Dahlia Lounge changed Seattle – but it never changed itself

The day I started my first job out of college, my boss offered to take me to lunch. He listed a bunch of restaurant options, none of which I – a 22-year-old barely clearing minimum wage – knew. But then he mentioned Dahlia Lounge, a name I recognized, a “fancy” place, the kind my parents maybe went to celebrate an anniversary.

I jumped on it excitedly. My seafood cobb salad, which cost the same as an hour and a half of my wages, was delightful. But even then, before I first put pen to paper about food, I remember thinking, “What’s so special about this?”

More than a decade and a half earlier, when Tom Douglas opened his first restaurant, Dahlia Lounge, he was doing something special – and changed the city’s food culture.

“It's hard to imagine a more adventuresome menu anywhere,” wrote Jonathon Susskind of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, just under two months after Dahlia debuted. It echoed the sneak preview by his Seattle Times counterpart, John Hinterberger: “It has an innovative menu too uncommon to ignore.” But looking back at Dahlia Lounge’s early dishes, it becomes clear that while it once lifted all Seattle restaurants with its rising tide of culinary standards, its aging foundation wasn’t built for 2021.

Thirty-two years is practically a century in restaurant years, if not a millennium. Dahlia Lounge’s lifespan stretched over multiple recessions that raked the industry with closures, and it likely could have rested on its laurels for years to come. But the pandemic hastened a death knell for many restaurants, particularly those Downtown among the tourists and office workers, and a glance back at the restaurant’s beginnings, shows that Dahlia Lounge was of another era.

Other restaurants – including ones from Douglas himself – evolved and pushed forward, jumping off from Dahlia’s innovations, while it seemed happy to float along, not unlike an aging rock band that changed the genre and continues to tour with passion and skill, but no longer produces new hits.

The gushing reviews started almost before Dahlia served its first coconut cream pie, Douglas’s reputation from his time as chef at Café Sport preceding him. One after another, pieces praised the restaurant for how it wove local ingredients and styles together with dishes and techniques from other cuisines.

With a more deft, nuanced touch than the restaurants that flew the banner of “Asian Fusion” before him, Douglas’s menu created a blueprint for Seattle’s own cuisine, cherry-picking the best elements of dishes from local immigrant-run restaurants and European fine-dining traditions alike, expertly pairing them with the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. From an enormous, red-walled space in the heart of Downtown, Dahlia Lounge wowed Seattle with its creative mashups.

But by the time I sat down for that lunch 15 years ago, the Seattle P-I preferred the crab cakes at Douglas’s newer Etta’s to the ones at Dahlia Lounge and the chef was in full restaurateur mode with the launch of Serious Pie. It was still, as Nancy Leson of the Seattle Times described at the time, “A fine example of what the region does best,” but that’s a far cry from the groundbreaking nature of the original effusive praise. The final Seattle Times review, in 2015, lauded it, but called the atmosphere retro and deemed the once-inventive dishes definitive.

Seattle’s current crop of restaurants that cross culinary cultures, in a city where most people are as likely to choose pho as French fries, it seems incredible that Douglas’s sun-dried tomato-studded menu was so shocking three decades ago. The global outlook, applauded for its incorporation of gnocchi and polenta, hoisin sauce, and chow mein, now seems muddled at best, and – when reading reflections on it – appropriative.

The 1992 “Pike Place Market Cookbook” describes a dish as “an original Tom Douglas recipe, inspired by a meal he enjoyed at a local Chinese restaurant.” In his own 2001 cookbook, “Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen,” he attributes some of his access to his “discovery” of the cooking of Seattle’s Asian communities. “I want food to taste good, above all,” he explains, “and I’m happy to borrow from anybody or any tradition to achieve it.”

Douglas evolved: he helped staff open restaurants featuring cuisines from their own background, including a Tibetan dumpling house and modern Japanese restaurant. But Dahlia stuck with what had made it so successful in the first place: seasoning its dishes liberally with the food of other cultures, often stripped of their context, gussied up with the then-novel use of fresh local seafood.

Dahlia’s legacy lives on in what are now table stakes for opening great local restaurants: that they show off the incredible local ingredients from wild mushrooms to just-caught salmon, and that they speak fluently the many culinary languages of the city. Douglas found success with these by combining them in new ways, along with his attention to detail and quality. But as he expanded, he used his creativity, acumen, and ideas to open new places, rather than keep Dahlia pushing forward.

By the time it closed, Dahlia Lounge no longer represented a flashy, exciting way to marry the city’s best parts, but just the opposite: it served as a reminder of a time when we didn’t have fresh fish and pho all over, catering to those who hadn’t adjusted to that reality.

So as you mourn Dahlia Lounge, just don’t forget to celebrate that we live in a city that made such a premise obsolete.