In 2023, the James Beard Foundation named Kann its Best New Restaurant in America. Kann is in Portland, Oregon. Its chef and owner is Gregory Gourdet, who is Haitian-American and publicly sober. Its menu is built around Haitian foodways and open-fire cooking, using Pacific Northwest ingredients.
That combination -- Haitian food, open fire, Portland, James Beard -- should not feel surprising in 2023. The fact that it still does is the whole story.
Gourdet opened Kann in 2022 after years of building a national profile on Top Chef and through his time at Departure in Portland. He had been cooking at the highest level for years. What he had not had was a room where his own food -- the food of his Haitian heritage -- was treated with the same seriousness as French or Japanese cuisine.
“Haitian food is complex, layered, and beautiful. It just needed a room that matched.”
-- Gregory Gourdet
Kann gave him that room. The name means 'sugarcane' in Haitian Creole. The menu cycles through dishes rooted in the African, French, and indigenous Taino traditions that make Haitian cooking one of the most complex and underrepresented culinary traditions in the Western Hemisphere.
In 2024, Gourdet won James Beard's Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific -- his second major James Beard win in consecutive years for the same restaurant. Back-to-back wins of that nature for a single restaurant are extraordinarily rare. They represent a consensus judgment from the most respected culinary institution in America that Kann is not just good -- it is among the best.
What Gourdet has built is not a diversity win for Portland. It is a world-class restaurant that happens to center Black food traditions. The distinction matters. Representation as charity is fragile. Representation as excellence is permanent.
