‘Everybody’s getting out of the Pearl District,’ says co-owner Micah Camden, who says SuperDeluxe will soon close its Northwest Portland location.
Kinnamons, the cinnamon roll bakery which Portland restaurateur Micah Camden co-owns with Ndamukong Suh’s Generals Restaurant Group, has closed its Pearl District location, Oregon Business has learned.
According to Camden, the restaurant has moved its production facility from Northwest Portland to its Northeast Alberta Street location, which closed in mid-February so mixers and other equipment could be moved from one location to another.
The bakery’s official Instagram account announced Sunday that the Alberta site had reopened; Camden tells OB the restaurant is planning on holding a grand reopening Saturday, when the weather is forecast to improve.
The Cedar Hills location, which opened in December, is still open and is now the flagship Kinnamons, Camden says.
In February Willamette Week reported that two other companies owned by Camden, Boxer and SuperDeluxe, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
But Kinnamons and Bae’s Chicken, both of which Camden co-owns with Suh’s Generals, were not affected by that filing. That’s because, while they’re all managed by MMMco, MMMco is a third-party company that provides administrative management services like payroll, Camden says.
“This isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a business mechanism that says, ‘Hey, you took on some debt, and it’s time to start reorganizing that debt so that we can have a healthier business,” Camden says. “Kinnamons didn’t need to do that. Bae’s didn’t need to do that. SuperDeluxe and Boxer are much bigger companies with much bigger overheads. And unfortunately, we had to reorganize their debt.”
But the closure of Kinnamons’ Pearl District location and the bankruptcy filing do appear to share an underlying cause: declining foot traffic in Portland’s city center, notably the Pearl.
“Everybody’s getting out of the Pearl District,” Camden says, noting the recent closures of Basics Market, Rite-Aid, Starbucks and the furniture store Hay. In prior interviews, he’s also also pointed to the February closure of REI as a sign that the neighborhood is hollowing in a way even multinational companies aren’t able to absorb. “We’re basically standing on an island by ourselves with no real foot traffic, nobody coming down there and no other businesses to support it,” Camden says.
He noted that the drive-through locations of SuperDeluxe — a fast-food concept with five locations in the state — are doing well. But the Pearl District location — a walk-in restaurant situated just a block from the now-shuttered Kinnamons — has struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he plans to vacate it as soon as he can under bankruptcy.
“SuperDeluxe on Powell is great. My drive-through locations are absolutely great. But that location in the Pearl was dragging the ones that were actually doing well into the mud,” Camden says.
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