Local Butcher-at-Large Doing a Month of Meatless Mondays

March Mondays are meatless at Skelly and the Bean.
Now that Skelly and the Bean has completed its first week in business, the Capitol Hill restaurant is launching the next phase of owner Zephyr Paquette’s uniquely community-focused vision.
On Wednesday through Saturday nights, Paquette is in the kitchen and it’s business as usual at SkellyBean. The other nights of the week, the chef turns her space over to her “incubator series,” which begins Monday night. First up is chef, instructor, and butcher-at-large Sarah Wong, who has studied the finer points of dismemberment both domestically and abroad, and is a member of the Butcher’s Guild.
And what will this butcher be cooking during her Monday night stints this month? Why, a meatless Monday menu, obviously.
Wong says she took on a month of meatless Mondays in part for the irony (“because all chefs love irony”) but also because the idea of sustainable eating is something she advocates as an instructor at Seattle Central Community College’s culinary program. Before becoming a chef-instructor, Wong worked at Café Flora and the Harvest Vine and, as the dinner’s ticketing website coyly states, “was a personal chef for two very famous Vegas-based tiger-lovers.” She’s an articulate advocate of eating lower on the food chain, and urges her students to become conversant in emerging needs like allergies and dietary restrictions.
The five-course dinners cost $35, and you can buy tickets for the March 5 installment online. The first dinner is devoted to Southern-style flavors and ingredients, followed by a vegan meal March 12, and five gluten-free vegetarian courses are on the menu March 19. The final dinner on March 26, says Wong, will be live food, fermented.