Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by... [ music playing ] WOMAN: Oh, they're just beautiful, they're perfect.

The ones that I'm looking for, this variety here, is a multiple-petaled variety, and I love it also because it's this deep pink, which will get deeper pink when it gets pickled and brined.

What you are looking for are these fluffy, full petals.

So, I think what I'm going to do is toss them in here and just flip it around a little bit to try to get some of the little brown stems.

It's just simply sea salt and plum wine vinegar.

And so just like as you're doing pickles, this will be in the refrigerator for about two days, and you go to it each day and just kind of squeeze it.

You'll find more liquid comes out.

[ music playing ] My name is Gena Renaud, and I make wagashi.

"Wagashi" literally translates to "Japanese sweets."

The "wa" stands for "Japanese" and "gashi" is "sweets."

All of it, it all really comes down to nature.

Nature is the muse.

In Japan, back in the old days, they didn't have air conditioning, and so a lot of the sweets they would make would be visually cooling and refreshing: pools of water, you know, fish splashing about.

Oftentimes, the wagashi maker will give the sweet a name.

And we're going to make jelly.

So, one of the really important things about wagashi is that it really needs to appeal to all five senses.

Just want all those petals to separate.

How is the cherry blossom going to hold its place?

So, this is what we're going to do, I'm going to suspend it.

So, these are the kind of problem-solving things I learned at Michael Curry.

When you're working on puppets and sets, there's just, like, constant problem-solving.

[ music playing ] Working there, it was really kind of wonderful to be with people who were makers, physically crafting with their hands.

I spent 25 years doing graphic and industrial design, eventually working at Nike and for Adidas.

So, this was in the New York Times Magazine.

They never told me that it was going to be, like, spread out on a big table with cats roaming around.

[ laughs ] Top five video countdown number five: For all of its home-grown spirit, my friend Gena and her delightful little wagashi... RENAUD: That felt amazing.

I felt like I was getting invited into some club.

ZIMMERN: It is homemade, and it is excellent.

Oh, I broke a tooth!

No, I'm just kidding.

I fell under Gena's spell a couple years ago.

She walked into a tea shop with a tray of wagashi.

I did a double take like one of those cartoon characters where the springs come-- boing!-- out of your eyes.

I'm obsessed with the manju.

So, think buttery dough rolled out, wrapped around an intensity of bean-paste jam.

Thirteen hours in the making, I might add.

The tops are glazed with a little bit of dark soy and white wine, which gives this toasty aroma.

RENAUD: The manju is filled with sweet lima bean paste.

Totally familiar, you know, especially to people in the South.

So, when I tell them that they're eating sweet lima beans, they're like, "What?!"

[ chuckles ] So, it's a little bit more familiar to the Western palate.

So, I think what I'm going to do is go for a white camellia.

And we're going to add a little bit of pink blush.

And what I want is a cool pink.

A lot of effort goes into determining what colors you're doing.

BROOKS: They may be small, but each one contains an entire philosophy.

You taste the joy, the commitment, the rigor.

This is not like popping a batch of brownies in the oven.

RENAUD: Did you play with Play-Doh when you were young?

I sure did.

[ chuckles ] There, that's a nice shape.

[ music playing ] Here are the tools that I use: branding irons and molds.

These molds started my journey into wagashi making.

I stumbled on them in a Japanese grocery store in Portland.

I then started researching more and more.

I finally found some Japanese cookbooks with confection recipes.

My mother translated them for me.

I was turning 50 in the next year, my son was staring high school, and my relationship, marriage of 27 years, was coming to an end.

I felt like I needed to kind of go back and figure out what made me me.

And part of that was my history.

It was a time where I really had to reflect on what the next step was for me and my life.

And that I wanted to create something that would make both me and my son proud.

[ music playing ] In 2010, I launched Yume Confections.

"Yume" means "dream."

Because it was kind of a dream.

[ chuckles ] And my friends kept saying, "But, you know, people are going to call it 'yummy.'"

And I said, "I think that's okay, too."

Portland was a great place to introduce wagashi because the food culture is just so open to everything and anything.

BROOKS: Gena just embodies that mythical Portland food scene: everything made in small batches, plunging down the rabbit hole to perfect that thing you love even if it makes no sense on a spreadsheet.

[ music playing ] If you did a blind tasting for sweets, tea sweets, I think she'd be up there in the upper echelon.

RENAUD: Confections have been an important part of Japanese tea ceremonies for hundreds of years.

