![]() The Chromesthesia cocktail at Hopscotch, with white rum, banana liqueur, and blue curaçao. “We’re supporting local artists and makers and using some products that are already great.” “I’m going to proudly tell you that 80 percent of what I’m doing is not house-made,” Hauman says. Instead, she used products from Portland businesses: Hot Mama’s guajillo-chile oil over popcorn with Albina City corn nuts and cotija, for instance. That meant using shortcuts, but not ones that felt cheap. When developing the menu, Hauman wanted to play with Portland’s overarching culinary themes, while also making the menu manageable for a team serving crowds every 15 minutes. When Jensen and Inman started seeking a chef consultant for the project, Hauman seemed like a natural fit: Her creativity and sense of fun clicked with their premise for the Hopscotch menu - “adults going wild at the county fair,” in Hauman’s words. “I have a long history of hospitality experience, and I’m always surprised by how much people can leave out food and beverage.” “For a long time, I’ve felt like there has been maybe not as much dedication to the food or beverage side of art in the art world,” Jensen says. For Jensen and Inman, having a strong food and beverage presence at Hopscotch was non-negotiable. At the Portland Hopscotch, cocktails are similarly elaborate, garnished with flaming limes and cerulean butterfly pea syrup. Nicole Jensen and Hunter Inman began Hopscotch as an Austin pop-up, before opening the permanent gallery in San Antonio with rotating food trucks and a bar stocked with edible glitter and popping boba. Galleries and installations at Hopscotch. So this project is great, because it’s not about me - it’s just about creating a playful experience.” “I don’t need to be the creative genius behind anything. “I never really wanted to open a restaurant,” Hauman says. Those jobs allowed her to celebrate the things she loves about cooking without the pressures of the restaurant world. Instead of using the Top Chef buzz to open a restaurant, she hosted pop-ups, launched a tinned fish company, and took consulting gigs, like Hopscotch. “I realized that I wasn’t paying attention to my real life.” “The reality show gave this snow globe I was in a shake,” she says. She moved to Portland and was the executive chef at Pearl District restaurant Arden, but she left the restaurant world soon afterward, heading to Soter Vineyards and then Top Chef. I got accolades very early, and I felt very undeserving of them.” “But as I moved up the ranks, something just started to get a little bit lost. “I was really happy in my early 20s, as a cook going into the kitchen with my head down and learning all of these new things,” she says. But as the country’s food world discovered and celebrated her, she struggled to hold onto herself. At age 28, she became an Eater Young Gun the following year, she was a semifinalist for the James Beard Awards’ rising star chef of the year. She worked with celebrated San Francisco chef Brandon Jew in her 20s she then staged at Asador Etxebarri in Spain’s Basque Country, currently ranked fourth on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Hauman started her career - and excelled - early. Sara Hauman breaks apart a piece of jalapeño popper fried mac and cheese. At Hopscotch, Hauman is trying to let go of those restaurant industry hangups and just have fun. Instead, she’s frying mac and cheese and topping Tillamook ice cream with potato chips. ![]() In her current role, the chef is not doing much that’s house-made. The Southeast Portland gallery opened in the Goat Blocks on June 9, with 14 installations from Portland-based and international artists as well as strawberry-matcha sundaes. Hauman developed the menu for Portland’s new interactive gallery space, Hopscotch, home to caves made from 86,000 upcycled bags - how many are used every five seconds globally - and a color-changing ball pit visitors climb inside. The shade of the light around her changes, blue shifting to purple shifting to red as the cheese stretches. “Ooh, that was a good one,” she says, watching a ribbon of Monterey Jack stretch between her hands. These days, however, she spends her time tearing apart squares of fried mac and cheese. A decade ago, Top Chef alumnus Sara Hauman would spend her afternoons in high-powered restaurant kitchens, butchering whole animals and poring over menus.
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