When you think of Seattle, you might imagine seafood shacks and life-changing fish and chips. And while we have those, the city’s laid-back restaurant scene is better defined by the freedom it gives chefs. Take Dungeness crab, the super-tender crustacean caught off the coast, which might get curried and folded into scones, or tossed with mint and crispy fried onions in pappardelle.

This genre-bending and boundary-busting makes Seattle an unpretentious food town that harbors surprises at every turn and prioritizes flavor and function over formality. My list of essential local restaurants tells the story of a city in constant flux—and invites you to join in. Whether you wind up tucking into Lebanese tacos at an art bar or sharing an order of Ethiopian-spiced green beans at a Halal butcher shop, use this roadmap to plan your culinary adventures. Along the way, you’ll get a true taste of Seattle’s diverse communities.

Ahadu

1508 NE 117th St.
(206) 440-3399

Samuel Ephrem and Menbere Medhane’s Ethiopian restaurant evolved from a butcher shop when customers started asking if the duo could cook Halal beef. It wasn’t long before the ribeye was destined for kitfo (raw chopped beef with spiced butter) and the bone marrow for a stew called kikel. They still bring in fresh local meat and break it down themselves. But the expert butchery can’t explain why their (vegetarian) green beans—heady with caramelized red onion and floral coriander—are such a sleeper hit.

Mike’s Noodle House

418 Maynard Ave St.
(206) 389-7099

The food and decór at this cash-only Chinatown-International District standby are as straightforward as its name implies. The chatter of elderly couples, the clatter of families serving up soup, and the slurps of solo diners fill the room better than any wall art could. Mike’s light, flavorful broth and needle-thin egg noodles draw lines out the door on weekends. The soup comes in almost 30 varieties, from standard wonton to house-made fish balls with beef brisket. And there are nearly as many styles of dry noodle and congee.

Wedgwood Broiler

8230 35th Ave NE.
(206) 523-1115

Stepping into the Wedgwood Broiler is like journeying back to the ‘60s, when this steakhouse opened—and the old-school booths and sassy waitresses still charm customers like they did back in the day. But my favorite part of the retro set-up comes in how they carry on the prudent custom of turning the beef trimmings into fresh burger patties and French dip sandwiches. Either pairs nicely with an equally old-fashioned martini in the wood-paneled lounge, or with a milkshake in one of the dining room’s many booths.

Situ Tacos at Jupiter Bar

2126 2nd Ave Suite A.

When the pandemic forced drummer Lupe Flores to cancel her shows, she found a new way to entertain audiences: by making them tacos like the ones her Lebanese Mexican grandmother cooked for her as a kid. Fastened shut with toothpicks, the crisp-fried tacos come filled with brown-butter beef, garlic mashed potatoes, or harissa cauliflower and cilantro chickpeas. Place your order at the stand in front of the quirky, sprawling art bar, then head over to the arcade consoles to knock out a game of pinball or Street Fighter II while you wait for your food.

Toshi’s Teriyaki Grill

16212 Bothell Everett Hwy.
(425) 225-6420

In 1976, Toshi Kasahara opened a tiny shop near Seattle Center selling his spin on the teriyaki of his childhood in Japan. Filling Styrofoam containers with piles of steamed rice and shiny, crackly-crusted chicken year after year, Kasahara honed and defined Seattle-style teriyaki. When Seattle teriyaki took off, so did Toshi, expanding and franchising until he completely burned out. Now, he’s back to his roots, with a single spot which harks back to the original: small and simple enough that he can run it himself, serving only teriyaki—no extras or ceremony.

T55 Pâtisserie

18223 Bothell Way NE.

Muhammad Fairoz Rashed shapes his pains au chocolat like flowers, dotting each petal of feather-light croissant with semi-sweet chocolate, which ups the ratio of chocolate to pastry. The same attention to detail and innovation fuels the savory specialties, such as the curry crab scones or black truffle goat cheese focaccia served in T55’s sleek, minimalist space.

Local Tide

401 N 36th St UNIT 103.
(206) 420-4685

This casual spot specializes in fun and funky seafood lunches. The bounty of the Pacific Northwest’s chilly and pristine waters shines through in dishes inspired by Seattle’s favorite foods, like the bánh mì filled with ground rockfish and pork patties. Subtle surprises also tweak familiar flavors in the house clam chowder, enriched with clam fat, the “BLT,” which swaps in crispy salmon skin for bacon, and Local Tide’s own “Filet-o-Fish” starring Dover sole.

Billiard Hoang

3220 S Hudson St.
(206) 723-2054

When this Vietnamese pool hall sprung up off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1986, Seattle barely knew its bánh mì from its bún thịt nướng. But today, locals line up at Billiard Hoang for both those dishes, plus soups and rice and noodle bowls. The latter come topped with tender short ribs or puffy fried tofu, which pair well with either Vietnamese coffee or beer, no matter the time of day.

Mashiko

4725 California Ave SW.
(206) 935-4339

Seattle has an outstanding sushi scene, but Mashiko stands out for being the first established sushi restaurant in the country committed to serving only sustainable seafood. Those limitations elevated the skills and resourcefulness of the chefs, who have created a thrilling menu centered on offbeat species like spot prawns, geoduck, and herring.

Mezzanotte

1210 South Bailey St.
(206) 466-6032

After flirting with fame on Bravo’s Top Chef, dabbling in Middle Eastern cuisine at Mamnoon, and briefly trying on taco cheffery at a brewery, Jason Stratton has settled back into his sweet spot: high-end, Northwest-inflected Italian cooking. In the casual low-slung brick dining room in Georgetown, expect seasonal gems such as tender asparagus cloaked in bagna cauda sauce, burrata draped over sweet grated carrots, and Dungeness crab pappardelle. Other menu stalwarts include Stratton’s signature tajarin al coltello, hand-cut noodles in rich sage butter sauce.

Salima Specialties

11805 Renton Ave S Suite C.
(206) 906-9331

When Salima’s Restaurant closed in 2009, the region’s significant Cham population lost its community gathering point—and Salima Mohamath’s bold peanut sauce. For those unfamiliar, the cuisine of these Indigenous people of Southeast Asia is a blend of local and Islamic cuisines. At the new Salima Specialties, which opened in 2022, expect Malaysian-style satay, rich lamb curry, and Vietnamese sandwiches with housemade Halal chicken “ham”—plus that killer peanut sauce.

Midnite Ramen

Seattle, WA
(425) 524-1604

Elmer Komagata made his name cooking in LA’s fine-dining restaurants in the 1980s, then spent decades running hotel kitchens in Mexico. But he always dreamed of something smaller, like the tiny ramen cart he and his wife now park outside Seattle breweries a few nights a week. The concept is modeled after yatai, the evening mobile food stands he remembers from growing up in Japan. His balanced broth is a testament to decades spent cooking and studying French, Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese cuisines; it combines Chinese preserved vegetables and ground chicken breast. The noodles are specially made for Midnite and parboiled to his specifications, so they cook in 15 seconds. That keeps the lines outside the cart for the limited number of bowls each night moving just a little bit faster.

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Washington State is admittedly a long way from the Highlands of Scotland. But when Seattle’s Westland Distillery opened in 2010, co-founder and master distiller Matt Hofmann was determined to use the greatest whiskey-making resource the Pacific Northwest provided: optimal barley-growing conditions.

