Rolling Burritos and Making Memories with Laughing Planet Café

11/13/17 • 24 min

The Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast

Today on the Oregon Brewery Running Series podcast, we’re talking about one of my favorite places to eat in the whole world, Laughing Planet. If you’re not from the Portland area, Laughing Planet is a small chain of local, quick service restaurants in the Portland Metro (also with locations in Bend, Eugene, Corvallis, and Reno, Nevada).

Laughing Planet is hard to classify as one particular food category. They offer burritos, bowls, and salads, but it’s not Mexican food. You have to experience it. Michael Firth, the General Manager at my local Laughing Planet location, in the Hollywood district of NE Portland, describes it this way.

You can get this legitimate farm-to-table, nutritious meal made by happy people that give a damn about what they're doing. You know and how they like, just influence this world in their daily lives by doing the right thing. But you get that for like 25 bucks!

In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking to Michael and the owner and CEO of Laughing Planet, Franz Spielvogel, about what makes this place so unique. You'll get to learn:

How Laughing Planet came to be
What makes Laughing Planet a farm-to-table restaurant
Their approach to creating nutritious, delicious food
How they are trying to create a happy, fun dining experience for both their employee's and guests

Why We Love Laughing Planet

Laughing Planet holds a special place in my heart. When we moved to Portland from Minneapolis, our stuff was delayed, and I swear we ate at Laughing Planet for a week straight. It never got old, and we continue to eat there around once a week. Part of what keeps us going back is not just the delicious, healthy food, or the fact that my kids love it (which is a huge bonus), but also the friendly people who work there. They never even let us clean up after the kids have thrown a ton of food on the floor!

Laughing Planet is one of the Oregon Brewery Running Series small business partners in 2017. We reached out to them because they are a company we aspire to become. Their values seem to align with our own, and with what we hope to grow into as an organization that gives back to the community. Consider all the good they do the next time you eat there.

About the Podcast

The Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast is a weekly show dedicated to inspiring Oregonians to Get Active, Have Fun, and Give Back. We host untimed family-friendly 5K fun runs that start and end at some of Oregon’s best breweries. Register for our next run using promo code LaughingPlanet5 to save $5.

In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking to Michael and the owner and CEO of Laughing Planet, Franz Spielvogel, about what makes this place so unique. You'll get to learn:

How Laughing Planet came to be
What makes Laughing Planet a farm-to-table restaurant
Their approach to creating nutritious, delicious food
How they are trying to create a happy, fun dining experience for both their employee's and guests

Why We Love Laughing Planet

About the Podcast

Previous Episode

The Kindness Boomerang with Orly Wahba, Life Vest Inside

Today on the Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast, Nathan sits down with Orly Wahba, the founder and CEO of Life Vest Inside a non-profit organization focused on empowering and uniting the world through kindness. Last week, I talked with Jason Hattrick, who is the local Kindness Ambasaddor with Life Vest and has been and a few of our recent runs. Go back to listen to that episode for more ways to get involved locally.

Orly and Nathan chat at The Pie Spot over on NE 24th and Sandy Portland on the first day of her six-week kindness boomerang tour. Her goal with the trip is to engage people in positive dialogue around kindness. Click the links below to learn more about Orly and Life Vest. This episode is a little long because I left our conversation mostly unedited. I want you to hear Orly’s passion as I think it will challenge you to think differently about how you interact with those around you.

About Life Vest Inside

In 2010, Orly set out to create a film, the Kindness Boomerang, about the power that each one of us has to make a difference in the lives of others through merely spreading kindness. That video went viral, being viewed over 100 million times and landed her a TED talk as well as appearances on The TODAY Show, NBC, CBS, ADWEEK, International Business Times and more. She also has a book, the Kindness Boomerang, and a host of other resources.

Quick Resources

A date you may want to get on your calendar is November 12 for the Dance for Kindness, a global freeze, and flash-mob. Yeah, it sounds crazy, but Orly swears it’s super fun.

About the Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast

The Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast is a weekly show dedicated to inspiring Oregonians to Get Active, Have Fun, and Give Back. We host untimed family-friendly 5K fun runs that start and end at some of Oregon’s best breweries. Register for our next run using promo code LVI5 to save $5

Theme music, "The Oregon Song" by James Hoffman.

Next Episode

A Conversation with an Oregon Beer Legend, John Harris, Ecliptic Brewing

Welcome back to another installment of the Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast. Inspiring Oregonians to Get Active, Have Fun, and Give Back. We host family-friendly, 5K fun runs that start and end at some of Oregon’s best breweries.

Today’s show is a rerun of an interview I did back in April of 2017. You may not know this, but before we started the podcast, I was interviewing people live on Facebook, and then posting that video to our YouTube channel. It was a little clunky, and not super easy to listen to. And from a production and interviewer perspective, well, let’s just say we’ve learned a lot.

Anyway, I’m resharing my interview with the legendary brewery, John Harris. You may not know who that is, but you probably know his beer. John is a hero in the beer world, and after spending almost 30 years working for some of the most prolific breweries in Oregon, he decided to start his own brewery, one of our favorites, Ecliptic Brewing.

A quick summary of his background, John began as a brewer at McMenamins’, then moved to Deschutes in Bend, where he created the recipes for Mirror Pond, Black Butte Porter, and Obsidian Stout to name a few. In 1992, he was the brewmaster at Full Sail where he was in charge of creating the Brewmaster Reserve line of beers.

After three decades of brewing for other people, he decided to take on the ambitious challenge of opening his own brewery and restaurant. Ecliptic Brewing began in October of 2013, just off Cook and Mississippi Ave in a booming area of North Portland. They have quickly become one of the hottest breweries, winning a lot of awards for their beer, including being named the fifth top brewery in the country for 2017.

Talking to a Legend

When I sat down to talk with John, I have to admit I was a little intimidated. Here’s a guy who created some of the most iconic beers in Oregon, and influential in the success of multiple breweries. I rarely get starstruck, but I guess I sorta was, as you’ll see, from my rambling question asking. We get to sample three of John's Ecliptic beers, and hear some of the backstory about what went into making them.

John was nothing but kind, and incredibly gracious with a few of my oddball, newbie beer questions and attempts at humor. A big thank you to John Harris for taking time away from his crazy schedule to chat with me. When we talked, Ecliptic had just installed a canning machine, and it wasn’t going well Not sure if you noticed John’s comment, but I know it was causing him headaches, yet he still found time to chat. That’s a solid guy.

And thank you for listening to the Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast! Part of the reason I’m sharing this again now is that we just found out Ecliptic is on board for one of our runs in 2018 and we're incredibly excited! If you want early access to that event, register here and get $5 off for a limited time.