Atoma is excess of its signature rosette cookie. However you are gonna wish to order just a few of them for the desk.
It took me 4 dinners at Atoma earlier than I may stand to not order the rosette cookie. Which is comprehensible. In any case, we’re speaking a couple of crepe-thin flower of fried batter that hides mushy white farmer cheese and Walla Walla onion jam inside its crisp petals. It’s classic Scandinavia meets U-S-A rustic honest meals, wrought in a Northwest kitchen that’s no stranger to tweezers.
As an alternative, that evening, I started dinner with the panisse, a hefty chickpea fritter with an inside mushy as custard regardless of its golden shell. On prime, a whisper of leek marmalade and a shouting quantity of comte cheese custard, piped to resemble a savory eclair. I didn’t miss that cookie one bit.
Chef Johnny Courtney would slightly swap issues up, however diners’ love for the rosette retains it locked into first place on Atoma’s menu. “Folks get them for starters and desserts,” he says. “After which they get them to go.”
Johnny and Sarah Courtney introduced moody new vibes to the previous Tilth house.
Certain, a high-end cookie—that’s additionally fried and crammed with cheese—looks like a tough act to surpass. However each nook of the menu produces related thrills, from steak tartare shingled with housemade vinegar potato chips to dungeness with crab fats caramel on idyllic ache de mie toast. Meals this exacting may really feel intimidating if it weren’t served in a comfortable transformed home, alongside a drink menu divided into sections with names like “brief kings” (a.ok.a. cocktails served in rocks glasses) and “STEM fields” (that may be something in a stemmed coupe).
Final November, Johnny and Sarah Courtney opened Atoma within the compact former Craftsman the place Tilth pioneered natural eating and gained a James Beard Award. Johnny’s culinary resume is filled with cred, however his 4 years within the Canlis kitchen are an particularly shiny accolade for Seattle diners. Canlis plus Tilth equals plenty of big-name expectations to heap on a brand new restaurant powered by an SBA mortgage and a few DIY normal contracting.
All these months later, although, diners don’t actually carry up these different eating places. As an alternative, they may point out the dim sum–impressed radish cake or the lion’s mane mushroom katsu. Perhaps the collection of miniature cocktails, two-ounce batched concoctions—ultimate for once you’re debating whether or not to have yet another spherical. Undoubtedly that rosette.
Atoma burst onto Seattle’s challenge-addled restaurant panorama with wonderful eating ambitions and the guts of a small, bootstrapped place. Like a fried, cheese-filled cookie, it presents the very best of each worlds. For putting this elusive stability, for Johnny Courtney’s precision menu, for delivering finesse but additionally housemade Cheez-Its on the bar—and, sure, for that rosette cookie—Atoma is Seattle Met’s restaurant of the 12 months.
Dillon Raaz has plenty of enjoyable making—and naming—the cocktails.
Courtney’s greatest contribution to our eating tradition could be establishing this class of sturdy finger meals. The menu begins with just a few decadent little compositions; servers urge you to contemplate every order a person serving. This notion feels bizarre in a shared-plate world. Plus splitting a $7 rosette or $8 panisse amongst a number of folks definitely makes for a friendlier invoice. However Woman and the Tramping one thing so delicate undermines the luxurious delight of the expertise.
Luxurious delight is a scarce commodity in Seattle eating places proper now. There are many locations the place you’ll be able to ring up a large test. However institutions huge and small are reckoning with many years of off-kilter math. Protecting your doorways open on this metropolis—whereas additionally paying workers a residing wage, serving scrumptious meals, and conserving costs at a stage the place common people can afford to exit to eat—is a diabolical recreation of fiscal Jenga. Hiring stays onerous. To work within the restaurant enterprise is to work your ass off. However a few of the similar measures that assist a spot keep solvent, like balancing prices with counter service or simplifying the menu, can disappoint prospects. These strikes grow to be a visit wire as a lot as a lifeline.
The radish cake is loosely impressed by the dim sum traditional.
No one is asking this menu easy; Courtney’s kitchen makes its personal XO sauce out of dried geoduck trim. Particulars past the plate get the identical stage of scrutiny: glassware, soundtrack, spacing of tables, sound-absorbing panels hidden in plain sight. Atoma’s meals is spectacular. The high-end really feel it accomplishes in an previous home (on a restricted price range, on this tough local weather), maybe much more so.
Describing Atoma’s meals as hyperseasonal is each totally appropriate and a prison underselling of what Courtney’s crew pulls off in a kitchen barely bigger than a California king mattress. Past these single-serve canapes, the menu splits between entrees and crafty vegetable creations; I’m nonetheless fascinated with that kohlrabi with dungeness crab in almond milk. Primary dishes like sockeye salmon and pork collar sound acquainted however really feel as full and thrilling because the smaller bites—an underrated high quality in eating places.
Earlier than Canlis, Courtney cooked in high-end spots in Denver and Melbourne. He and Sarah lived in Todos Santos, on the Baja coast, and his upbringing included New Mexico and the American South. These very completely different locations supplied concepts and influences that he collects on Atoma’s menu. His travels additionally impressed upon him that the Northwest is an unreal playground in terms of produce. His kitchen does proper by this largesse. The produce that clothes the pork collar, the piripiri carrots, a transcendent salad of grilled cucumbers: The issues this crew does with produce take each dish up a notch or three.
Atoma’s enjoyable aspect actually comes out on the tiny bar tucked within the again, a mere 4 seats and likewise the one place the place you’ll be able to rating a ramekin of housemade Cheez-Its as a bar snack. That is the area of bar director Dillon Raaz, who dreamed up the two-ounce cocktail thought with Johnny and Sarah Courtney over drinks one evening. The cocktails at Atoma had been excellent from the beginning, although over the previous 12 months Raaz (with assist from his colleague John Lundahl) has actually upped his recreation in terms of cheeky, joke-filled drink names. It’s onerous to take issues too significantly when ordering a Male Sample Garabalding off the “Excessive Ball Is Life” part of the menu.
Certain, there are quibbles. Desserts nonetheless really feel like a piece in progress. Some service hasn’t lived as much as the remainder of the expertise. Then there was the gent who served my celebration of 5 pals one night (warning: the next anecdote is under no circumstances household pleasant).
The tartare and carrots each pack a little bit of texture.
Our meal was so good, the shared cod entree disappeared earlier than it may make its approach across the total desk (we ordered one other). The woman speak bought, I admit, a bit of R rated. Perhaps NC-17 after that second bottle of wine arrived? Our server remained studiously impartial {and professional} all night, regardless of overhearing some NSFW snippets. When the good friend main the cost on this grownup material ordered a ultimate beer, she remarked to him, “I actually admire that you just guys serve beer in a calming glass.”
“Thanks,” he replied with the smoothest of poker faces. “You could possibly say, we’re anal about it.” Reader, I’ll allow you to fill within the blanks, however speak about assembly your visitors the place they’re, whereas sustaining the decorum anticipated at a spot that serves $40 entrees. Our desk whooped like viewers members on a mid-’90s daytime speak present. Moments like this are most likely why the Courtneys house the tables a bit of farther aside than they may.
Johnny Courtney nonetheless laments that the ambitions of his common menu (and the dimensions of his kitchen) finally foiled his plans so as to add a tasting menu. An Atoma tasting possibility can be cool certainly. However there’s a lot occurring on this restaurant, you don’t even miss it. Not once you’re mellowed by just a few miniature cocktails, stuffed from a menu versatile sufficient to ship conventional starters and entrees, or only a flurry of snacks. Not once you’re debating whether or not to order a second rosette and name it dessert. And never once you’re having this a lot enjoyable.