And he didn’t just have his sights on American whiskeys, which are typically distilled from a blend of grains. Hofmann aimed to rival the famed single malts of Scotland, traditionally made from just three ingredients—barley, water, and yeast—before being introduced to a fourth: the barrels in which the liquor is aged. Because most single malts rely on the same few strains of pale-gray barley, that barrel wood often wields outsize influence.

As Hofmann explains: “In the larger whiskey industry, everything is driven by the bottom line, so low-cost, high-yield barley wins. And it seemed so obvious to us: What if we put flavor first?”

Seeking to work outside the commodity-crop system, Westland Distillery partnered with Washington State University’s Bread Lab—a grain-growing research facility run by renowned plant-breeder Steve Jones. In collaboration with Jones and dozens of farmers in the mineral-­rich Skagit Valley, Westland has spent much of the last decade experimenting with lesser-known existing barleys and developing new ones, all in pursuit of interesting flavors.

Hofmann found them in two UK varieties: Talisman (whose distillate imparts notes of nectarine and sage) and Pilot (white peach, citrus, and raspberries). Obsidian, an Egyptian heirloom, boasts a distinctive purple hue, while the disease-­resistant Alba was developed in neighboring Oregon.

Each whiskey crafted from these barleys requires a significant investment from Westland that is only now on the verge of paying dividends. The company devotes as much as 40 percent of its annual distillate to such experiments, which are typically aged five years or longer. Finally, this summer, Westland will debut the first in a series of limited-edition single malts derived from the Bread Lab collaboration.

For Hofmann, the endeavor is not simply about finding novel flavors for its own sake—his aim is to produce a whiskey unique to the Pacific Northwest. “We could choose to drag corn 2,000 miles across the country and make bourbon here, but in our opinion, that’s not what this region should be making,” he says. “We should be making something best suited to the agriculture of a place, even if that product doesn’t exist yet.”

The post Seattle Scotch Is A Thing. And It’s Good. appeared first on Saveur.

If you’re driving the winding roads of Orcas Island in late summer, you can smell the ripening fruit all around. On one such morning last year, I stopped the car at my destination and met Audra Lawlor, owner of Girl Meets Dirt, who was surveying one orchard’s recent Italian plum harvest in tall rubber boots and a denim shirt. As we walked among the rows of trees with their full canopies spilling over onto the trail, Audra picked up a fallen plum from the ground and turned it over in her hand between us. “Before I got here, most of the fruit from these trees would have rotted on the ground,” she says. Lawlor and her team of five mighty women at Girl Meets Dirt harvested more than 2,500 pounds of Italian plums alone last season.

Some people leave their corporate jobs to rescue animals. Audra left Wall Street to rescue pink pearl apples and Orcas pears. Today, many of the island’s residents see her as the steward of the legacy fruit trees on the island, a 57-square-mile piece of the San Juan Islands, an archipelago that lies in the waters between Seattle and Vancouver, just barely on the U.S. side of the border.

Orcas owes its long history of orchards to the area’s unique climate. Known as Washington’s “banana belt,” and also called the Olympia Rainshadow Zone, this area is protected from excess rain by the Olympic Mountains, Vancouver Island, and the Cascades, and it enjoys more sun annually than mainland coastal Washington. Lawlor likens it to Northern California in its ability to sustain crops.

It was horticulturist E.V. Von Gohren in the late 1870s who first proclaimed the climate ideal for growing Italian plums, better known to the locals as prunes, because that is what most of them eventually became. The mild climate and rich soil encouraged settlers on the island to plant nurseries of these plums, along with apples, pears, and, by some records, up to 20,000 total fruit varieties, from apricots to cherries and berries. But the Italian plums had the prized seeds, the trees bearing them deemed to have the greatest commercial potential at the time.

By the end of the 19th century, many inhabitants had made their way over to work the plum orchards and operate the prune dryers (barnlike structures where the fruit was set to shrivel up), and the economy was surging. The success allowed the building of docks for steamships, as well as a boon for jobs sorting, grading, and packing fruit for transport. It also led to an island that became far more orchard than anything else. The country lane that runs through the center of Orcas Island’s main village is still named Prune Alley.

Many of the legacy fruit trees—entire orchards of them—fell into disrepair during a period of economic downturn around 1915. It was in part due to the rise of railroads, improved irrigation, and heavy planting in nearby eastern Washington, which became a fierce competitor. Islanders began to ignore the fallen fruit, and tree limbs weakened with overgrowth. Thousands of trees were left to die, and the plum industry collapsed. It wasn’t until decades later, when the island began attracting new residents—those who sought out the area for its bucolic landscape—that the trees gained new stewards. Today, Lawlor and her company are working with fellow islanders to revive and utilize those trees that remain.

Raised in Washington, Lawlor spent years working in New York City but always knew she would one day return to the Pacific Northwest. The San Juan Islands were her fantasy destination, but the move never seemed practical. That is, until 2011, when she left her lucrative but hectic job with her husband and two dogs to go full-on Green Acres. The couple bought a farmette on the secluded island, determined to live a simpler life. “I didn’t have a plan,” Lawlor says. “I just knew I wanted to get my hands dirty.”

It was in those early days that Lawlor found a passion for fruit. During her first fall season on the island, the seven fruit trees on her property bore more than 200 pounds of apples and pears. She began making pies and jams but quickly found her kitchen filled with yet more fruit—quince, crab apples, and plums—as her new neighbors welcomed her with edible gifts. “I fell in love with the sense of abundance on my property, and all around me on the island. I wanted to learn more,” she says. She turned to a local cookbook club for education, camaraderie, and inspiration.

Come Thanksgiving 2013, Lawlor found her kitchen filled with boxes upon boxes of homemade preserves she had taught herself to make. At the urging of family and friends, she created Girl Meets Dirt to do something productive with her newfound hobby. She began producing handmade, organic preserves from the island’s ­century-​old trees, and selling it locally under the small label.

As her business grew over the years, so did the need for more fruit and other flavors. But rather than purchasing it from commercial farmers, Lawlor decided to take a more community-minded approach and build win-win relationships with local residents. “Some people don’t even know they have [fruit trees] on their property,” she says. She didn’t have to go far to find her first stewardship arrangement; it was right next door. The 5-acre farm was covered with overgrown, untended Bartlett pear trees, prompting Lawlor to approach the farm’s owners, Dale and Marcia Gillingham, about helping. “It started with a casual ‘use our fruit’ relationship, and then over the years, I offered to start taking care of the pruning in winter just to give something back,” she says. “They were never farmers or commercial growers; they just happened to have bought property with a lovely old orchard on it and are glad to see the fruit being used.” Since then, a few local farmers have offered to sell her items—tomatoes, peppers, and local herbs, including sage and rosemary, and chamomile, which she uses in her jams and products.

Lawlor’s approach is “to make the most of what trees are still here.” She adheres to the practice—as in the nose-to-tail movement—of using all parts of the ingredient. This year, she began processing the pits, bark, and leaves of plum, apple, and fragrant peach trees and fruits (and a little alcohol) to create “tree bitters,” which she barrel-ages using either bourbon barrels from Washington distilleries or spent local apple-brandy barrels. The latter relationship led to her creating her first batch of apple brandy in 2019, in partnership with Orcas Island Distillery.

Lawlor trades with up to 100 people each harvest season, including those on neighboring islands, whose fruits arrive by ferry. “Often, people just show up at my door with boxes of whatever they have,” she says, “and sometimes they just want to trade it for some preserves.”

