Get to Know Recess, the Restaurant in Portland’s Cambria Hotel

Last month I stopped in at Recess, the restaurant in the new Cambria Hotel located in the Pearl District. They opened this past August 7. I had a chance meet the staff, hear about their work, and see what they are bringing to the neighborhood—especially when it comes to food and drink. Here’s what I learned during that visit.

First Impressions

When you walk into the hotel, the concierge/check-in is right in front of you. If you look to the left, there’s a lounge space that flows nicely into the restaurant. The dining room has a variety of seating styles: tables, chairs, high tables, stools, and the bar seating. The bar is on the far left, essentially in the back of the restaurant.

Everyone was in a good mood when I got there, and vibe is relaxed yet upbeat. I met with Michael Barron, Director of Sales and Marketing; Klint Kolbu, GM; and Chef Micheal Iles. Originally I thought it was just going to be a meeting with Chef Iles, but it turned out to be a tiny dinner party. Everyone was authentically friendly (not glad-handing) and we had an enjoyable time hanging out and talking the hotel, the restaurant, and their presence in the Pearl District.

 Chef Micheal Iles

Going by “Chef” as a preference, the first thing I learned about him is that he was the chef at Sierra Nevada Brewery in Chico CA, and had great things to say about them after all these years. “They’re super consistent and a fabulous brewery. If you’re ever on Highway 5 and want to do a great tour, it’s really pretty amazing,” said Chef.

In addition to his work at Sierra Nevada, he opened a brewery in North Carolina, opened restaurants, worked at large venues, and taught food service management and the culinary arts at Chico State University for 15 years, .

Past Times at Vaux (With Origins in Montreal)

It was clear that Michael and Klint are fans of Chef and his work. “Chef’s not going toot his own horn, so I’m going to do it for him,” said Michael. “He’s originally from Montreal and has proper French culinary training. He is a real, amazing talent that we’re very lucky to have.”

He continued, “And it’s funny, we worked together before—he was the chef at Vaux, which is the restaurant at Canopy. And I remember that Vaux almost has no kitchen. It was designed with a pizza oven and a prep station—they had salads and you could have pizza, obviously. But it was a pretty minimal menu.

“And then we had a banquet event, and I saw Chef cooking for hundreds of people. And then I saw what he’s really capable of. And I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize we had like such a heavyweight!'”

A Proper Kitchen at Recess

Michael continued his story, “Here, Chef has a real, proper kitchen—this kitchen is beautiful, brand new.” Chef remarked, “With a real hood and more than four burners. It has an oven that you can open the door without first opening the walk-in door.” Literally, he had to open the walk-in door before being able to open the oven door to put a sheet pan in. Everyone agreed it’s nice to have all the extra space.

Chef’s Stone Farmhouse and Garden

Chef moved to Portland right before COVID, in 2019. He bought a stone farmhouse built in 1906 in Southeast Portland, not far from the Leech Botanical Garden. “And I took a year and a half off and completely refurbished the house.”

“It’s really nice, a beautiful old house,” said Chef. “I have a big garden, seven fruit trees—lots of stuff that comes here for my garden. There’s pawpaws, plums, Asian Pears, jujubes, pomegranates. And I planted a flower garden in spring for the restaurant, so we use a bunch of flowers here at the restaurant.”

The Snack We Had at Recess

At that point in time, they were just switching over to a new menu. “I’m actually changing menu this week!” said Chef. Then he brought over a new popcorn snack he was working on, too.

“I kind of played with the new popcorn thing that we’re doing today, so I’m just going to go and prepare it for you.” It’s organic popcorn cooked in duck fat, with aleppo pepper, butter, and then bacon honeycomb. I can’t deny, it was very tasty.

The Cambria Hotel—How it’s Managed

I got a primer on how hotels work as far as ownership goes in this conversation. Michael did most of the explaining. The TL;DR is that the Cambria Hotel is owned by Choice Hotels and managed by PM Hotel Group.

Cambria is part of Choice Hotels, which is based in Bethesda, MD. While Choice franchises out most of their 6,500 properties, they own this hotel.

“This is one of, I’m going to say, like maybe ten or a dozen that Choice actually owns around the country,” explained Michael. “They’re pretty asset-light as a company. They have 22 brands. Most of them are in the mid-scale and economy scale, and extended stay.” Think Quality Inn Suites, Comfort Inn. Cambria is their flagship upscale brand.

