Skip to main content
Roger Porter died March 3, complaining about the food to the very end. He was 89. Porter, a professor of English at Reed College, author, literary critic, and theater aficionado, also wrote about restaurants for Willamette Week.
Porter was born in Newark in 1936. While he lived in Portland most of his life, his New York perspective never faded and often popped up in his restaurant reviews. He called vegans “the Hezbollah of vegetarians” and quipped that a short-lived corporate burger joint was “on the road to Beaverton, and it feels it.”
He loved good writing, maybe even more than a good meal. For more than half a century, he taught English at Reed, everything from Shakespeare to modern fiction. His own books ranged from a consideration of autobiography to a guidebook to Portland restaurants. In an interview about Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing, the book he co-edited with Molly O’Neill, Porter quoted from Terry Eagleton’s essay about the relationship of food and language: “Literary language can be mouth-filling or subtly flavored, meaty or hard-boiled, spicy or indigestible.” It’s an apt description of his own work.
He later wrote for The Oregonian, and his restaurant criticism was a James Beard Award finalist in 1989. We’d often joke that we were the longest-tenured freelancers at WW, and we were definitely the oldest.
The last time I saw Roger he was in hospice, still sharp as a tack as he approached 90 despite the failure of his body to keep up with his mind. Surrounded by his favorite books and listening to the symphony, he told me he was content, but as I left he said, “You’d think this place would have better bread.”
