Westward & Little Gull

Cure, smoke and the Lake Union pass

The salmon is cured before it reaches the wood oven bagel, a quiet sequence of salt, time and heat. Zoi Antonitsas , chef at Westward & Little Gull, Vashon Island, is tied to that bench through the Westward kitchen in Seattle, where her named work as executive chef sat beside her 2014 post as chef de cuisine at Madison Park Conservatory. Food & Wine named her a Best New Chef in 2015, recognition attached to those Seattle kitchens and to a year when her cooking was being read through the market, the water and a disciplined Mediterranean hand. They are not ornamental dishes. They ask the kitchen to hold a cure, manage smoke, keep texture in seafood and dairy, and send the plate out with enough restraint that the method remains visible.

The bagel and the octopus

The range of the program shows in two stations. One works like a bakery and a larder at once: dough formed for the wood oven, wild salmon held under cure, labneh carrying the cool acid against the fish. The other leans into the pass, where octopus has to come through braise and fire without losing its line. Tzatziki does useful work there, not as garnish but as temperature, fat and lactic brightness. Around those dishes the menu has been described through Pacific seafood, raw oysters and a Northwest and Mediterranean vocabulary, with grilled octopus, salmon gravlax tartine, wood baked gigante beans and braised Oregon lamb shoulder all belonging to the same cooking language. Little Gull adds another register to the house: an oyster bar and grocery counter attached to Westward, with bottled wines, fresh baked bread, cheeses, smoked olive oil and whole oysters to go. Its oyster bar has 22 seats, a small number that matters because shucking is bench-side work, repeated by hand, one shell at a time.

The room by the water

The room carries a nautical style without needing to perform it too loudly. Westward sits on the north shore of Lake Union, where the patio looks over the lake and the city rises beyond it. Inside, the pass belongs to seafood and fire; outside, Adirondack chairs and fire pits turn the edge of the restaurant into a slower station, still part of the service but not quite the same tempo. The raw bar gives the place its most direct rhythm. Oysters arrive cold, opened to order, then move quickly from hand to plate. Little Gull's counter changes the scale again, bringing bread, cheese, oil and bottles into reach of the same appetite that fills the dining room. It is a restaurant with a larder attached, and that makes the craft feel less like a single meal than a set of habits.

Recognition kept in its address

Antonitsas's Food & Wine Best New Chef recognition belongs to 2015, and to the Seattle work named around Westward and Madison Park Conservatory. That matters because awards travel badly when they are loosened from the kitchens that earned them. Here, the stronger record is still the work at hand: cure, smoke, shellfish, bread, and the particular discipline of sending braised octopus with tzatziki from the Westward pass.