About Us
Astera is a love poem to Oregon’s vinified, farmed and foraged created by Chef Aaron Adams. We offer a multiple course tasting menu, our Horticultural Cuisine of Cascadia, built on flavors utilizing classic and modern techniques with an emphasis on fermentation.
Astera inhabits a historic brick building in the Buckman neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Our kitchen utilizes craft fermentation techniques in novel ways to accentuate our cuisine, including the production of interesting misos, shoyus, vegetable ferments, koji charcuterie, vegan cheesemaking, water kefir, and kombucha.
Our service
We offer a lively and semi-communal dinner party with a continuous trickle of tastes from the kitchen. Each dish is made to build on and transition to the next. We encourage conversation and engagement with our guests. We eschew the stuffiness often associated with fine dining and instead offer a friendly and energetic hospitality.
We offer a wine, beer, cider, and temperance list featuring many local and international purveyors.
We are proud to serve our cuisine on pottery made by Aaron Dick, Steve Kelly, Careen Stoll, and Alexandria Cummings.
We offer service on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We ask that all guests arrive on time to ensure we start dinner together.
Farms And Foragers
We source our produce direct from local farms and the farmer’s markets. Most of our produce comes from Groundwork Organics Farm, Gathering Together Farm, Eloisa Farm, and Campo Collective. Additionally, we grow many of the herbs and some vegetables and fruits for our service in our own garden.
We are committed to represent our region by utilizing farmers that employ sustainable practices.
ZERO WASTE & Carbon sequesTration
We are always striving to reduce our waste to zero. In this effort, we continue to learn how to utilize vegetable waste into new opportunities for flavor. This is mostly achieved through drying, fermenting, and culturing with the remainder being composted.
We also collect 1% of sales and donate to Zero Food Print. ZFP offers grants to supply farmers the funds they need for regenerative agriculture projects, ensuring healthy soil build up and in turn sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. As programs like ZFP grow, we can restore our soil, one meal at a time.
Animal WELFARE
To do a small part for the welfare of local farm animals, we are donating a portion of sales to Lighthouse Sanctuary each month. Lighthouse Sanctuary, located in Scio, Oregon, allows animals to roam on their 54 acres with a second lease on life after being saved from their existence as farm animals.
Chef and Owner Aaron Adams
Born in Livermore, California, Aaron spent most of his youth watching cooking shows on KQED public television, putting on dinner parties for his pals, and dreaming of some day being a chef.
His first year in the restaurant industry was spent washing dishes in the scullery of a steak house in Seattle. From there he went on to garde manger and hot line at Italian and American regional restaurants in Seattle before moving to Guam in 1996, working at Westin Resort as a chef de partie in their main restaurant, Cafe Kalachucha.
Aaron moved back to mainland USA to attend Johnson & Wales University, North Miami Campus. While in Miami he worked primarily at Cafe Maxx in Pompano Beach, working as Saucier. In 1998, Aaron moved to New York City and worked as Saucier at Park Avenue Cafe, while also executing the charcuterie program.
In 2001 Aaron opened his first restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida, The Village Store. There he started having doubts about some of the products being served and went on to eliminate veal and foie gras, and then moving to only grass fed meats. Soon after, he gave up on animal products entirely, not seeing how he could ethically run a restaurant otherwise.
In 2003 he moved to Portland, Oregon. He didn’t see a path forward to working in restaurants as a vegan and for a time worked as a machinist. The draw to the kitchen was strong and eventually Aaron started doing pop-ups and working in vegan kitchens. In 2008 he opened Portobello Vegan Trattoria until parting ways with his business partner in 2013. While at Portobello, he offered a series of dinners called “BOH” with tasting menus inspired by the bounty of Oregon’s produce. BOH rekindled his love for tasting menus and the work he did at previously, and a path towards a fine vegan restaurant seemed possible.
In 2015, he opened Farm Spirit with the goal of offering a plant based menu completely sourced from the farmed and foraged of Oregon. In 2018, Aaron moved Farm Spirit from its original space to a larger space on Belmont Street. In 2020, Farm Spirit closed, seeking to offer a more accessible form of dining during the Pandemic. Fermenter, Astera's sister restaurant, was born out of that time, and continues to offer thoughtful and accessible offerings based off of fermentation and cultured foods like tempeh and koji.
After acquiring the shop space next door , Aaron expanded Fermenter’s fermentation space, adding dedicated incubators for tempeh and koji production. While operating the new workshop next door, Aaron kept his eye on the storefront that remained empty as Fermenter buzzed next door.
Eventually Workshop occupied that empty storefront and became an incubator for different concepts, including a fermentation deli, a Cuban inspired restaurant celebrating Aaron’s heritage, and a craft cocktail bar. Finally, Workshop came back to tasting menus and that concept stuck.
In January 2024, we announced a commitment to offering the tasting menu with a renewed spirit and a new name: Astera. Astera refers to a star, guiding us in a new focus and direction.
