In the quiet pre-opening hours at Ballard's Staple & Fancy on a Friday afternoon, chef/owner Ethan Stowell sets his Pandora app to play Abba and their ilk. The bespectacled 36-year-old nurtures nostalgia for some of the frothier cultural products of his childhood; he's watched Airplane and Blazing Saddles more times than he can count.
Kevin P. Casey
Stowell seated at Staple & Fancy, the latest hit in his "mini-empire."
Kevin P. Casey
Unlike Tom Douglas, Stowell spends several nights a week stationed in his kitchens.
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VIDEO: In the Staple & Fancy kitchen with Ethan Stowell.
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The lighthearted music does nothing to take away from his intensity, though. Elbow to elbow, he works the pasta station while his three line cooks devote themselves to appetizers, meats, and sides.
As he starts making gnocchi, Stowell pulls a sheet of plump potatoes, glistening with olive oil, from the oven. "I don't believe in boiling them," he says, alluding to the common way gnocchi is made. "The idea is to make as concentrated a potato flavor as possible." It therefore "makes no sense," he says, to drench the potatoes in water.
One by one, he puts the potatoes through a little contraption that turns them into threads resembling shredded cheese. He adds an egg for each potato. "I like it to be rich," he says. He sifts flour over the mixture.
Trying to explain why he likes cooking as he begins to knead the resulting mass of dough, he says: "It's working with your hands. You get to produce something every day." He adds that he "doesn't think cooks are artists; they're more like craftsmen." But he credits his ballerina mother—who later in the evening will come for dinner with Stowell's father, the two of them just back from Venice—with teaching him a vital lesson: the importance of technique.
"There is a correct and an incorrect way to do things," he says. In cooking, that means you need to learn "how to butcher things the right way, how to slice things the right way"—and how to roll gnocchi dough into perfect, rounded strands, ready to be cut into bite-sized wedges. He demonstrates, explaining how you have to avoid too much pressure as you rock the dough, instead gently spreading the palms of your hands outwards.
His attention to detail has paid off. Stowell is one of the most celebrated chefs in Seattle. He's the owner not just of Staple & Fancy but of three other acclaimed restaurants: Tavolata, Anchovies & Olives, and How to Cook a Wolf. It's a veritable "mini-empire," in the words of Antoinette Bruno, editor of the national culinary website StarChefs.com. She credits him with "doing more than any young restaurateur in the city for making a difference in the culinary scene in Seattle."
Flash back just a year ago, though, and Stowell was in turmoil. Union, then the chef's flagship restaurant—the one he had started at the improbably young age of 28, the one that had earned rave reviews, the one into which he had poured his heart and soul—wasn't doing well.
Stowell had taken himself out of the kitchen in order to keep his line cooks employed. But still Union was a quandary that kept him up at night. Did it need to be more hip? More fun? Was it the recession that was killing Union, or the refined, high-end concept?
An opportunity to start Staple & Fancy settled the matter. With Staple & Fancy to run, he had a place to put his Union cooks without losing them. He held a closing dinner at Union and prepared to move on from what he calls "one of the proudest things I've ever done—and one of my biggest failures."
Yet in some ways that failure seems to have been the making of Stowell. It forced him to chart a new style of cooking. In the process, he created a signature brand on a scale of which Seattle has really only seen once before.
"He's kind of the new Tom Douglas," says Eli Dahlin, a cook who has worked for Stowell at several of his restaurants. It's a common refrain, albeit one sometimes said in jest. "You're a Mini-Me Tom," Tamara Murphy, the former Brasa chef who now presides over the two Elliott Bay Cafes, sometimes tells Stowell.
Stowell, like Douglas, not only runs his restaurants, but markets himself in other ways. In the fall, Stowell released a cookbook on "new Italian" cuisine. He's selling handmade pasta, under the trade name Lagana. And just this month, he opened two concession stands at Safeco Field, one offering crepes and another grass-fed burgers.
Also like Douglas, Stowell is piling up the accolades. Last year, Bon Appetit named Anchovies & Olives one of its 10 best new restaurants in America. In March, the James Beard Foundation listed Stowell as a finalist for Best Northwest Chef. In the days leading up to the finalists' announcement, though, Stowell confessed he was hoping for a bigger win. Staple & Fancy was a semifinalist for Best New Restaurant nationwide, not just in the Northwest, but failed to make the next cut. No Seattle restaurant, in fact, has ever won that category; the foundation typically favors establishments in New York City and other locales anointed by East Coast critics as food towns.
However, Douglas—who runs 10 restaurants including Dahlia Lounge, Etta's, and Palace Kitchen—was able to transcend that bias and place as a finalist in the national Outstanding Restaurateur category. The different showings stand as a reminder that Stowell, for all his cachet and entrepreneurial drive, stands on the precipice of Douglas-like fame but has yet to achieve it.