The Girl Meets Dirt commercial kitchen is more reminiscent of your grandmother’s kitchen than that of a finely tuned business that sells and ships handcrafted preserves around the nation. In summer and fall, dozens of rustic crates teeming with reds, purples, and greens are stacked ceiling high, creating a maze of narrow passageways for Lawlor and her team. Large copper pots sit atop expansive burners that line an entire wall. There’s little prep work required; Lawlor boils the fruit with the skin still intact to take full advantage of the peels’ natu­ral tannins, pectin (which thickens juices so they set into jams), and full flavors.

The team uses a classic French confiture technique to create their spoon preserves. It starts with a quick, high-heat cook in broad-bottom copper pots to remove water from the fruit as quickly as possible to fortify the fruit’s essence. The cooks will then macerate the fruit with sugar for 24 hours to concentrate and sweeten the flavors. Finally, they’ll cook the fruit slowly until it’s broken down into pieces and suspended in a clear, thickened syrup. Some preserves are inspired by Lawlor’s travels. In Spain and Argentina, she encountered dulce de membrillo (a prized quince paste), and now makes a plum version inspired by it. Once the ripe, purple fruit—some from trees nearly 100 years old—is cooked, it’s hand-milled and simmered slowly into a concentrated spread, perfect for cheeseboards or slathering on toast.

As we talk over the sounds of the busy kitchen, Charles West of Orcas Island Distillery stops by to check on a recent collaboration. “How is the pear situation going?” he asks. Lawlor responds: “I can’t process them fast enough. But what’s urgent right now is rotting plums,” she says, indicating her need to get back to her kitchen. Before long, the copper pots are gurgling with deep-purple juices.

Her relentless, ever-growing enthusiasm for the region and its community, and for putting its bounty to use, is as pure as the products Lawlor makes. “The very challenges of the island,” she says—of its particular weather, the island’s rhythms, and keeping up with fruit bursting from tree limbs—“are also the things that make it romantically ideal, and intriguing. Our difference is the fruit we use,” she adds, pausing, “and all the ways we get it.”

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Before I floated down Oregon’s Grande Ronde River with chef and charcutier Elias Cairo, I would have figured that an angler who brought his own trout on a fishing trip to be sure to have something for the grill was not much of a fisherman at all. This was the first lesson of many.

The idea of joining a fly-fishing trip with Cairo came up as we were wrapping the cookbook we wrote together for his restaurant ­Olympia Provisions. “I’ve never seen anywhere quite like the Wallowas,” he had told me. “It’s a mountain range: 250,000 acres of public land, six thriving rivers, and Hells Canyon, America’s deepest gorge. Come out and fish sometime.” I went home and looked it up on Google Maps. Fishing wasn’t usually my thing, but this was coming from a guy who apprenticed for a murderers’ row of intimidating Swiss chefs and Jägermeisters, a former USA national team snowboarder who also has a vineyard in his backyard. In nine years, he turned his first business into a Portland mini empire: five restaurants and a massive salumeria, plus a hot dog cart for good measure. He is, in other words, not someone who half-asses anything he does.

The plans were forgotten until they weren’t, and all of a sudden I was in a Toyota Tacoma three hours down the road from Portland, with five more still to go. Cairo was driving me and two of his Olympia Provisions colleagues—and oldest friends—Tyler Gaston and Eric Moore, to a cellphone-­signal-free retreat close to the Idaho border. Trips like this have been routine for Cairo and Moore since they were teenage snowboarders in Salt Lake City. “When I wasn’t at school or working at my parents’ diner, I’d borrow the car, and we’d escape to the river,” Cairo says. “We’d talk trash, drink beers, smoke, and fish.”

Not much has changed. One reason Cairo chose Portland as home was its proximity to wilderness. After a week at the meat plant, he often heads east with his fiancée, Jessica Hereth (an Olympia Provisions sommelier), and his two dogs, Leather and Utah. When a week really gets to him, he’ll trek all the way to the Wallowas to fish. “This spot may have the most diverse water in America,” he says. “Chinook salmon, gorgeous bass, and trout so big, they feed on mice.”

Along the way, we blow by Pendleton­—home of the eponymous blankets—and at one point pull over to pick wild plums and ­huckleberries. Eventually we turn north onto Promise Road and climb in elevation. Below, a canyon sinks terrifyingly. The sun is setting against the Wallowas, turning the tops a rich copper, around the time we reach the hamlet of Troy. Here you’ll find 10 people (according to the most recent census), a grocery store that’s open “once in a while,” a schoolhouse, and, down the road, our cabin.

We’re among the last to arrive and, even though we’re eight hours from the city, it feels like industry night: A sizable crew has ­assembled, and while there’s no electricity, there is Campari. Hereth greets us with glasses of a pinot noir that she made herself, and Cairo and his friend Dave Flynn, a local rancher, begin tossing enormous bone-in cuts of beef straight into a fire to cook directly on the coals, which leaves the outside of the steaks crusty and smoky but not a bit sooty.

“Historically, Oregon is cattle country,” Flynn says. “Free range is all we do.” One of Troy’s 10 inhabitants, he first visited the town on a fishing trip when he was 19 and resolved to relocate. He asked a rancher off Promise Road if he needed a hand and, over a decade, helped multiply his 30 head of cattle to around 30,000. Part of their secret turned out to be pigs: The cows eat the grasses, which are regenerated by the pigs, who turn the soil and keep out invasive species. They’ve begun leasing the pigs to other local ranchers. “This really is progressive stuff,” Cairo points out. “His practices have redefined how we receive pork at our shop.”

Once the steaks are ready, Hereth brings out a slab of California blue cheese. Slices of cheese as big as a piece of birthday cake are gingerly placed atop the beef like pats of butter. We fall into a rhythm: Add logs to the fire when it burns low, replace the bottles of wine and whiskey as they’re emptied, and suddenly it is only a few hours from sunrise.

The next day, in fact, starts at sunrise, as if we are on some bizarre hedonistic Oregon Trail: late nights, endless bottles of wine, harmonicas, and coffee filtered through a paper towel. The boat is provisioned with Yeti coolers full of beers, pickles, and Olympia Provisions terrines; and we’re soon drifting down the Grande Ronde. Cairo points out the areas where the most trout can be found—where the water foams up, or the dark shadow where a shallow shoal drops off into a deeper channel. We choose one, park the rafts, and wade in. Pretty quickly, Moore catches not a trout but a long, silver northern pikeminnow, a whitefish that thrives in the reservoirs of the state’s hydropower system.

Here begins my education. Fly-fishermen aim to be responsible stewards of the rivers they fish. Pikeminnows, it turns out, are a little too happy in the reservoirs, and they prey on juvenile trout and salmon, threatening their survival. The state of Oregon will pay anglers up to eight bucks for every fish removed from certain bodies of water. We don’t need this inducement—in the right hands, I would later learn, they are delicious.

For vulnerable native fish like trout and salmon, on the other hand, Cairo practices a strict catch-and-release ethic. The days of fishermen showing off long chains of native fish are long gone. “We are trying to learn from our mistakes,” Cairo explains. “We use barbless hooks, and if we catch a native rainbow trout, it’s important to be sure we get it back into the water as quickly as possible.” This explains the store-bought fish: If we want to eat trout, it is a BYO situation.

Non-native smallmouth bass are another story. We float on our way in search of “bassy” areas. When we find the right spot, the competition begins. “If you catch nothing­—get skunked—you can’t show your face around these guys,” Cairo says with a laugh.

