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Local restaurants and pubs are ports in the storm: Touches of realness amid the online pomp and posturing. Places to escape the political madness. Steady points in a changing world. Establishments where everybody might not know your name, but a waiter or two might. And sometimes that’s all you need.
But they are fragile, given to short lives. Half of all restaurants die within five years. Only a third make it beyond a decade.
Slumping economies, difficult-to-keep servers and cooks, failing health of owners — many reasons conspire to thwart places that become our culinary touch points.
Which brings me to Johnny Ocean’s Grille, in Oakway Center. It has long been a go-to place for me and my wife, Sally.
I first ate there three decades ago when it was Johnny Ocean’s Great American Hamburgers — it had a ’50s diner theme — before the Oakway Center was remodeled and expanded.
The owner was Shawn Rahimian, who’d come to the U.S. from Iran to attend the University of Oregon in 1977. He graduated in business management, but what he really loved was people and food. A restaurant seemed like the perfect fit.
A month after they were married in 1987, he and his wife, Sue, opened a burger spot on Echo Hollow and launched the Oakway location a year later. But, in 1993, when their fourth child, Micaela, was born, they gave up the Echo Hollow restaurant Sue was running.
In 2002, when the Oakway Center upgraded, Shawn and Sue expanded the menu, changed the name to Johnny Ocean’s Grille and created a larger sit-down restaurant, complete with thatched umbrellas to accentuate the Caribbean-accented food offerings.
Over the years, we got to know Shawn, who would always stop to talk and, on occasion, pull up a chair and join us, sometimes outside on summer evenings. He was like a throwback to some black-and-white movie — had it been 1948, he would have lit our cigarettes.
“What’s always distinguished Shawn is his hospitality,” says John Neal, a former UO defensive backs coach and a close friend of the man. “His personal touch of friendship and his appreciation of you for eating at Johnny Ocean’s were hallmarks of the place.”
To his workers, Shawn could come across as the kindly father — chef Andrew “Ice Man” Bollman has been there 23 years — but if you weren’t all in, he wasn’t averse to showing you the door.
“He wasn’t always the easiest boss,” says Sue. “People either loved or hated him.”
“But he’s always been good to me,” says Windy Barnes, who started as a server at age 20 in 2013.
The restaurant did well, in part because it has so many regulars and in part because Shawn established a strong relationship with UO football, beginning in the Chip Kelly era.
“Right before home games would end, we’d deliver a couple of hundred hamburgers for the team, then run up to the stadium and watch the end of the game,” he says.
In 2015, when Shawn heard Sally and I were going to visit friends in California who’d lost a 19-year-old son to cancer — a kid who’d revered UO football — he went to work. He arranged for the Ducks to print a jersey with Riley’s name on the back.
When a Johnny Ocean’s regular, artist Rodger Deevers, heard about that, he painted a scene of Riley as part of a UO huddle along with the likes of LaMichael James. When we presented the jersey and painting to our friends, they were in tears.
It worked both ways. Shawn and Sue had a son serving in the military. When Johnny Ocean’s regulars heard he was going to be married in New Zealand, they put together a surprise fundraiser to help Shawn and Sue attend the wedding.
Organizers met with Shawn under the guise that the restaurant would stay open an extra couple of hours on a Sunday night for a surprise birthday party for Neal, the football coach.
Instead, as more than 60 people looked on, a giant check for $4,000 was presented to a stunned Shawn and Sue. This time, in a scene like the last one in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the tears belonged to them.
More tears would come, for different reasons. When Shawn arrived at the restaurant to start preparing food each day, around 5:30 a.m., he started noticing his hands were shaking. At 61, in 2018, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
“He told people it was just the stress of working 80-hour weeks,” says Windy Barnes, the longtime server. “But we knew it was more.”
A 2010 graduate of Mapleton High, Barnes had married her high school sweetheart, Tyler Huddleston, and in 2014 the two had a son, Dominic.
“People love Windy,” says Sue Rahimian. “She’s that server who’d remember that this particular person always wore wild socks. Or that person always ordered the Coconut Curry. She made good tips.”
Barnes soon became Shawn’s go-to server. She began doing much of the daily food-gathering at US Food’s Chef’s Store on Game Farm Road. And putting together the work schedule.
Then, in 2020, COVID-19 hit. Few people ventured out to eat. Food costs skyrocketed. Sue, a bus driver for the Eugene School District, and Shawn pulled from their retirement account to keep the restaurant going. But they refused to lay off servers and cooks.
“COVID just about killed us,” says Shawn.
They were about to close the restaurant when they heard about Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who in December 2020 launched The Barstool Fund, a relief setup to help businesses that were suffering during the pandemic but wouldn’t lay off employees. In addition to contributing $500,000 of his own money, Portnoy solicited donations from celebrities to raise more than $41 million.
Based on a video Sue put together, Johnny Ocean’s was one of only two Oregon businesses that won funding from The Barstool Fund — $20,000 a month for seven months.
“We couldn’t have kept the doors open without that,” Shawn says.
Sally and I marveled at how the restaurant kept doggedly opening each day. How the smiling Windy Barnes could always remember exactly what we wanted. And how, on special occasions, the restaurant continued to offer the build-your-own s’mores, complete with your own flame.
But Shawn’s Parkinson’s worsened.
“I knew it was time,” he says. “I knew I had to sell the restaurant.”
In 2024, an unlikely would-be buyer stepped forth.
“What about me?” his go-to server said to him one day. “I’d like to buy it.”
At 33, Barnes was roughly half Shawn’s age and had no experience operating a business.
“It surprised me,” says Shawn. “She was so young. I told her, ‘Are you crazy?’”
“I’d love to carry on Johnny Ocean’s spirit,” she told him..
She and Huddleston scraped together their savings, borrowed $15,000 from her parents — “I got turned down by 10 banks for a loan” — and made it work.
On July 31, 2024, Barnes gave birth to her and Huddleston’s second son, Scott. In honor of Barnes’s boss, she and Huddleston gave him the middle name “Mehdi,” which is Shawn’s middle name.
Two weeks later, she officially became the owner of Johnny Ocean’s Grille.
Huddleston, a stay-at-home father with kidney issues, makes the restaurant’s cakes. Barnes comes in early — though not nearly as early as Shawn used to — to put together the “buy list” and purchase the ingredients for the day.
“At first, Shawn would call me three or four times a day,” she says. “He’d say, ‘Is everything OK? Is everything OK?’ Now he calls only once a day.”
“She’s doing a great job,” says Shawn, now 68. “I couldn’t be happier that she took over.”
The restaurant will celebrate its 40th anniversary next fall.
Barnes has ramped up the catering portion of the restaurant. But beyond that, little has changed; the Rahimian family photos remain on a wicker shelf in the corner. The menu is virtually the same.
“I always want this to be a place that’s comfortable, that’s like going to your grandparents’ for dinner,” she says. “No way was I going to flip it around and make it something else. There’s value in longevity.”
She, Shawn and Johnny Ocean’s Grille are living proof of that.
