Tonight, April 27, at the Paramount Theatre, Seattle Weekly hosts its annual Voracious Tasting & Food Awards, which will feature fare from more than 50 of the area's finest restaurants. As part of the sold-out event, our annual awards will be handed out, recognizing innovation, sustainability, and embodiment of the spirit of the late culinary mastermind Angelo Pellegrini. Following are descriptions of these honorees and why they're so deserving.
2011 Innovation Award
Joshua Huston
Co-owners, and brothers, Brian (left) and Mark Canlis.
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Check out slideshows of the Voracious Tasting and chef showdown action here and here.
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Canlis
Normally, when one thinks of an innovative restaurant, the image that leaps to mind is not of a 60-year-old fine-dining institution where your grandparents probably celebrated their wedding anniversary. It's probably not of one of those rare restaurants where jackets are still required, where an antique rotary phone still holds a place of honor in the dining room, or where the best plates on the menu were designed half a century ago and have barely changed at all.
When you're talking about Seattle's most innovative restaurants, no one really ever thinks of Canlis. But they should.
These days, it's a dead cinch to go the Ferran Adrià/Grant Achatz/Wylie Dufresne route—to open some spare and modern space with a menu full of food pills and foams. Take a trip down to Ye Olde Molecular Supply store, load up a wizard's chest with gellan, locust-bean gum, calcium alginate, and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, and you're ready to start making deconstructed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, squid noodles, and reverse-sphericalization faux-fruit caviars. Throw in a tank of liquid nitrogen and you've got yourself a concept right in line with the forefront of American cookery.
That's easy. But what's hard is taking a menu like the one at Canlis and bending it ever so slowly in the direction of modernity, overcoming the crushing weight of expectation and tradition, jumping the rails that have been laid by generations, and doing something new.
Chef Jason Franey is doing just that. In small ways, he has been subtly altering the board at Canlis to bring new life to it: offering quivering globes of encapsulated Tequila Sunrises to guests as an amuse, and doing things with salmon that go so far beyond the traditional notions of smoking or grilling that the resulting plate is almost unrecognizable—and one of the more delicious things you're likely to taste in a year.
The best thing on the menu at Canlis is still the Peter Canlis Prawns—a dish that will forever be a fixture on the menu, taken from a recipe laid down by the restaurant's founder decades ago. And the house salad was named as one of the 100 best dishes in America. But under Franey, Canlis' kitchen is not content to bank solely on those guaranteed winners. He pushes constantly against the titanic weight of 60 years of convention, creating tasting menus and carefully altering practices that always run the risk of calcifying in a restaurant with a history like Canlis'.
Franey is not the only one out there taking risks and trying new things. The Canlis brothers, Mark and Brian, have done something amazing with their highly respected, very conventional restaurant in this past year as well, making the best possible use of new (to the restaurant industry, anyway) social networking. In October, in celebration of its 60th birthday, Canlis hosted a citywide scavenger hunt (via Facebook and Twitter) in which copies of its 1950 menu were hidden all over the city and hints were given to friends and followers. The best thing about the game was the prizes: Find a menu and you got to order off it—at Canlis' 1950 prices, which meant getting a lobster dinner for just $4.
For Act Two, the brothers went back to the well for a grassroots campaign to get Franey chosen as Food & Wine magazine's "People's Best New Chef." This involved Mark and Brian wearing sandwich boards, busking at Pike Place Market, and waving "Vote for Jason" signs from the top of the Space Needle. Of course, they had their pictures taken at every location. And these pictures were immediately posted on Facebook for all their fans to see.
In each picture was a hidden Morse code which, if translated, would spell out a clue as to the location of a pop-up operated by Franey during the run-up to the People's Best New Chef voting. The whole thing was perfectly executed. So with the salmon, the scavenger hunts, the Morse code, the Facebook stunts, the pop-up restaurants conceived and executed by a team who, by all rights, could simply be sitting behind the stoves banging out Canlis salads and plates of prawns for the unending stream of customers, is there any doubt that Canlis deserves this award? Finally, in a year that saw Canlis doing all this cutting-edge stuff, it was also nominated for a James Beard Award for service—one of the most hotly contested restaurant awards in the United States. JASON SHEEHAN
2011 Sustainability Award
Seattle City Council
Seattle is a city where it's easier to eat farm-to-table than not to; where chefs and servers, when asked where a particular oyster or green came from, can sometimes just point out the window and say it came from right over there. It's a place where sustainability and good stewardship isn't just something chefs and restaurateurs do because there's good money in it, but because, with the region's bounty and the wild diversity of stuff available for the asking, it would be stupid not to. A chef buys what's good and presents it to the customers in the best way he knows how. And when the best stuff that's available comes right from your own backyard? Well, that's almost too easy.