The key to catching whatever lies beneath is finding the perfect fly. Some fish eat tiny midges and will be fooled only by flies smaller than my pinkie fingernail. Others prey on small fish and will attack big, flashy streamer flies. Today, we start casting poppers—a fly that imitates a frog and makes a popping noise as it skims on top of the water. One after another, the fish emerge from their hiding spots and crush the foam flies with an alarming, thrilling splash.

We break for lunch: pimiento cheese and grilled padrón pepper toasts, baked beans with corn and cherry tomatoes, sardine sandwiches with olives and sliced tomatoes, and Olympia Provisions saucisson sec. Once we’ve killed the last bottle of wine, some 200 yards from camp, I dive into the water to float downstream as I admire a black bear sunning itself on a cliff in the middle distance.

We didn’t get skunked. All in all, we brought back six smallmouth bass and $40 or so worth of pikeminnows. (All of the trout got released.) Cairo stuffs the fish with lemon and fennel fronds, then tosses them on the coals just as he did with the steaks the night before. He tries to remember how he first heard about a place this magical and out there.

“Wasn’t it Gene?” Moore asks. Gene Thiel was a pioneer of the Slow Food movement in the Pacific Northwest, and was one of the first purveyors at the Portland Farmers Market. In the early 2000s, if you were a chef in Portland, you worshipped Thiel. Cairo met him in 2006. “The guy would show up places with weathered, baseball-mitt hands full of plums. He also loved fishing,” Cairo says. “Hardly 30 seconds would go by any time I saw him before he brought up fish.” Eventually, Thiel told him about this place, known mostly only by progressive farmers and foragers he’d met through the market, where the lakes were alpine-clean, the gorges breathtaking, and the trout hungry and gullible.

Once the skins of the fish have been amply charred by the coals, Cairo removes the lemon rounds and fennel fronds, smashes them in a mortar, and uses the pulverized mixture as a garnish for the fish, which we devour with skillet-roasted zucchini and summer squash with oregano, mint, and warm sheep’s-milk cheese. Someone passes me some Meadowsweet Punch—a cocktail made of gin, rosé, and a homemade meadow­sweet flower syrup.

“On my first trip up here, I remember running up small creeks in the mountains, bagging morel mushrooms and catching cutthroats,” Cairo says, referring to a shy native trout. The whole trip, he didn’t see another soul. “It’s an escape from reality,” he says. “You come up here, and all you have to focus on is where the fish are.”

The Must-Try Recipes

The post Portland Chef Elias Cairo Is as Serious About Fishing as He Is Eating appeared first on Saveur.

Jill Kuehler never anticipated she’d swap a career in food education and access advocacy to gin. But when an unexpected trio of Portland women aligned, that’s exactly what happened. Kuehler worked on the idea behind Freeland Spirits, a small-batch Portland purveyor of herbaceous gin, for over three years before launching. And once she had the concept, she went about establishing a dream team of women to help shape her new product. “I was really excited about having an all-woman team, from who grows the grains and botanicals, to the distillers,” Kuehler says. And in a male-driven industry where origin stories come second to production, they’re breaking new ground.

Kuehler first worked as the director of Zenger Farms, an educational nonprofit farm in East Portland, but she always planned to launch her own spirits business. “I didn’t really see many craft brands telling the story of where the ingredients in their spirits were coming from,” Kuehler explains. “Using my agricultural background, I thought it could be really fun to launch a brand that tells that story, of the farmers involved.”

She started with her friend Cory Carman, the force behind Carman Ranch in Eastern Oregon. She was the first person with whome Kuehler shared the idea for Freeland Spirits. “Cory said, ‘Oh my God, I’ll grow the grain!’ She always wanted to incorporate small-batch grains into her ranch, but there wasn’t an obvious market for a small-scale production, so this was a great fit,” Kuehler recounts.

Kuehler was then introduced to Molly Troupe, who joined Freeland in summer 2017. Troupe, who spearheads the distilling process, decided to tinker with a Rotovap, a rotary vaporator used to infuse flavors, utilized in tandem with traditional distilling techniques to “really elevate” the gin. The Rotovap distills at a lower temperature, which makes for fresher spirits. Some Rotovap experiments were a bust: “The weirdest thing I tried was balsamic vinegar—that did not go well—and we also tried Szechuan peppercorns, which was interesting,” Troupe recalls. What did make it in: cucumber, rosemary, mint, and thyme, “all used in their fresh states, which is pretty unusual.” Distilling involves 12-hour days, complete with playlists featuring plenty of Beyoncé. “Molly is insistent that music plays during distillation—she sincerely believes it improves the quality,” Kuehler explains. Once a batch is distilled, the bottling process becomes a friends and family affair: “I don’t think Molly’s parents have missed a single bottling,” Kuehler says.

Freeland debuted the first fruits of its labors—meant to invoke a garden’s flavors, housed in elegant, distinctive blue bottles—in December 2017. Then, the trio opened the distillery to the public for tastings and tours in July 2018. “Gin is a whole different ball game than whiskey: you get to play with as many different botanicals as you choose and create a really special flavor wheel,” Kuehler says.

The team expanded further in May 2018: Jesse Brantley, Kuehler’s childhood best friend, a sommelier with restaurant management experience, joined Freeland to run sales and the tasting room. That tasting room is meant to be “really experiential,” saysTroupe, as she thinks spirits education (specifically about gin) is pretty limited. Botanicals used in Freeland Spirits’ gin grow right outside the tasting room, and are featured in drawers inside the space; tastings happen close to the “beautiful 500-gallon copper pot” their herbaceous gin is distilled in.

The name Freeland Spirits is a nod to Kuehler’s grandmother (a.k.a. Meemaw), whose surname was Freeland—”she was a huge inspiration to me, she was the breadwinner in the family; such a hard worker—and my interest in agriculture really came from her,” Kuehler says. “She really showed me that all the good things in life come from scratch.” The homage has nothing to do with grandma Freeland’s libation preferences, though: “Meemaw never touched a drop of booze in her life, and now has a spirit brand named after her,” Kuehler recounts with a laugh. “I grew up helping Meemaw in her garden in Texas, so we were thinking a lot about what gin from Meemaw’s garden would taste like; that was the impetus for using fresh ingredients.”

Freeland Spirits’ sense of levity and cheekiness is pretty unusual in the spirits world—and by design. “There are so many men who just want to make booze, and I didn’t see the origin stories or much personality coming through,” Kuehler explains. “It’s a really, really hard industry: there’s so much capital required, and the waiting time, especially for whiskey, makes it a next to impossible business to be in, so humor plays an essential role,” she says, also noting “Spirits have a darker side, the connotations of booze are of backroom deals, and I wanted to approach the industry from a place of transparency, supporting women, having a community layer, and supporting non-profit partners.”

Currently, the latter has taken shape as donations to organizations like Planned Parenthood—but Kuehler hopes to use her nonprofit background to build it into something bigger. “I really want to avoid one-off donations, the one-time $500 check that takes up more than $500 of your time to put on an event and accept that check; I want to do something more authentic,” she explains. That might take shape as donating a portion of proceeds from each specific spirit to different nonprofit partners, for the lifetime of the product (be it gin, bourbon, or whiskey), not just as a seasonal or isolated gesture.

