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[What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s Black Innovators & Changemakers issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.]
“Judson and I met in Hoboken, New Jersey, working at this place called The Brass Rail,” Normandie co-founder Amanda Winquist tells me. “I was in grad school, he was in a band.”
One thing led to another and 2,436 miles west of Hoboken we’re sitting in the couple’s second restaurant, Sunday Sauce, on North Killingsworth. Amanda’s attention is evenly split between telling me her life story, tracking her adorable toddler scurrying between the booths, and the concerning amount of rainwater that’s coming out of the HVAC system thanks to the torrential rainstorm outside. “I tell people, ‘if I could do anything else I would.’ This isn’t the easiest industry,” she observes wryly, “but we just fell in love with what we do.”
On first glance Sunday Sauce is very much an old school East Coast Italian joint: Chianti-red vinyl booths, checkered placemats, and of course the omnipresent perfume of olives and garlic. But a closer inspection reveals some distinctly millennial touches: the neon sign in the window reads “Saucy AF,” the stained-glass chandeliers are giving vintage Pizza Hut, and the portrait of a beatific saint behind the bar is none other than Danny DeVito.
“This kind of place, when I was a kid, would always be playing Frank Sinatra… there were murals of Italy, there were white columns,” Amanda says. Pop bangers of yore, tokens of the old country on the wall, eggplant parm. Transplanted to Portland, that means it’s the Strokes coming out of the speakers and the “old country” is Hoboken.
The food is also a mix of Old School and Y2K. There are pasta joint classics like orecchiette and pesto, plus fun remixes like the giardiniera misto, kind of a deconstructed hero topped with fried pepperoni. The titular Sunday sauce is an East Coast Italian American staple, more commonly found burbling away on a nonna’s stovetop all afternoon. There’s also a couple of Jersey-specific specialties like disco fries—a sort of Garden State poutine which Winquest describes as “quintessential Jersey.” And of course there’s a selection of parms (chicken or eggplant), if you need something deep fried under layers of sauce and cheese. “Covered and smothered,” is how Amanda describes the Jersey approach to plating.
The bar program is also equal parts irreverent and indulgent. That’s Judson’s department, and he says his guiding star was an abiding love of dirty martinis (there’s four of them on the menu—from tomato and dill, to sour cream and onion) and a refusal to feel shame over the sugary Sex and the City-era concoctions that were all the rage back in the day. “The things that people wanted back then,” Judson says, “that’s what I want too.”
The first iteration of Sunday Sauce began as a pop-up in the couple’s first restaurant, Normandie. Amanda says she was dealing with the recent passing of her own mother, Marianne, and wanted to share a sense of the home cooking she grew up on.
“I didn’t have much time to grieve,” she says, “I lost my mom, and then I had a baby right? I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t work out. And… I don’t know, grief is hard to process.” What she settled on was adapting the home cooking she grew up with for a Portland audience. Head chef Issaah Brown, a Normandie line cook at at the time, took on the role of culinary consiglieri: “I would bring in food and we would collaborate on how to make it ‘restaurant,’” Amanda recalls, “It [was] my first holiday without my mom, which is a big deal, and I wanted to do a tribute.”
Because the menu was based on unfussy home cooking, the first pop-up felt like a dicey proposition. “With family cooking, you don’t always see the value in it,” she notes, “it’s not duck confit. It’s not high end French food.” Restaurant pop-ups can be a risky endeavor, largely dependent on word of mouth and industry buzz. “I thought just my friends were gonna show up,” Amanda admits, but the recipes translated well and Portland’s love affair with mid-price Italian restaurants was in bloom. When a corner restaurant space opened up on N Killingsworth, the couple decided to take it brick and mortar.
What’s most rewarding, Amanda says, is getting the nod from fellow east coast expats. They swap the velour tracksuits for puffy Columbia vests she says, but the enthusiasm is undimmed: “One night this hippie-era lady with frizzy hair grabs me, real hard, and says ‘I’m a Jersey girl too, and I’m going to leave you the best fucking Yelp review of my life.” That’s the kind of direct feedback you don’t always get from reserved Northwesterners.
“We knew the food would be good. We knew it would be fun,” Amanda says, “But holy shit… Jersey shows up for Jersey.”
Sunday Sauce, 902 N Killingsworth, sundaysaucepdx.com
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Ben Coleman
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