[ woman speaks softly in Japanese ] RENAUD: The sweet whets your palate, in a sense, to get ready to take the tea.

And it's also a reminder, the metaphor of, you know, the balance of sweet and the bitter, you know, in life, as in the tea ceremony.

So wagashi can be as simple as everyday snacks in the afternoon with your tea.

[ music playing ] I'm creating something that is very intimate that somebody's going to touch and put into their mouth and take into their body.

Ichigo ichie.

Ichigo ichie, yeah.

That is the philosophy or the idea that it's a one-in-a-lifetime chance meeting, that this moment is here, it's now, and it will never happen again.

The person who's going to taste this, maybe this is going to be their first experience, and, damn it, I want it to be really good.

I want them to be really delighted.

[ laughs ] I love the ephemeral nature of my work.

It's dreamy.

It's yume.

[ music playing ] WOMAN: The type of atmosphere that I'm hoping to create at the restaurant is, first, when you walk in, simply I hope it's inviting.

It's meant to feel like a bit of escapism.

You're somewhere very green and warm and doing that through lighting and plants and people and music and all of that.

You feel welcome and you feel somewhere else.

My name is Megan Sanchez, and I'm the chef and owner of Güero.

[ sizzling ] At Güero, we serve home cooking, mainly tortas and other bright sides and fabulous cocktails.

I say home style because kind of just to me feels like if you were at your grandma's house and she made you a torta or something.

I think it's still a special thing to be able to have a meal that is inviting and affordable and makes you feel that you're not wanting for anything and create a satisfying experience where someone just feels taken care of.

[ music playing ] What I love about tortas is it's everything you need on one plate between two pieces of bread, and hopefully there's something exciting inside just two simple pieces of bread.

To kind of brighten this big thing that comes on this big roll, we have the tamarind tomato on there.

And then that's topped with onion that's tossed with cilantro and lime, shredded cabbage, and pickled onion.

I think I'm seeking something deeply satisfying paired with something bright and something acidic, something totally fresh.

Then that's the perfect torta.

We opened the food truck in 2013, and it felt like endless possibilities.

And I think that is reflective of the age I was when I did it.

You don't know where things are going to take you, and I certainly didn't.

-This one?

-Yes.

We do this every day.

Felipe was selling to another food truck, and we reached out to him and said, "Hey, could we get maybe a couple rolls a day?"

His bread was really good, and the more popular our tortas got, the more we were hitting up Felipe all the time.

When they started, they got only-- buy me 20 teleras.

Two bags, three bags.

Now they sell a lot of bread.

Every week, they sell 1,500 tortas.

Yeah, that's.. a busy place.

SANCHEZ: It's been over 11 years of us working together, but having that connection with him allowed for us to imagine a torta-specific restaurant.

It's been a good decade.

Maybe one more decade, we'll keep doing it.

-Maybe, yeah.

-[ both laugh ] [ music playing ] I was born in southern California near my dad's side of the family.

Every family gathering was like 30-plus people, but the Sanchez side was, like, all volume.

When I think of being with them, I think of just masses of people and so much food.

Their ethos is just unconditional love.

Everybody's welcome.

And that's the legacy I feel I carry from my dad's side of the family, that I hope translates through the restaurant a bit.

Moving to Washington, my mom's side of the family, it's a big Egyptian family.

Food is everything.

I got to grow up at my grandma's table.

She notoriously would feed everybody, piling food you were begging her not to give you onto your plate, because once it was there, you had to eat it.

And now I do that as well.

When you come to my restaurant, I will, like, pressure you to eat more than you're comfortable eating, and I'm working on it.

I think a common theme with the restaurant is one that relates to me personally of feeling, like, mixed in every way, you know?

Like, the space reflects the people in it, and there's 50 of us who-- I think there's a genuine diversity in terms of countries of origin, color, experience.

[ music playing ] I think all of that has turned into a unique space that doesn't really feel like an easy-to-identify style of dining.

We have people come in for Valentine's Day sometimes, and that's great.

And then you have, like, the construction crew down the street working on a project coming in for really fast lunch, and I like that.

I like that range.

That makes me feel like we're doing something right.

When I look around the restaurant and it's full and people are having a good time and every table inside being full to every table outside being full, really, truly to this day, the feeling is still shock.

I'm like, "How did they hear about this place?

How did they know where this little torta restaurant is?"

And then I just feel-- I feel really grateful for the team that's helping us do something right and bringing those people back consistently.

I'm just happy to still be here and happy to be getting to do what I do and evolving in it every day.

