Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Jennifer Tam, Restaurant Navigator

There are over 1,500 restaurants in town and, from her office on the 57^th floor of the Municipal Tower, Jennifer Tam has her pulse-or at least the official perspective of Seattle's Office of Economic Development-on all of them.

Tam, officially Seattle's "Restaurant Advocate," grew up on the Oregon coast in a restaurant family who had immigrated from China. "We would close the restaurant, clean everything, and turn out the lights. Then we would eat." In the dark.

Her job right now is to help turn on the lights so aspiring restaurant owners (as well as existing operators hoping to move or expand) don't get lost in the dark corridors of the urban bureaucracy. Tam is both interpreter and facilitator for the ambitious and the brave who want to throw themselves into the restaurant business, letting them know about leasing contracts, permitting (health, construction, remodeling), human resources requirements, and so on. A daunting task, those 17 permits.

There really is a "GrowSeattle" website, and "restaurant success" is a real mission for the City. And though there's a desk and phone for Tam at OED, she's usually found walking Seattle neighborhoods with clients. In the 14 months she's been on the job, Tam has worked on projects all over town. The "Only in Seattle" initiative isn't hers, but restaurants are an integral part of Seattle neighborhood vitality, so she's part of the team that's helping restaurants in the International District, to name just one. Opening, closing, moving, relocating, expanding from mobile to brick & mortar, each situation (Super Six in Columbia City, Hurry Curry in South Lake Union) is different and requires different doors to open.

Before she moved to 700 Fifth Avenue she worked in the Rainier Valley as a business case manager, and before that, she spent time in India with village-level "micro-entrepreneurs." Is she a bureaucrat herself? Yes, and no, she admits. Bureaucracy is all about process rather than innovation, but, she claims, "Process is nuanced in each city, or even in different municipal departments." From developing a business plan to scouting locations, from getting permits (a nightmare) to stocking the larder, Tam is a sort of midwife, or as she puts it, "the navigator."

"I enjoy bringing everyone to the table," she says. "Everybody loves food."

Kent Fleischmann, Dry Fly Distilling

Let's take advantage of the season to pause for a moment and reflect: there was a time that no one understood the term "small batch distilling." Yes, Bigfoot still roamed the Cascades in those ancient times, seven or eight years ago, when fishing buddies Don Poffenroth and Kent Fleischmann would stand streamside along the Gallatin (yup, Montana, where a river does indeed run through it) and cast their flies in quest of rainbows and brown trout. I'm not a fisherman myself but I do know that the subtext of fishing isn't catching fish; it's about what you do before and after; in this case, the two friends were making plans to open a distillery, back in Spokane, where they both worked in marketing and brand development. No matter that it hadn't been done since Prohibition, no matter that their project wasn't even legal. And yet, the Legislature got turned around; it created a "craft distillery" category requiring 50 percent local ingredients, and the wheat farmers of the Palouse got themselves a new customer.

Today, Dry Fly is one of the top three craft distillers in the state (along with Woodinville Whiskey and Westland Distillery), and has just done something the others, so far, have not: partnered with a restaurant chain as its exclusive vodka supplier. The chain is California-based Eureka, which has an outlet at University Village, lots of burgers but plenty of interesting fare like beet salad, osso buco riblets, and shrimp tacos. And Dry Fly vodka as the base for spicy cocktails like the Reaper.

"True craft distilling isn't profit-making," Fleischmann explains. "It's a high-overhead, low-margin business." Still, 10,000 cases a year, all of it from wheat grown in the Palouse country of eastern Washington, milled to a fine powder. From Spokane, it's shipped to 35 states and 22 countries, one batch of 576 bottles at a time.

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle. His blog is www.Cornichon.org, and he has published a new book "Home Grown Seattle: 101 True Tales of Local Food & Drink."

November 2015