The blue bottle, sporting a label of “a super confident, empowered woman reaching for what she wants, almost goddess-like,” as Kuehler describes, was created by Dando design, a Brooklyn-based company. “We were creating such a beautiful product, it was so important to me to have a beautiful bottle to be in—Molly’s gin deserves a beautiful bottle!” Kuehler says. Currently, Freeland is in over 20 Oregon liquor stores—“it’s been amazing how excited the liquor stores are; they’ll say, ‘We need more women in this industry!” Kuehler says. In April, they began distributing to a handful of California stockists, though the goal is to keep things more gradual and organic, focused on the West Coast throughout the next year or so, then doubling down on national distribution—and, within five years, hopefully international distribution as well.

“Working as a woman in this industry has its challenges; there are definitely days where you have the strangest encounters,” Troupe says. “There’s often disbelief that I’m actually in charge—or in production at all. A lot of people just assume that you’re just a face and you don’t actually do any of the hard work. The best way to handle it is to show them what you do know.” Fundraising as a female small business co-founder has been enlightening and frustrating, per Kuehler. “I’ve learned that 95% of commercial bank loans go to men, and 97% of venture capital money goes to men, while 30% of businesses are run by women,” Kuehler says, “It’s shocking that that’s still a reality.”

In the near future, Freeland plans to roll out another style of gin “really focused on the grains,” Troupe says. “The plan is to have fun, experiment, and try new things! One of the things I love about this industry is how playful it can be, and that’s definitely encouraged at Freeland.”

The post This All-Female Gin Distillery Is Shaking Things Up In Portland appeared first on Saveur.

Pat’s Place in Neah Bay, Washington sits on Makah tribal land at the edge of the bright blue Strait of Juan De Fuca, essentially the Northwestern-most point of the continental U.S. From the outside you might mistake it for someone’s home; inside, family photos and Seahawks regalia line the restaurant’s walls. The sounds and smells of bubbling oil fill the room. When you walk in, a man greets you with a smile as he furiously writes down orders. Pat’s Place makes fry bread: a fried, slightly sweet dough about an inch thick, with the chew of a yeast donut.

The menu is short: You can have your fry bread plain, with homemade jam, vegetarian, or supreme. The obvious choice is supreme. Diced tomato, shredded cheese, iceberg lettuce, beans, ground beef, black olives, and jalapeños are precariously placed on top of your bread, hence the common monikers of “Navajo taco” or “Indian taco.” Behind the counter, a woman mixes fresh dough to order, already sold out at half past noon, and carefully pats it out on the countertop, creating flurries of flour with each gentle palming. The recipe is deceptively simple—just flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, and lard or shortening—but fry bread is not a simple food.

Fry bread began inland, far from the water and evergreens, with the Navajo and their forced relocation from Arizona to Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1864. The 300-mile march is known as the ‘Long Walk’ and relocated over 9,000 Navajo to arid desert where water wasn’t potable and traditional food staples like corn, beans, and squash couldn’t grow. The U.S. government provided rations, mostly canned and processed foods including the white flour, sugar, and lard that would ultimately become fry bread. While the Navajo were able to return to their land following an 1867 treaty, they returned to find their existing crops and orchards completely destroyed, a result of the American ‘Scorched Earth Policy.’ In the decades of replanting to come, fry bread would continue to supplement the traditional foodways that the Navajo, even at home, could no longer access.

As other tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations and given the same rations, fry bread spread throughout the West. “It’s a food that shows our resiliency,” says Andi Murphy, of Toasted Sister, a podcast based in New Mexico that explores the origins of indigenous cuisine. “A long time ago it was something we survived on. Today it is something that has so much food memory, it reminds people of their mom, their grandma.”

But on a nutritional level, fry bread is more akin to a doughnut than a dietary staple, consisting of fried bleached white flour with added sugar and high amounts of fat. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates one paper-plate-sized piece of fry bread, without toppings, is 700 calories with 27 grams of fat. This complicates the dish’s symbol and tradition, as health among indigenous populations has long been disproportionately poor. The Indian Health Service found that heart disease and diabetes are among the leading causes of death for Native Americans, who, on average, have a life expectancy of 4.4 years less than the rest of the U.S. population.

This is a result of high poverty levels on reservations, lack of access to healthful food, and discrimination in the delivery of health services. About 25% of Natives struggle with food insecurity, and are on average twice as likely to lack access to healthy foods. Of course, fry bread is not solely to blame, but its consumption is representative of the ways in which indigenous cuisine has been redefined post-contact as knowledge of older foodways has disappeared. This is what projects like Toasted Sister are trying to recapture—and she’s found that she’s not alone.

She recently interviewed Sean Sherman, chef and owner of The Sioux Chef, an Indigenous catering and education group. His cookbook, The Sioux Chef: An Indigenous Kitchen, recently won a James Beard Award for best American cookbook for its important work on reclaiming the Native culinary history that has long been buried. Murphy has also interviewed Mariah Gladstone, a home chef, using her kitchen to share indigenous recipes that extend far beyond fry bread.

Gladstone, of the Blackfeet in Montana, created a cooking series called Indigikitchen with recipes and instructional videos that teach people how to cook and eat a pre-contact diet. This means exchanging processed foods for ingredients sourced from the edible landscape, such as wild game or local berries that are traditional diet staples. Her project was “hatched out of the food sovereignty movement,” says Gladstone. “Because of the systemized colonization of our diets and this multigenerational shift from traditional foods, a lot of people no longer know how to prepare healthy food. That’s where Indigikitchen comes in.”

She sees that the missing link in the food sovereignty movement is knowledge, because better access to fresh produce won’t help if people don’t know how to cook with it. Combining “indigenous ingredients and the modern kitchen, it brings a relevance to ancient foods in ways that foster a sense of connection, but with the nutritional benefits as well,” Gladstone explains. “There is room for fry bread, but I want to provide people with a ton of other options.”

With grocery stores often sparsely distributed on tribal land, Gladstone has sought to revive traditional food knowledge as a means of providing alternative ways of sourcing fresh food, which can include everything from hunting and fishing, to farming, and foraging for edible wild plants. “On my own Rez,” she notes, “my dad’s house is about 40 miles away from a grocery store.” Beyond nutrition, her mission is also about recognizing where food comes from, promoting a stewardship of the land that goes hand in hand with healthy food and healthy people.

Murphy shares a similar experience: She grew up in the Southwest on the Navajo reservation, which has an area of about 27,000 square miles and, according to Murphy, “there are only 10-13 grocery stores that have fresh food, everything else is like a convenience store.” On the stretch of coastal road leading to Pat’s Place, there was similarly only a convenience store or limited general store for groceries. A proper grocery store required following that one road into another town.

When Murphy began talking to local Native chefs, she says, “I was surprised to learn how much of the environment is edible here in New Mexico. Now I’m thinking more about what my ancestors used to eat and it’s not just fry bread, it’s not just the commodity foods everyone talks about. It goes back much further.”

Murphy also explains, however, that “you can’t just turn away from fry bread and never it eat again.” Gladstone echoes this, saying, “We owe our lives to fry bread.” But both believe that it’s best enjoyed in moderation, emphasizing the historic importance of the food, but also the importance of their people’s health, focusing on other traditional and healthier foods that have been erased. As Murphy point out, “It’s kind of like making doughnuts. Are you gonna make doughnuts every day?”

The post Redefining Fry Bread appeared first on Saveur.

