The restaurant-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Chimayo takes its clientele from Tex-Mex to Tuscany.
Joshua Huston
Bill Patterson, owner and head chef.
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CHIMAYO 123 N. Beach Rd., Eastsound, 360-376-6394. 11 a.m.β3 p.m. and 5β9 p.m. Mon.βSat.
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"We're kind of hard to find," confesses Bill Patterson, the pasta virtuoso who offers nightly recitals on Orcas Island at his restaurant, Chimayo.
Patterson is given to understatement— he believes the communion of eater and Dungeness crab shouldn't be interrupted by anything other than butter—and his assessment represents the square root of the situation. His restaurant is maddeningly hard to find, in this world and its virtual equivalent. There's no website for the restaurant, tucked into the rear corner of a shabby indoor arcade that houses a consignment clothing shop and a realtor's office, nor is there any sort of signage that would magnetize a diner craving lardo and guanciale. A shingle hung above Eastsound's Main Street boardwalk points to Chimayo, a name Patterson kept when he bought the 9-year-old New Mexican restaurant from local restaurateur Karen Campbell in 2010.
Patterson didn't hang onto only the name. He kept the menu intact, continuing to sling the tortillas, chiles, and beans that had acquired a following he was loath to unsettle during a fierce recession. "When you know 90 percent of the people who walk in the door, it's hard to look them in the eye and say they can't have what they want," Patterson says. "It would be perverse."
A former caterer who'd dabbled in pop-up Sunday suppers for islanders long before such arrangements were trendy, Patterson had watched five local restaurants succumb to the flailing economy. If he could ride a plate of enchuritos through the financial squall, he fully intended to do so.
But, after six months, Patterson was struggling to repress his culinary inclinations. So he started sneaking Italian dishes onto the dinner menu. The unexpected appearance of linguine and risotto baffled tourists, who weren't sure how to reconcile the fancy-sounding dishes with their quesadillas. Among locals, though, Patterson's affinity for Mediterranean cookery was well-known. They cheered the restaurant's clandestine transition from Chimayo to Chianti.
Diners who Patterson describes as "well-heeled and well-traveled" were ecstatic to discover the island's best pasta in a New Mexican restaurant. The specter of cognitive dissonance didn't stop them from running up guest checks that put Chimayo on track to replicate its 2008 sales figures. "The Italian stuff is outselling the Tex-Mex menu eight to one," reports a grateful Patterson, who realized he'd never get rich selling $8 sandwiches. (A plate of scallops at the reimagined Chimayo runs $24.)
Still, he refuses to rush the evolution. Patterson standardized the Italian format last fall, but the dinner menu's back side still lists a number of "Chimayo favorites." Patterson says he plans to dispense with the bi-cuisine menu within weeks, but as recently as last month it wasn't unusual for Chimayo guests to encounter fellow diners happily gobbling chiles rellenos with Vivaldi playing in the background. The "Chimayo favorites" will still be served at lunch, but Patterson is edging toward a name change. "I don't know if I want to address that publicly," he says, hinting he might retire "Chimayo" before year's end.
"People expected it to change overnight, but you need to move slowly in a small town," Patterson explains. "Everything I've done so far I've done slowly."
By the time you read this review, Patterson may have rechristened the restaurant, which is bound to make it even harder to find. Consider the aggravation a side effect of being sucked into a brilliant chef's vortex. The eccentricities that surround Chimayo are secondary to the splendid pasta the restaurant produces. And while pasta is the showstopper, I didn't find a single dish at Chimayo that would make a Seattleite regret the ferry ride.
Chimayo doesn't have an especially distinguished-looking dining room. With its bare, white oak–hued tables and arbitrary wall hangings, the sunny space could double as a suburban home's breakfast nook or a burrito joint. There's space for only a few dozen diners, and the restaurant had nowhere to seat us when we arrived for our reservation. Realizing the carpeted hallway on the opposite side of the restaurant's closed front door was an unsuitable waiting area, the hostess suggested a glass of wine on the patio, a lovely terrace that spent much of the chilly summer unoccupied. When I didn't immediately settle on a varietal, the staffer warmly offered to pour a sample of any of the four available reds.
Patterson's menu is dominated by local products, including the Dungeness crab that's the centerpiece of the restaurant's most popular appetizer. "I'll be perfectly honest," Patterson says of his shaggy, crimped cushions of crab ravioli, which are frequently wiped off the specials chalkboard before 7 p.m. "It's a shameless ploy to get tourists into the restaurant."
Crab is a headache for Patterson, who can almost hear the shellfish's freshness ticking down: "It has to be iced, it has to stay on ice, and you've really only got about 48 hours to use it. I don't care what the package says." His urgency to rid the kitchen of crab before it goes bad might account for the abundant portions of meat he encases in each delicate raviolo. Confronted with so much deep-seated sweetness, eaters are unlikely to question Patterson's motivations. They'll be too busy savoring the dish's oceanic flavors and fighting over the third raviolo, finished with bloated sun-dried tomatoes, effervescent leaves of basil, and enough butter to coat the bottom of the shallow serving bowl.
