Listen to Renee Erickson — chef-owner 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 America by Bon Appetit in 2011. In 2013, the magazine called it one of the 20 most important restaurants in the United States. With all that attention, the restaurant consistently has a two-hour wait for a table — on weeknights, no less.
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. (Plan to be there on the day they serve octopus terrine with Ligurian olive oil and lemon.)
Even Boat Street Cafe, 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, made with ingredients firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest — is consciously simple. Lentil salad with nettles, mustard seed oil, currants and tarragon. Herring butter toasts with pickled fennel, lemon peel and parsley. Grilled whole favas over ricotta with honey, lime and Aleppo pepper. A tangle of roasted carrots and fennel, slathered with rose-petal harissa, atop a plate of thick house-made yogurt. Her food is warm, earthy and thoughtful.
“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.”
One reason Erickson’s restaurants are so beloved must be the owner’s attitude toward her staff. Perhaps because they are treated so well, employees at Erickson’s restaurants seem to be just as warm and friendly as the food they produce.
“I’m … not a classically trained chef — actually, I’m not trained at all — so there aren’t a lot of rules about cooking in my kitchens,” she writes in the opening of her cookbook. “It’s more important to me that people are happy and comfortable than that they can crack an egg with one hand or slice a case of shallots in a minute flat. If I don’t want to do something, I don’t want to make someone else do it. I want my staff to have healthy lives and dynamic, interesting jobs that don’t entail someone hovering over them.”
As Jess Thomson, a Seattle food writer who co-authored the cookbook, said, “Renee isn’t like most chefs. In working with her on this book, it became immediately clear to me that she really does use a lot of care with the people around her. She treats them like family.”
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 Cafe, first as a waiter and then in the kitchen. Over time, to her surprise, she fell in love with restaurant life. “I had never worked in a place that was so hands-on,” she said. “It wasn’t a corporate structure. The camaraderie and the team effort on the line — we were all being creative. There’s nothing like it.”
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. She thought Erickson would be ready for the challenge. ” ‘Do it,’ everyone said. ‘Jump in and we’ll see what we can do.’ ” And so, at only 24 years old, Erickson became a restaurant owner. Her father and brother built a patio and helped make repairs. Her best friend waited tables. Her mother made the desserts.
One weekend, shortly after buying the restaurant, Erickson closed down the cafe to remodel. She and her family and friends gutted and cleaned it, starting Saturday morning and finishing Monday night. They were open again for dinner Tuesday evening. A local restaurant reviewer called shortly after, confused.
She had eaten at Boat Street on Friday, but when she returned for one more meal before writing her review, the place looked entirely different. Erickson explained, in a panic, that she had just bought the restaurant and was making significant changes. Could the reviewer please hold her review? The reviewer agreed and came back eight months later.
“It was really gracious of her,” says Erickson. “I was so lucky. No one can do that now. This was before cellphones, before Yelp, before the instant reviews. Opening my first restaurant now would be terrifying for the amount of attention I’d get.”
As Erickson wrote in the acknowledgments of her new book, “A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus,” “there is an ocean of gratitude upon which every restaurant floats.” That gratitude seems to infuse the dishes in her restaurants.
Her nurturing attitude also shaped the recipes in her cookbook. “She is open to the possibility of changing a recipe for home cooks,” Thomson says. “She knows that not everyone has a wood-fired oven at home, so the recipe in the cookbook will have to change. She wanted these recipes to have the sophistication of the restaurants but work for everyone at home.”
But now, after 12 years of standing in front of the stove, Erickson rarely cooks on the line in her restaurants anymore.
Why? Simple. “I have employees I trust,” she says.
