With the well-documented health impacts of wood smoke, some Portland chefs are opting for other heat sources
At the Turning Peel in Southeast Portland, charred, thin-crust pizzas arrive topped with everything from prosciutto to purple cauliflower, three-year-aged Parmesan to house-made vegan mozzarella. Before opening her pizzeria in 2023, owner Candy Yiu did her homework. She knew that she wanted to use sourdough for her crust, and to create pies similar to the ones that have been bubbling in the wood-burning ovens of Naples for hundreds of years. Gas Pizza Oven
“I really love Neapolitan pizza, where the crust is really thin and it’s really light,” she says. “We were really debating what pizza oven to use... People get really excited about wood fire.”
While working on her restaurant, however, she happened across a documentary about the health impacts of working with a wood-fired oven. It’s true that burning wood releases small particles that can work their way into the lungs — and even the heart and brain — and can trigger asthma attacks, heart attacks, and strokes. Woodsmoke also contains cancer-causing chemicals and contributes to climate change, says John Wasiutynski, the director of Multnomah County’s Office of Sustainability. Yiu, upon doing more research, worried about her own health and the health of family members working in the restaurant alongside her.
Multnomah County currently runs a public education program that discourages residents from using fire pits and fireplaces. (Portland residents can even request a lawn sign that says, “Skip the Fire, Love Your Lungs.”) It’s illegal to burn wood on days when the air quality is especially bad — say, when there’s a wildfire nearby — unless you are using it to prepare food. Incidentally, more and more Portland restaurants seem to be doing that.
“There’s this trend in the food scene that seems to be pro-wood,” says Wasiutynski, noting that it would fall on Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality to study the issue and provide the scientific basis for any future regulations. “To my knowledge they have never really analyzed, ‘Okay, how many restaurants do we think are using wood, and how much wood are they using?’” Without that data, he says, “we’re really in the dark.”
In the end, Yiu didn’t have to compromise. She found the modern, electric Pizza Master oven that can achieve the high heat, up to 900 degrees, that Neapolitan pizza requires.
“We have been really happy about our health, as well as the pizza coming out,” Yiu says. “I would say, as beautiful as cooking in a wood-fire oven.”
Portland has roughly 20 wood-fired pizzerias, not to mention the countless other restaurants serving cuisines that traditionally rely on wood fires — from Haitian to Argentine to Southern-style barbecue. The city’s dining scene has developed a reputation for its hands-on, artisanal approach: Chefs hone old-world skills like pickling, foraging, and whole-hog butchery. Cooking over an open flame fits right into the same genre.
While mounting evidence illuminates the negative environmental and health effects of woodsmoke, absent specific restaurant-based evidence, regulation surrounding Portland food businesses is nonexistent. As such, Portland restaurant owners and chefs have had to make their own call, in favor of either reducing risk or preserving tradition.
Artfully stacked wood is part of the decor at Bluto’s, a Belmont neighborhood Greek restaurant. It’s also the fuel that cooks dishes like skewered lamb, charred broccoli, and charred scallion pork chops. Chef Barry Fitzpatrick says that the wood-fired grill, given pride of place in the open kitchen, is crucial to the restaurant’s identity. It’s appealing to customers, and to cooks as well.
“[Wood fire] definitely gives more flavor and really just brings different techniques and styles,” he says. “Just maintaining a fire throughout a service — there’s something primal about it.”
He says the smoke rising from the chimney every day hasn’t triggered any pushback, although he acknowledges an inevitable impact on the air quality of the surrounding neighborhood. But, he says, with so many wood-fired spots in town, why complain about one more? “It’s what the city’s known for,” he says, “having high-quality restaurants doing different things.”
Neighbor complaints did have an impact on one wood-fired spot, the grilled chicken-focused Mama Bird. The restaurant made the news in fall 2019 when it temporarily shut down just weeks after opening in a densely residential Northwest neighborhood, in a case that brought a burst of attention to the absence of regulations around woodsmoke. Now, the restaurant’s smoke is filtered through an industrial scrubber, installed at a reported cost of $100,000.
Chef and owner Gabriel Pascuzzi says the complaints have faded away, except for one person who is still coming by and spitting on his windows. He remains a fan of cooking with wood — his current menu even includes a s’mores dessert with a toasted marshmallow.
Every kind of fuel, he points out, has its issues — natural gas is a fossil fuel, electricity comes from dams. In fact, the hand-wringing about the impact of gas stoves has become a policy touchpoint in Oregon; Eugene effectively banned natural gas appliances in new residential construction in 2023, which the city council quickly repealed after a federal court ruling overturned a ban in Berkeley, California. In Pascuzzi’s perspective, cities are always going to be noisy, energy-guzzling places with smells, waste, and air pollution, regardless of how you cook food in your kitchen.
Could the city someday require all wood-burning restaurants to install a scrubber? The county’s Wasiutynski thinks it’s possible, but says the data to back up that kind of requirement doesn’t yet exist. “Again, this points us towards the idea that we need to have some analysis from the regulators to tell us, ‘Okay, these scrubbers can do the job and reduce pollution to healthy levels’ — or really we should just be looking at other ways of cooking food other than wood.”
For some chefs, the environmental impacts that wood-fired cooking poses are just as concerning as individual health risks. In Sarah Minnick’s case, at some point, she started to worry about all the trees she was consuming. Since opening in 2010, her North Mississippi spot, Lovely’s Fifty Fifty, has consistently been mentioned as one of the top wood-fired pizzerias in town. Minnick gained additional fame when her herb- and edible-flower-topped pizzas were featured on the Netflix show Chef’s Table: Pizza, and she is currently in the running for a 2024 James Beard Outstanding Chef Award.
As the restaurant got busier and busier, Minnick started to feel guilty about how much wood she was going through. “In the early years of Lovely’s, wood was a beautiful way to cook,” she says. “But that doesn’t matter when you’re looking at the environmental cost of it.”
As time went on, she says, pizza oven technology also improved. Since June 2020, Minnick has been cooking with an electric Pizza Master oven, the same oven that Yiu brought in. She says she hasn’t had to sacrifice on the quality of her food, though she does miss the primal feeling, and the fun, of cooking with a flame.
“I’m not saying we’re saving the world over here, with this electric oven,” she says. “But I do feel better about it.”
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