Chef Pascal Chureau has played a key role in helping Don and Georganne Sader turn their vision into a reality. Learn what makes this French transplant an important part of the Local Choice Advisory Board.

What is your background?

I’ve been opening and working at restaurants in Portland for the last 12 years. I owned Fenouil for a few years and Don and Georganne were there all the time. They were neighbors, who lived in the Pearl District. When they came back from Italy, I was reopening Brasserie Montmartre where they contacted me and said, “We have a great thing coming up.”

What unique perspective and experience do you bring to the Local Choice Advisory Board?

I think that the insight and knowledge from my restaurant background is something I am able to bring to the table because of the nature of their business. There’s the deli, which is in between a restaurant and store. And the coffee bar, beer & wine bar, and chef’s table dinners are all much more restaurant than market.

How have you helped Local Choice Produce Market with the development?

I helped with the kitchen equipment and layout, and I’ve been able to look critically at the menu and the displays. I know the kitchen staff are very capable but it’s always a plus to have a second set of professional eyes, coming from a different market and a different area of town.

What is different or exciting to you about Local Choice—what are you most looking forward to?

I think what’s cool and different is what we had in France when I grew up. The butcher, and the fishmonger, and the market, and the grab-some-food-on-the-go kind of thing. And it’s in all one place, which is kind of neat. They put a food cart inside a market next to a deli and a wine bar, all in one shell. You can go shop for your fruit, but you can hang out and have a cup of coffee with your friends and then sign up for a chef’s dinner coming up. You don’t have to drive. If you live in the neighborhood, this is your daily market.

How do you plan to help Local Choice with their expansion plans?

The space they have for their first market is amazing. The next space they develop I might be able to help in the earlier stage of development with the restaurant side of it all. Maybe a seating chart or kitchen design. I helped a little bit with the kitchen equipment and layout for the current space. It was pretty minimal, they had a pretty good handle on it already but I looked at the first time and was like, What is this? When you open a business a lot of people help you, and it’s good and it’s bad sometimes. Not bad, but you have to sort through it and see what advice people are giving you. So I was able to steer them a little bit with that stuff. That would be the main help I would contribute to the next market.