Christopher Israel

Chef-owner, Grüner
Portland, Oregon

Having grown up in San Diego, California, eating the traditional

American food that his parents cooked and the traditional Mexican

food that his grandmother cooked, and after helping to jump-start

the Portland food scene in the 1990s with his Mediterranean

restaurant Zefiro and then tackling the Far East with the Chinese

restaurant Saucebox, chef Chris Israel sought a new frontier. And

that frontier is Germany.

“People don’t have a positive concept of German food,” he

tells me at Grüner, his Portland, Oregon, restaurant, which GQ

magazine named one of the best new restaurants in the United

States in 2011. “Even though so many American dishes have roots

in Germany—hamburgers, hot dogs—Americans have a hard time

with Germany.”

But peek into the Grüner kitchen for a moment, and you’ll start

to wonder why: hot pretzels are carried steaming out of the oven;

containers overflow with sauerkraut, spicy mustard, speck, and

buckwheat spaetzle; strips of smoky bacon are cooked and ready

to sit atop crème fraîche on tarte flambée (an Alsatian pizza).

“People think all German food is heavy,” Israel tells me as we

proceed to a long wooden table to make our first dish, a radish