However, Choice didn’t really focus on upscale until more recently. “They bought the Radisson Hotels America brand, and then there’s Cambria, a brand that’s been around since 2005,” said Michael.” This is the first Cambria brand for Oregon, but nationwide there are close to 80 of them, mostly located in big cities like LA and NYC, as well as Omaha and Austin.

PM Hotel Group, the Management Side

Both Michael and Klint work for PM Hotel Group, which manages this Cambria Hotel. They handle the day-to-day operations, but report to Choice.

“It used to be back in the day that, say, Marriott owned the hotel and they managed it as well. That started changing, like, probably in the 80s and 90s, where your big companies started selling off all their hotels to real estate investment trusts.”

Operating Recess

They also manage the restaurant—no restaurant group is involved. “This is also a little less and less typical,” said Michael. “Usually you get a third-party operator. A lot of hotel companies want to leave the restaurant operations to a separate operator. So they’ll find a restaurant group like ChefStable or something.”

Here, Chef manages the kitchen, there is a bar manager, too, who they raved about.

“I love our bar manager,” said Michael. “He’s really talented with cocktails, and brings an old school kind of vibe. Chuck [Ward] has been doing this kind of job for 45 years. I have never met anybody with more personal reviews than Chuck.”

He continued, “He has a great way with everybody. Punk rock people come in after a concert. He deals with the drunks and like the fancy people really well. He’s a rare person and a lot of our reviews mentioned him because they just really liked him. He’s a really integral part of what we’re doing here, for sure.”

Recess: What’s in a Name?

It’s called “Recess” because there was a school on the property before the hotel was built—The Emerson School. Plus it’s about taking a pause and being playful.

The original building on this site was built in 1921. Before The Emerson School opened there, Childpeace Montessori occupied this building in 1988.

And, as I mentioned earlier, it’s near a park—the North Park Blocks, dedicated in 1869, with the first playground established in 1908. You can read more about the North Park Blocks on the City of Portland website.

They really consider this proximity to the park to be an asset. “Yeah, right at the edge of the Pearl!” exclaimed Michael. “I mean, it’s hard to beat, right? You’re two blocks from Powell’s.”

“It seems hard to believe, but for a city that’s covered in parks and green spaces, there’s not that many hotels facing them,” said Michael. “And so when we realized that we’re actually a very unique property in that we’re opening right across the street from a playground and a park with great historical significance for the city. That park, we found out, was the first public supervised playground in Portland, Oregon.”

He added, “So that led us to dig into the Oregon historical archive, and we found photos from the late 19th century.” They took those photos and incorporated them into the design of the place.

More on the Location

We chatted about how the news cycle has not been kind to Portland, and they observed that the Pearl District has been under less scrutiny compared to its neighbor to the east, Old Town. “Fortunately for us, like we are opening in a neighborhood that has generally maintained a very positive reputation,” said Michael.

“We opened in August and we intend to be part of this community,” said Michael. “We know everybody in the neighborhood now. We know the people that live in the buildings. We know the people that run the Jewish Museum across the way. We know the people that own the property on this next block and we’re working with them to make sure things stay positive.”

He added, “People were really excited to see this park—this block—activated with a new hotel open.”

Design of Space and Cost

Choice Hotels was responsible for designing the restaurant space, and worked with a team from Baskervill. Klint said they love the space and feeling of openness. “It’s modern, very warm,” said Klint. Michael added, “Choice has a wonderful slogan that I really like, and it’s ‘approachable luxury.’

This means something that’s really nice, but still affordable. They take this approach to the room rates and the restaurant. “They want their guests to have a lot of bang for the buck,” said Michael. He also says they do not charge a resort fee.

The Recess Menu

When Chef and the management staff and all sat down, they realized how naturally their creative ideas bubbled up together. “Just calling it ‘Recess’ and thinking about taking a pause and being playful,” said Michael. “And so that extends to our cocktail program, which I think has a lot of color and whimsical presentation, as well as our food and what we name it.”

He talked a little about the menus themselves. “When you see our menus, I think it’s actually quite funny,” he said. “We asked Chef for a picture for the website and for the menus, and he was not into it.

