On April 29, 2016, customers showed up at Lincoln restaurant expecting a well-crafted meal from a well-known Portland chef. Turns out they also had front row seats to a fight.

That night, chef Jenn Louis punched her then-husband David Welch in the face, breaking his nose. Police arrived and arrested Louis on accusations of domestic violence that were later dismissed.

Two years to the day later, Louis has posted a story arguing that the incident was caused by Welch's alcoholism and years of emotional abuse. The post drags an old story back into the spotlight, adding new details to intimate drama that spilled over into the public realm.

In a post on the Medium website, Louis says her relationship with Welch started sweetly. The two met at Wildwood restaurant in the summer of 1999, sharing a kiss and some late-night carbonara on her Northwest Portland balcony. "He balanced me," she writes. "I was always active and running around; he was softer and slower." In 2008, the couple opened their first restaurant, Lincoln, on North Williams Avenue. Sunshine Tavern, a lively bar with upscale pub grub, followed three years later.

But over time, Welch changed, Louis writes, becoming a "person who regularly drank to excess, who verbally berated and emotionally abused me, who ultimately became a person I no longer recognized nor loved." He drove drunk, earning an arrest for driving under the influence.

"Owning a business is hard work, and it seemed to me he wasn't dealing with it well," she wrote. "He was wasted at work, holed up in our office watching TV on his computer all day; he'd pass out without warning at the dinner table with friends. ... He would blackout every night."

Reached late Sunday, Welch broke his silence about the incident for the first time, acknowledging that he did things he's "incredibly regretful for."

"It's a really awful, awful thing to go through. I wouldn't wish that on anybody," Welch said of living with an addict. "I coupled that with being in one of the worst places to be as an alcoholic -- the owner of a restaurant, a kid in a candy store. I could drink whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted."

Welch, who said he's now in recovery, said the couple were in the midst of a rancorous divorce that night and had been "fighting like cats and dogs" for some time. That night was the first time the fighting turned physical, he said.

"I was never violent physically with her, and so it wasn't her responding to me being physically violent with her," Welch said. "The district attorney felt it wasn't a case that he could pursue, and that seemed fine at the time. I accepted it and moved on."

The couple's memories of the night deviate in some respects. Louis wrote that Welch "pinned" her in a corner after growing enraged about an "error in the kitchen." Welch said the fight broke out after Louis "tried to take over something in the front of house," the area he managed. He doesn't remember cornering her, though he acknowledged his "memory is not the greatest from that period."

According to Louis, Welch's alcoholism led her to throw herself into her work. At the time, the former "Top Chef Masters" contestant was working on a pair of cookbooks, planning an Israeli restaurant in Los Angeles and traveling frequently to cook at events. Not long after the divorce was finalized, Louis sold Sunshine Tavern and closed Lincoln, replacing it with Ray, an Israeli restaurant. A new chef was announced for the Los Angeles project.

After the punch, Welch moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to family. He manages Waterbar, a seafood restaurant in San Francisco. He said he signed over both Portland restaurants to Louis for nothing.

"If you're an alcoholic who owns a restaurant with your partner, and you burn those bridges, maybe it's fair that you don't get anything back for it," Welch said.

He said he's suspicious of the timing of the post, which came less than a month after Louis made news for using the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to promote Ray's fried chicken.

"I don't know what her motivation is," he said. "Considering it's been so long. If she needs the healing and this is how she could have it, that's great."

In the post, which comes against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, she writes that the incident continues to haunt her. Reached for comment Monday, Louis said the timing of the post was "part of my healing."

"Google my name and you'll see a laundry list of pieces about my arrest," she writes. "I've spent twenty years in the restaurant industry, fighting an uphill battle to realize my dreams, spending countless hours developing and working toward achieving independence. It breaks my heart that the focus is on this one deeply personal and humiliating moment in my life."

Welch said he is happy in his new life and sobriety, and has no interest in going back and forth with Louis.

"What did I do to provoke her to punch me? I've thought about that a lot," he said. "If my words and my mannerisms were such that it made her feel unsafe, then she has every right to feel that way. But it's neither here nor there because there's nothing we can do about our actions at this point.

"Two years later, I'm hoping that she's in a better place, as I know I am. And I'd like to believe that she's healed from her experience."

-- Michael Russell