Elaine Tanzer, the local “visionary” behind one of Portland’s first specialty food stores, Elephants Delicatessen, died Tuesday after a fall, friends and colleagues confirmed Friday. She was 77.
Tanzer, who developed her passion for good cheese, pasta and wine during a year abroad in northern Italy while studying at Portland State University, bought a deli in Northwest Portland’s Uptown Shopping Center in 1979 and started filling it with things she loved.
“It was a huge Old World deli kind of feeling,” said Anne Weaver, who joined the store as a manager in 1980 and is now its CEO. “There was a long, long, long deli case, and we sold braunschweiger and head cheese and all. We were going to the Fancy Food Show and getting all these cheeses and no one in Portland had seen this stuff.”
Well before the days of artisanal everything in Portland, Elephants Deli became one of the city’s first modern markets to extrude its own pasta, squeeze its own orange juice, pour its own espresso and bake its own bread. The deli soon entered the “Portland baguette wars” of the 1980s, Weaver said, offering fresh-from-the-oven loaves to lines of hungry customers who would jockey for position “as if they were at a Walmart on Black Friday.”
“She started this curation of pesto and sun-dried tomatoes and things that we take for granted now, but they were truly revolutionary products back then,” said Weaver, who notes that Elephants was among the first Portland markets to carry whole wheels of Parmesan cheese. (Along with husband Scott, who was hired as Elephants executive chef in 1983, Anne is now an Elephants co-owner.)
Soon, supermarket executives would stop by to see what all the hubbub was about, taking notes and translating Tanzer’s passions for a wider audience at their stores. And as specialty foods began to splinter, with coffee shops and micro roasters and juice bars and more, Elephants began focusing more on its prepared food and catering wings.
According to Jim Dixon, the reformed food writer-turned-specialty foods guru at Northeast Portland’s Real Good Foods, there just “wasn’t much else” in Portland when Elephants hit the scene.
“It’s not like today when you can go into Whole Foods or New Seasons or even Fred Meyer and find interesting cheeses,” Dixon said. “You might find an aged white cheddar from Tillamook. But unless you went to a restaurant, unusual things were not widely available.”
According to Judith Dixon, Jim’s wife, Elephants was the place to go when people visited Portland in the 1980s, either for a quick lunch or to fill your pantry with items you would rarely find outside of upscale restaurants such as Southeast Portland’s Genoa.
“You would go to Powell’s Books, then go eat at Elephants,” Judith Dixon said. “Especially if you were coming from the mid states. And you would always get to brag about what you got when you get there. It was just a fun, novelty food place.”
After testing the expansion waters with Packy’s at the PacWest center in the 1980s, Elephants began its modern growth period with Flying Elephants, a Parisian-inspired cafe with a “greatest-hits” menu opened in the Fox Tower development in 2000. The company now runs eight Elephants locations overall, including five Flying Elephants, each with a limited retail selection alongside the salads, sandwiches and soups. The tomato-orange soup, introduced by Scott Weaver in 1984, remains a customer favorite.
According to Elephants food and beverage director Nick Doughty, Tanzer was a “visionary” with a “flair for flair” who “loved to make a grand entrance” whenever Elephants opened a new location.
Perhaps no Elephants entrance was grander than the one arranged for the current flagship, when Tanzer and Weaver secured a marching band, stilt walkers, an elephant float and local celebrities Darcelle and Gerry Frank to make the short walk from the Uptown Shopping Center to the new home on West Burnside at 22nd Avenue.
“She would say things like, ‘You can’t bake the cookies too early in the day, because then the customers can’t smell the cookies when they come in,’” Doughty said. “She always wanted our kitchens to be open kitchens. She wanted customers to be able to see and interact with the people making the food.”
Elaine’s husband, Jacob, a Portland lawyer and judge who spent time with the U.S. Department of Justice, preceded Tanzer in death in 2018. His investigation into the 1964 slayings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, which helped secure indictments against Ku Klux Klan members, inspired the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Survivors include Tanzer’s children, Joshua Tanzer, Jessica Tanzer Conroy, Rachel Tanzer and Elan Tanzer, as well as one grandson.
-- Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell
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