Maria Hines

Satisfaction comes from doing a good job and holding true to your beliefs. For Maria Hines, life is pretty satisfying right now. Her dream of operating certified organic restaurants, creating craveable food and unique experiences has come true. And on December 21, her third certified organic restaurant will open.

Maria Hines in Istanbul, by Frank Huster

Maria manages to control costs while providing the freshest organic food, not an easy task considering the price for seasonal, organic, local ingredients. "The higher gauge of wealth to me is to do the right thing," she says. "We get food from local farmers and foragers. They are hand picking at certain times of day when items are at their crispest, and then delivering them to my door."

What drives Maria is challenge. Life is not aligned if she's not learning. After two and a half years as executive chef at Earth & Ocean at Seattle's W Hotel, she needed a new challenge. "Being the executive chef in a hotel is about as much responsibility as you can get," she says. "I was ready for more. The next obvious step was to open my own place. I was already completely in love with the idea of sustainable, seasonal, local and organic, and was so excited to work my vision of a certified organic restaurant."

She wanted to be in the north end. "I'd worked downtown and wanted to create a neighborhood joint. The house in Wallingford was perfect. The kitchen has windows! And if I need a breath of fresh air, I walk around a neighborhood with nicely-landscaped yards. It fits my vibe and style of restaurant." Tilth offers new American cuisine and wines that are organic, biodynamic or both. Opening the kitchen was easy—she'd done it before. "The hard part was opening as an owner and learning new responsibilities. As a chef, you work with the GM, the wine person, the dining room manager. So I had a good understanding, but hadn't been in charge of an entire operation before. And, boy, did I use my mentors and chefs I respected but didn't know! Other chefs would tell me ‘Come see me, bring your paperwork, we'll go through it.' Whatever questions I had, they were willing to help." Since opening Tilth in 2006, she's added a sun room, rebuilt the deck, and ripped out floor tiles that didn't match the oak flooring. "We're happy with the success of the restaurant and that meant I needed a new challenge."

While traveling to Morocco 15 years ago, she fell in love with the food. Several years ago, she went to Greece and again fell in love with the food. "I remember thinking that if I had another restaurant, I'd love to cook these foods that I'm so passionate about. I think hunger for knowledge and excitement to express a cuisine translates onto the plate." Golden Beetle was born in 2010 as a gastro pub offering Eastern Mediterranean shareable plates and artisan cocktails. "We offer as much love and artisanship in the glass as we do on the plate." The lesson with the second restaurant was ‘location, location, location.' "It's changing and we're seeing more traffic on Market Street, but it's been hard to get people off of Ballard Avenue. If you ask me about this next year, I'll say that it's a good thing to go into an emerging neighborhood," Maria laughs. Even with the location challenge, Golden Beetle is doing well enough for Maria to feel the need for her next challenge.

She lived in Fremont for five years and loved it. When the 35^th Street Bistro became available, she knew it would be a great site for her next restaurant, a Sicilian-focused trattoria called Agrodolce. "There will be Southern Italian dishes as well, and we'll always have an extruded (tubular) pasta, stuffed pasta, and laminated pasta (sheets). 25% of the menu will be pasta. We'll have meat and fish entrées and small plate appetizers." She's leaving the space as is. And the small kitchen? "Compared to Tilth's kitchen, this is big!" Wine will be the beverage of choice. "Italy's one of the biggest wine producers in the world, so that's our focus."

One restaurant is a lot of work, two even more. Three? "I'll bounce around and will be working a lot: a new level of normal. I'm 40 now and love what I do, so I'll hunker down and work hard. I love everyone I work with and am so happy to see their faces when I'm there. I love our food and the atmosphere. The restaurants are cool, and cool people gravitate to them. I have such good people in place now. We all feel that we cook and serve good quality food—but what we do means something; we're doing something bigger than ourselves. Our feelings create the vibe in the restaurants and guests feel that."

St. Jude's Albacore Tuna at Tilth, by Frank Huster

Maria has done a lot of events, auction dinner packages, Burning Beast, and realized that they have the ability to cater. "It's something we can grow and maybe one day even have a brick and mortar space where we hold our events."

The future, if you've been paying attention, will hold more challenges for Maria. What form those take is anyone's guess. "When I opened Tilth, I just wanted one restaurant. When I gained confidence as a successful owner, I felt I could open a second restaurant. Someone recently approached me with a merger offer for my two businesses. I'm too emotionally involved with my restaurants to do it, but that gave me the confidence to open a third spot. Every place needs to be unique and offer a different experience. So maybe another restaurant, maybe increased catering, a cookbook, TV, I don't know. What I do know is that the more I grow, the more opportunities arise. And I'm open to that."

Connie Adams/December 2012