“I haven’t been home in two weeks,” says Gregory Gourdet, speaking on the phone from a food festival in Colorado. “I’m staring at Aspen trees.” We weren’t supposed to be talking.
Gourdet, the “Top Chef” star and three-time James Beard Award winner, had reached out in late May about Electric Summer, a block party coming to the street outside his wood-fired Southeast Portland Haitian restaurant . (Learn more about the block party below.) Yet even then it seemed there might be more to say.
Gourdet, 48, was preparing for a packed itinerary that included the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in Las Vegas on June 5; the James Beard Awards gala, where he was a favorite in the Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific category, in Chicago on June 10; a quick business trip to New York City; and on to the Aspen Food & Wine Festival, where he planned to smoke Haitian-spiced chicken wings on a Colorado ranch with stunning views of the Elk Mountains. But even that undersells the amount of news Gourdet was about to generate. Just before the Beard awards, where he would win his third consecutive medal from the foundation named for Oregon’s own James Beard, Gourdet made a major announcement.
The chef had signed on to open five distinct restaurant concepts as culinary director at the upcoming Manhattan location of historic Paris department store Printemps. And then, last Saturday, Jamal James Kent, a longtime friend of Gourdet’s, and his partner in those New York restaurants.
