What to look forward to in 2022: Seattle food scene edition

Last year, along with all the COVID variants and weather closures (too hot, too cold, too much snow!), brought Seattle diners plenty of good things: fresh tortillas, incredible pop-ups and innovative collaborations.

This year, sadly looks to have started with many of the same difficulties — omicron and ice, in the first week alone — but hopefully holds plenty more for local eaters to get excited about. National trends coming to town, concepts that would make a great fit in the city, and expansion on current ideas are all on this list of things to look forward to in 2022 – the Seattle food scene edition.

More collaborative spaces

Last year breweries and cideries realized they could combine forces if they registered together as a distillery, and what this year really needs is more of that spirit. Space and time are at too much of a premium for everyone to pay for full-time kitchen space just to start doing pop-ups.

Look for more pop-ups to start regular weekly residencies on days restaurants are closed, for shared restaurants spaces or mini-food court concepts like Tukwila’s Spicebridge, and even more creative ways to build an audience before diving full-scale into opening a restaurant or food truck. Consolidating days they are open helps current restaurants hold down on staffing needs, while putting their space to good use on off days.

Hybrid design

Many local restaurants pivoted to selling products — their own or the kind of niche or high-end ingredients they use in the kitchen —as part of their effort to stay solvent in the worst of the pandemic. Now, as new restaurants open with the perspective of nearly two years of COVID, it’s likely many will bake this kind of operation into the business plan.

Chefs worth traveling for

Plenty of Seattleites have followed favorite chefs to try restaurants in outlying areas, like Nick Coffey’s Ursa Minor, Kevin Davis’s cooking at Canyon River Grill, and Colin Patterson’s vegetable forward menus at Mana in Leavenworth, and now it looks like more big names are heading for the hills.

Mike Easton of Il Nido plans to open Bar Bacetto in Waitsburg, while Max Petty of Eden Hill has taken over the former Whitehouse-Crawford space in nearby Walla Walla to open Kinglet. And a certain local Top Chef has hinted that his next endeavor won’t be in Seattle, but it will be nearby and celebrate his love of the mountains.

Smaller menus – in a good way

The reason that menus will likely shrink this year is bad — places working short on staff — but then end result could turn out well for a diner. Many of the best street food stalls and small restaurants around the world do just one thing or a few things, allowing them to do that single thing as well as possible. This trend could lead new pop-ups down the single-dish path, or a restaurant toward a more honed focus. While Phinney Ridge’s Chicken Supply does side dishes, their fried-chicken focus shows an example of how this is done.

Staff-focused policies

Well, here’s to hoping, anyway: the realities of the pandemic brought many chefs time to really think about what it meant to lead a team. Combined with the difficulty of hiring and retaining employees during the pandemic, many chefs are thinking about how they can create a restaurant kitchen that sustains and benefits their employees in ways that they haven’t before.

Portland’s Kachka lays out the details of how they are doing it, and will hopefully show Seattle chefs a path forward for a better industry, including wage equity, profit sharing and free healthcare — and they are offering to talk about it with any restaurateurs looking to try it themselves.