Kann

Haitian Fire in the Pacific Northwest

Live-fire cooking and Caribbean tradition share more common ground than Portland's reputation as a wood-oven pizza city might suggest. The charred edge, the herb-laden marinade, the long tradition of cooking over open flame — these are currencies that cross cultures. At Kann on SE Ash Street, that convergence finds its most argued-over expression in Oregon: a Haitian restaurant where the wood fire is not a technique layered on leading of a concept, but the structural logic of the whole kitchen. It opened in 2022, was ranked the number one new restaurant in America by Esquire that same year, and by 2024 had earned Gregory Gourdet the James Beard Award for Leading Chef: Northwest and Pacific — one of the highest recognitions in American dining.

Haitian cuisine occupies a complicated position in the American restaurant conversation. It has long been underrepresented relative to its Caribbean neighbors, pushed to the margins of a category that the dining mainstream tends to flatten into a single register. What Kann represents, within that context, is a studied insistence on specificity: the herbs are Haitian, the seasoning logic is Haitian, and the fire is the through-line that connects the island's outdoor cooking traditions to Oregon's own culture of wood and smoke. That combination is not incidental , it is the editorial argument the restaurant makes with every plate.

The Menu's Grammar

The kitchen's organizing principle is the open fire, and the menu reads accordingly. The database record flags a half-chicken finished with an emulsion built from epis , the Haitian green seasoning of herbs, aromatics, and alliums that functions as a foundational flavor compound in the cuisine , and finished with cashews. Warm sweet potato bread arrives with berbere-infused butter, a gesture that signals the kitchen's comfort borrowing from the wider African diaspora without losing its Haitian center of gravity. Battered okra is described in the record as a snappy, savoury preparation , a useful reminder that okra's reputation in American food culture is not universal, and that technique matters more than the ingredient's baggage.

The menu is entirely gluten and dairy-free, which at the cuisine pricing tier of $$ (a typical two-course meal in the $40-$65 range) is uncommon in fine-leaning casual dining. Most restaurants operating in that price band treat allergen accommodation as an afterthought or a subtraction. Here the framing is different: the absence of gluten and dairy is a structural feature of the cuisine's logic, not a concession to a dietary subset. That distinction matters both for how the kitchen communicates and for how a diner plans their evening.

Gourdet extended the concept in 2023 by opening Sousòl, a subterranean cocktail bar directly beneath Kann. Esquire named it one of America's leading bars. The vertical integration of a serious bar program underneath a serious kitchen is a model Portland has seen in different forms , Langbaan (Thai) runs its tasting menu experience inside a separate room within a larger restaurant , but the basement-bar pairing at Kann functions more like a downtown-New York model transplanted to Southeast Portland.

The Wine List and Its Signals

The 90-selection, 550-bottle wine list, with pricing weighted toward France and Oregon, sits in the $$$ tier , meaning the list carries many bottles above $100. That is a deliberate positioning choice. Caribbean cuisines are not traditionally paired with French Burgundy or Willamette Valley Pinot Noir in the public imagination, but Kann's wine program makes a case for that pairing, implicitly arguing that the acidity and fruit register of both regions can move through the herbaceous, smoke-inflected flavors of Haitian cooking. Wine Director and General Manager Elishca Charles holds the list together, with Michael Branton listed as sommelier. Corkage, for those who bring their own, is set at $40.

Compared to Portland's broader restaurant wine culture , where places like Nostrana (Italian) and Ken's Artisan Pizza (Pizzeria) anchor the casual end of the spectrum , Kann's wine program signals a more formal ambition without the formal service architecture. The list length and inventory depth (550 bottles is a substantial cellar for a casual-tier restaurant) push it toward a peer set that includes Portland's more envelope-testing projects, including Berlu (Vietnamese), which operates at its own intersection of Southeast Asian cuisine and serious beverage programming.

