Seattle chef writes for those who truly love to cook
Unpretentious restaurant owner’s recipes developed for home kitchens
Listen to Renee Erickson — chefowner of four of Seattle’s most extraordinary restaurants and the author of a new cookbook — and you’ll hear her use one word more than any other: care.
“I want my customers to feel welcomed, to feel cared for,” Erickson says. “I want them to feel like they’re walking into a warm, inviting space, like a home.”
Erickson’s restaurants indeed seem to feel like home for so many in Seattle, but they’ve also earned a national reputation. The Walrus and the Carpenter, an oyster bar with a Parisian vibe, was named one of the best new restaurants in the U.S. by Bon Appétit in 2011. In 2013, the magazine called it one of the 20 most important restaurants in the United States.
At The Whale Wins, people return for lunch or dinner on a weekly (or daily) basis to sit in the spacious white room and wait for dishes like Hama Hama clams with dill, Serrano ham, fennel, brown butter and cream, roasted in the wood-fired oven. Barnacle, a tiny bar with fresh seafood dishes, charcuterie, cheeses and wine, changes its menu daily based on what is in season that moment. Even Boat Street Café, Erickson’s oldest restaurant, is filled with fervent followers, especially now that Jay Guerrero, formerly the sous-chef at New York’s Prune, is running the kitchen.
Erickson’s food — dishes with a decidedly French countryside bent — is consciously simple. Lentil salad with nettles, mustard seed oil, currants and tarragon. Herring butter toasts with pickled fennel, lemon peel and parsley.
“It’s the ingredients that are spectacular,” says Erickson. “What goes on our menus is what I was attracted to at the farmers’ markets. I don’t want to intellectualize food.”
Perhaps the reason Erickson, 42, is such an unusual chef is that she never expected to enter the restaurant business. In her early 20s, on the path to pursuing a graduate fine arts degree, Erickson started working in the kitchen at Boat Street Café, first as a waiter and then in the kitchen. Over time, to her surprise, she fell in love with restaurant life.
Hooked on the life of a chef, Erickson still had no intention of owning a restaurant. So she was surprised in the late 1990s when the original owner of Boat Street, ready to leave the restaurant, asked her to take over the business. And so, at only 24 years old, Erickson became a restaurant owner.
Unlike some restaurant cookbooks, which seem primarily concerned with documenting a professional approach and burnishing a chef’s reputation, A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus: Menus and Stories (Sasquatch Books) is organized for the home cook. Based on meals for particular occasions — Sundays at Home, New Year’s Eve Party, Wild Foods Dinner — the recipes are arranged the way people truly cook.