By Christian Messer

Since the year 2001, Portland has been in love Mother’s Bistro. The food is amazing and best of all, it serves the most pleasurable food of all…Comfort food. Full disclosure? I am a bit biased. This restaurant has been a brunch favorite since it opened. Years later, just when you thought owner Lisa Schroder couldn’t step it up a notch, Schroder and her partner Rob Sample opened Mama Mia’s Tratatoria in the same building, on the opposite corner of the block. Mother’s Bistro is at 212 SW Stark Street, Mama Mia’s at 439 SW 2nd Ave.

I sat down with Schroder at Mother’s to discuss the history of the restaurants and her support of the LGBTIQ community.

id Magazine: Tell me how this all came to be, Mother’s and Mama Mia’s.

Lisa Schroder: Back in 1992 I was working for Weight Watchers International, in marketing, trying to get people to buy things they didn’t necessarily need…and I was simultaneously doing catering on the side. So I’d leave work and I read about food and think about food, and I would prepare food for others, but my family went without because I was so busy working and doing this other stuff. And I realized, well, we can do take out food – I could get Thai, Chinese, Mexican and pizza, but when it came to the kind of food that I would make my family if I had the time…there was no place to get it.

I also realized that there were a lot of restaurants around the country called Mother’s, but none of them served the kind of food mothers would make if they had the time. So back in 1992 I had the epiphany that the world needed a place to serve mother food.

Everything I did for eight years after that was getting me ready to open this place.
So, friends at the time said, “Oh you can just open Mother’s right now,” and I said, “No I need to have the credentials, I need to have the education behind me, so I enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America…then people said, “Oh now you can, you know everything,” and I said, “No I don’t know everything.” I said, “I need to work in Four Star restaurants and learn their way to run things and I can apply it to the mother food I want to serve, and that what I did.

And then…No, I still didn’t think I knew enough, so I went to Europe and cooked in Europe for a little while. And…No, I still didn’t feel like I knew enough, so I felt like I had to be a chef at a restaurant, before I’m actually the chef of my own restaurant. So I paid my dues for eight long years before opening Mother’s after having the idea.

That is a long journey and worth it! How did Mamma Mia’s come into the picture?

Well, I had been living in Portland for, a guess about five years and I couldn’t get Chicken Parmesan, or spaghetti and meatballs or homemade mozzarella to save my life! And I just wanted to eat that kind of food and I tried all the places around town. Some of it was o.k. but the sauces were tired and had probably sat for hours…and it wasn’t the kind of food I had when I grew up in Philly and New York.

I decided if I want to get the kind of food I want to eat, I have to make it myself. I started looking for a location, and then got a call from a landlord of Elephant and Castle…well I got a call from a real estate agent of the landlord and he said, “Are you looking for another location,” and I said, “Wow, ironically I am.” I said, “Why do you ask?” He said, “Well, we’re looking for a tenant like you, so I figured I might as well call you.” And I thought about it and the rest is history.

How are the Mothers selected each month, to feature on the menu?

It varies, I’ll give you an example. Well…sometimes I’ll look for a particular mother, so if it’s March, I’ll ask everyone I know who’s Irish if they have an Irish mother so I can have a Irish mother for St. Patrick’s Day or for May I’ll try and find a Mexican mother so I can have a Cinco De Mayo mother, then the whole month will be that.

Other times they’ll fall from the sky. There was one month where I was working with someone from New Orleans and as we were approaching getting the dishes…he was representing this woman and she was a friend of the family, and thought she’d be a good mother and as we’re part way into the discussions, he says, “What does she get paid?”

And I said, “Uh…nothing, I buy you a meal, her and the family a meal and that’s the payback.” “Oh, well, if she’s not gonna get paid and your not going to fly her out here, etc,” he said. So that fell through.

I didn’t know what I was going to do for my next mother and that very day in the mail was a cookbook…the woman’s daughter had read about me in USA Today, she knew her mother had a cookbook, she told her mother to send it to me. The daughter was in Saudi Arabia, the mother was in Texas…and lo and behold I got this great cookbook that I used for that month. In fact one of the dishes that we ran that month has become a staple on our menu…Faye’s Chicken Salad.

Really? What a great story!

Yeah…October we had Nancy Hammeran who was brought to me by a friend. People in my dinning room say, “Oh I love your food and oh by the way, I wrote a cookbook (or) here it is,” they’ll say…O.K., she’ll probably be my next mother. Usually if they make it easier on me, it makes it easier to happen.

Some mothers, people send them to me…they come to me in many different ways.

And people can nominate a mother?

Absolutely! Always looking for new mothers.

You know, in doing these interviews with other restaurant owners, one of them said, “I always tell people, if you want to see a well oiled and run machine, go to Mother’s and have brunch or lunch.”

