INSIDE BAUMAN’S ON OAK, THE SOUTHEAST PORTLAND CIDERY WITH A STAR-STUDDED KITCHEN
The restaurant within Bauman’s on Oak, the Southeast Portland cidery and taproom from the award-winning Gervais cider brand, exists as something of a trade. When Cafe Olli alumnus Daniel Green first wanted to learn more about cider, Bauman’s founder and head cidermaker, Christine Bauman Walter, became a mentor. As they got closer, Walter was trying to decide whether she should offer food at her Portland location; she asked Green for advice, assuming he’d suggest a pop-up chef or a food cart. “Daniel walked through the space and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do your food program,’” Walter recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t have a food program.’”
Bauman’s on Oak has come together in a similar way since the team moved in earlier this year. Walter says the business has attracted talent that surprised her — Oregon craft beer professionals, seasoned Portland restaurant vets. Chris Leimena, the restaurant’s general manager, has spent time at places like Per Se, Canard, and Le Pigeon, now pairing loganberry ciders with smoked salmon toasts at Bauman’s. Operations manager Chris Cummens left Breakside, arguably one of Portland’s best breweries, to press cider on Oak Street.
The attraction to Bauman’s is not exactly a mystery: Since it opened eight years ago, the cider brand has won more than 150 medals in competitions around the country, including multiple “mid-sized cidery of the year” titles. But Walter isn’t going for any sort of culinary or cider-based snobbery. To her, part of the appeal is how much cider does with so little: simple, elegant, but unpretentious, showcasing the camaraderie and dedication to craft among the area’s farmers. And the food program — the one that wasn’t supposed to exist — reflects that same ethos.
Walter comes from a long line of farmers. Elizabeth Bauman first began farming in Oregon in 1895, and her family continued the tradition, transforming Bauman’s into the site of a popular farm stand, orchard, and seasonal harvest festival. Walter spent her childhood in the Bauman orchard, and remembers eating food her family grew or caught throughout her life. “Growing up on a farm, we ate seasonally, we hunted, we fished,” she says. “My grandma would say, ‘You go get ears of corn, you go get tomatoes,’ and we would preserve them. And then we’d eat what we preserved.”
The one thing her family did not do with the apples they grew? Ferment them. “When I had my first glass of hard cider, I went, ‘This is just apples?’” she says. “So I came to my cousins and said, ‘We need to be fermenting the apples.’” Walter’s family was less convinced, so she started doing her own research. Consumer interest in hard cider was growing exponentially, and more cider bars were opening around the country. So, with $5,000 and access to the family apple orchard, Walter began making hard cider, opening Bauman’s in 2016.
Less than a decade later, Walter sits on the board of the American Cider Association, and Bauman’s offers an extensive selection of award-winning modern and traditional ciders, primarily sourcing fruit from Bauman trees and other Oregon orchards. Ciders like the Mountain Rose Single Varietal, which ages for a month in French riesling barrels, took home hardware from festivals like the NW Cider Cup. However, Bauman’s is just as likely to have fun with fruited ciders as it is to dive into single varietals or thoughtful aging processes — peach raspberry and boysenberry lemonade ciders appear alongside barrel-aged ciders on the Oak location’s taps. As the cider company expanded, the operation outgrew the family farm, and Walter began pursuing a larger space in Portland. Two small-batch cidermakers stayed behind while the main operation moved north.
While Walter was growing Bauman’s, Green was growing as a chef. The former Submarine Hospitality head baker had trained in pastry, but knew he wanted to move into the savory world; struggling to break in, he decided to stage around the country, emailing bakers and chefs before he left. While every baker emailed him back, only 25 percent of the chefs did the same.
When he got back to Oregon, he tried to learn more about beverage, but he hit similar walls. “I wanted to learn more about wine,” he says. “I encountered that same protected, tight knit community that made it hard to access. But in cider, I found that same warmth and openness as I had with bakers, that same interest in community. ... No one is above bread.”
As a thank you for Walter’s support, Green wanted to capture that same sense of warmth and approachability with the food menu, while also paying homage to the cidermaker’s upbringing. “I gave Daniel free rein, but I wanted him to be inspired by the farm,” Bauman says. “It has exceeded my farmer memories.”
The menu doesn’t read as particularly fussy — hazelnuts, bread plates, pickles, cured sardines — but each item is painstakingly executed and deeply personal. The brined hazelnuts are straight from the Bauman’s family farm. The pickles, which currently include things like Hakurei turnips and carrots, also feature chicken of the woods mushrooms found on the Sauvie Island orchard Green manages. The sourdough bread not only uses durum, rye, and spelt flour from Pacific Northwestern grain growers; Green hydrates the bread with water from a natural spring on a Corbett friend’s farm.
Many of the dishes at Bauman’s on Oak rely on each other. He churns the butter he serves with the sourdough in-house. The buttermilk left over from the butter-making process goes into a Danish rye bread made with Bauman’s apple syrup, which arrives with house-made creme fraiche and smoked salmon caught and smoked by Walter on a trip to Alaska.
Green is doing almost all — if not all — the preserving, foraging, and pickling for the restaurant himself. He cures trout roe and sardines from Two X Sea, and makes the house stracciatella, served with green garlic and house seeded crackers (“I’ve taken this [stracciatella] everywhere I go,” he says.) A roasted beet dish with ricotta and dukkah arrives with a nettle salsa using nettles he foraged. The exceptions are things shared by friends: A former neighbor supplies the restaurant with mushrooms he grows in his driveway; they go into a seaweed-steamed rice bowl — a request from Walter — made with confit shiitakes.
The menu will likely shift over time, but some foundations will stay the same — rice bowls, things on toast, pickles, cured fish. Farm-to-table is nothing new to Portland; however, the personal, neighborly touch of the space feels fresh. The food that arrives at the cider taproom’s tables, made by Walter’s daughter, come from family fishing trips, gardens, backyards. It reflects the way Walter talks about cider: When she talks about why she loves her award-winning Reine Des Pommes, a blend of French varietals grown in Oregon, she says, “The grower is so dear to me.” It’s a cider house, and restaurant, built on relationships, more than it’s built on anything else.
Bauman’s on Oak is now open at 930 SE Oak Street.