Renee Erickson awoke to a flurry of Instagram tags from her numerous eating places’ accounts. One dish from her latest spot, Lioness, made her squint particularly laborious. What was that—oatmeal?
Nope, it was scallops topped with nuts. Erickson despatched a display screen shot to Bobby Palmquist, the manager chef for her Sea Creatures restaurant group. She needed to know, “Why are we placing nuts on one thing that’s so delicate?” Later that day, Palmquist teased his boss about her early morning question: “I’ve one of the best job within the firm.” She’s not uncomfortable giving suggestions, although should you’re making an attempt to reality verify, say, a narrative about her restaurant group, Erickson will preserve that each good concept, each profitable dish comes straight from the cooks de delicacies.
And at Lioness, there are many these dishes. The loud and full of life Italian bar opened in January with all of eight indoor tables, every one full from the minute the doorways open day by day. Inside, candles flicker in Chianti bottles; Erickson picked out the custom-painted plates that maintain oysters, smoked cod mousse, and a meatball so compelling it wants no spaghetti.
By 5:30pm one latest Saturday, the waitlist was already so lengthy, Lioness was theoretically full for the remainder of the evening. Normal supervisor James Ingles needed to break the information to arrivals hoping for a desk. The bar space is just too tight for seats; prospects should stand, as drinkers do in cities like Rome or Barcelona. It’s a really un-American idea, however occupants appear too busy with their martinis—served on a tray with a choose-your-own garnish setup—or glasses of Montepulciano to thoughts.
Chad Dale, Renee Erickson, Jeremy Value, and Ira Gerlich. Value and Erickson think about Gerlich’s arrival, and Westward’s, the 2 vivid spots in an uncommon 2018 acquisition.
Lioness already operates with the reassurance of a spot that’s been in movement for a yr. Partly as a result of the trio that created it have been in movement collectively for almost 15.
Erickson and her enterprise companions, Jeremy Value and Chad Dale, got here collectively to open Walrus and the Carpenter in 2010. Their first undertaking captured lightning in a rosé bottle, to not point out the duvet of the New York Occasions travel part.
Their newest enterprise looks like a full circle second: One other elbow-to-elbow bar with nice meals, hidden from the road however becoming a member of different close by companies to create a way of place. Each spots have menus that vault far past typical bar meals, plus a definite model that takes cues from Europe. They’re tiny areas with massive chandeliers and a good greater footprint on Seattle’s eating psyche. However so much has occurred between Walrus and Lioness.
“Renee by no means set out or needed to be a restaurateur, proper?” says Dale. “She all the time needed to have that one restaurant and be there cooking day by day.” Dale is a developer; we’re having this dialog atop the Shared Roof constructing, his newest undertaking. 5 flooring beneath us, Lioness is hidden away in a courtyard. “That a part of our partnership has been a blessing,” he says. “They maintain me again, and I push them a little bit bit.”
Most new Sea Creatures initiatives originate with Dale. Value is a bridge—a man who is aware of what it means to bus tables or handle a frantically crowded eating room, but additionally relishes design and may wrap his mind across the nuances of medical health insurance plans. A fourth companion, Ira Gerlich, got here on in 2018 and is usually silent.
Renee Erickson imprinted each the meals and the aesthetic at Sea Creatures’ new enoteca, Lioness.
It’s not an accident the corporate isn’t known as the Renee Erickson Restaurant Group. However we inevitably discuss with any Sea Creatures undertaking as a Renee Erickson restaurant. “It was all the time fairly clear that if we had been a band, she was the entrance individual,” says Value. “Chad and I are enjoying bass or on the drums or one thing.”
As lead singers go, Erickson’s a compelling one—a chef who spends her off-hours crabbing on Puget Sound along with her mother and father and husband, or exploring Normandy or Rome or Baja for inspiration. Restaurant life lured her away from learning tremendous artwork; Erickson as soon as introduced a beloved canine to the paint retailer to paint match a sure spot in his fur as a result of she needed the partitions of her first restaurant, Boat Avenue Cafe, to be that very same shade of luminous white.
Every thing about her says small, direct, private. That is likely to be why the dimensions of Sea Creatures hides in plain sight. Collectively, these bespoke little eating places add as much as probably the most influential, and quietly prolific giants of Seattle’s restaurant panorama. The corporate at present runs 10 venues (14 should you depend every Normal doughnut store individually) with three extra on the best way. Sea Creatures employs 250 individuals, relying on the time of yr, most with medical health insurance, retirement financial savings, and wellness advantages. They put out meals that captures nationwide consideration and James Beard Award acclaim. The cross-purposes baked in from the beginning—a chef ambivalent about empires, a developer keen to construct one—is likely to be the proprietary mix that makes this all potential.
