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farm-to-table cuisine comes to Seatac
BY REBEKAH DENN
PHOTOS BY LARA FERRONI
Less than a mile away, the jumbo jets fly supplies into SeaTac Airport: Berries from Chile, shrimp from Thailand, New Zealand lamb, edamame from China, mangos, bananas.
Mark Bodinet and Roy Breiman don’t need any of it. At Copperleaf, their 28-seat restaurant, the chefs rely on lamb from Arlington’s 90 Farms, on shellfish from Puget Sound, mushrooms from foragers and from the mycelium layered with damp straw and wood chips on their own SeaTac grounds.
Copperleaf opened last year smack in suburbia, located on an 18-acre oasis a few blocks from an airport Motel Six. It sounds like an unlikely spot for a “refined farm menu” sourced mostly from a 100-mile radius, featuring entrees like St. Jude albacore with fennel confit. But the unlikeliness is part of the point, said Breiman, whose past positions include stages at the Salish Lodge and Michelin-starred restaurants in France.
It’s easy these days to sell a local-organic menu in a major city. It might be even more important to bring that food and philosophy to places out of the gourmet spotlight, Breiman said. And tiny Copperleaf doesn’t have to rely on local word-of-mouth or airport guests. It got a big head start because it doesn’t stand alone. It’s housed in Cedarbrook Lodge, a former training center for Washington Mutual Bank, currently a business and leisure hotel aimed at an eco-green niche. The industrial-size kitchen serves up farro salad, organic chicken and the likes at business events and meetings held at the lodge, providing economies of scale for the small dining room framed at one end with blown glass sculptures and at the other end with the outdoors.
What’s on the menu?
Better to ask the suppliers—Bluebird and Stiebrs, Foraged and Found and Full Circle, Nash’s and Theo and other familiar names from the Northwest.
“The farmers are really the stars,” said Breiman, whose formal title is Culinary Director.
“What ingredients they have for us is what we're going to use in the menu,” added Bodinet, the executive chef.
His favorite?
“My favorite is what’s the best.”
Copperleaf wouldn’t be the first restaurant to carry off a local-organic ethos in the midst of wedding bookings and corporate ownership. Just look at Earth & Ocean at the Starwood-owned W Hotel, where local heroes Jonathan Sundstrom and Maria Hines got their start.
But Copperleaf has incorporated the green philosophy throughout the facility from the ground up, and has the advantage of its sanctuary-like surroundings. More than half the 18-acre property is restored wetlands; the rest includes room for Copperleaf’s own gardens and wild growing areas. It’s got a healthy bin of compost that takes up as much real estate as some restaurants’ walk-in freezers.
The shortest distance in the 100-mile menu is a minute’s walk from the dining room. That’s where three sizable raised beds are loaded with strawberry plants transplanted from Breiman’s North Bend garden, 16 varieties of tomatoes (they didn’t do well in last summer’s chill, but the chefs are trying again), and enough carrots and beets to supply the kitchen for a few days per harvest. Lemongrass, chocolate mint and pineapple sage take the lead in an “herbal infusion area,” while hoop houses keep celery and lettuces and other hardier plants growing through the winter. A former manager at the South 47 Farm is on staff, and the entire kitchen crew spends a few hours each week working in the gardens. Used cooking oil is recycled for biodiesel, a satellite-activated watering system turns on sprinklers only in areas where they’re most needed, and runoff is filtered and reused on the grounds.
The green and seasonal focus isn’t new for Bodinet, 27, who came to Copperleaf after five years at the famed French Laundry in the Napa Valley. What’s different for him here, besides the new title and responsibility, is the limits of the Northwest winter. He’s ended up relishing the restrictions they impose.
“Things taste better when you’re anticipating them,” Bodinet said.
He can buy English peas any time of year, but “they're not as special, they're not as great,” until spring. Pulling braised short ribs with carrots out of the oven to warm a winter night? “That’s exciting,” he said.
And one of the best compliments he could hear from a diner? “Wow, these beets were grown a half-hour from my house, and they're delicious, and I don't even like beets!” he said.
“You’ve got to be able to adjust to all the different seasons, or you're just like all those other restaurants out there, thinking it's always summer somewhere.”
The project is a partnership, Breiman and Bodinet said. It’s a serendipitous twist in a relationship that began when Bodinet, a big guy with a gentle air, was a young culinary student working under Breiman in Martha’s Vineyard. They kept in touch over the years—the high-profile French Laundry kitchen involved “great times, not always easy times,” Bodinet said—and it helped to have a mentor for advice.
Breiman, 49 and polished, is accustomed to hotel and lodge operations. But he saw the Cedarbrook job as the first time he’d “had it all”—a chance to help design a restaurant and build its culture as well as its staff. The partnership has worked well: In Copperleaf’s first months, it was named one of the country’s top 10 new restaurants by Gayot. Breiman doesn’t even have to say the words, it’s clear from his pride in the younger chef, but he says them anyway as Bodinet heads from dining room to kitchen: “I love him like a son.”
The restaurant itself seems almost an elegant demonstration area, given the size of the kitchen that backs it, but the enormous space is put to good use. The kitchen walk-ins hold whole fish and house-cured prosciutto and other charcuterie; in one corner a staffer sweeps flour off a broad wooden board after pinching out the day’s supply of agnolotti.
Bodinet takes over one of the lines to plate dishes for photographs, sizzling and swirling the plates with aplomb.
He had found his calling at a vocational high school, he said, hitting an epiphany while making a classic mushroom-based chasseur sauce. The chef-instructor stopped by to taste it, and put in a handful of salt. Bodinet tried it again. “Wow,” he said. Suddenly, it was perfect. From then on, he knew what he wanted to do. And as the lunch buffet ends and the kitchen starts preparations for dinner service, he goes off to do just that.
Seattle-based reporter Rebekah Denn has won two James Beard awards for food writing.
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