Wellspent Market

In the late nineties, Jim Dixon and his wife Judith took a wrong turn down an unmarked country road in Italy and ended up at the door of Don Alfonso Ristorante, well past closing. Chef Alfonso and his family invited them to stay the evening. They’d stumbled into one of Italy’s first Michelin-starred restaurants, and in the morning they were given a tour of the olive groves.

Dixon tasted oil straight from the barrel — viscous, cloudy with sediment, intensely fruity with a bitter artichoke note and a sharp peppery finish. He’d never tasted anything like it. He loaded as many liters into his suitcase as would fit, and on the way out Judith said: you should import olive oil to Portland.

He did. The first shipment was a couple of cases, and he sold some to cover the freight. Portland chefs wanted more, and Real Good Food became a supplier to the city’s best restaurants, moving over 100 gallons of extra virgin olive oil a week.

For more than 25 years it was a one-man operation. Dixon picked up pallets in a beat-up van, hand-filled and labeled every bottle, made all the deliveries himself, and did it before heading to a full-time day job. He was also the bookkeeper, recipe tester, and janitor. The shop was open a couple of days a week, and if you ran out of olive oil or salt, you waited.

The first proper retail store opened on SE Division in Portland in 2019. The McMinnville shop followed, inside Mac Market — a 10,000-square-foot historic warehouse in the Craft District, shared with a pizzeria, a coffee bar, a café, and a bar.

What’s on the shelves reflects Slow Food principles Dixon has followed for years: real food, clean food, no chemicals, produced without a heavy environmental footprint, and grown by people who aren’t exploited doing it. Old-world olive oils, salt, vinegars, spice blends, chile oils, house-made miso and kimchi, Japanese snacks, local produce from Even Pull Farms, cheese, and an unusually good wine and cider selection — natural and unusual bottles from the Willamette Valley and around the world, plus one of the more serious non-alcoholic sections in the county.