“Chad is aware of the right way to construct high quality initiatives,” says Tracy Cornell, one of many metropolis’s go-to brokers who helps put eating places in business areas (she labored with Sea Creatures on its initiatives on Capitol Hill years in the past). With Shared Roof, “he constructed the nicest undertaking on Phinney Ridge.”
Individuals who have labored with Dale say he’s a savvy, even powerful dealmaker. Sea Creatures advantages from having him within the combine, however the profit runs each methods. When Renee Erickson is concerned, says Cornell, “Everybody’s rolling out the purple carpet. Any considered one of my listings, I may have gotten my landlord to ship her a turnkey deal; no query about it.”
Erickson fell into cooking with zero long-term concept of what her profession would appear like. The meals drives her, whether or not it’s tremendous tuning her cooks’ dishes, or the four-page firm information that particulars the native, sustainable pathways Sea Creatures eating places ought to use to supply produce and proteins. (“If you wish to serve trout it needs to be fed non-GMO feed and in a closed-loop system.”)
Lioness exudes European sensibility, from the plates to the tabletops to the small menu of dishes like oysters and burrata.
For her, a brand new endeavor “has to really feel—a minimum of as a lot as it may well really feel—as one thing I’m actually enthusiastic about. That’s why the merging with Nice State and all that was simply fucking horrible.”
She’s speaking about her firm’s acquisition of chef Josh Henderson’s eating places, often known as one of many weirdest surprises in Seattle restaurant historical past. Sea Creatures’ companions are candid in regards to the missteps and sudden strikes their dynamic has yielded alongside the best way—just like the oyster meals truck the well being division kiboshed, or the doughnut store in Los Angeles that didn’t take. And present me a chef who appeared much less prone to open a restaurant beneath the Amazon Spheres.
However the trio has an settlement: three yesses, or it’s a no. Their success appears to come back from discovering the trail that every of those disparate personalities can reside with. Overlook the Area Needle, the espresso increase, the salmon tossing. This pressure of craft versus commerce is Seattle’s important story.
The partnership began with a notice on a serviette. Or possibly it was a menu. In 2008, Chad Dale needed to speak to Renee Erickson, the chef at Boat Avenue Cafe, about possibly opening a second restaurant in his redevelopment undertaking in Ballard. He beloved Erickson’s meals, however had no solution to contact her. So he confirmed up at Boat Avenue and left her a message.
“He did that greater than as soon as,” says Erickson. “And I used to be like, you’re loopy.”
Loopy persistent. Dale and a few companions had been redeveloping the Kolstrand Constructing, a good-looking outdated Ballard Avenue construction that started life as a marine provide store in 1910. It was his first business actual property undertaking. And one of many final business initiatives accepted earlier than the monetary meltdown. The financial institution, he says, was not blissful and needed to drag out. He was an unproven entity and wanted a marquee tenant, stat, to harden the cement on the financing.
Erickson, in the meantime, was prepared to consider one thing new. She’d purchased Boat Avenue from founder Susan Kaplan. Within the Kolstrand Constructing, she may create one thing from scratch. And the concept of a Northwest model of France’s informal oyster bars had been on her thoughts for years. Although she initially seemed on the restaurant house, which might seat 200 individuals, and handed. Her imaginative and prescient known as for one thing small.
Finally she and Ethan Stowell cut up the room between them; Erickson requested the again portion, a former loading dock with little aesthetic enchantment and nearly no road presence. If she was going to do that, she wanted a trusted companion to run her little restaurant’s entrance of home whereas she was busy cooking.
Jeremy Value (above) has “this extensive and loopy vary of abilities,” says his enterprise companion Chad Dale. These embody overseeing design on every thing from interiors to logos, but additionally the much less glamorous elements of an organization’s operations.
Value was a busboy at Boat Avenue on the time, doing calculus prereqs at neighborhood faculty to use for a masters program in structure. As a substitute, he discovered himself designing an oyster bar, and unknowingly shifting the trajectory of his profession. Value constructed the cabinets and banquets together with his father. Erickson provided drawings from the artist, Jeffry Mitchell, and located a classic chandelier at an vintage store in Los Angeles that reminded her of coral.
