Ashland, Oregon — When Sarah Cook decided to leave Texas, she dreamed of her ideal new home. She shared with her friends what she envisioned: a small town that offered an audience of natural beauty, slow pace, and the artistic and intricate cuisine she created at Kyoten Sushiko. Six-seat omakase restaurant in closed Austin during a pandemic.
“I explained Ashland before I heard it,” Cook said.
Her dream seemed to come true in June, when she became a chef. RawThe 20-seat restaurant in a city of 21,000 people, she calls it “perfect in so many ways.”
However, she recalled, “There were days when it was orange outside and you could see the ash falling.”
“It was apocalyptic,” she said.
This split screen—paradise on one side, disaster on the other—shows the uneasy tension here in Rogue Valley. This tension is forcing the food community into a period of transition and innovation.
Thanks to the emergence of a dynamic restaurant and wine scene and a resurgence of tourism, the vision of transforming the region into a laid-back alternative to the West’s more famous culinary destinations is about to come true.
But climate change has become the most striking threat to that vision.Two years ago, when the Almeda wildfires ripped through the valley, destroying more than 3,000 businesses and homes, the Oregon Forestry Department said it was tragic. 8,500 residents were left homeless.
Ashland is the cultural hub of the Rogue Valley, rich in wineries, farms and orchards. Even in years when flames do not threaten the area, smoke is a perennial problem, carried by winds from fires elsewhere and trapped in valleys near mountains, resulting in higher atmospheric temperatures.
The new reality is astonishing to locals who remember the days ago when the valley was a smokeless Garden of Eden.
“I don’t think the fire season will stop affecting us.” rogue food unitea relief organization she co-founded to feed fire victims.
she was sitting outside mix bake shop It’s July 2021, a day when it seemed as if twilight had fallen at noon and the smoke was billowing. Things clouded again last month around his second anniversary from the fire when Mr. Ferguson said he was “still recovering from what happened two years ago.”
The Almeda fire broke out in Ashland, three blocks from Ferguson’s home, but the adjacent towns of Talent and Phoenix suffered the most damage.
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Rogue Food’s original mission was to use state recovery funds to work with local chefs and restaurants, many of which were closed due to the pandemic, to feed residents living in temporary housing.
“It all came together like a beautiful dream of finding money, paying restaurants, buying from farms, and feeding people,” said Ferguson, who was a restaurant manager in Portland. beast Toro Bravo before moving to Ashland in 2016.
It has also become a permanent organization and has contracts to feed current and future fire victims in five southern Oregon counties, Ferguson said.
The fire exposed the social and economic inequities of the area by disproportionately damaging the lower-income residents of Phoenix with less wealthy and more diverse talent than Ashland. Coalition Fortalezais an advocacy group for local Latinx and Indigenous communities that has worked to develop affordable alternatives to home. lost in fireLocals say the cost of replacing a mobile home is well beyond the means of most farms and hospitality workers.
Like Rogue Food, Fortaleza was formed after a fire. They are one of many charities that have built solidarity between hospitality and farmworkers, and in the process broadened the outlook on what relief efforts should offer.
Fortaleza organizer Celine Garcia, 26, was raised in Talent’s mobile home by her mother, who came from Mexico to work in the orchards. Her father lost her house in a fire.
Rogue Food said, “It seems like they’re always there, feeding and feeding people. And we still need them.”
More than 50 families in the Ashland area remain in temporary housing, according to the Oregon Department of Social Services, but aid workers say it’s a difficult time, especially for the working class reeling from the affordable housing crisis exacerbated by the fires. It says the numbers mask widespread economic distress. Rogue Food has created a new mobile farmers market to serve customers where they are.
At a fair in Medford, Rogue Food employee Lucas Wedeman helped fill customers’ bags with locally grown zucchini, tomatoes and more at the market debut.agricultural products, many of which are provided by fly family farmwas restaurant quality and free.
Wedeman, 27, began a rescue operation after seeing nearly every building in Talent’s neighborhood on fire.
“We were very lucky not to lose our home,” he said. “It made me even more motivated to volunteer.”
Flavio Martinez, 42, similarly thanked his restaurant, El Comal Taqueria in Phoenix, for being spared the fire. I was one of the restaurateurs. Since then he has opened his third El Comal location.
