These two Black-owned Seattle restaurants show how to support Black chefs

A year and a half past the George Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement creating awareness of just how badly this country leaves its Black residents behind, the lists of Black-owned restaurants make the rounds less frequently and the cries to support budding Black chefs quieted down. But for two of Seattle’s prominent Black-owned restaurants, supporting Black people in the industry is an ongoing, committed part of their lives.

Changing the systemic problems putting Black chefs and restaurateurs at a disadvantage requires a change from rampant gatekeeping to holding open doors. These two restaurants demonstrate how to do just that.

Osteria La Spiga

In February, Osteria La Spiga chef and co-owner Sabrina Tinsley started the restaurant’s Future of Diversity Guest Chef Series. Operating a one-off pop-up usually requires fronting a lot of money for ingredients, tracking down a space, and drumming up an audience, but this program does its best to make things as easy as possible for the BIPOC guest chef to come in and impress with their unique culinary stylings.

Natalie Evans of We Be JAMin’ Bakery cooked Afro-Caribbean food, Monica Wachira of Monique’s Hot Kitchen cooked Kenyan cuisine, and in September winemaker Shae Frichette of Frichette Winery teamed up with Chocolatier Michael Poole of Hot Chocolat for a class.

La Spiga provides the space, equipment, and facilitates all the ordering, plus purchases all of the ingredients. The guest chefs then take home 20% of the proceeds from the night, plus tips and many sell their own products in addition to the food they make that night. On top of this, Tinsley interviews each chef on Zoom to make sure that pop-up customers get the context of the food and understand who made it and why. While you can’t taste the food, La Spiga’s website keeps an archive of all the previous interviews.

December’s version of the event is a pop-up Holiday Market on Dec. 5 from noon to 4 p.m. at the restaurant. The previous guest chefs will sell their products, including spice blends, oils, baked goods, and sauces, along with various hot street foods, and raffle tickets for a basket full of stuff from La Spiga and the guest chefs.  

Ezell’s Famous Chicken

Siblings Faye Stephens, Lewis and Darnell Rudd now openly discuss the many systemic challenges they ran into as Black people trying to launch a business in Seattle. Beyond sharing their story of trouble getting loans and issues with city permitting, they hope to find ways to make it easier for today’s Black entrepreneurs to follow a similar path. In September, the company announced its Rudd’s R.U.B.B. initiative: Raising Up Black Businesses. The beloved fried chicken chain paired up with food delivery service DoorDash to give away $2500 to each of 20 Black-owned businesses in the form of no-strings-attached grants.

The partnership came about when DoorDash offered a free promotion to Ezell’s in 2020 as part of their own efforts to support Black-owned business. But while Ezell’s was doing fine right then – takeout fried chicken being a pretty pandemic-proof operation – Ezell’s CEO Lewis Rudd took the opportunity to show how their support for Black-owned businesses could do even more.

The initial $50,000 ($40,000 from DoorDash and $10,000 from Ezell’s) got dispersed in October. While all types of businesses received money, the group included grants to local food business Fully Charged Allergy Friendly Baked Goods (formerly Dotz).

Ezell’s plans to continue the program in the future and is recruiting businesses to partner with them to fund it as an ongoing operation. But while the formal organization only launched this year, for those that know Rudd, this just continued his long tradition of supporting employees and community members as they start their own businesses.