Lower than a yr after Walrus opened, the New York Occasions journey part ran a glowing story about Washington’s “wondrously watery” eating scene, full with a photograph of Walrus—and an impressive platter of oysters. The story printed on a Sunday; at dinner service that night, the kitchen ran out of nearly every thing. Walrus’s temporary tenure as a chill hidden-away oyster bar had come to an finish. Solely a handful of latest eating places get this sort of bounce, however Walrus has displayed a long life that’s much more uncommon. Fourteen years later, diners nonetheless line up for seats a half hour earlier than service begins.
“Walrus is a kind of unicorn eating places,” says Stowell, a chef whose personal portfolio spans almost 30 institutions from Edmonds to New York Metropolis. After we get on the telephone, he walks me by way of a heart-palpitating account of simply how fragile eating places’ funds may be—and the way rapidly they’ll come undone with out a fixed eye to the massive image. He’s a chef who enjoys the stability sheets and P&Ls inherent to proudly owning a restaurant group. “I really feel like I’ve to know all that,” he says. “Whereas Renee has Chad and Jeremy.” Stowell was considered one of a handful of cooks Dale partnered with over time. “His background is enterprise and finance; he has the ability set to do it.” Moreover, “With out the expansion, Renee wouldn’t have the ability to do a pair cookbooks and be in Sicily.”
The Walrus and the Carpenter stays busy, even after 14 years.
Dale initially signed on as a companion principally as a result of he may inform Erickson simply needed to deal with being a chef. The trio didn’t know each other properly after they obtained on this boat collectively and began to row—Value and Dale didn’t know one another in any respect. The title Sea Creatures was nonetheless a number of years off. However the small place they made collectively would vault them into among the highest-profile areas within the metropolis.
Jeff Bezos by no means really attended the numerous conferences that led as much as Sea Creatures opening a bar and restaurant beneath the Amazon Spheres. However the firm’s founder handed alongside loads of notes and concepts. “There was a lot effort in making an attempt to make it his,” Erickson remembers. “He’s been there twice.” He even prompt a reputation, through his delegates: Completely happy Backside Driving Membership.
Bezos, after all, is a notable fan of aviation. The Completely happy Backside Driving Membership is a Forties-era dude ranch run by a historic feminine aviator, Florence “Pancho” Barnes. It turned a hangout for take a look at pilots from the close by navy base, even exhibits up in Tom Wolfe’s ebook The Proper Stuff. Nonetheless. Exterior of that very particular context, Completely happy Backside Driving Membership suggests much less aerodynamic actions. Particularly for a bar tucked beneath a set of huge balls.
Chad Dale is a developer, and the impetus for many of Sea Creatures’ new initiatives.
When Amazon began to show the Denny Regrade space right into a satellite tv for pc of its South Lake Union company campus, it recruited native eating places and companies that carry texture to different Seattle neighborhoods. By then, Sea Creatures had opened the Whale Wins in one other Chad Dale constructing undertaking on Stone Approach (today it’s beneath totally different possession). Erickson had gained a James Beard Award in 2016. The chef identified for oysters had additionally opened Bateau, a steak home that created a brand new paradigm across the environmentally dangerous elements of serving beef. For a time, Sea Creatures even raised its personal cattle. For a chef ambivalent about progress, says Dale, Erickson “has, and continues to have, so many truly good concepts that may’t be performed out in a single place.”
Visits to Brittany and Normandy impressed Bar Melusine, the oyster spot subsequent door to Bateau (right this moment it’s Boat Bar). Sea Creatures’ Normal Porpoise doughnut store serves a stuffed brioche homage to London’s St. John Bakery Arch. Every of their locations positively has its personal look, however Value’s designs mix Erickson’s affinity for all issues homey and French together with his extra midcentury, minimalist leanings: “After we meet within the center it tends to be fascinating and delightful,” was Erickson’s commentary when Bateau opened—an evaluation that is still true these years later.
It wasn’t a shock that Amazon needed to speak. Or that Dale rapidly grasped the numerous enterprise upsides. It was intoxicating to consider what they may do with an Amazonian finances, says Value. “The issues we see in New York that we will’t afford right here. That is our likelihood.”
Collectively, he and Erickson say no way more usually than sure. The trio will get a number of proposals a month, says Value, most of which he and Erickson ignore. The sensible ones go on to Dale. “He’ll ship us stuff and we’re like, ‘nope,’” says Erickson. Some alternatives make nice sense financially, however she balks on the concept of a easy cut-and-paste of an current restaurant. “We may have opened 50 eating places on the Eastside by now.”