They’re amazing. You know, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, I mean it takes a lot of vigilance. I’m in the window tasting the food everyday and if it’s not me, it’s somebody who’s been trained by me:I’m in the dining room making sure the guests are getting their water filled, and they are happy…It’s a lot of hard work, but this is my dining room, and the people here are my guests, so I want to take care of them as if they were in…my dining room.

And your energy is present in both places, you can feel it.

I do have amazing people who get it. Like you know, people who work for me either get it or they don’t. The people who get it stay, they’re happy, they make our guests happy and I’m happy. And the people that don’t get it, well they don’t last and they’re not here to talk about it.

What would you say drives your passion to serve the food you serve, the service you give your guests…what’s the underlying passion there?

Well…(laughs) First one question might be, well, maybe I wasn’t mothered enough…so I’ve got to mother the world, but that goes very deep. It is a…I feel that there’s a real gap in the culinary world for the two things that I serve. Motherly Italian food and home cooking from mother’s around the world.

In both my restaurants I feel I fill a void in the culinary community in Portland, but as far as Mother’s is concerned, in the world. There’s not many restaurants that serve mother food from around the world, each month showing the cuisine of a different mother. So I feel driven to do it because nobody’s doing it and the world needs it and I know I need it.

With the Italian food, Portlanders were used to Sylvia’s (closed now) as the restaurant to go to for great Italian. Yet, when I went there my food was o.k., and one of the gals in my party was totally miffed at the manicotti…she said it was horrible. My entree wouldn’t be comparable to what I’ve had at Mama Mia’s.

I think sometimes we get a bad rap because people equate that kind of food with bad food, because it did get tired over the years. They’ve been in the business for a long time, they forgot how to make things fresh and delicious.

So I take the culinary techniques I learned in cooking school and the four star restaurants and apply it to mother food and mother Italian food, so it’s that but it’s better. Our sauce doesn’t sit on a burner all day long. No! It’s heated when you order it. We use the best tomatoes we can buy, the best ground beef we can buy, the best pork. It’s all those flavors but kicked up a notch with quality ingredients and love. We put love in everything we do.

And it shows.

Thank you! It matters to me, every guest matters to me. If I call to my staff, “Run this food! Run this food!” it’s because I’ve got food that hot and I don’t want it to get a second colder. Because food should be enjoyed hot.

Why am I driven to do that? I guess I’m driven to do things a well as I possibly can. That applies to the way it’s cooked, the way it’s served, the way it’s cleared, and how you’re greeted at the door. I tell my staff, “Your the first face somebody sees, show them happiness and joy and the rest of their experience here can only get better.

Is it the same here as it is at Mama Mia’s? Everything is made fresh?

Yes…we make everything fresh, nothing is pre-made, nothing comes from a can. I have bakeries call me and say, “Hey, do you want to buy our stuff wholesale?” Well, no, we’ll make it ourselves. We do make the bread on the tables at Mother’s, but we do buy the bread for our sandwiches because, quite frankly, Pearl Bakery makes the best baguettes as far as I’m concerned, so that what I serve at Mamma Mia.

I don’t have the kind of ovens to make the kind of French and Italian breads that these bakeries can. We make our own manicotti shells, we make our own ravioli – stuffing each one, our own pierogi here, and the gnocchi.

The garlic bread you serve is pure heaven!

Thank you – I tested all the breads in town and all the different ratios of butter…glad you like it.

Why do you think people gravitate towards comfort food?

You know it’s funny, when I had the idea back in 1992, everybody was talking about comfort food and I thought, “Oh my God, I have this idea, but I have to pay my dues first, I’m not ready to open today.” As the years went on and on and I opened up Mother’s, and 9/11 happened the year after and everybody was going back to the warm and comfort and the feeling of home. I think that…when I first had for Mother’s I felt that the world needed a place that served mother food because…there were two reason.

One, no one else did it, but number two, people stopped cooking at home. There was a time when people would go to a restaurant or something other than home cooking. You wouldn’t go out to a restaurant to order meatloaf, because your mother made it every Monday. But now…mothers don’t make anything anymore. Mother’s has to exists to give the world those kinds of foods that people want to eat again, because it’s from what they remember in their youth…or it’s something they never had because their mothers never cooked.

I’ll 70 year old men say, “Oh my God, I just tasted this biscuit and it was like I’m standing right next to my mother!” So it brings back memories, but it also gives memories for the future.

I think there’s a shift happening. Where we are going back to things like one on one communication, comfort food…it’s almost…Not a backlash to technology.

