Reo's Ribs

"In 1999, Varnado, known as 'Uncle Reo,' opened the original Reo's Ribs in Aloha with business partner Myra Girod. The restaurant focused on Mississippi-style barbecue and soul food: saucy baby-back ribs and barbecue chicken, as well as chitlins and oxtails. The restaurant moved fairly frequently around greater Portland, opening on SW Macadam and then eventually on NE Sandy, where it sits today. Fires damaged Reo's Ribs twice — once in 2017 and again in 2020. Still, the restaurant reopened again and again, and was preparing to open again in the spring of 2021." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden

"Riot Ribs, the mutual aid kitchen offering barbecue and other meals to protestors, houseless folk, and all others, has transferred its leadership to Don’t Shoot PDX, a nonprofit activist group. Riot Ribs has also developed Revolution Ribs, a pair of vans that will be traveling the country to cities with protests." - Alex Frane

"Riot Ribs, a mutual aid kitchen based in Lownsdale Square, fed people night and day for 12 straight days. On the 13th, the group lost the kitchen they built. Standing in the middle of Lownsdale Square in downtown Portland on Wednesday night, among the various tents, drummers, and masked-and-helmeted twentysomethings, a man named Legend flipped ribs. He was cooking in the middle of a makeshift kitchen, a table scattered with metal containers, plastic shelves stacked with water, hand sanitizer, and rubbing alcohol. On July 15, the kitchen was surrounded by a small barrier built with coolers, Kendrick Lamar’s music played in the background, and Legend’s fellow cooks tended to the other business at hand: sorting through donated water bottles, cutting slices of watermelon, tossing hunks of pork in barbecue sauce. A man named Rico handed the pork to people inside the kitchen and out — some sat in camping chairs, smoking cigarettes. Other volunteers greeted customers, serving them meals for free. 'The people out here, they haven’t had a hot meal in 12 days,' Legend said. 'That’s a big thing for us.' By Thursday morning, Riot Ribs — a mutual aid kitchen physically located in the middle of contentious protests over police brutality — sat abandoned, behind a metal fence. After 12 days serving free ribs, chorizo tacos, and Beyond sausages to the people of Portland, city and county police arrested at least five members of the Riot Ribs team between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., according to the collective; 10 members are still unaccounted for. Parks and Recreation brought in a cleanup crew, confiscating all of the group’s food, coolers still full of food for another day. As of 11 a.m. Thursday, the people behind Riot Ribs who haven’t been arrested are now separated from the kitchen they built, watching Parks and Recreation workers sift through from the other side of the fence." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden

"A barbecue restaurant that reopened after burning down last year, opened on November 10." - Brooke Jackson-Glidden