Catching Up with Cathy Whims
A Q & A with the chef/owner of Portland's Nostrana; plus, her vegetarian take on a classic Umbrian pasta
How does someone with no Italian background end up running one of the country’s best Italian restaurants? It’s a question I’ve been wanting to put to Cathy Whims, owner of Nostrana, in Portland, OR, for a long time. I finally had the opportunity a few weeks ago when we chatted on Zoom.
Cathy and I first met a dozen or so years ago at an annual conference for food professionals. We were introduced by our mutual friend, the cookbook author Diane Morgan. It wasn’t long after the publication of my second book, Big Night In, and I was participating in the conference’s book signing expo (a harrowing experience for introverts like yours truly). Cathy stopped by my table and bought a copy (thank you!) and, as I was signing it, told me that she and her restaurant crew cooked often from my first book, The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy; she was especially fond of the recipe for maccù, a Sicilian vegetable soup made with dried fava beans.
It was the first time I had ever heard of a chef or restaurateur cooking from any of my books and I was thrilled, but also a little freaked out at the thought of a professional chef making my decidedly homestyle recipes. Cathy is a six-time James Beard Award finalist. Nostrana, which she owns with her husband, David West, has won all sorts of accolades since it opened in 2005; it’s known for food that beautifully blends Italian cuisine with the ingredients and flavors of the Pacific Northwest (I’ve been lucky to dine there twice over the years). Cathy is also co-owner of Enoteca Nostrana, a wine bar next to the restaurant; and a pizzeria and bar called Oven and Shaker. Prior to opening Nostrana, she was a chef and co-owner of Genoa, a (now-shuttered) fine-dining Italian restaurant in Portland that was known for its seasonal multi-course dinners and rotating menus. A 2021 article on the English website of La Cucina Italiana declared that “Portland’s food scene thrives today in large part due to her efforts.” Cathy also writes an occasional vegetable-focused column for the Wall Street Journal’s Off Duty section.
Our paths have crossed over the years, either at conferences or on social media. During the many months of Covid lockdown, when her businesses were closed, she started taking my online classes, so I’ve gotten to know her a little bit more. I admired how engaged she was and how ready to keep learning, in spite of what she clearly already knew. I finally asked if she would consent to a Q & A, which she graciously did. (The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.)
Buona Domenica: You’ve been in Portland since 1979 but you grew up in North Carolina.
Cathy Whims: Yes, I grew up in Chapel Hill and went to college in my hometown (UNC).
BD: How did you become interested in food and cooking, and more specifically, Italian cooking?
CW: I grew up with really good food, and my parents encouraged me to be adventurous. My mom didn’t know how to cook when she got married, so she started cooking her way through Southern dishes and things that her mother and my father’s mother made. She became an incredibly excellent cook and eventually she had a professional job cooking as a private chef. But the thing that really started it was that I decided in high school that I was going to be a vegetarian and, boy, was my mother angry. One night she made piperade. There were these soft scrambled eggs and delicious peppers and tomatoes and there were slices of fried country ham. And I wouldn’t eat it because the ham was touching the vegetables. I was such a spoiled brat. She said, ‘This is how we’re gonna get through this: you’re going to make a dish every time you have dinner at home and it’s going to be vegetarian. You can make whatever you want but you have to make enough for everybody.’ And she bought me some vegetarian cookbooks. I think that was brilliant. So I was cooking, and I also was baking bread a lot and I was bringing bread to my soccer coaches. By the time I got to college, a friend of mine’s parents hired to me to be a private chef one day a week for a party they would throw. That was really fun. Then I got a job at one of those what they used to call natural food restaurants, a vegetarian restaurant. It was one of the best restaurants in Chapel Hill at the time. It was my dream job at that moment.
As for the Italian part, I liked Italian food and my boyfriend had spent a year in Rome. I always thought Italian food was romantic. My parents used to go to this restaurant called La Pizza on Friday nights and there were hanging grapes and everything, and the candles with the wax. My parents always seemed happy when they were there but it was really cliché Italian food.
I ended up moving to Portland, and I got a job at the best restaurant in Portland at the time, a place that I had saved up to eat at a couple of times. It was called Genoa, it was a special occasion restaurant with a six- or seven-course prix fixe meal. I would never even have knocked on the door and asked for a job, but they contacted me because my roommate at the time was working at a sister restaurant. She heard that they were looking for a cook at Genoa and she said, ‘You should talk to my roommate. She’s always throwing dinner parties and she’s always cooking things all the time.’ And I literally got a call and I came in and interviewed and I got the job. That was a dream job; everybody wanted to work there, nobody ever left. It was a real counterculture place; nobody had been professionally trained, including myself.
Eventually, I ended up buying the restaurant with three partners, and by default I became the wine buyer, and that’s when I started going to Italy.
BD: Tell us about your first visit to Italy.
