The restaurant is in Hotel Brookmere, an 88-room boutique hotel located on the site of the former Longfellows Hotel & Restaurant on Union Avenue, which is scheduled to open later this year. “Getting to do everything from the ground up is super exciting,” said Smith, who has spent more than a decade as a chef at fine-dining restaurants in the boutique hotel industry. A Seattle-area native, Smith began cooking for his family at a young age.
It started as a chore shared with his four siblings but eventually became something he looked forward to. At 16, he enrolled in a culinary program at a local vocational school and was hooked. “[I] fell in love with the culture, the people, that tactile response of just getting to cook with your hands, but really just that aspect of making great food and watching people fall in love with that first bite they take,” Smith said.
From there, he worked at the Sahalee Country Club, Salish Lodge and Willows Lodge as well as freestanding restaurants in the Pacific Northwest. Over the years, he says he has gravitated toward restaurants in boutique hotels because of the high-quality food and the support structure. “Restaurants are always just surviving by the skin of their teeth and hotels provide that support structure, where you get to play around a little bit more, do cooler, more interesting things, without it being like, ‘If we don't get this exactly right, if we have an off week, we fail,’” Smith said.
He was named the executive .
