OK Omens Brings on Chef Joseph Papas to Run the Kitchen

In 2018, the casual sibling restaurant to the now-closed tasting menu destination Castagna went through a transformation. Sommelier Brent Braun and then-executive chef Justin Woodward disentangled the restaurant from its lofty counterpart, giving the wine bar an identity of its own as OK Omens. They paired imported Rieslings with oysters and funky natural wines with fried chicken, poured rare West Coast wines with burgers and fries, and earned two consecutive James Beard nominations for the bar’s wine program.

But in late 2024, Woodward parted ways with the restaurant—an amicable, mutual decision months in the making, according to Braun. The vacancy gave him and co-owner and founder Monique Siu an opportunity to reexamine OK Omens’ identity. The question top of mind for them: How could they best tell the story of Portland? Their answer was to return to a once-ubiquitous style of dining. “The one thing we felt was not being represented as well as it used to be was hyper-seasonal Pacific Northwest cooking,” says Braun. To execute that vision, the pair tapped an under-the-radar up-and-comer, chef Joseph Papas. At OK Omens, he unapologetically leans into Pacific Northwest tropes and relies on techniques he’s honed over a decade of working in Portland’s finest restaurant kitchens—pickling, curing, and joyfully attending to an abundance of local produce, meat, and seafood. 

Rather than post a job listing for their new chef position, Siu and Braun tapped the Portland restaurant community for leads. Davenport founding chef Kevin Gibson and former Tusk chef Wesley Johnson—alumni of Castagna and Cafe Castagna, respectively—separately and enthusiastically recommended Papas for the role. A Portland native, Papas started his career as a line cook at Bollywood Theater, and from there tore through several high-profile Portland kitchens. His time at Tusk introduced him to Johnson and cemented his adoration for Pacific Northwestern produce, and he became fluent in French–Pacific Northwestern cuisine while working under Gibson at Davenport and Katy Millard at Coquine. He spent harvest seasons in vineyards and a year working the fields and cellar at Cameron Winery, giving him a deep understanding of wine that would prove useful at a place like OK Omens. Even still, Papas wasn’t a shoo-in for the position. It was his sample menu that most impressed Siu and Braun—in fact, most of those dishes ended up on the restaurant’s newest menu.

Papas describes his style as “holistic,” centering the main ingredient. “I want the beef to be like beef, I want these carrots to be carrots,” he says. “I want the crab to be seasoned with its own fat.” Those crabs, sourced from the waters near Garibaldi, arrive live at the restaurant daily, and after cooking and harvesting their meat, Papas renders the fat and organ bits from the inside of the carapace for a dressing. “It’s almost better than the meat itself,” he says. He then tosses them with early spring herbs and late winter greens, including tardivo, a long, elegant radicchio of vibrant mauve.

Seafood has a strong presence on the menu in general—he did, after all, prep peel-and-eat barnacles and butter clams for Jacob Harth at his seafood pop-up at Nevor Shellfish Farm. At OK Omens, Papas tackles mackerel two different ways. For one preparation, he cures the fish for exactly 12 minutes, harmonious and vivid after a follow-up 13-minute pickle in an infused vinegar blend. The fish appears again further down the menu, cooked over a Thaan charcoal grill and topped with freeze-dried green peppercorns that disintegrate in the mouth with a citrusy pop. They’re an homage to the ones on the steak au poivre at L’Echelle, where he worked during its pop-up phase.

Another standout on the inaugural menu is the restaurant’s version of mussels en escabeche. Like his pickled mackerel, Papas’s mussels rely on a judicious blend of vinegars to highlight—and not overpower—their oceanic sweetness. Meticulously hand-picked bivalves land, shell-less, in a blend of two vinegars: one infused with smoked and grilled onions, and the other with fennel. They soak overnight before Papas finishes them on a heated plate with a generous drizzle of warm chicken fat, leaving them butter soft. Beyond typical pickling techniques, Papas also dry ages proteins to draw out flavor, as he does with a rainbow trout before it cures on a bed of kelp; it arrives at tables atop a stunning parsley aioli on toast, with a generous shaving of nutty, slightly sweet horseradish.

While the mackerel comes from the Atlantic, nearly everything else on the menu is sourced hyper locally. This includes Papas’s take on tartare, sourced from Pat-n-Tam’s Beef in Stanfield, OR. An egg yolk, tempered with smoked soy sauce, binds the beef with capers and onions, to be served on toast grilled with rendered tallow.

Some OK Omens standbys remain on the menu, like the fried chicken and the Torito Caesar. Others get a bit of Papas’s voice, like the burger made with house-ground brisket. But perhaps most indicative of the young chef’s style is the crudité, a simple platter of raw seasonal vegetables and pickled off-season ones. Everything on the menu is designed to pair with Braun’s collection of wines and, other than the burger, is best when shared.

Despite his newfound position, Papas’s vision remains fixed on the menu. “I don’t want to put myself in front like I’ve got something to prove,” says Papas. “It’s not about me; it’s about the work. It’s about the team. It’s about the food.”