“I grew up here,” Martinez said. “It wouldn’t be fair not to help when it’s sorely needed.”
Rogue Food is just one example of the collective spirit and creative thinking that roams the valley.
Pioneering winemakers in the Applegate Valley, in particular, elevated the wines of southern Oregon, historically overshadowed by the Willamette Valley, to the north. Their work in developing techniques for growing grapes in dry climates is reflected in nearby small and medium-sized farms.
Kelsey Jack Last year, I moved from my hometown of Michigan to start Orange Marmalade Farm. She is optimistic about expanding beyond the quarter-acre she grows in Ashland, but competition for land and water, especially from the burgeoning local cannabis industry, is fierce and many local Crops from prosperity, despite the first season she suspects the smoke has been prevented, similar to the farmer’s.
“There’s a lot to learn here,” she said. “It’s just a pocket of knowledge.”
Jack’s potential customer base is growing in Ashland. Her rows are lined with sisquiw her orange her tomato and sweet walla walla her onion. Osteria La Briccolakorean style Yoon Focus on natural wine Bar Juliet All have opened in Ashland since last summer. Oregon Shakespeare Festivalwas a key driver of local tourism, still held back by the pandemic.
Carla Guimaraes moved to Ashland from Santa Barbara, CA in 2020. It was during the lockdown due to Covid and just before the fire.The year after she opened Vida Baking Companyspecializes in gluten-free Pon de Queijo, a cheese bread popular in its native Brazil.
She was looking forward to the Shakespeare Festival going on a full schedule this year, but was only disappointed when the outdoor performances were canceled due to heat and smoke.
“People have disappeared from the streets,” Guimaraes said. She calculates that Vida’s business fell by 25% year-over-year in her August and her September.
Josh Dorcak opened his 16-seat tasting menu restaurant, MÄS, in 2018 after more than a decade cooking in restaurants in Ashland owned by others.
“It’s blue skies today, but tomorrow it could be a whole different story. ‘If we have to shut down, it’s just me and a few other people who need to worry.'”
The enforced discipline, coupled with inspiration from immersive tours of Tokyo’s izakaya and sushi bars, made Dolchuk re-evaluate his cuisine and adopted home.
“I went from feeling claustrophobic and small to thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’m actually living in a chef’s dreamland,'” he said. has a lot at his fingertips.”
His cuisine, which he calls Cascade cuisine, emphasizes local and regional ingredients in precise, small servings.
Cook brings that same skill and passion to Nama, the 20-seat restaurant Dorcak opened next to MÄS last fall. A recent meal included slices of amberjack in a grapefruit juice slick, finished with orange marmalade farm herb-infused dried flowers and oil. waiting.
“If someone thinks the carrot they just ate is great, they can say, ‘Go talk to the person who grew it,'” Cook said.
According to Dorkak, the new era of dynamism these and other chefs are bringing to Rogue Valley builds on the foundation laid by Charlene Rollins and Vernon Rollins. The couple opened her New Sammy’s Cowboy Her Bistro in Talent, an Ashland suburb, in 1989. It was destroyed in the Almeda fire.
Ms. Rollins was the chef at Sammy’s (named after her son) and Ms. Rollins was its host and sommelier. Much of the restaurant’s ingredients come from the garden on his acre and a half, where the Rollins family also lived.
“Charlene and Vernon have taught travelers coming here what to expect from the culture,” said Dorcak. The bamboo that grows around Sammy appears in the artwork hanging on the raw.
When Rollins, 74, toured the property in July 2021, Sammy’s charred remains were still untended. she forgot them.
“I’ve made many kinds of ice cream,” she said, standing by a fire-resistant fig tree.
This summer, Rollins moved into a modest, fireproof house on the site of a restaurant. She took a walk in the garden last month, stopping to admire her tomatillo, cantaloupe and tromboncino squash. She was looking forward to cooking for her friends in her new kitchen, but she has no intention of rebuilding Sammy’s kitchen. This property is for sale.
Rollins, who died in March at the age of 77, is buried near his new home. Rollins planted a fig tree in the center of his grave. “Because the fig tree never dies.”