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Portland chef Vitaly Paley closes Imperial, other downtown restaurants in doubt
Sep 30, 2020
When Imperial opened in 2012, the restaurant was part of a wave of big-name restaurant openings after a decade when most of Portland’s dining attention had been firmly focused on the east side.
But at 5 p.m. last Friday, as Paley and wife Kimberly were breaking the news to staff that Imperial would close for good, the sidewalk outside their Southwest Broadway restaurant was filled not with customers, but grim reminders of a downtown he thought had been left in the past.
“I look outside the window of the restaurant and there’s not a single soul walking by,” Paley says. “At one point, downtown Portland resembled a big city. It resembled New York. it was bustling, hustling, energetic. At any given point on a Friday night, in the summer, every single outdoor table would be filled with happy people eating and drinking; across the street, people walking. And now the boarded up windows and businesses, fairly dirty streets that are not being kept up. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go downtown for food and drink.”
On Wednesday, local food blog Eater PDX picked up on a discreet note at the top of the Imperial website announcing that the restaurant was kaput. Saturday was its final day. The Crown, a sister pizzeria located on the opposite side of the Hotel Lucia’s lobby, will serve its last fried chicken-topped pizza on October 8.
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