Karen Livingston’s last restaurant review for The Columbian appears today. She will move to Detroit next month. We thought it would be fun for readers to finally meet the woman who has dined anonymously to guide our readers for more than a decade.
When she started her freelance gig with The Columbian 12 years ago, she was fresh from Los Angeles, where she had lived all her life and had sampled a wide variety of excellent restaurants.
“I learned a lot just going out to eat there,” she said. “I felt like this community was not on the map as compared to Los Angeles.”
The restaurant scene has changed in her years here, but she remains unimpressed.
“I don’t know that it’s improved in the sense that we are better at it, but we have more variety than we used to,” Livingston said. “People on this side of the river, they’re mostly about quantity. They like large portions.”
The one chef here who truly dazzled Livingston was Morris Fenton, who opened Vesta on Mill Plain Boulevard in 2007.
“He didn’t use a bunch of seasoning or salt and sugar and all that stuff people will use to enhance food flavors. He understood the art of pairing foods that brought out the best in each other,” she said. “He was just really good.”
Yet Vesta closed in 2008.
“From my observation, it was not because of anything negative about the place,” Livingston said. “We work hard for our money. We don’t want to spend a lot dining out, and if we do, we go to Portland. To have it in our own backyard is not sustainable yet.”
If Vesta was the best, a beloved but now-closed Mexican restaurant was the worst in Livingston’s book.
“The beans were more lard than beans. Everything tasted like dog food,” she said.
Livingston, 52, said she developed high standards for food in childhood.
“My mom was a fantastic cook. She’s from the Midwest, so I had a lot of really hearty meals,” said Livingston, who is nonetheless slender.
When she became a stay-at-home mother of four children, cooking became a big part of her life.
“I found it very easy,” she said. She often cooked without recipes. “I just put things together that worked.”
Livingston, then Karen Persson, moved from Los Angeles to La Center in 2005. She wanted to be a novelist, so she signed up for a correspondence course that required publishing a piece of writing, any kind of writing.
She ate at the Klondike Restaurant and Bar in St. Helens, Ore., and wrote about her experience for the Lewis River Review in Woodland. She ended up with a monthly column. (Both the restaurant and the newspaper have since gone out of business.)
She decided to try for a larger publication and approached The Columbian.
Livingston’s first review for The Columbian — of the Doner Haus Cafe, which claimed to be home of “World Famous Toasted Doner,” and has since closed — appeared in April 2007. “I was curious to learn what a toasted doner is and what makes it world famous,” she wrote. She learned it is “a clever pocket sandwich” and gave it high marks.
At first, her reviews rotated with those from Columbian staff, but she evolved into the newspaper’s regular weekly dining writer.
During that time, she went from being a stay-at-home mother of four, to a single mom barely making ends meet by working at a hotel laundry, to launching all her children into the world and regaining her footing.
“Writing for The Columbian has been the only constant,” she said.
She filed for divorce in 2011 from her husband of 27 years. She and the two of her four children still living at home moved into an apartment. After years out of the work force, she got a job doing laundry at a hotel in the Salmon Creek area.
“I was continuing to write, working every shift I could get doing laundry, and I still wasn’t making enough,” she said.
Then her husband, who had moved back to L.A., died in a motorcycle wreck while the divorce was pending.
“The death benefits made it doable. I was able to pay rent and feed us,” she said. “I’m so thankful for this time in my life. Everybody needs to learn how to take care of themselves without anybody’s help. That’s what I’ve learned to do.”
She left her job at the hotel for one as a driving instructor. She grew bored with that, and landed a job selling motorcycles at Pro Caliber Motorsports three years ago. She has enjoyed riding since her dad taught her on his 1963 Yamaha trail bike when she was 13 years old.
She said she’s looking into a job selling tractors in Michigan, where she’s moving with her boyfriend. Because she hopes to resume reviewing restaurants with anonymity in Detroit once she gets settled, she didn’t want us to print a photo showing her face.
Livingston’s final review (of Skamania Lodge) is in today’s Weekend section. In that spot next week, you’ll find dining reviews by Vancouver resident Rick Browne, a former Columbian photo editor, barbecue pit master, cookbook author and restaurant critic.
