Willamette Valley Farm-to-Table Restaurant Hayward Is Going Solo

In 2020, chef Kari Shaughnessy left behind the celebrated Bay Area restaurants of her early career and moved to McMinnville. At the time, the Willamette Valley town wasn’t heralded as a premier culinary destination—it was better known as a common home base for those exploring wine country, offering a few reliable dining spots to refuel between pinot noir flights. But a burgeoning food hall, Mac Market, was looking to change that: A culinary hub highlighting farmers and producers in the region, it was home to Shaughnessy’s first Oregon project, Collab Kitchen. Before the now-closed Okta served its first tasting menus, before the team at Humble Spirit was baking Oreo riffs with lard from their own farm, Shaughnessy was sourcing locally and thinking globally, serving takeout larb, meze, and chickpea tostadas at an unassuming stall now home to Honey Pie.

It didn’t take long before Shaughnessy evolved the concept into Hayward, a sit-down restaurant taking Collab Kitchen’s ethos in an ambitious, more polished direction. Occupying a corner of Mac Market, Hayward took cues from Italian, Japanese, and Pacific Northwestern cuisine, but was never locked into one theme other than a dedication to Oregon-grown ingredients. For weeks at a time, she would transform the menu into an homage to the Sopranos or Twin Peaks, picking up a James Beard nomination and plenty of glowing media buzz along the way. But Shaughnessy has outgrown her restaurant’s birthplace. At the end of May, Hayward will close in McMinnville, reopening later this summer in Carlton, just 15 minutes down the road. There, in a roomy locale with a back patio and bar, Shaughnessy plans to make the restaurant, in her words, more personal, more intimate, and just more Hayward.

“Mac Market has been incredible,” Shaughnessy says. “I’ve gotten to work through who I am as a chef, and test out a lot of just different food over my time here… It just felt like it was time for Hayward to graduate from the ‘incubator’ space and be in its standalone location.” She started scouting brick-and-mortars a year ago, focusing on other parts of the valley like Dayton, Dundee, and Lafayette. She struck pay dirt when she stumbled across the old Earth & Sea location, a Carlton celebration spot that closed earlier this year. “I really view us as a restaurant for the Willamette Valley and from the Willamette Valley,” she says. “I didn’t feel as beholden to a town.”

There is nothing quite like Hayward in Carlton at present. Many of the town’s culinary standbys involve burgers, Italian stalwarts, or French bistro standards. Hayward has dabbled in the above, though Shaughnessy rarely plays it straight: Semolina pasta gets a kick from harissa; profiteroles benefit from the earthiness of black sesame ice cream. Shaughnessy anticipates a lot of collaboration with other local restaurants; she’s already envisioning block parties and community events, including a potential Fourth of July party this year. But having her own space—particularly her own kitchen, considering Hayward currently shares one with two other restaurants—is the biggest draw.

The food at the new Hayward will remain largely the same. However, taking over a new setting will allow Shaughnessy to match the dining room’s aesthetic to the restaurant’s fully developed identity, one the chef and her team have anthropomorphized over the years while scrubbing sinks and washing tables.

“We created this personality, a very independent woman, a worldly traveler who lives on a farm in Oregon,” she says. “She raises cattle, she makes her own food. She has a basement to store all of her ferments and her cheeses. And we always kind of envisioned this taking place, like, slightly in the ’70s.” To execute that vision, she’s working with contractor Danridge Geiger, who also designed Portland’s Yaowarat and Langbaan. She promises to keep the many rugs and lamps that have become iconic to the restaurant, and to lean into “a lot of tile.” A large bar will welcome diners upon entry with seats for 10, while the dining room itself will fit another 50, more than Hayward can currently seat. In summertime, a 20-person covered back patio will offer an idyllic space to dine on sesame focaccia and sip wines.

The new building’s basement will provide ample space for storing fermented goods and cheeses, while a larger walk-in allows for more whole-animal butchery and greater relations with local farmers, butchers, and purveyors (Shaughnessy’s fiancée and business partner is Jimmy Serlin, who co-owns Revel Meat Company). And she may be bringing back some kind of version of her TV show–themed dinner series, though more likely as single nights or weekends. But mostly she’s doubling down on what has defined Hayward so far: a celebration of the Willamette Valley and its culinary bounty. “We got to live out what Hayward is over the last year and a half, and now we get the opportunity to amplify what that is throughout the design, the food, and the hospitality,” Shaughnessy says. “The idea of the food is still exactly the same. We just want to feel even more personal and more intimate than we did before.”