“But then we said, ‘Hey, can we have a school age picture? And Chef was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you can have that!’ And now, that’s what we do. And our bar manager, Chuck, gave us a child picture for the cocktail menu. So now we use pictures of ourselves as kids as part of the menu.”

Food at Recess

I asked them how they would categorize the food (eclectic? PNW? American? New American?) Chef responded, “We use really good ingredients and don’t mess it up.”

He continued, “I have a lot of experience. I traveled a lot and I love food. It’s all I’ve ever done.” He likes to use local and seasonal ingredients in his food, and tries to be culturally sensitive in his work with food and dishes from cultures he did not grow up in.

Chef’s Greatest Hits

Klint said, “I’ve heard you describe this place as your greatest hits reel.” Chef responded, “Yeah, this is my last my last project. I’m going to retire after this project. I’ve got a couple more years to get things fully up to speed. So, yeah, it’s kind of like my greatest hits.”

Favorites Are Stories

I asked him if he has any favorite things on the menu and he responded, “I have favorite stories that come from the menu.”

Case in point: their coconut prawns. “I found that dish in Hanalei,” he explained. “I was driving between Hanalei and Waimea Canyon. There’s a little red and yellow shack on the side of the road outside of Hanalei High School. I stopped there at 3 o’clock in the afternoons and Friday afternoon, and I’m standing out front. I wanted to get something to drink, and there was nobody there, so I kind of walked around the side.

“There were a bunch of guys back there, and they had a pile of shrimp—like ‘this big,’ that they were breading. I was like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And so we started chatting and they said, ‘It’s for the high school.'”—they sell about a thousand shrimp for Friday night football.

“So I sat there with them and they showed me what they were doing. I just loved the dish, so I brought it onto the menu. It’s coconut prawns and we serve it with wakame salad, so it’s a seaweed salad, a sweet chili sauce, and a wasabi crema.

“Most of the things that I do have some kind of story.”

And, I can tell you that I had a chance to taste these prawns and they were so tasty. I normally do not like shrimp and prawns (except bay shrimp), and I was not prepared to like this dish as much as I did.

Some Brunch Items at Recess

They talked a bit about their brunch. “For I think an amazing price point, we have a really incredible brunch,” said Michael. And it’s becoming more and more popular the longer they are a presence in the neighborhood, “though still a far cry from like Screen Door or something like that.” Understandable, as their brunch is pretty much unstoppable.

They highlighted a couple of things: a smoked trout scramble, for one. It starts with what they call a bacon brioche crouton, which is a kind of fried bread, “almost donut-like.” They take the bread and fry it in bacon fat, top it with scrambled eggs and smoked trout.

They’re also doing a chicken fried steak, done with filet instead of round. Also a peanut butter and jelly French toast. They make their own English muffins for their Eggs Benedicts. Overall, everything is made from scratch.

Elephant and Milk Cartons

They also talked about their drinks, which are very creative and fun. “We serve a cocktail here that comes in a glass elephant,” said Michael. ‘It’s because there’s Bao Bao the elephant. It’s 12-foot bronze statue from China in the next park over there.”

Michael added, “Then we have an horchata cocktail that comes in a glass milk carton like you get in school.”

You can see the full menu at Recess on their website.

Recess Is Special Because of Their Staff

I always like to ask what makes place special—this time at both Recess and Cambria—Michael responded, “Besides the food, I’m going to say our staff.” Hospitality is very important and the staff, from what I could tell, was attentive and professional, from the front desk to the bartenders.

Chef said, “Myself, I worked every single day from the first of August to the middle of September. The staff knows that I really honestly care both about them and every single dish that goes out. That’s really important.”

Michael also pointed out that most Portlanders go to neighborhoods like Mississippi or Division or Hawthorne to go out to eat. “I think we really aspire to make this place something that would be a regular spot for locals,” he said. “I know every time I bring the locals in here, they’re always like, ‘Oh, this is not what I expected!'”

Thanks to Chef, Michael, and Klint for their hospitality and for taking the time to chat about the Cambria Hotel and Recess. Wishing them only the best as they continue managing this hotel in the Pearl.

Recess at Cambria Hotel [opened August 7, 2025]
105 NW Park Avenue, Portland
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