Johnny Ocean's

Editor’s note: Thanks to an arrangement I’ve made with Lookout Eugene-Springfield, the digital newspaper I write for, I’m able to re-publish Lookout columns here in Substack — after a three-month waiting period. This is such a column. Today’s bonus column is a bit dated, and some of you will already know it, but, I figured, why hide a column about two people who make the world a better place?

LOCAL RESTAURANTS and pubs are ports in the storm: Touches of realness amid the online pomp and posturing. Places to escape the political madness. Still 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.