“We have to do it before someone else does,” says Yenvy Pham of building out the new restaurant, Phở Bắc Súp Shop, she owns with two of her siblings. As gentrification and big developments rapidly eat up the land around Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, the Pham siblings look to fend off the loss of their cultural enclave to newer, shinier restaurants by opening one themselves—and, they hope, showing others in the community how they can, too.

Pioneering new ideas in the mini-neighborhood of Little Saigon, sandwiched between the Seattle’s Central and International Districts, runs in the Pham family. In 1982, Yenvy’s parents changed their sandwich shop, then called Cat’s Submarine, into Phở Bắc, the city’s first phở shop. Now that her parents are retired, the business is run by three of their five adult children, Quynh, Khoa, and Yenvy, and finding phở in Seattle is about as easy as finding a slice of pizza in New York (and nearly as essential to the city’s identity).

“There was nothing there,” says Yenvy of when her parents opened the red, boat-shaped original shop at the corner of 14th and Jackson. “It was a really blue-collar area.” On weekends, the crowds would spill out of the Vietnamese Catholic church two blocks away and pack in for phở. The community—Washington has the third-largest Vietnamese population in the country—came to shop at the Asian grocery stores and stopped in for soup. Soon, a whole neighborhood sprang up, an unofficial “Little Saigon,” centered on “The Boat.”

Less than a mile north, Capitol Hill’s dense population of hipsters and wealthy new arrivals fills up luxury apartment buildings. To the east is the rapidly gentrifying Central District, once a hub of African-American culture, with its jazz clubs spilling down Jackson and extending into the beginnings of Little Saigon, now filling up with multi-use new developments as the city scrambles to house the tech-boom employees flooding the city.

Today, 40 years after the first Vietnamese businesses opened here, more than 100 small, family-run businesses crowd the micro-neighborhood. A half-dozen bánh mì, or Vietnamese sandwich, shops circle the busy intersection of 12th and Jackson; low-rise buildings hold layers of restaurants boasting their offerings in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Among the three-table noodle spots and two-dollar sandwich counters, the Pham’s Súp Shop sprawls. The space, an expanded remodel of Phở Viet, formerly another of their family’s restaurants, includes a full bar, a coffee shop, an area for people to settle in and do work, and another for hosting events. “It’s the Central Perk of Little Saigon,” jokes Quynh Pham.

One corner holds a surprising mini-business: a natural wine shop called Vita Uva, run by Suzi An, whom Yenvy calls her “Korean-American sister.” The décor is at once modern and, it seems, a little bit of a throwback to the rickety tables and plastic chair style of their parents’ original shop.

Yenvy laughs at the question of how she decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps, “I was tapped,” she clarifies. Like so many children of restaurateurs, she grew up in the kitchen of her parents Vietnamese restaurant, working since her pre-teen years before joining full-time after she graduated from college. Each time one of the five Pham kids graduated, their parents would encourage them to travel and see the world. “But when we got back,” says Yenvy, “they’d buy us a restaurant and make us run it. Just throw us right into the fire.”

A post shared by P H Ở B Ắ C (@phobacseattle) on Jan 12, 2017 at 4:19pm PST

Today, she runs the three Phở Bắc locations and the Súp Shop with two of her siblings (the other two, she says, “have real jobs.”) But running a restaurant in today’s Little Saigon is a little different from three decades ago. The Vietnamese church moved to Tukwila, as did much of the community, priced out of Seattle’s hot housing market: Little Saigon sits just minutes from Downtown, with easy access to the latest improvements to the city’s public transportation system.

“The demographic kind of changed.” Now, says Yenvy, the area attracts a mix of customers: those who have been coming for 25 years and young people taking the brand-new street car over from trendy Capitol Hill. She and her sister Quynh both serve on the board of the Friends of Little Saigon, a community non-profit advocating and acting on behalf of local businesses fearing displacement in the face of the incoming developments. With at least three of those large developments slated for the next few years and a strong possibility of more, the younger generation of Phams wanted to open a place that would serve all parts of the community, and they knew just where to do it.

“We were tired of leasing other buildings,” says Yenvy of their thought process. “Why not just improve what we have?” Even as more people moved into the neighborhood, nothing around stayed open past nine, and nowhere sold cocktails. “We felt like the neighborhood needed something different: that was our motivator.”

Something different, yet quintessentially the same: Súp simply means soup in Vietnamese. The same phở their immigrant parents first brought to Seattle forms the backbone of the menu, with the addition of a few small bites and, of course, the full bar. Weekly soup specials, a short-rib phở, and what she describes as “satisfying comfort food” round out the offerings. What the Phams want to change most are minds, not menus. “We want to set an example for the rest of the community.”

The siblings hope, through their own business and through Friends of Little Saigon, to promote the area as a Vietnamese cultural center. “We hope it will be multicultural, that people of color can live, work, and stay in their neighborhood.” Many of the Vietnamese own their business’s properties, but that’s no guarantee they’ll be able to flourish in the impending onslaught of development. With Phở Bắc Súp Shop, the younger Pham generation hopes to set an example of how Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the heart of Seattle’s Little Saigon can leverage their businesses to help retain the culture and tradition of the neighborhood. It’s no different, says Yenvy, from what their parents did in 1982, when they plunked down the first Vietnamese restaurant in the city before anyone else did. “We’re just optimizing on the opportunities we have. We want to inspire others to do the same.”

The post How the Next Generation of Seattle’s Little Saigon is Keeping the Neighborhood’s Culture—and Food—Intact appeared first on Saveur.

“There is an amazing diversity of ingredients here,” Greg Higgins tells me about Portland, Oregon. Higgins grew up in a small town outside of Buffalo, New York, but he’s called Portland home for over 30 years. He’s been the chef/owner of Higgins Restaurant and Bar for more than 20 of those and he won the Best Chef: Northwest James Beard Award in 2002.

Higgins travels a lot. He had just got back from Paragor, France and he was starting to think about the menu for the James Beard Foundation Taste America dinner he’s hosting on Friday with Stephanie Izard, Ken Forkish, and Marissa Burback. “Every time I come home I’m reminded of how much is here. There’s just so much to choose from, especially if you’re into gardening,” he says. “It’s nirvana.”

Higgins’ passion for quality local, and foraged ingredients didn’t start in the last decade when the concept came in vogue. As a kid growing up in the 70s, Higgins took to the woods in his small town of Eden and dug around for mushrooms and other edibles. He was an avid fisherman from a young age and he fished for dinner in small streams there.

“Part of it was just being hungry,” he says, recalling those early days and being raised with four siblings by a single parent—the Higgins house always had a garden from which food was pulled too. “And the other part is just the strange way my brain is wired.” Higgins tells me has been obsessed for as long as he can remember with archeology and anthropology, and the fact that people have lived off the land for centuries fascinates him.

Higgins is a busy man. He tends his own garden on a half-acre plot not far from downtown Portland. “I cook at home more than I go out,” he says. “Monday is pizza night.” Those pizzas, and array of other foods, are cooked outside in a wood-burning brick oven, which he refers to as the backbone of the property. But Higgins does venture from home on occasion. And when he does, this is how he does it.

Eating on the Outskirts

“You’ll find a lot of mom and pop places on the outskirts,” Higgins says. His preference is Nak Won, a Korean restaurant that serves rustic homestyle food like pork belly stir-fry, kimchi, and tofu and noodle dishes.