That's been, like, the big reward, is just to still have somewhere to be, still have somewhere to work every day.

[ music playing ] WOMAN: If we look at how much we talk about and photograph and video food in our culture, like, we love food.

It makes us happy, it's tasty, we kind of obsess about it, and I love food also.

I think photographing it and just having a lot of fun and playing with it showcases that even more, and especially doing exceptionally fun things with it.

All right, let's smash these!

[ music playing ] You're almost there.

My name is Isabella Cassini, and I'm a photographer specializing in food still life conceptual work.

Okay, what should we throw down first, gents?

My project "Splashes, Crashes, and Smashes" is pretty much what it sounds like.

It's splashes... crashes... and smashing.

Basically just make a mess of things.

I'm curious to see-- let's do two eggs.

It really is all about embracing the chaos, and I think that stems from who I am as a person.

Like, that looks so cool.

Look at this.

I don't like to shy away from chaos.

Not that I want to invite it into my life, but I think all too often we as a society want to make everything look pretty and everything's fine.

That series allows me to explore the chaos, and I'd like to think that it also invites other people to explore it for themselves... -Okay.

-Go.

[ shutter clicking rapidly ] -Carnage.

-MAN: Love it, love it.

...to make it okay that everything isn't perfect, everything isn't always pretty.

Really, we're just all giant messes.

Thanks, boys.

[ music playing ] Let me bring in-- we left one out here, so...

Uh, okay, plexi.

These two ramps that I made out of two-by-fours, the whole idea behind them was to be able to throw two different food items, liquid, down them and into each other and so that they would crash in the middle and create something explosive and exciting and unexpected.

It was a lot of trial and error.

Ready.

You got a little lift.

Yeah, but... -MAN: Oh!

What the heck happened?

-CASSINI: Bummer.

Everybody ready?

Yeah?

Three, two, one, go.

-Oh, they were like... -Oh!

They were like half an inch-- -They touched!

-They touched!

We got a bowl touch!

I definitely try to compost everything after we've used it.

[ singing ] ♪ I just reuse it You beautiful egg ♪ A big thing for me with this project in particular is reusing everything as much as I can.

Found a little lonely macaron back there.

Good, good.

Which is very different from a traditional food shoot that's plated and needs to look perfect.

[ music playing ] My dad, who was a filmmaker, gave me a camera, and both parents were very encouraging to pursue my love of the arts.

[ whistling ] Photography just really allowed me to articulate myself in a way that was just very accessible and there were just so many subjects to explore... with lighting, choosing subjects.

I think food visually was just very exciting and allowed me to explore.

It's just a very versatile subject.

[ music playing ] Most of my work until recently was commercial.

That's kind of just the avenue that I understood and I knew how to get my work out there.

And then during COVID, I was able to make these big old prints and I was able to put a show together of my work, and that's kind of directed me in a more fine-art direction.

[ shutter clicks ] [ music playing ] My kaleidoscope series, I started out with a completely different idea.

I went to the Asian market, and there were all of these things that I had just never seen before and gave me a completely different color palette to work with.

And spent a long time in the market staring at everything like a weirdo just like... you know, looking at every angle.

They're not kaleidoscopes in the sense that they're a repeating pattern.

But there is a lot of, like, precision and perfection that goes into placing every little thing where I want it to be.

It really is about seeing how they're all going to fit together, and it's almost as if they have a perfect place but I just haven't figured it out yet.

Mmm...

The kaleidoscope series feels like I only have to think about and look at this, like-- each element as I'm working with it.

I do step back and look at the big picture, but I-- I can really lose myself in it.

Post-processing for the kaleidoscope, it might be like a hair I didn't see or a crumb I don't want there.

I guess mostly retouching of it.

Oh, man, that one's so great.

But for the other project, "Splashes and Smashes," it is a combining of images.

I'm seeing elements from different photos that I want to see together.

Should this one go on top?

Yes.

[ computer dinging ] Not to toot my own horn, but it's been really great, and people who do like my work are really excited about it and give me a lot of compliments, which is always nice.

I do want people to embrace the chaos in their own lives, in the world around us... -You ready?

-MAN: Ready.

...and know that the chaos is okay.

Sometimes I do feel like I'm here to let people know, like, they're okay just the way they are, perfectly imperfect.

-MAN: Go!

-[ shutter clicking rapidly ] [ Cassini exclaims ] [ all cheer, applauding ] [ music playing ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at the stories we're working on right now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

CASSINI: That's what I'm talking about, baby!

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Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by...