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David Bergen

I grew up in New York and New Jersey. While I was in High School I worked on a small truck farm just a few miles from home. It was like “Diary of an Early American Boy” come to life. The work was tremendously satisfying and inspiring. Later on I worked on small farms in Vermont and Oregon. Small family owned operations that had real passion and dedication.
     In college I traveled to Europe with John Ronsheim and the Antioch College Choir, singing Ockeghem and eating and drinking my way through France, Belgium and Italy. Those experiences left an impression that still inspires me.
     I moved to Oregon in 1977 and framed houses for a couple of years. I went back to school and started cooking at Delevan’s in 1980. I discovered that I could taste and that I loved being in a kitchen. I moved over to 2601 Vaughn in 1982, and after that closed a year later, I opened Paul*Bergen Catering & Charcuterie with Ron Paul. I’ve had the great good luck to work with some very talented and generous local cooks before it was groovy to be a cook. Most good cooks in Portland at the time were self-taught. I don’t mean institutional cooks, but places like L’Auberge, Genoa, The Wood Stove and 2601 Vaughn. These were cooks that were inspired by travel and reading. We were trying to create a sense of place through the culture of food.
     When Tina and I moved to Yamhill County in 1988 I had the chance to work in wineries for a couple of years. Getting to know more about the technology and process of the wine industry has made me a better advocate for this corner of the world and helped us better define the food we wanted to cook in a wine growing region.

Tina Bergen

I grew up in Cincinnati, and remember running through the barrel rooms of the old German neighborhood wine shop where my mother bought wine. I played restaurant in my room with my toy stove and refrigerator and Play-Dough blueberry pies, scribbling orders before I could write. My pleasure with food can be traced to the homemade yeast biscuits that were served in my high school cafeteria. I went to the College of Wooster in Ohio, studying art and sculpture. My first cooking job was in San Francisco in 1975. The owner took me under his wing and taught me how to make gallons of soup, and corned beef sandwiches. I knew that this was where I wanted to be. When I moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1977, I worked in many different places, ending up at 2601 Vaughn, an offshoot of L’Auberge. We were all self-taught cooks, using Julia Child, Freddy Giradet, the Troisgros brothers to guide us. For two years I shared the L’Auberge ethnic brunch duties with my friend, Barbara Simon. We researched our menus with cookbooks and interviews with Polish mothers, creating our interpretations of regional cuisine every Sunday.
     When I traveled in Europe and in the States, I always had the strong desire to find the unusual; duck liver mousse, chocolates from a shop outside Versailles, pastries in Normandy, ice cream near Notre Dame, Turkish spices near the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. When I traveled food was always a pleasure waiting to be discovered.
     I stayed on Vaughn Street when L’Auberge moved to that site in 1983. I was hired as the Kitchen Manager at Paul*Bergen Catering in 1985, and I cooked briefly at Café Des Amis, Bread And Ink and Eddie Lee’s. I married David and we have two girls, Robin and Mimi.

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