Boat Street Bread Pudding
Recipes are adapted from “A Boat, a Whale and a Walrus: Menus and Stories,” by Renee Erickson with Jess Thomson (Sasquatch Books, 2014). You can use day-old bread. The sauce can be made 3 days in advance, covered and refrigerated. 12 servings
Ingredients
FOR THE BREAD PUDDING
1 cup golden raisins
½ cup bourbon, such as Buffalo Trace
3 large eggs
1½ cups granulated sugar
Finely grated zest of 1 orange
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon kosher salt
4 cups heavy cream, plus 2 cups for serving
1 large baguette (about 1 pound), torn into 1-inch pieces
FOR THE SAUCE
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
¾ cup bourbon, such as Buffalo Trace
Pinch kosher salt
14 ounces canned sweetened condensed milk
Directions
For the bread pudding, soak the raisins in the bourbon in a small bowl; let them sit at room temperature for 1 hour or up to 1 day. Drain, reserving the bourbon for the sauce.
Preheat the oven to 350. Have a deep 9-by-13-inch baking dish at hand.
Whisk together the eggs, granulated sugar, orange zest, vanilla extract and salt in a large mixing bowl until well blended. Stir in the 4 cups of heavy cream; once that’s incorporated, add the bread pieces and drained raisins, making sure that all the bread is coated. Transfer to the baking dish.
Place the baking dish on a rimmed baking sheet (to catch any drips); transfer to the oven and bake uncovered for 1 hour or until the top layer of bread is nicely browned, the edges are bubbling and the center of the pudding is firm to the touch. Let cool.
For the sauce, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over low heat. Gradually whisk in the confectioners’ sugar; once the mixture is smooth, add the reserved bourbon (from soaking the raisins) and the ¾ cup bourbon. Increase the heat to medium; cook for 6 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally; this step will burn off just about all the alcohol.
Add the salt, then whisk in the sweetened condensed milk, stirring for another minute or two until the sauce thickens. Let cool.
When ready to serve, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Scoop the bread pudding into individual shallow, ovenproof bowls or ramekins. Drizzle each portion with a generous amount of sauce. Place the bowls on a baking sheet; bake for about 5 minutes or until the sauce is bubbly. Serve right away, topped with an indecent amount (about ¼ cup) of the remaining 2 cups of heavy cream.
Nutrition, per serving: 840 calories, 10 g protein, 94 g carbohydrates, 41 g fat, 25 g saturated fat, 185 mg cholesterol, 440 mg sodium, 1 g dietary fiber, 72 g sugar
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Celery Root and Celery Leaf Salad
This is a beautiful, unusual-looking salad that earns big points for treating raw celeriac (celery root) as a star ingredient. It’s best to use a mandoline for this recipe. The dressed celery root, without the walnuts, can be refrigerated for up to 4 hours in advance; bring to room temperature before serving. Six to 8 servings
Ingredients
FOR THE VINAIGRETTE
Peel of 2 preserved Meyer lemons or regular preserved lemons, homemade or store-bought, cut into julienne (very thin strips)
Scant 1 cup crème fraîche
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon minced shallot
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon poppy seeds
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
FOR THE SALAD
3 baseball-size celeriac, peeled (about 2½ pounds total)
1 cup walnut halves, toasted (see NOTE)
1 cup picked celery leaves (from the heart of 1 bunch celery)
2 teaspoons poppy seeds
¾ cup fresh pomegranate seeds
Extra-virgin olive oil
Flaked sea salt, such as Maldon
Directions
For the vinaigrette, combine the preserved lemon peel, crème fraîche, lemon juice, shallot and poppy seeds in a food processor; pulse until the solids are finely chopped. With the motor running, gradually add the oil to form a creamy emulsion. Season lightly with salt. Transfer the dressing to a large bowl.
For the salad, use a mandoline or sharp knife to shave the celeriac into wide, -inch thick slices, adding them to the bowl of vinaigrette as you work, and coating them so they don’t turn brown. Stir in about three-quarters of the walnuts, crushing some of them with your fingers as you work.
Transfer the mixture to a large platter. Garnish with the remaining walnuts, celery leaves, poppy seeds and pomegranate seeds. Serve at room temperature, drizzled with oil and garnished with the flaked salt.
NOTE: Toast the nuts in a small, dry skillet over medium-low heat for a few minutes, until fragrant and lightly browned, shaking the pan as needed to prevent scorching.