CW: I went to Piemonte first. And it’s probably where I know the most people because I know lots of wine makers. We sold a lot of Piemontese wine at Genoa. Before I went, I had some kind of idea my head of what Italian food was. I think we all did at Genoa, some sort of made up version of Italian food. It was homemade pasta, but it also allowed things like rack of lamb with Bearnaise sauce, because we were a special occasion restaurant. It also was heavily influenced by California cuisine because Chez Panisse was happening. Genoa actually opened in 1971, which is same year as Chez Panisse opened, so there was some parallel stuff, some counterculture stuff, all these people who were really artists who became cooks because that’s the way they made their money. So when I first ate Italian food in Italy I was like, wow, I know nothing about Italian food! It’s so much more simple and ingredient driven than what we’d been making at Genoa. That really fascinated me. I basically had to unlearn what I thought I knew about cooking.
I wanted to get to the root of what Italian food was, and that didn’t go over very well at a special occasion restaurant where people expected things like rack of lamb and tenderloin steaks. So eventually they bought me out and that’s when Nostrana happened. It became the platform for me to make the kind of food I wanted to make.
BD: Nostrana’s home page has a quote from Marcella Hazan about what the word ‘nostrana’ means:
Local, is the most powerful selling word in the market and it is never taken in vain. In Italian, it is nostrani or nostrane (depending on whether you are using the masculine or feminine form), whose literal meaning is ours. To shoppers, ours means it’s better because it has travelled a short distance to the market, hence it’s fresher. An underlying, more emotional secondary message is that it will be more satisfying because the taste is the comforting one of home.
CW: Yes, and it’s still what guides the restaurant. We just turned 17 in October, I can’t believe it.
BD: In what way does that quote guide the restaurant?
CW: Farmers are my main sources. I love when a farmer comes in with something new. Recently, it was spigarello [a leafy broccoli similar to rapini]. And it’s like, Oh! I’ve seen that all over the fields outside of Naples. How are we going to use this in a dish? Then, if someone comes into the restaurant and they have this vegetable they’ve never had and they like it, that helps the farmer because they may go to the farmers’ market and buy it.
We still have our signature dish, which we call Insalata Nostrana [a riff on Caesar salad made with local radicchio], that has been on the menu since we opened and it’s our biggest selling dish. Over the years, so many people have told us, ‘I love that salad. I don’t like bitter, I don’t like radicchio but I love that salad.’ I think it’s exciting to promote things that people are skeptical about. [Cathy is a longtime supporter of Lane Selman and the Culinary Vegetable Institute, which hosts a radicchio sagra every year and which I wrote about last fall.]
BD: What keeps things interesting for you?
CW: Every new cookbook that I get excited about, thinking about how we’re going to translate a recipe or a dish into something that will work at the restaurant. Finding new ingredients for people to try. There’s this bottarga that I love from Orbetello (Tuscany). The reason I like it so much is because it’s only cured for a week, whereas the Sardininan bottarga is cured for up to six months. So it’s milder and not so intense or strong. My chefs love it and I love it. It’s exciting to be able to put it on the menu and get people interested in it.
I remember when we opened Nostrana, it was a really hard time to find cooks. There were a lot of restaurants that opened at the same time. We were really struggling, we had a small staff of young, green cooks. These cooks would come and work and then say, ‘Well, I’m going to move on now, I’ve worked here for six months and I think I’ve learned all I need to know here.’ I blame it on Food Network. I mean, I’m 66 and there’s a lot I still don’t know. That’s what keeps it fun.
BD: Tell us about a favorite Italian food memory or experience.
CW: This wasn’t so much a food experience as a wine experience but there was food involved. We were staying in Porto Santo Stefano in the Maremma and I suddenly realized that we could take a ferry to Isola del Giglio. There’s a wine called Altura from Isola del Giglio that a winemaker friend of mine introduced me to years ago. I love it and it’s usually hard to get and I realized I could finally go to the island. The owners live in an old round mill way up in the hills at the top of the island. It’s all very natural and unmanipulated and we’re on top of the island staring out at this incredible view. It was just the most out-of-world experience. Viticulture had practically stopped on the island and the owner, Francesco (Carfagna) pretty much brought it back on his own. Here were were, against all odds, having this delicious wine being made in this mill that the owners live in. And he cooked for us, very simple but in that way that simple tastes so delicious because everything is so pure. I remember we had pasta with zucchini and shrimp that had just been caught that same day. It was just crazy rustic and crazy elegant at the same time, and I think that’s what is so exciting about Italy. I think it’s that yin-yang that’s just so intoxicating for me.
BD: Looking ahead, what do you see for yourself and your restaurants?
CW: I’m personally struggling a little bit with what I want my next act to be. I love curating the cooks and getting them excited about things. But I just turned 66 and I kind of didn’t think I’d be in it for this long, so I’m kind of having a struggle. Covid was a disaster for the restaurant and I couldn’t imagine deserting it. I love Nostrana, I wish I could get my employees interested in owning it—there goes that counterculture again. But with everything we’ve been through it’s really difficult to make any changes and survive right now until we get our footing. If I’m there when it’s our 20th anniversary, we will want to have a big celebration.
