Review: Hayward Is Oregon Wine Country’s Destination Restaurant

There are a dozen different routes you can drive from Portland to Carlton. Some involve rolling hills, sun-kissed vineyards, and happy goats, while others are an hour and change of exurban sprawl, traffic lights, and freeway congestion. I’ve done them all over the last few months, during mind-melting rush hour and summery twilight. The destination, however, remains the same: a restaurant of growing national esteem called Hayward, presently one of the most exciting, challenging, and discussion-worthy dining rooms in the state.

Hayward started life inside the Mac Market food hall in McMinnville, occupying an oversize dining room in the back of a former shoe grease factory. This “incubator” stage, as chef-owner Kari Shaughnessy has called it, benefited from the joy of discovery. Shaughnessy wasn’t a big-name chef transplanted to the valley. Free of expectation, Hayward’s early menus often felt like exercises in whimsy—particularly a series themed around TV shows (a David Lynch menu included cherry pie and a beef tartare styled to resemble a Bob’s Big Boy cheeseburger). It was sometimes hard to tell the dressed-up menus from a standard Hayward service, as both favored fermented local vegetables and a global set of recipes executed with straightforward elegance. The food was playful, risky; you couldn’t put your finger on it. Then came the James Beard Award nominations—Best New Restaurant finalist in 2024, Best Chef Northwest semifinalist in 2025—and shout-outs from The New York Times, Vogue, and USA Today.

Attention has a way of dissolving underdog status, but the context around Hayward has changed as well. It opened as a plucky counterpunch—cool, exciting, and vegetable-forward—to the ornate tasting menu a few blocks away at Okta, chef Matthew Lightner’s too-beautiful-to-last atelier. All eyes were on Okta. Humble, makeshift Hayward was free to figure itself out. If you’ll forgive the baseball analogy, sometimes the no. 5 hitter benefits from batting after the cleanup superstar.

Cut to 2025: Lightner’s Okta is gone, replaced by the pared-back Okta Farm & Kitchen, and Shaughnessy’s Hayward has decamped to a big fancy stand-alone restaurant 15 minutes away in the town of Carlton (pop. 2,273), the grain elevator capital of the Willamette Valley. And the scrappy underdog is now the destination restaurant that people drive all the long way from Portland to visit.

After several trips to Hayward’s gorgeous new space, a few dishes I can’t stop thinking about—a corn gratin layered with thinly sliced potatoes in peach-leaf cream, petite bell peppers stuffed with feta and crisped coppa, cucumbers marinated with gochugaru and lime—make clear that the restaurant is in no hurry to define its cuisine. What kind of food even is this? is a question the restaurant has cheekily taken to addressing online. It’s hard to give it a name, but you can’t call Shaughnessy’s food boring.

While many Willamette Valley restaurants look to Portland for inspiration (and clientele), Hayward 2.0 carries a marked Californianess, by dint of Shaughnessy’s time in San Francisco, cooking at Melissa Perello’s Michelin-starred Frances and baking at Amy Brown’s Marla, but also the restaurant’s breezy earth- and jewel-toned decor. Folk-patterned rugs cover its polished concrete floors, vintage Wilson tennis rackets perch on the blond three-quarter wainscotting, and wonderfully clunky wooden light fixtures hang from chains like folksy miniatures of Donald Judd sculptures. There are waist-high candle stands, bruised apricot velveteen curtains, and plants plants plants—enough tillandsia and potted S. zeylanica to make an elder millennial check their Klarna account.

Reservations will likely put you in one of two dining rooms, or, weather permitting, on the leafy patio beyond the open kitchen, Shaughnessy at the pass. But walk-ins can sit at the front room’s clay-red bar, which seems to float next to a brick fireplace, portending significant winter coziness. Cocktails (you can order a half serving of any of them, which is brilliant!) take pride of place on the drink menu and favor local produce and foraged ingredients. The Field Note, a white Negroni, leans floral thanks to gin infused with valley-grown arnica, a relative of the sunflower. So far my favorite is a high-octane house martini named Freyja; it’s made with sherry and served, very cold, with blue cheese–stuffed olives.

