Yes, we're trying something new here at the Hedonist. I alluded to it in a previous post, but I wanted to make sure I was able to set something up before tellin' y'all about it.

Tom Douglas, for those of you not from the Seattle area, can be said to be an institution here in the Emerald City. He runs several restaurants, including the Palace Kitchen, The Dahlia Lounge, and Lola. He's been nominated for the James Beard Award back in 1996. He has two book out on the market: Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen and Tom's Big Dinners : Big-Time Home Cooking for Family and Friends. He's also been recently invited to participate in Iron Chef America (which airs this Sunday).

And most importantly, he makes a kickin' Coconut Cream Pie.

He and his staff were kind enough to arrange a sit down with me, and answer a few questions (some of which were provided by some of you readers out there).

You moved to Seattle in the late 70's and have been working in the food industry since that time. How has the food scene changed in the area between then and now?

Well, there are more restaurants now, with more people living downtown. The variety of restaurants have increased tremendously.

"Chinese" food, which used to be concentrated in Chinatown, is more readily available. Thai food and Vietnamese have come along. That and the depth of ethnicity has really changed, Restaurants like that have now gone upscale. Wild Ginger and Monsoon, places that have taken a pan-asian approach, can now concentrate on their specialty, whether it's barbecue or seafood. I think that's great.

I don't think that how the infrastructure of how restaurants "are" has changed. But they've certainly changed for people. People eat out more for sustenance now, and not necessarily for special occasions. People eat out for dinner more than they used to. Lunch used to be an equal player with dinner, but now dinner is way out there. People don't take the time to deal with lunch like they used to. The two martini lunch is pretty much gone. That has pretty much changed everywhere in the country.

That's too bad, because there was a charm to that, a civility to doing business over a meal and a cocktail.

What do you like most about working in Seattle?

The people. It's a great town here. My staff is wonderful. It's nice to have the depth of great employees out there. We could always use more, but there's a great amount of restaurant professionals out there to choose from, something that's more difficult when you get to other places.

Jeffrey Steingarten has suggested in one of his columns that the Pacific Northwest has wonderful raw materials, but no cuisine based on them. Do you think that's so?

I don't look upon restaurants as having cuisines, I look at them as restaurants. There's a "style" of restaurants.

The cliche of Manhattan restaurants is the snooty Maitre D' who will maybe or maybe not let you in for dinner, depending on how you're dressed, do you have a reservation, who you're with, blah, blah, blah. New York suffered from that for years and hurt their business for a long time. When Danny Meyer took his trip along the West Coast in 1984-85, and the opened Union Square Cafe in New York, I think that he brought some of that West Coast and Seattle culture back to the East Coast. He got rid of the snotty maitre d'. Servers became your servant and not your big brother. He brought them professionalism.

I think that's what's part of Northwest Cuisine. Northwest cuisine is how you're treated on the telephone. When you call for a reservation, it's not "I'll see if I can get you in", it's "We'd love to have you come in". It's the Northwest approachability and style that you didn't used to see everywhere.

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Getting back to cuisines, I do think there's an approach to the food here. There's a natural, beautiful, simplicity in, for instance, serving a King Crab Leg with a warm side of butter, that you might not see in a Nobu or Gramercy Tavern. Here we celebrate the crab leg, where others might put it in an omelet, stew it in a cup or serve it in a custard with fishcake and morel mushrooms.

What value do you see in organically grown food?

I think it all depends. I was just on a panel for the Seattle Times where we talked about this.

There's a little difference of opinion between Holly Smith, out at Cafe Juanita, Daisley Gordon from Campagne and myself who were on the panel, and Christine Keff from Flying Fish who was in the audience.

Christine has gone completely organic. I'm of the mind that organic foods depends on the percentages. I can't compete, with all my restaurants, if I'm paying more for product than they are. I'm comfortable with paying ten to twenty percent more for organic, but if my chicken costs thirty dollars a plate to my competitors twenty, then I'm going to lose customers.

Then I started looking at other things, like -- Is organic better than local? Am I better of with a non-organic head of cauliflower from the Skagit Valley than an organic head of cauliflower from the San Joaquin Valley? If I buy organic, then I have a diesel truck driving 1400 miles up the coast spewing fumes getting me my cauliflower.

So I make my choices based on whether it's local, then sustainable, and then organic. Local is first, definitely, sustainable second, especially when dealing with wild products such as salmon. Then organic.

Other than your experiences in the kitchen, what has been your best education as an owner/operator?

Being a general manager of a restaurant. I had the opportunity to be general manager and head chef at Cafe Sport. As a GM, you learn to get rid of the "my food at any cost" side of being a chef pretty quickly. If you can't put down a plate of food on a table and make money at it, you're going out of business.

If you can't get people to look at your menu outside your door, and get them to come in, you're going to go out of business. Until you recognize that the customer is king, and that the person with the wallet is keeping you alive, and until you put that into your business model, you won't survive. There are the rare exceptions, but I find this to be true.

How did you get the Iron Chef gig?

They called me.

Was this out of New York?

Actually the production company is out of L.A. Triage Entertainment I think is their name. I got a call one day "We're from Iron Chef, would you be willing to come on?"

I've always said that I would never do it, because I've never been in a cooking contest in my whole life. But I realized the power of it. I wear many hats in my job, and I certainly wear the marketing hat. If you're not doing Iron Chef when they call, you're not much of a marketing person.

How was the experience overall? Was it fun?

It was a hoot! It was kind of wacky. I missed my flight and didn't get in until the middle of the night. I got in at 3 AM and had to be there at noon.

It was taped in Manhattan. Who wouldn't want to go there on a free trip? Free hotel, free plane ride, and 350 staff members covering my ass back here while I was out there playing around. It was a once in a lifetime kind of a thing and was fun.

But it was certainly not at all like a Saturday night here at one of the restaurants. Cooking for three judges with a camera up your nose is small potatoes compared to waiting for 300 people to order, staff working all around you, people calling out orders, 3 managers milling about, and expeditors screaming "where the hell's my food?".

Any advice for new chefs out there?

Go work at a restaurant. All these people want to go to Cooking Institutes, when all you have to do is work at a restaurant. Make sure it's right for you. Look at your talents and compare them with what it means to be a chef. Get your priorities straight.

Being a chef is as much about the food as it is about learning how to manage people around you. Learn how to run a proper cost scenario. Because if you don't, you won't be a chef for long. For young cooks, they need to know that there's a bigger picture.

What's next for you? Another cookbook? Another restaurant?

We have a book coming out in May called "I love Crabcakes". 50 recipes, all with crab. Different rifts on crabcakes, basically. Taking on the American classic. It's going to be fun.

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