These odds make the initiatives that do occur much more fascinating. There’s no higher instance of the memorable outcomes Sea Creatures’ inherent push-pull can produce than the bar and restaurant they finally opened beneath Amazon’s Spheres. Willmott’s Ghost serves the country road pizza Erickson devoured when learning overseas in Rome as an undergrad. The inside looks like Italian modernism by way of the eyes of George Jetson, particularly because it’s encased in a bubble of glass and geometric metal.
In the meantime, the bar one Sphere over finally turned Deep Dive (considered one of Amazon’s management ideas is “dive deep”). Erickson nonetheless grimaces once you ask in regards to the title, however native artist and curator Curtis Steiner helped fill the room with limitless curios. To carry a fragile coupe, or hefty cut-glass tumbler in your hand right here is to depart the world of backpacks and badges and enter someplace surreal and hyper-Edwardian. It’s like consuming contained in the world of Lemony Snicket.
“It’s type of the antithesis of who we’re,” Dale acknowledges of the Amazon initiatives. However Sea Creatures’ identification was increasing. And refracting. And it was about to face one hell of an organization tradition stress take a look at.
Unseasonable February sunshine pours by way of the glass of Westward’s atrium; half the individuals gathered across the lengthy desk put on sun shades, despite the fact that we’re indoors. However this assembly’s material isn’t almost so vivid. As seaplanes take off from Lake Union within the distance, Westward’s basic supervisor, Kira Brink, reads some fairly grim January gross sales numbers from her laptop computer.
Westward feels basically Sea Creatures…although it did not begin out as a Sea Creatures undertaking.
It’s not the meals. Chef de delicacies Mike Stamey has a specific knack for pulling dishes from up and down the Pacific coast and making a menu stuffed with uncooked oysters, pozole, spicy clam dip, and seafood towers really feel cohesive. And apart from, Brink’s spreadsheet reviews he hit his finances percentages on the nostril. It’s the annual actuality of operating the town’s dreamiest summertime restaurant in a metropolis the place our non secular summer season doesn’t begin till early July.
Each month, kind of, Value and Erickson (and generally Dale) caravan round to every of the Sea Creatures eating places and conduct these “interval opinions” with the final supervisor and govt chef. If Erickson’s private model entails oyster picnics and sun-splashed cookbook analysis, the fact entails a major quantity of conferences about blissful hour gross sales and the sorry state of the lavatory plumbing at Walrus and the Carpenter. Lately, the corporate has a reserve fund to bridge Westward’s quieter months. To not point out a management staff: the company-wide beverage, operations, and gross sales and advertising and marketing administrators collect across the desk together with the companions to brainstorm and troubleshoot.
Subsequent, Value reads an incident report concerning a diner whose therapy of a server one night required the worker to step off the ground to regain composure. Reservation software program indicated comparable conduct at one other Sea Creatures restaurant. Simple consensus: decline this buyer’s future reservations and subject a courtesy notification. “I’m blissful to jot down that,” says Value.
An hour earlier, on the Walrus and the Carpenter assembly, Erickson steered a brainstorm about specials away from hen potpie and prompt both Puglia crab legs from Alaska or bouillabaisse. She’s now not in a kitchen nightly, however the cooks in her firm know her ethos. “Letting the substances shine is a giant factor for her,” says Stamey. He, in flip, layers in as many daring flavors—particularly pickles and sizzling sauce—as he thinks the Ericksonian philosophy can assist.
Dale wasn’t at this specific Westward assembly, however he’s the rationale Sea Creatures is on this spot in any respect. In July 2018, Skillet founder Josh Henderson ended one of many frothiest progress spasms in Seattle restaurant historical past by promoting almost all his eating places to Sea Creatures. Dale, a enterprise companion in each restaurant teams, was the widespread hyperlink on this shocking type of monetary triage.
Value and Erickson, two individuals who take pleasure in creating their very own locations, required excessive convincing to amass a portfolio that included a ramen store and a burger chain. Immediately, Erickson discovered herself on the prime of a stack of almost 20 institutions. Sea Creatures, for a time, had extra attain than even Tom Douglas and Ethan Stowell, the 2 Seattle cooks who’d develop into synonymous with empire constructing.
“It turned out to be a extremely great point,” says Erickson, as a result of it introduced Gerlich aboard. However Westward was the factor that obtained her to sure. The oyster-focused restaurant on the curve of Lake Union shoreline felt like a spot she and Value may make their very own. After a considerable gutting and redesign, after all.
