New
beginnings
“
The future has vast potential, and achieving your dreams is possible
And now we welcome the New
Year, full of things that have
never been,” said the poet Rain-
er Maria Rilke. He spoke not of
the well-intentioned resolutions
we never keep, but of the vast
potentiality of the future. Life
is full of new beginnings of all
sorts, and every beginning is the result of an
ending.
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and nurseries around Woodburn, Oregon,
and in the canneries of Astoria before mov-
ing back home to Oaxaca, Mexico, with her
husband and two children. Two years later,
they moved back to Astoria for the sake of the
children’s education, and Maya began work-
ing in restaurants.
“I love to cook. When you grow up in
Oaxaca,” she says, “you learn to cook.” But
something was missing. “When I went to
Mexican restaurants looking for real Mexi-
can food, it was all Mexican-American,” she
says. “Mexican food isn’t just beans and rice,
and every state has its own food. It’s very di-
verse.”
While working at Clemente’s Restaurant,
Maya decided to start her own restaurant, and
Lisa Clement encouraged her. “I was scared
because I didn’t know how to run a business,”
Maya says, although she had taken account-
ing and business courses at the insistence of
her aunt.
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and in 2012 she made her decision. “If I lost
my savings, it would be okay,” she thought,
“and if I won, it would be good.” A month
after leaving Clemente’s, she opened her
restaurant and named it for the famous Oaxa-
can pre-Columbian site Monte Albán. Now at
MonteAlban Restaurant, she cooks food, “ev-
erything natural, no cans, fresh vegetables,
homemade tortillas, Mexican cheese.”
Maya’s new beginning means that now
Coastal Life
Story by DWIGHT CASWELL
4 | January 7, 2016 | coastweekend.com
Photo by Dwight Caswell
Sara Maya saved money for five years before opening MonteAl-
ban Mexican Restaurant in Astoria with her husband in 2012,
Photo by Dwight Caswell
A Long Beach Peninsula native, David Kim dreamed of owning a bed-and-breakfast. After a difficult year full of loss and a big move,
he now works at the Shelburne Inn in Seaview, Washington.
Astoria has real Oaxacan food.
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“Farmer Fred” Johnson’s new beginning was
exactly the opposite. As a restaurateur and
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of fresh food. “Fresh has life force,” he says.
“It leads to a new level of cooking. I got the
bigger picture: Develop and grow a local food
system.”
Soon Johnson left his successful Vashon
Island restaurant behind and was looking for
land. “I found this farm in Naselle and fell
in love with it. I went sort of crazy. I bought
this farm and started trying to be a farmer.”
He bought the 113-year-old, 70-acre farm
in 2003. It’s been challenging ever since. “I
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“totally enthused” about intensive grazing
systems, and restoring salmon habitat.
Johnson’s new beginning is still a work in
progress, the successes slow and hard-won,
“but I love the work,” he says: “Throwing
caution to the winds and trying to be a farm-
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glad I did it. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere
else.”
Maya and Johnson chose their new be-
ginnings, but David Kim had his thrust upon
him. Or did fate give him a little shove in the
right direction?
A restaurant manager and consultant,
Kim says he was tired of “working 60-
70 hours a week, giving them everything,
and getting little in return.” As a child
he had decided that he wanted to own
a tavern and café, like one owned by a
family friend. By the time he was in culi-
nary school he had decided that he would
someday own a bed-and-breakfast, and it
had to be on the Long Beach Peninsula,
where he was born.
Then came the worst year of his life, but
a year that would end with him at an inn and
restaurant on the Long Beach Peninsula.
In April of 2014, Kim’s wife died, and
he made up his mind: “It was time for a
new beginning.” He quit his job in Kansas
City, Missouri, sold everything, bought a
EO Media Group file photo
Farmer Fred Johnson stands in one of his greenhouses on his
farm in Naselle, Washington.
second-hand motor home, and moved to
Long Beach. Eventually. Joining him on
the journey were his 22-year-old son and
his 77-year-old mother (“an adventure in it-
self”), and in Salina, Kansas the motor home
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Then Kim had a heart attack.
He recovered his health and, unable to
purchase a B&B, applied for a job at one. “I
was lucky they had a job available,” he says.
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business here, this is absolutely as spot-on
as it can be.”
He looks around him at the stained glass
and varnished wood of Seaview’s Shelburne
Inn. “I love a place with stories,” Kim says,
“and there are so many stories here that they
would take forever to tell.”
And every one of those stories, whether
of loss or of promise, was a new beginning.