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After more than 18 months open, global restaurant and live music bar Perlot will close in January. The restaurant, home to Iron Chef winner and Paley’s Place alum Patrick McKee, will serve its last meal on January 13.
According to owners Casey O’Brien and Eric Schindele, the restaurant’s main investors have backed out, forcing the team to leave the Fremont Street space. “To them, it didn’t seem financially viable down the road,” Schindele says of their investors. “It wasn’t really our decision — we thought we made something amazing here — but they decided to pull the plug.”
Perlot opened in 2016 as Southfork, a Southern restaurant with live music in the former Smallwares space. After its first year, the restaurant switched gears, rebranding as Perlot — named for Schindele’s long-lost relative, early Portland produce pioneer Jean-Nicolas Perlot. The menu became far more globally influenced, from a burger slathered with green curry aioli to an increasingly popular cacio e pepe special.
Still, business never really picked up to the point of comfortable success. The owners are hesitant to attribute the lack of business to any particular cause; however, it should be noted that the critically acclaimed Smallwares also struggled at the same address, and it wasn’t the first not-exactly-casual restaurant to close in Beaumont-Wilshire. “I’ve always been a believer that there’s enough room in Portland for everyone,” O’Brien says. “The year we opened, there were another 170 (restaurants) that opened; in the next year, there were another 140 places that opened... There’s so much in the city of Portland, and maybe we weren’t in the right pocket for what we wanted to do.” No word yet on where Patrick McKee is headed next; stay tuned for more updates from the Perlot team.
• Perlot [Official]
• Perlot [Instagram]
• Chef Patrick McKee Is Back and Taking Over the Old Smallwares Space [EPDX]
• Beaumont’s SouthFork Ditches its Name and Emerges as Perlot [EPDX]