The tight wine list, with just a few glass pours and around 40 bottles (and only a handful from Oregon), quietly announces that this is a restaurant in wine country, not a wine country restaurant. You’ll note the many BYO bottles on neighboring tables, treasures pulled from cellars or purchased out on the valley wine trail. Service mirrors this polite minimalism, attentive and friendly but without spiel or enthusiastic explanation. Usually this is great, though in the extreme—and with a daily-changing menu that flatly lists ingredients—it’s easy to get lost.

Collated, the best of what I ate across three visits makes an extraordinary meal. Alone, each dinner was an adventure: sporadically thrilling, mysterious, and sometimes fighting itself.

A guiding strategy: If anything on a Kari Shaughnessy menu involves bread, order it. (Hayward is quietly one of the best bakeries around, perhaps because Shaughnessy started as a pastry chef.) Housemade focaccia is redolent of the hearth, with big pops of sea salt, toasted sesame, and koji butter for slathering. One night the menu featured a play on dim sum shrimp toast, mounted on a sourdough cracker instead of sandwich bread, with creamy tofu and chile crisp. Another night beef tartare came with startling, seeded rye toasted in that good butter. The seeds popped alongside fried capers, the whole thing melting into itself in a uniquely satisfying way.

Shaughnessy’s hand with fried dishes is similarly outstanding: a bundle of Tropea onions, “chicken-fried” and served with shishito pepper aioli, or a hearty pork schnitzel, which arrived next to a traditional cucumber and yogurt salad heaped with dill. The latter came with a lemon wedge crusted in tangy sumac, bringing a sophisticated acidity to the porky proceedings.

The daring that made Shaughnessy such an exciting upstart chef just a few years ago is still present, but big swings win both home runs and whiffs. Vegetables remain the star. Roughly half of the dozen dishes on the menu will center something pulled from the field on a given night. But making a meal of, say, a head of cabbage, isn’t easy. The one I ordered, charred and served in green curry, was overblackened and undercooked, like a steak still cold in the middle. The curry read more like veggie hummus, surprisingly lacking any kick of heat or burst of acid. Late-summer filet beans dressed with fried garlic and hazelnuts offered layers of crunch but just one flavor—a dimly round garlickiness, diffuse and oily.

Though glorious and proudly simple when they connect, like that schnitzel, proteins can also underdeliver on an enticing combination of ingredients. A smoked pork chop with Jimmy Nardello peppers longed for one of those smart lemon wedges but instead got a baffling amount of dill and an uninspired red pepper sauce. Apricot-glazed Columbia River salmon over wild rice sounded great on the menu, and was beautiful in a freckled stoneware bowl, but it ate bland and mushy, and again I yearned for a spark of hot or sweet or sour intrigue. (Perhaps I could have borrowed some of the chile crisp from the shrimp toast.)

Still, the spark is certainly alive. When Hayward works, it really works. I ordered the daily pickled and fermented vegetables three times and was never served the same thing—a duo of fermented and pickled radishes one night, a shock of whole pickled carrots the next, each with varied acidity, texture, salinity, and aroma. A perfect moment arrives when the pickles, warm focaccia, and a complexly herbal cocktail hit the table.

Each time I drove down with a dining partner, we spent the entire ride back talking about the experience—sometimes through little vineyard roads, or in the quiet gloam of Highway 99 after dark, rehashing all of it, good and bad. Hayward is many things, perhaps too many things, but it finds trenchant harmony in the madness more often than not. I’m not sure it knows exactly what it wants to be yet, Instagram explainer posts be damned. But food that evokes this level of discursion is a marvel. A true destination restaurant, underdogs included, is one that keeps you interested all the way there and back.