Urban Farmhouse
Emmer and Rye’s farm-to-table menu begins with pure ingredients and ends with reasonable prices.
WHEN I SEE what’s fashionable right now in restaurants, I can hear my grandmother cracking up from the afterlife.
Emmer and Rye looks more like a Snohomish antiques market than what it really is: the most hotly awaited restaurant to open in Seattle this year. Folksy vintage light fixtures illuminate the oak-encrusted Victorian at the crown of Queen Anne. The primary decorations in the cluster of cozy rooms are stained-glass windows and mason jars filled with grain. The place looks—and candidly, sort of smells—more like a ’70s-era falafel collective than the darling du jour of the hipster foodie set.
But what really has Grandma slapping her knees is the menu. Roasted Jerusalem artichokes and fingerling potatoes, creamy parsnip soup, cider-braised pork shoulder with root vegetables and collards. They’re charging big-city money for the suppers we fixed on the farm! Well, I doubt Grandma was dredging sunchokes through black truffle aioli or pan-roasting oysters down on the farm—but point taken. And the prices are more like small-town money…but more on that later.
Fact is, owner and chef Seth Caswell has in his five-year Seattle tenure become one of our fiercest proponents of the back-to-basics, farm-to-table, natural-and-sustainable paradigm that has revolutionized dining out. From gigs in East Coast kitchens with their own organic farmland, Caswell migrated west in 2005. He made his Seattle name sending earthy innovations out of the kitchen of the Stumbling Goat Bistro on Phinney Ridge.
The owner’s sale of that restaurant launched a prolonged period of suspense for deposed chef Caswell and his growing legion of groupies. “I wanted to open a restaurant that would dignify the farmer,” he says earnestly, a vision that ricocheted his dreams and those of his investors from downtown to South Lake Union. And then The Crash sucked the reality out of all those plans.
Amid a space that still bespeaks goopster cinnamon rolls comes the culinary whiplash of a raw-as-the-forest-floor aesthetic.
Caswell hunkered down, performed guest gigs in friends’ restaurants around town, and kept his radar up. When he heard that the folks who owned Julia’s on Queen Anne were in search of a new partner and a new profile, the stars aligned. Though it had evolved into a mediocre brunch joint, Julia’s had begun decades earlier as one of Seattle’s seminal natural food haunts. It closed its doors January 20, and Emmer and Rye—Caswell’s homage to an ancient grain and the beguiling whiskey—opened 10 days later.
And so, amid a space that still bespeaks Julia’s goopster cinnamon rolls and breakfast burritos, comes the colossal culinary whiplash of Caswell’s raw-as-the-forest-floor aesthetic. In plates sized as appetizers or entrees (both of which come in small and large versions), Caswell bejewels chunks of barely seared tuna with colorful, candy-sweet diced beets and swirls of sunchoke puree. He spangles dewy leaves of organic radicchio and mizuna with pickled rhubarb and heartbreak-tender mustard-marinated rabbit loin. He tangles toothsome ribbons of wild nettle pappardelle pasta with shreds of braised rabbit and ragged spring vegetables in a thyme-fragrant broth. (Wild nettle pasta! Divine!)
Published: June 2010
Seth Caswell was not the Chef at the Stumbling Goat Bistro at the time it was sold, Phil Halbgewachs for a year before the sale and he did some amazing things as well.