The izakaya dream

“He didn’t know anything about Japan before he came to PSU,” Portland State professor Ken Ruoff said of his former student, Gabe Rosen. “He started taking Japanese studies [classes] and became fascinated with Japan and Japanese cooking. His long-term dream of opening a restaurant would transform into a dream to open a Japanese-style restaurant.”

Rosen’s dream ultimately became a reality: He and his wife opened Biwa, an izakaya or Japanese-style pub, on March 15, 2007.

Rosen will be on campus this week to share his story. Rosen’s talk, “The Biwa Story: Establishing and Managing a Japanese-Style Pub in Portland,” is part of the Oregon Success Stories in Doing Business with Japan lecture series presented by Portland State’s Center for Japanese Studies.

Born in New Jersey, raised in Iowa and settled in Portland since 1997, Rosen has always had a passion for food.

“I’ve always been interested in food and restaurants, ever since I was little,” Rosen said. “My parents both really liked to eat out; food was always a special event in my family.”

After high school Rosen tried the college track, but instead found himself pulled by the lure of a career in cooking.

“I went to college [in Iowa] when I was 18 and I didn’t like it,” Rosen said. “I got a job at a restaurant, which I did like. It kind of took off from there. I realized it was something I really liked doing, that I was good at, that I could do for work, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.”

In 2001 Rosen began attending PSU as an applied linguistics major. After attending Ruoff’s aforementioned class, Rosen focused on combining his love of Japan and his love of food.

Rosen’s continued studies and interest in Japan sparked a desire to go to the country, which he finally did after he was accepted into the prestigious Japan-America Student Conference.

“It’s a conference that’s done every year, where 30 Japanese and 30 American students flip school years,” Rosen said. “That was the first time I [had] ever been to Japan. That was a really interesting experience. I got to spend a month in Japan involved in study with about 70 people, half of them Japanese.”

The Japan-America Student Conference is a prestigious conference, especially in Japan.

“The program is taken pretty seriously in Japan,” Rosen said. “We got to meet members of the Japanese royal family [and] a guy who eventually became one of the Japanese prime ministers, and we were entertained by the U.S. ambassador. It was pretty amazing.

“After that, I came back to the United States for a month,” Rosen continued. “Then I went back to Japan for a year on a scholarship through the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was another pretty amazing opportunity for me and a really cool program, where [the] Japanese government brings third-year undergraduates over to Japan and raises their Japanese language up to a degree to where they can come back to Japan as research students.

“I was lucky enough to get one of those scholarships as well,” Rosen said. “That was a pretty transformational experience.”

Rosen went to Japan on this scholarship during the 2003–04 school year, his final year of schooling.

“Even when he was a student in Japanese classes, Gabe was interested in food,” said Patricia Wetzel, Rosen’s academic adviser at the time. “If I remember correctly, he was thinking about studying the history of Japanese cuisine.

“Food is a very common topic of conversation in Japan,” Wetzel explained. “People always seem to be eager to know where the food they’re eating comes from, how it was prepared, what the season for it is, et cetera.

“There is a calendar that reflects the seasonal vegetables, fruits and fish that are fresh—and therefore desirable—during that particular time,” Wetzel said. “And I have the iPhone app for it! It’s a great culture for ‘foodies.’”

Rosen took his passion for food and poured it into Biwa, which, with a lot of hard work, eventually came to fruition.

“It’s a difficult process, it’s a hard process,” Rosen said, “the combination of hard work and being flexible, being able to make changes when they have to happen. I went into this knowing nothing about business. I had to learn about business so we wouldn’t go out of business. It’s been an interesting process.”

And at Biwa business is good. Lauded as one of the few informal Japanese-style restaurants in town and even featured in travel section of The New York Times, Biwa has become a fixture of the Portland dining scene.

Ruoff, who’s also the director of the Center for Japanese Studies, feels that Rosen’s talk will provide an instuctive example for current students.

“This event is about someone who took a liberal arts degree at PSU and transformed that into a hugely successful career as a chef and an owner of a restaurant,” Ruoff said. “For any PSU undergraduate, especially in this economic environment, who is sitting around thinking ‘what next?’—these kinds of case studies tend to be not only very informative but also very inspirational about the sort of things you can do. You can go get a job, or you can go make your own job and start a business. That’s what Gabe did.”

As a former PSU student doing what he loves, Rosen had a few words of advice for current students.

“Be flexible and keep your eyes open,” he said. “I’ve never been a person with an eight-year plan. Things have just kind of happened and I’ve gone with it. From my own personal experience, it’s about keeping your eyes open for opportunities and those key moments of life. It’s also about being there to recognize them.”