Shoved away in a drawer somewhere is a list of things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 30, with almost nothing on it achieved. I have a plan for what to do when zombies take over the world, and I have a list of favorite restaurants. Actually, I don't have just one list, but several—most of them highly situational, organized by geography or keyed to certain events. The last restaurant I'm going to eat at when the zombies come? Johnson's Corner in northern Colorado. The first place I'm going to eat when they get that time machine humming? The French pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair.
Peter Mumford
Folks get what they want from Christine Keff.
Peter Mumford
The small plates make sense.
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Flying Fish 300 Westlake Ave. N., 728-8595, flyingfishrestaurant.com. Dinner 5–11 p.m. daily, lunch 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m. Mon.–Fri.
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Knowing where to get food is probably one of the oldest, most hard-wired of human instincts. In their sloping, hairy noggins, our caveman ancestors kept lists of where the berries that wouldn't kill them grew and where the woolly mammoths cavorted. A million years later, I, the inheritor of that impulse to always know where to get a taco in a hurry, always keep lists. The most useful has always been my list of Safety Restaurants—those places you go when every other plan falls through, when you don't really want to think about where you're eating tonight, or when you need something dependable and decent and don't care much for specifics. Safety Restaurants are to modern dining what Safety Schools are to the college-application process: names you keep tucked in your back pocket just in case all your wildest dreams are dashed, but you don't want to end up studying automotive repair through the mail (or eating at Olive Garden when your parents are picking up the tab).
And this week, I have a new name to add to my list of Safety Restaurants: Flying Fish.
Before you get to thinking this is a backhanded slap at Flying Fish, let me tell you why you're wrong. A Safety Restaurant is not, by any stretch, a bad restaurant.
It is, in almost all cases, a good restaurant that is just not great in any specific way. It's not where you go when you're looking for the most mind-blowing meal of your life. It's not the place you nominate when your wild friends want something weird and different and risky. It's where you go when you simply want to be taken care of—seated easily, presented with a menu full of things worth trying (even if none of them are jump-off-the-page intriguing), and served a fully satisfying meal that you can completely forget about five minutes after paying the bill. In a day and age where all dining is entertainment and all chefs are rock stars, that kind of thing—the simple ability to eat and move on—can be incredibly attractive, even if it's not something that generally finds its way into any restaurant's ad copy.
Chef Christine Keff opened Flying Fish in 1995 in the middle of Belltown, back when the area was busy and popular but not quite so busy or so popular—or quite so jammed with hat-boy bars and last-call survivors wandering up and down First Avenue horking Jäger into the gutters. For 15 years, it's been a dependable spot for seafood in a city that's never really lacked seafood places, but it's managed to rise above much of the competition by focusing almost completely on seafood, and playing up the world food/fusion angle back before that was such a completely overdone gimmick.
Recently, Keff—whose remarkable career has stretched from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, with stints at the Four Seasons, the Hunt Club, and McCormick and Schmick's (as their executive chef), and included standing before Manhattan crowds in 1999 to receive her James Beard Award as Best Chef Northwest—decided that she no longer saw herself or her restaurant as fitting in with the neighborhood that had grown and changed around her. She started looking for a new home for her tried and trusted concept, and found a spot in South Lake Union that was nearly perfect: the first floor of a shiny new tower, all wrapped in windows and with a ready-made neighborhood clientele just aching for something new to fall in love with.
I never knew the old Flying Fish; it was before my time in Seattle. But after speaking with those who did, I understand the risk Keff took in pulling up stakes and moving. What she had was that rarest of restaurant life-forms: a going concern—a popular, respected, occasionally beloved restaurant still moving considerable numbers after 15 years in business. And even if she was no longer crazy about her neighbors, the thought of killing something like that and essentially starting over in a new location is just insane by most rational restaurant-world standards.
But she did it, buoyed perhaps by the 10 years she'd spent in New York opening and closing restaurants, or maybe just by the confidence that comes from truly knowing what you're doing. The new Flying Fish is busy. It draws a decent crowd on traditionally slow nights and a heavy one during prime time. And the how and why of that are written into every square inch of the space and the menu.