Exterior that exact stretch of shoreline, the acquisition proved culturally uneasy, even after Sea Creatures utilized its twin levers of meals and design. Erickson quietly overhauled the meals at Nice State; it turned the kind of burger chain that solely makes use of tomatoes (extremely good tomatoes) after they’re in season. Saint Helens restaurant in Laurelhurst turned a bistro named for Erickson’s mother. The ramen spot changed into King Leroy, a bar clad in classic beer indicators and Showbox posters; it was positively the one spot within the Sea Creatures canon serving housemade jalapeno poppers.
Diners do not hear a lot about companion Ira Gerlich, however Value and Erickson say he was instrumental in retaining the enterprise afloat in 2020.
Eating places are massive, slow-moving, unpredictable issues. To construct multiple of them means missteps are inevitable. “I don’t know that we had the fervour for fast-food burgers that we would have liked to do it properly,” Value acknowledges. The possession dynamic that landed Sea Creatures on this association additionally helped them devise an exit technique. In 2023 they offered Nice State, King Leroy, and the shuttered Bistro Shirlee to Nice State’s longtime operations director, Nathan Yeager. A couple of companions (particularly Dale and Gerlich) helped finance the sale, which meant they may select an individual who felt proper to take over, slightly than restrict themselves to consumers who had entry to funds. “We’re fairly good at letting one another determine it out,” says Erickson. She dislikes the cheesiness of claiming they’re like household, “however you recognize—we positively love one another.”
That’s in all probability why she stated sure to Sea Creatures’ latest undertaking, the primary one the place Value and Dale would be the major drivers—although we are going to unfailingly discuss with it as a Renee Erickson spot. Dale was the one who first toured the brand new RailSpur advanced close to the stadiums. And Value is a Mariners and Seahawks season ticketholder who wanted little convincing to make over the previous FX McRory’s, a sports activities bar that exudes 40 years of Seattle historical past.
They obtained Erickson to sure, partly with the attract of serving to to fill Seattle’s oldest neighborhood with individuals and power. In April, Sea Creatures introduced plans for a European-style tank brewery and beer corridor, plus a nestled-in bar that may promote pizza by the slice.
Erickson is unfailingly candid: “That was a tough no for me for a extremely very long time,” principally as a result of she’s far more into wine than beer. However now she’s sharing menu concepts and desirous about the tiny, extra Ericksonian full-service restaurant additionally deliberate contained in the bigger house.
“Restaurateur” is a humorous phrase. And never simply to say or spell. It smacks of the impersonal—of some faceless Huge Brother diminishing the ineffable pleasure of eating right into a spreadsheet, then guaranteeing it exhibits a revenue. The chef is the title we join with. The cookbook we purchase and the Instagram we observe. Renee Erickson the chef championed oyster farmers at Walrus and the Carpenter and made one hell of a pork chop at Boat Avenue Cafe. Renee Erickson the restaurateur has uncovered numerous diners to the charms of extra sustainable seafood, like mackerel, and helped lots of people perceive a great steak doesn’t need to be a rib eye. When she determined to cease serving king salmon at her eating places, as she did in 2018 in a present of assist for our resident orcas, it turned a information story.
Collectively, she and Dale and Value pull off the existential acrobatics of giving Seattle what it desires in eating places: Nice meals that helps native farms, served by staff with medical health insurance and paid time without work, plus an annual companywide subject journey to Hama Hama’s oyster farm. Stunning eating rooms that enrich neighborhoods. And a model that motivates individuals to pay the menu costs that make this all potential. It’s not simple, however it’s heartening that somebody is ready to do all this—even in Seattle, with its excessive prices and myriad hurdles to profitability.
For all Erickson’s hesitation to tackle new initiatives, “I don’t know that I’d have saved doing eating places if I simply had one,” she says. Her solo days operating Boat Avenue Cafe had been isolating and bodily grueling. With out the scope of Sea Creatures, “I’d burn out a lot quicker.”
She and Value prize Sea Creatures’ sense of place, which makes them reluctant to open something exterior Seattle metropolis limits. After which there’s Dale. “I’ve my very own want to develop Walrus,” he says. “I think about a handful of Walruses unfold across the nation.” The monetary upside could possibly be important. “Is there a extra Northwest restaurant than Walrus? I’d like to carry what we do right here to those different markets.”
Although even he is aware of this notion is an uphill dialog. “He would open 10 Walruses if he may,” is Erickson’s good-natured retort after I ask her about this. However who is aware of. There’s all the time a path, of some type, that might result in sure.