Portland as the Right City for This

The argument that Portland was the place where this restaurant had to happen is worth examining. The city's dining culture has rewarded chef-driven, culturally specific restaurants for years , not as a niche category but as the main event. In 2025, JinJu Patisserie won the James Beard Outstanding Bakery award, extending a streak of Portland kitchens receiving national recognition. The city's infrastructure for sourcing, its proximity to Oregon's agricultural bounty, and its diner appetite for specificity over spectacle created conditions where a Haitian live-fire restaurant could find both its supply chain and its audience.

Gourdet's earlier work at Departure Restaurant and Lounge in Portland and his three James Beard nominations before the 2024 win gave him a platform in the city that a lesser-known chef could not have leveraged at the same speed. The restaurant's Opinionated About Dining ranking climbed from #97 in 2024 to #117 in 2025 in the Casual North America category , a shift that reflects both the growing competition in that tier and Kann's sustained presence in the national conversation two and three years after opening. Pearl also listed it as a recommended restaurant for 2025. For context on where the broader Portland dining scene sits nationally, our full Portland restaurants guide maps the city's current range.

The city's hospitality scene extends beyond restaurants. Our full Portland hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the full range of what makes Portland worth a considered visit.

Gourdet Beyond Portland

The 2025 launch of five restaurants inside Printemps, the French department store in New York City, extends the allergen-friendly, diaspora-rooted cooking model into a very different context. For EP Club readers who also follow dining on both coasts, the Printemps restaurants sit in a New York scene that includes destinations like Atomix in New York City and Le Bernardin in New York City , venues operating at different price points and cultural registers but sharing the same city's competitive air. Gourdet's New York presence arrived with a French inflection at a French department store, which makes sense as a distribution point without being the same thing as Kann's Oregon argument.

His collaboration with Deadstock Coffee to launch a Haitian coffee , available by the cup or the bag at Kann , is a small detail that carries weight as an indication of how the restaurant functions as a platform for black-owned artisanal producers. It also means that a visit to Kann can extend past dessert into an entirely sourced-from-Haiti beverage finish, which few Caribbean restaurants in the country can match.

For comparison across the wider national fine-dining tier, readers tracking James Beard-level restaurants across the country might also consider Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, The French Laundry in Napa, Alinea in Chicago, and Emeril's in New Orleans , each occupying a distinct regional and stylistic position in the national conversation. Further afield, 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong offers a useful international comparison point for how chef-driven cuisine travels across cultural contexts.

Portland's ZUbakery rounds out the city's award-recognized baking and pastry scene, reflecting the same pattern of specialists earning national recognition that defines Portland's current culinary moment.

Planning a Visit

Kann is open Tuesday through Thursday from 4 to 10pm, Friday and Saturday from 4 to 11pm, and Sunday from 4 to 10pm. Monday is closed. The restaurant is at 548 SE Ash Street in Portland's inner Southeast, a neighborhood dense with serious independent restaurants. Google reviews sit at 4.6 across more than 1,000 ratings. Sousòl, the cocktail bar below, operates on its own schedule and is worth factoring into an evening that begins upstairs with dinner. The corkage fee is $40 if you bring your own bottle to put against the 550-bottle list.

What Should I Eat at Kann?

The database record points to three confirmed preparations as representative of the kitchen's range. The half-chicken with epis emulsion and cashew garnish is the dish that most directly encodes the Haitian flavor logic the restaurant argues for , herbaceous, aromatic, and built around a sauce that is specific to the cuisine rather than borrowed from a more familiar frame. The sweet potato bread with berbere butter arrives early and signals the kitchen's willingness to draw on the wider African diaspora while keeping Haiti as the primary reference. The battered okra is a more direct test of technique: a vegetable with a polarizing reputation in American dining, cooked here in a way the record describes as snappy and savoury, which suggests the kitchen is making a case rather than hedging. The menu is entirely gluten and dairy-free across all dishes, which shapes every preparation. Gregory Gourdet holds the 2024 James Beard Award for Leading Chef: Northwest and Pacific, and the restaurant earned the number one spot on Esquire's Leading New Restaurants list in 2022 , credentials that, taken together, indicate the kitchen's ambition is matched by its execution.