“There’s a place out on the beach called Bell Buoy of Seaside. It’s a retail fish market with great fish and chips. But they sell really fresh seafood and they smoke their own fish. It’s on an estuary and we always go down there and load up on that smoked fish.”

“There’s a cafe at Cornell Farm that was built into an old farmhouse. There’s a beautiful view of the coast range and you can see a ring of hills that separate Portland from the coast. It’s a breakfast and lunch kind of place. The menu changes a lot but get anything that has eggs or baked goods. Sara Strong is a really great chef and baker.”

Beer

“Astoundingly good craft beer is quintessentially Portland,” Higgins says. There are more than 60 microbreweries in Portland, but Higgins’ go-tos are Hair of the Dog and Ecliptic. “Hair of the Dog started the real movement and the specialty styles,” Higgins tells me. Alan Sprints, the owner, is a former chef turned brewer, and he travels all over Europe and Asia for inspiration. “John’s funny,” Higgins says of John Harris, Ecliptic Brewing’s owner. “His beers are great, and they’re all named after celestial destinations.”

Breakfast

“My breakfast of choice is always a pastry and really strong coffee,” Higgins says. “Grand Central Bakery Group’s bakeries are really great across the board. They use Nossa Familia Coffee and they source everything very responsibly.”

Japanese Food

For an izakaya-style meal, Higgins hits Yuzu. “The menu changes quite a bit, but it’s always classic Japanese drinking food.” Higgins always gets charred peppers and whatever shiso leaf prep there is that day.

“Behind the Museum Café is a great little place. Tomoe Horibuchi, the owner, makes everything herself; little bites like an izakaya in a really cool setting. There is crispy lotus root and salted plums rolled in sugar. But there are always more substantial savory things that always vary and are always perfectly cooked. It’s a great place for tea too. Tomoe always uses the appropriate teaware, so whatever tea you select will be brewed to perfection. It’s a hole in the wall, but once you find it you have to send people.”

The post Chef Greg Higgins’ Guide to Portland, OR’s Best Beer, Breakfast, and Bar Food appeared first on Saveur.

Norway

In Norway, cod is aged on racks anywhere from a couple of weeks to two months. Called tørrfisk, or stockfish, it’s reconstituted and folded into fish soup, stewed with tomatoes and onions for bacalao, and sautéed with bacon and potatoes.

Italy

The largest consumer of stockfish outside of Norway. Restaurants in the Veneto make baccalà mantecato, or rehydrated cod whipped with olive oil until dense but fluffy, like a fish mousse.

France

In French, cod is known as morue, which at one point, was synonymous with “prostitute.” Today, it’s more often equated with salt cod, which is soaked and whipped with garlic, olive oil, cream, and potatoes, and baked to make brandade de morue or (the potato-less) brandade de Nîmes.

Spain

Called bacalao in Spain, salt cod is commonly used in Basque and Catalan cooking for al pil-pil, a preparation in garlic, chiles, and olive oil, or a la vizcaína, a tomato-and-roasted-pepper-based stew.

The post Everyone in the World Loves Dried Cod appeared first on Saveur.

Somewhere on a small and placid island at the edge of America, two men in an octagonal wooden house are drinking vintage port and discussing Trinidadian steel drums, Alain Passard, and the taste of wild salmonberries.

“Don’t mention the drums,” Blaine Wetzel says. His meditative hobby, he’s aware, too perfectly completes the portrait of the crunchy young foraging chef who lives in an octagonal house equipped with a woodshop and cider press, kombucha fermenting in casks in the greenhouse, and a sauna out back.

In truth, Wetzel’s not much troubled by the image. He landed on Lummi—which rhymes with “tummy” and is named for the native tribe that no longer inhabits these eleven square miles of towering firs and cedars, hilly microfarms, and shingled cabins, ringed by a single main road and finely pebbled beaches—five years ago. Coming off a three-year stint at Noma in Copenhagen, he was eager to move back to his home state and figured he would work one season at The Willows Inn (a place he’d never seen before answering an online want ad) and then move down to Seattle to find a “real” job. What happened instead was that he fell instantly in love with the place. Fell for the apples that tasted like apples. The sensitive pork farmer who bought five handles of vodka and got his hogs sloshed and happy before slaughter. The wild salmon that swims into the reef-netting of fishermen down the hill. The bushes thick with found berries—wild thimble berries, currants, gooseberries, black raspberries, and tart, blushing red salmonberries so delicate you had to have “butterfly fingers” to pick them.

“There’s a connection here I’ve never felt anywhere else,” Wetzel says. “When you’re working at top restaurants you get quality ingredients delivered to you, but that’s so different from really knowing your neighbor, who’s just some passionate dude who loves to raise sheep, caring for a few animals in a pristine pasture on an island. Here you can pull vegetables out of the ground and the taste is just mind-blowing. Coming here, cooking here—it’s been like discovering food for me. It completely changed how I think about food, what I think food is.”

Wetzel pours us a little more port, which, for obscure reasons, he’s decanted into an elegant Japanese teapot. His house, a five-minute walk from Willows, was hand-built in the ’70s and exudes eccentric homesteader charm. There’s a freestanding Scandinavian fireplace in one corner, an upright piano in another. Cookbooks piled everywhere. Passard—the stylishly neckerchiefed chef of Paris’ famed L’Arpège—looks down somewhat incongruously upon this woodsy nest from a black-and-white framed photo hung above a magnetic knife rack in the kitchen. Through the kitchen window, a bald eagle can be seen circling low over West Shore Drive. The bird casts its regal gaze across dandelion-dotted lawns and the dappled blue waters beyond. I nibble on some heartnuts. What’s a heartnut? Good question. Native to Japan, it’s a variety of walnut with a delicate, twin-pronged kernel that resembles a tiny wishbone. Raw, they’ve got none of the bitterness you associate with a standard walnut, plus they look pretty. A perfect nibbling nut. Wetzel sources his heartnuts from a man known to him as Gurubani, who runs an off-the-grid farm collective near the Sauk River on the mainland.

“I went to see him one day and he’s got this compound of huts in the woods, an awesome shanty town he’s built, staffed by interns,” Wetzel says. “The first thing that struck me was he was wearing giant wooden shoes.”

Now Gurubani and his interns drop by the kitchen once a week with a carefully curated and cleaned haul of wild berries, barks, bog plants, perennials, and weeds, many of which Wetzel has never seen before: a leafy green named Good King Henry, breakfast kale, beach cabbage, Bishop’s Weed, yarrow, a tart succulent called sedum.

Once smitten with the bounty and rhythms of life on the island, Wetzel decided not just to stay, but to double down. He built a farm up the road to supply the restaurant with all the beets, exotic cabbages, delicate greens, bright little radishes, and sunchokes it can use, every vegetable tailored and grown to his own exacting specifications. He brought in a partner to buy out the owner of Willows. And he set himself the slightly nutty goal of turning a century-old, wisteria-enveloped inn with a 26-seat dining room on a sleepy island most people have never heard of into one of the most exciting places to eat in America.

Everyone waves to everyone else on Lummi Island. “You gotta wave,” Wetzel confirms. “If you don’t wave you’re a dick.” A sign at the ferry dock says: “Slow Down.” So I coast slowly around the island, saluting each car I meet, which isn’t many.

