On the evening of March 20, Greg Denton got a call no small business owner wants to receive.
It was Cory Rom, general manager at Ox, informing him that a fire had broken out in the middle of dinner service at the award-winning Argentine restaurant Denton co-owns with wife Gabrielle Quiñónez Denton.
“It’s really bad,” Rahm informed him. “I have to call the fire department.”
By that point, staff had escorted diners to the restaurant’s parking lot. Some carried glasses of wine. One held a short rib. Inside, flames licked out from the ducting above the hearth and the dining room filled with smoke.
“Well, call them,” Denton recalled saying in a recent phone interview.
Denton drove to the restaurant, where fire trucks had already arrived. Soon, firefighters were cutting through the roof and dousing the flames with water. It was 6:45 p.m. and the hearth was still roaring. Shocked by the water, the restaurant’s custom metal grill buckled and warped. The pale blue tiles around the hearth chipped and cracked.
“Outside, there’s was a bit of a snow day feel,” Denton said. “But I looked at it and said, ‘We’re not going to be open until at least July.’”
That timeline proved accurate. Only now, more than three months after the fire, are the Dentons ready to announce a reopening date. Once they finish “candling” — lighting small fires to temper the new stone, tile and grout — Ox plans to roar back to life this Wednesday, July 10.
The Dentons used the downtime to make some minor improvements to the space, redoing the bathrooms, beefing up the kitchen air conditioning and straightening out a 90-degree angle in the ducting, where a smaller fire had caused a shorter closure about eight years ago. They’re also converting a pair of garages behind Whey Bar, Ox’s back cocktail bar-cum-waiting room, into a new banquet space, Atelier at Ox, that could eventually host private events and pop-ups for as many as 70 people.
But by and large, the old Ox and the new will be virtually indistinguishable. That’s by design.
“One of the things that we feel very proud of is that you can go inside a place that uses wood and smoke,” Denton said, “and when you leave our restaurant you smell like meat and spilled wine, but not smoke.”
One of Denton’s first calls on the night of the fire was to Darrell Bennett, the operations director at ChefStable, a restaurant group that provides accounting and other services for Ox. Through their insurance, ChefStable was able to secure employee pay for the duration of the closure, Denton said.
According to Denton, Ox’s ducting had been professionally cleaned two weeks before the fire, though he noted that those monthly cleanings typically occur late at night, and he did not independently verify that it had occured. The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
“We’re very excited to open the space back up,” Denton said. “Our focus is to make sure that when Ox opens its doors you are having the exact same experience that you had before it closed.”
Further reading:
Fire damages one of Portland’s best restaurants
Portland’s 40 best restaurants
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com
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