Right! You’re right. Whether it’s the knitting craze or the Do-It-Yourself craze. But also people going back to cooking at home for a few reasons…they have less disposable income to use on things like eating out, and there is more of a desire of being home with the family, understanding what’s important. Maybe acquiring goods is not as important as spending time with the ones that you love. In the hearth and in the home is a great way to do it.

The plan was always to write the book…for example in the soup chapter there’s a recipe that serves 10-12. The expectation is that you make that extra soup so you can have quart containers in your freezer and have two meals out of one, using the same heat. You know we have to conserve energy, so what’s better than a pot of soup that you use the same energy to make enough for 14 as you would for four. The book was written with left-overs in mind.

Let’s talk about the book…are they all of your recipes or is it a mix of the mothers featured?

It’s called “Mother’s Best” and that’s what it is, it’s a synthesis of the best recipes and the best dishes we’ve served here at Mother’s Bistro and Bar, Mamma Mia Trattoria and the mothers we’ve featured over the years.

It’s written in the voice of a mother teaching her adult child how to cook. There’s a lot of information there that you can read or not. If you want to know why I tell you to use a tall cylindrical pot to make your chicken stock, the answer is there. There’s also “Love Notes” – again, do you want to know why I’m telling you to do it? There it is…do you want to be just like a robot, you don’t have to read the notes. There’s lots of hand-holding, explanation, kind of the philosophy – you know the “Teach a man to fish he eats for his lifetime, give a man a fish…whadda ya got? One meal.” So that philosophy is throughout the book, with lots of reasons and wherefores.

There’s one other thing in the book that no one else has. Pull three cookbooks off your shelf, see how many of those books give you salt and pepper measurements. Usually, they say, ‘Salt and Pepper to taste’ and in “Mother’s Best” we give you salt and pepper measurements so you get an idea of what it should taste like.

I say, “Try a couple of recipes with my quantities and if it’s not to your liking, change it!,” but if you follow it you’ll know how something should taste. (the manager brings over the copy of the book) Oh…here’s the book if you want to look at it, this one’s in black and white, but it’ll be full color.

Wow…and how long did it take you to do this?

Eight years…I started in 2001. You know, the proposals, the first talks about it…it was always in the master plan. Concerted effort of actual writing, probably a year and a half.

This is amazing…

You see there…there’s the “Love Notes” – like why do you use beef-chuck. I’ll give you an example of hand-holding. (Flipping through the book) “Heat the oven to 350º and arrange the beef in a single layer on the baking sheet. This is a great tool for spreading out the ingredients to be seasoned and to hold cooked meat while browning.”
See…so that’s why you want to use your baking sheet instead of a plate. Or…you know…Brown the pieces on all sides, using tongs to turn them. Transfer them back to the baking sheet when they finish browning and add more meat to the pot as room allows. It’s ok to use the baking sheet that had the raw meat, because the meat will be full cook later.

These tips are great and for good reason. There’s a story about a woman who baked the family holiday ham, every year she’d always cut the ends off. Her daughter asked why she did it and her mother said it was just what her mother always did. So they call her mother, and she said, “Well, because my pan was too small.” Had nothing to do with the taste or prep.

See? That’s why I explain these things.

In closing…I know most people don’t taught what they do for causes and non-profits…but I know you do a lot for the LGBTIQ community. I know you were the honorary chair for the Our House Dinner series in 2007 and before, and the annual dinner you host at Mama Mia’s for Our House.

I was the chair for two years…I been very involved in Basic Rights Oregon, since it the “No on 9” campaign. When I opened Mother’s in 2001, it was “No on 9” and then 36, and so on. I feel it’s a human rights issue. To me, all people are equal and deserve equal rights. I can’t sit idly by while there’s a segment of the population that can’t live life the way they want to. It’s just not ethical for me to not do something about it.

I fight for human rights and freedom, and women and children causes. I’m a survivor of domestic violence, so I help the Bradley Angle House as much as I can. I believe in human rights so I’m there with Basic Rights Oregon.

So Basic Rights Oregon and Our House. I just happen to be a major fan of drag, so I’ve been a judge a Le Femme Magnifique last year, and then a judge at the Drag Races (the local version of RuPaul’s Drag Race) and I was once a supporter of what once was, “The D Word” at Red Cap Garage, but it’s gone bye-bye. We have a drag hostess for our Cabaret Karaoke, last Thursdays of every month.

Cascade Aids Project, I donated food at their Art Auction, although I didn’t this year. usually when I’m asked, I’ll say yes, particularly…my cause célèbre is Basic Rights and the LGBTIQ community.

Mother’s Best is now available on Amazon.com and at Powell’s City of Books.

Mother’s Bistro 503. 464.1122 • 212 SW Stark
Mama Mia’s Tratettoria 503. 295.6464 • 439 SW 2nd Ave.