Twenty years is worth celebrating.
Walk through the doors at Le Pigeon and it doesn't take long to understand why it's one of the Pacific Northwest's favorite restaurants. The room is warm. The kitchen is open. Every seat feels like the best one in the house, with front-row views of the team creating an experience through adventurous French-inspired food and whatever's in season. Questions are welcomed. Conversations happen naturally. Every plate carries the same level of care, whether it's your first visit or your fifteenth.
Today, that experience continues with Executive Chef & Co-Owner Dana Francisco alongside Chef & Co-Owner Gabriel Rucker, and Co-Owner & Beverage Director Andy Fortgang—whose shared passion for thoughtful hospitality and approachable fine dining ushers in this institution's next chapter.
Chef Francisco's journey to Le Pigeon has taken him through kitchens across Southern California, Hawaiʻi, and the Pacific Northwest before finding a home in Portland. Over the years, his partnership with Chef Rucker has evolved from mentorship into true collaboration—built over thousands of hours spent cooking side by side, swapping food memories, and sending one another ideas long before a new dish ever reaches the pass.
We've been fortunate to watch another journey unfold alongside it.
Chef Francisco first stepped into MISE in 2023. Since then, he's worn our footwear through prep, service, menu development, and evolutions. That perspective makes his thoughts on The Standard 2 and The Relaxed 2 especially meaningful.
He sat down to talk with us about leadership, creativity, taking care of your body in an industry that never slows down, and the responsibility that comes with helping carry one of Portland's great kitchens forward.
Le Pigeon, like so many kitchens, demands long hours, tight quarters, constant movement from prep through service, all while leading a team. What does taking care of yourself look like during a shift and when you finally step away from it?
You can only really take care of yourself so much during a shift in a high-end kitchen. The reality of this work is that it's very much a blue collar job. It is both physically and mentally demanding. I think the special thing about the workload of our restaurant is that you don't work service every single shift. I have great sous chefs that run the kitchen on certain days, which allows me to not run five or six 16 hour shifts a week, like I did for most of my career before coming to Portland. We put a high focus on trust in our kitchen, regardless of how long someone has been with the team or what their actual title is. Outside of the kitchen I spend a ton of time in the gym. I workout on a 3–1 split, and have for the last 25 years. I'm also sober, which just makes everything in work and life infinitely easier and more enjoyable. Days off also consist of sleeping. A lot of sleeping.
20 years later, Le Pigeon's menu continues to change and evolve with no dishes repeating with the exception of the foie profiterole. When you're building a menu at a place where the bar is already this high, how do you know when a dish is ready to go out? Where does the inspiration come from, and how do you and Gabriel keep that well from running dry?
When developing a new dish, our inspiration comes first and foremost from what our farmers, foragers, and fishermen tell us is available and great at the moment. The people that know best are the ones that have boots on the ground and are the closest to what eventually makes its way to our kitchen and then the plate. From there, after we have a good selection of ingredients to use as building blocks, Gabriel and I just have conversations. Those conversations might be about a food memory, a technique, or a delicious fast food sandwich flavor profile. We both just kind of freestyle and talk at each other until we land on something that makes us excited. We are very much on the same page about when a dish is ready to go out after that process has been worked through. A series of tastings, tweaks, and re-tastings until everyone on staff just gives you that look of "damn that's delicious." The dish goes on that next day. I think we keep things fresh and interesting because we take inspiration from so many different areas. Gabriel and I spend thousands of hours side by side and even on our days off we will send each other pictures or references of things that we want to eat. I also think that's the interesting thing about having your business partner be not only your mentor, but the chef that you admire most in this industry. It keeps me motivated to put things in front of him that will keep the Le Pigeon legacy alive and build on the foundation that he started. Also coming from a family of all boys and being hyper competitive, there's always that overlying friendly competition that keeps moving the needle forward with us.
You've spent time in both The Standard 2 and The Relaxed 2. Does one earn the call for a specific part of your day or week? And what put MISE in your rotation in the first place?
I think the great part about why I love this product is that the whole line is super versatile. I don't think any model needs to be related to a certain day or type of workload. Which is great in an industry where no two days are the same. I could be running up and down two flights of stairs a hundred times before service even starts, moving back and forth between our prep kitchen and the dining room, or standing ankle deep in water trying to fix a burst waterline, and they all get the job done. I was drawn to the product because initially I didn't like what I saw on the market with the usual suspects. I don't like step-ins, because I feel like the back part of my foot is not something that should be exposed when working with fire and hot oil all day. And the other companies that I did like, the shoes just looked kind of goofy. I feel like MISE strikes that balance of a good looking industry shoe that also is resilient enough to hold up to the work we do. There are no other shoes in my rotation now.
What's been the hardest part of stepping into this role that isn't cooking?
The hardest non-cooking part of this role is navigating a multitude of personalities both in-house and out. We don't have a traditional dining room and "kitchen" setup. At Le Pigeon, you sit right in front of my Mise En Place. You are close enough to touch my hands, or for me to splash you with some veal stock. That adds a whole other dimension of guest experience, and people that show up to our restaurant are there to eat good food and drink good wine, but they're also there for a show and to be entertained. Keeping calm and not panicking when something happens during service that absolutely should make you panic, while holding a conversation with a guest, is an unusual skill set. On the other hand, keeping my cooks motivated. Finding balance in how we interact with each other every day. I'm firm and strict but you don't want to be oppressive. You have to be understanding and have empathy but hold firm. Anyone that leads a good kitchen wears many hats. We are teachers, parents, guardians, janitors, therapists, and responsible for giving our guests a great experience and allowing our staff to make a living all in the same workday. It is a lot of responsibility, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
Le Pigeon has never been a vegetable-forward restaurant by identity. But it has arguably one of the best vegetarian tasting menus in the city, in our opinion. How do you approach it and what does it take to make it feel like a Le Pigeon menu?
I dated a vegetarian and got accustomed to eating vegetarian a lot in my life. And also when going out to other restaurants, I was often disappointed in the vegetarian offerings. It seemed like such an afterthought, or simply a dish sans meat. Spending most of my career in Southern California gave me an amazing opportunity to work with great produce and also very many guests that followed a vegetarian lifestyle. Making a delicious vegetarian dish is much harder than a dish that contains animal protein. If you put Wagyu and caviar on a plate, it doesn't really matter what else is accompanying that. That dish is delicious as is, the rest is just going to be a bonus. To make a carrot the star of a dish, now that's a bit more challenging. I think a vegetarian dish feels like a Le Pigeon dish when non-vegetarians want to eat it. When a couple sits down and doesn't have any food allergies or dietary restrictions and get both sides of the menu by choice alone, I know we've done a good job. The approach is very similar to the other side of the menu though. We ask ourselves, is it interesting and is it delicious, and do I want to eat this kind of dish at this exact moment of the year? If the answers are yes, it goes on the menu.