A soft carpet of pine needles and fragrant, freshly cut grass lines the looping road around town. I follow it past the reef-net fishing pontoons and the tidy post office and town store, past mossy Volvos parked in steep driveways, driftwood fences festooned with buoys. A sign says “Golden Retriever X-ing.” Another: “Parking for Norwegians Only.” I take Seacrest Drive up into the mountainous, mostly unpopulated southern end of the island, the car radio tuned to bad pop floating down from Vancouver. It doesn’t take long to get the full tour and soon I realize I’m passing familiar landmarks. Driving in circles suits me fine. One day in and I have acclimated fully to the drowsy tempo of life on Lummi.

I head over to Willows and find Wetzel and his team prepping for dinner. It’s late afternoon. The sun is high and benevolent. There’s a fire in the grill outside by the parking lot, the crackle of birch and alder harmonizing with the sound of water lapping at the shore far below. The phonebooth-sized smokehouse is full today: black cod, salmon, trays of tiny mussels, and cured lamb belly, all bathing in the cool smoke of wet green alder.

At the grill, a cook named Nick is rolling turnips directly in the embers. Once they’re nicely charred and cooked through, the roots will be peeled—leaving a few sticky burnt bits around the edges for character—then halved and marinated in lovage-infused whey. Then five hours in the dehydrator and, just before they’re served, the withered turnips are slaked with a grilled shiitake broth and garnished with toasted mustard seeds and tiny marjoram leaves.

I laugh—because of course it doesn’t sound simple at all. Later, though, encountering this dish at dinner, I see what he means. The taste is clear, dazzlingly direct, the essence of turnipness expertly coaxed forward by all this burning and slow-drying and careful reconstituting. Who knew a lowly turnip could possess this meaty depth of character, such goddamned swagger? In course after course I saw this: Through rigor, patience, dutiful attention, and plain smarts, Wetzel finds ways to accentuate the nobility of pedestrian-seeming ingredients, to make them sing. A single shiitake, the mushrooms collected twice a week from a farm in Bellingham, is dunked in shiitake broth, dried in the sun and then grilled at high heat. Shrimp toast—a trio of wobbly fat wild spot prawns set on toasted rye bread—couldn’t look simpler, and in a way it is just what it seems. The only “trick” to getting food to perform this way is knowing what to do: Get all your seafood from a one-boat “old-school burly-assed Irish fisherman” who knows all the spots around Orcas Island and beyond and who carries his catches directly from the boat up the beach and into your kitchen. And what not to do: Don’t fuss with the good stuff once you have it. Brush the raw meat of the prawns with a simple prawn butter made from their shells and then let them relax for a spell at the mouth of the bread oven, just enough to barely warm them and give them a louche, buttery sheen.

One of the ways coming to Lummi has changed him, Wetzel says, is that he’s no longer turned on by luxury ingredients or showy technique. “What I want to do is just share the tastes of this place with everyone who comes,” he says.

“I don’t need to be a technical or creative genius. I just want to show people real food, to share the experience of what we’re lucky enough to get to eat here.”

He used to want to be the fancy chef in a fancy restaurant. This was his training. Now he is the champion of unheralded strains of chicories and cabbages, poster boy for a kind of American cooking that is unique, naturalistic, stripped of unnecessary frillery. He’s intense in a laid-back sort of way. He won a James Beard Rising Star Chef award last year and promptly lost the medal. (“We found it later that night on the dance floor, being danced on.”)

The accidental innkeeper, Wetzel finds himself the ringleader of a tightknit brigade of utterly earnest skateboarding, foraging, tinkering young cooks, servers, and farmers feeding two dozen people a night in a little dining room floating above the Rosario Strait like the prow of a ship.

There’s a moment at dinner when the sun gets low and the light pours through the windows with blinding intensity. After the snacks in the lounge (kale chips dotted with Olympic peninsula truffle, a warm donut-type thing filled with meltingly soft black cod), it’s salmon time. The fish has been lounging in the low heat of the smoker all day. The bite is small, sweet, and rich. And there squinting into the honeyed light, I hear myself murmuring. Out loud. Talking to my food. And I’m not the only one. The low hum of contentment spreads across a roomful of people drinking tea made of birch bark, wondering at the ethereal intensity of a single mussel (smoked over alder, brushed with mussel stock and seared on a hot plancha, then paired with a bit of creamy, roasted sunflower root), unable to think of another place in this big country where we’d rather be right now.

“We’re just throwing rocks off a mountain,” Wetzel observes, throwing a rock off a mountain.

“Throwing rocks into the sea? That’s a real thing up here. That’s a nice way to spend your day.”

For once the sea is out of sight. We’re spending part of our day hiking through Baker Preserve, a lovely fern-filled sanctuary near the center of the island with a slightly prehistoric feeling.

“This island was the historical berry-picking grounds for the Lummi tribe,” Wetzel says. They fished these salmon-filled waters, harvested the fruit of the land. “Generations and generations of natives helped the berries grow by picking some over others, spreading seeds, pulling out what they didn’t like—this is why we’ve got such a variety here now.”

Wetzel talks regularly with culinary historians at the Northwest Indian College, looking for insight and clues into traditions and secrets of the culinary topography of this edible paradise.

“What we cook is a reaction to what’s happening here on the island. A reaction to people you meet, to what grows well here, to the experience of tasting things as they were hundreds of years ago. All of that culminates in the food of the Willows.”

Tonight the restaurant is closed, so the kitchen crew plan to cook dinner for themselves on the beach. It’s a not uncommon occurrence: Life on a small island means you hire people you like to cook with on your days off.

As the sun begins its slow descent over the gulf islands of British Columbia, the merry band—boys in hoodies, girls in big nautically themed sweaters—sets to work on a casual weeknight feast. Shigoku oysters are shucked and set on ice. Cold bottles of Oregon white are opened, drained, replaced. Wetzel improvises a grill by the water: a rough circle of lanky, gnarled gray logs in the sand, a small grate set over burning wood. He pokes it with a found branch that looks like a shepherd’s walking stick. The fat chops of those happy drunk pigs that the chef helped to butcher have been marinated in verjus and juniper berries. Leeks are tossed with oil and thrown on the grill in foil packs. Someone’s brought frilly horsetail stalks, plucked from the roadside, curious to know how they taste. Potatoes confited in oil, then smashed flat, are set to crisp on the grill. More wine. Some beer.

It’s dark now. Another lovely Lummi sunset come to a close. The coals of the fire glow red in the gentle, cool breeze. The name Lummi is thought by some to have been coined by Spaniards who approached by these seas and witnessed bonfires like this on the shore: Luminara.

Wetzel places a dozen wavy-lipped oysters in the fire. As they pop open and release a burp of steam, he pulls them out and we eat them from the hot shells. The meat is plump, full of smoky juice. Again a chorus of contented murmurs.

Wetzel smiles. “The idea of putting oysters right into the coals and just forgetting about them and eating them as they are?” he says. “I don’t know if that translates to a magazine, but in real life it’s awesome.”

Recipes

Verjus-Brined Pork Chops with Marinated Leeks

Marinated and Grilled Shiitakes

Grilled Rockfish

Flaxseed Caramels

Getting to Lummi Island and The Willows Inn

Lummi Island is accessible from the mainland by a five-minute ferry ride from Bellingham, Washington, which is a three-hour drive north from Seattle or a two-hour drive south from Vancouver and is home to an international airport. The Willows Inn comprises seven guest rooms in the main building, where the restaurant is located, and eleven freestanding units. It is closed in January and February.

Willows Inn
2579 W. Shore Drive
(360) 758-2620

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