We talked to him about his fierce love of Portland, his past as a social worker, and his ideas for the future of the SNA.

What is it about Sunnyside that attracted you to live here?

Dresden: It was always where I was naturally magnetized to. Everything I wanted to do was here—Laurelhurst Park, Mount Tabor, cool bars. A lot of my friends would either be in the area or want to hang out here. It just made sense.

Tell me about your “weird bar crawl with a fanatical local” which you advertise on Airbnb Experiences. What year did you start the tour and how did you get the idea to do it?

Dresden: I started it in 2018. When I was traveling abroad, I did a bunch of bar crawls, and I thought, “This is fun and I could do this better!” They would take us to locations, but that would be it. They wouldn’t try to stir conversation between people. I was a huge fanboy of Portland. I’d tell my closest friends about how Portland is heaven on earth. I wanted to be able to talk about how great this place was all the time, and then I just combined it with my love for travelers and leading people through cool places.

You call your tour “Throw Snakes”—what does that mean?

Dresden: Throwing snakes means doing something memorable and unexpected.

Where does that come from?

Dresden: I read this column that was entitled, “How to make the most of your time at your first semester of college.” The columnist said, “Play fewer video games and throw more snakes at things.” He explains that what he means is: Be bold. And what could be more bold than throwing a snake? You could get bitten by the snake, but that’s just the consequence of doing something bold. There’s risk, and what is a good life but a collection of bold moments?

We live in a culture where it’s really difficult to be seen, and it’s to the point where being seen is being bold. The snake that a guest throws on a tour is being seen. I like to curate the experience in such a way where people know that it’s a safe space to be themselves. One of the recurring reviews that I receive is, “It feels like you’re hanging out with old friends.”

You mentioned earlier that you’ve met thousands of people since launching the tours—and renting a room out on Airbnb.

Dresden: I’ve met 3,000 people over the past six years.

My tours are an experience of being immersed in the values of Portland. There’s this idea by [British-American author] Alan Watts—“The menu is not the meal.” And I feel like what a lot of tour guides do is they give you the menu. And I think that the meal of Portland, the experience of Portland, is to be vulnerable and your authentic self and to realize that it can be accepted by strangers. There’s a sense of kinship and camaraderie that comes from that that’s very unique to Portland.

Tell me about the Day Oddities tour.

Dresden: I take people to see more of a buffet of locations along Mississippi. I take people to eccentric art shops, to oddly-themed bars, to hidden cafes. I take them to food carts that were featured on Netflix. It really paints a picture of what Portland offers.

You used to work for Transitions Project homeless shelter, right?

Dresden: I’ve always been in social work. I was working with youth at the Boys and Girls Club in California. When I got here, I wanted to continue in social work and what was available were homeless shelters. I did that for about five years.

What did you do at the shelters?

Dresden: The first half of my stint there, I was a residential advocate for Doreen’s Place, which is a hybrid program where half of the beds are for veterans. It wasn’t just a free bed—you had to be working toward self-sufficiency with the help of a case manager. That was more of an uplifting shelter.

The latter half of my time at Transitions Projects was supervising a low-barrier shelter, which, at the time, was the largest in Oregon. There were 200 beds. At this shelter, you didn’t have to be making progress. And that was kind of demoralizing because you saw people who just wanted to stop falling, and they didn’t have hope to climb because in their minds, they would climb to a position where they would fall from it again.

Did you burn out on that kind of work?

Dresden: It was definitely humbling, and it taught me a lot about leadership. But it ultimately led to wanting to go back to my roots of helping youth, because with youth, there’s still a lot of hope. I felt my influence would go farther.

Over the past couple years, I also picked up work for Weird Portland United, building their social media. Over those two years, their following grew by over 16,000 people.

What do you think could use improvement in Sunnyside?

Dresden: I’m glad that we have a graffiti abatement program. I just worry that the businesses are being discouraged by the types of vandalism that happen to their storefronts.

And I do think that mental health has been an issue of people who seemingly are houseless and causing a scene on the street. But I do think that investing in programs like Portland Street Response is important.

Our Street Fair [the Hawthorne Street Fair] is awesome but I would love to see more community events. I know that the upper end of Hawthorne has Volume Bomb Fest—a punk rock concert where they have several bars collaborate to host different shows. I’d like to see Volume Bomb be a street event.

What do you like about serving on the Board of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association?

Dresden: I love that I get to interview local businesses and get a more rooted sense of the magic surrounding the entrepreneurs of the city. I do think a lot of them are driven by passion and by good networking etiquette. There seems to be a trend of a supportive community behind a successful business.

Portlanders love to support their small local businesses.

Dresden: This contributes to the idea that Portland is just a self aware place. And one of the parts of being self aware is realizing that when you prioritize convenience, you sacrifice community, and community is more important than convenience.