Seattle Is Your Oyster
When Evan Rich, the co-chef of the Michelin-starred Rich Table, decided to expand his RT Rotisserie franchise beyond San Francisco, he began to consider Seattle as his next city. “I love it,” he says. “It reminds me of San Francisco when I first arrived there a dozen years ago.” He’s exploring Seattle’s distinctive neighborhoods to find a home for a possible new location.
It’s easy to see why Rich, after establishing himself in San Francisco, has trained his culinary sights on Seattle—the similarities between the two are almost too many to count. The Emerald City is tearing down the viaduct along its waterfront and opening up views of Elliott Bay in much the same way that San Francisco demolished the Embarcadero freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Seattle is being reshaped by the tech set—namely, Microsoft and Amazon—just as the likes of Salesforce and Twitter and legions of startups have remade San Francisco. In both cities, these businesses are fueling innovations in the dining scene. Open kitchens, live-fire cooking, and the celebration of local produce seem destined to make the cuisines mirror each other.
Yet there are differences. While San Francisco is the fine-dining capital of the United States—the Bay Area has more three-star Michelin restaurants than Los Angeles or New York—Seattle is known for destination-worthy neighborhood spots.
“High-end dining hasn’t been as well supported in part because people in Seattle didn’t eat out much,” says Nathan Myhrvold, formerly the chief technology officer at Microsoft, who’s credited with more than 800 patents. One of his passions is cooking, and he is the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine, an influential six-volume series on the science of cooking. While he sees many similarities between San Francisco and Seattle, he contends that even with the current boom, Seattle’s changes have been more subtle: “Seattle was never into itself quite as much as San Francisco was.”
San Francisco restaurants have been hit hard with escalating costs—the city has the highest rents in the world, according to