I also just signed a contract for a cookbook with a working title of Italian Summer Kitchen, hopefully for summer 2024.
ADDENDUM: Shortly after our interview, I found I had one more question I wanted to ask Cathy, so I did it via email. I loved her response:
BD: What do you like to cook when you’re not cooking Italian?
CW: As I write this I am in Alabama for the first time ever. The main reason for this trip is to take Scott Peacock’s Black Belt Biscuit Class with my friend Sarah Scott, a fellow classmate that I studied with at Beringer’s School for American Chefs (taught by Madeleine Kamman) in 1987. On this trip, we made two different batches of biscuits; one with whey and another with local buttermilk. We talked biscuits with Scott, as well as local Alabama history; visiting The Old Depot Museum in Selma, AL, and walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Tomorrow we have a full historical tour of Montgomery. As I began writing this response, I thought I would tell you that I don’t cook non-Italian food very often, but I think I cook southern style food a bit more than I admit. Upon leaving Birmingham we stopped at the local Piggly Wiggly to pick up supplies for our three night stay in Marion. That night I made stewed black eyed (pigeon) peas with collard greens and local bacon.
My grandmothers and my mother were all very adept southern cooks; my mother often fed us biscuits (though from Bisquick) or grits for breakfast on school days and country ham was often on the side. Fried chicken was one of our family’s favorite evening meals. My mother was of the Julia Child era and followed the Time Life Food of the World book series. Her cooking soon expanded beyond Southern. Mine did, too, when I became interested in cooking. It wasn’t until after owning Nostrana for a couple of years that suddenly the similarities of Tuscan cucina and the rural traditions of southern food began occurring to me. These included two cuisines of an agrarian culture; two regions of the ham belt, grits vs polenta; stretching a small amount of meat with many vegetables and starches, a true appreciation for vegetables that are in season. I find it funny it took almost 25 years of studying Italian cooking to realize the similarities of the food I grew up with. Now often for huge gatherings I make traditional well known southern dishes and only rarely make them for myself at home.
BD: Grazie, Cathy, for sharing your story and insights. In bocca al lupo!
RECIPE: Cathy Whims’s Pasta with Mushroom and Black Olive Sauce (Norcia Style)
Here is Cathy Whims’s vegetarian take on a classic Umbrian pasta dish, Pasta alla Norciana. The original combines crumbled sausage, cream, and (sometimes) shaved truffle or porcini mushrooms. Here, meaty oil-cured olives take the place of the sausage, their strong, salty flavor tamed by the addition of button mushrooms and a generous quantity of cream. (Recipe slightly adapted.)
Cathy’s note accompanying the recipe: “This pasta celebrates the simple earthy flavors of Umbria, a region I call “Tuscany with the volume turned down.” I love how the combination of mushrooms and olives really surprises people. Umbricelli or Pici, a hand-rolled spaghetti, would be the traditional accompaniment but store-bought durum wheat flour spaghetti or penne work well. Open a bottle of Rosso di Montefalco to pair with this pasta.”
Makes 4 to 6 servings
INGREDIENTS
12 ounces (340 g) button mushrooms, cleaned
3 tablespoons (45 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 cup (125 g) oil-cured black olives, pitted
3 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1 cup (240 ml) heavy cream
1 pound (454 g) penne, spaghetti, or bucatini
3/4 cup (70 g) freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and salt it lightly (less than sea water; the olives are salty)
2. Chop the mushrooms into 1/2-inch x 1/2-inch (1 cm x 1 cm) pieces. Heat the olive oil in a large heavy sauté pan or skillet. Add the mushrooms and a pinch of salt and toss to coat with oil. Cook, tossing as the mushrooms begin to release their liquid. Continue to cook and toss until the mushrooms begin to brown, about 10 minutes. Lower the heat to medium, add the garlic and toss together for about a minute. Transfer the mushrooms and garlic to a food processor and add the olives and parsley. Pulse to a smooth, pesto-like consistency.
3. Melt the butter in a large pan over medium-low heat. Add the mushroom and olive mixture, along with a pinch of red pepper flakes. Cook over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes, until the mushroom mixture has absorbed the butter. Stir in the cream and cook until heated through.
4. Cook the pasta in the boiling water until al dente. Drain and transfer it to a warmed serving bowl. Toss with the sauce, lemon juice, and 1/2 cup of the Parmigiano cheese. Serve on warmed plates with additional cheese on the side.
PICTURE ITALY: Termoli (Molise) Fall, 2022
As always, thank you for reading, subscribing, and sharing.
Alla prossima,
Domenica
Thanks for this great article! Cathy is an inspiration and I’m so proud of her! My mom worked with her at Genoa, years ago.🥰I especially loved your last question, connecting her two cuisines. 💕
Thank you for sharing this. Loved loved loved reading it! Especially as a Portlander who didn’t know Nostrana was right under her nose! Will definitely be visiting.