Crazy Perfect

Or, How to Make Many People Happy at a Restaurant in Kirkland and Feel Pretty Good about Yourself.

It’s ten o’clock on Sunday at Seattle’s Fremont Market and things are not going smoothly for Holly Smith. The owner and executive chef of Café Juanita, Smith is launching a new line of gelato. Today.

It’s the first sunny day in weeks, which should bode well for icy treats. But there’s been a freezer malfunction. The custom-made gelato cart — the dessert is named “Poco Carretto,” literally little cart — came unplugged during its half-hour-long transport from the Eastside and even with the addition of dry ice the temperature has risen to seventy degrees. The gelato is melting.

“I like to make everything at the last minute,” Smith explains. “People can taste that passion in my food. Had I made it last night it would have withstood the fluctuating temperature better. But we’re going for crazy-perfect.”

Smith and her crew decide to go against convention and stall the opening of their booth until eleven, by which time they hope the gelato will have recovered. But by ten fifteen, would-be customers begin making their way over, eyeing the gaily painted cart and bright blue umbrella. When can we have a taste? they ask. Smith, wearing jeans, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, maintains a smile as she asks them to come back in a little while.

By eleven the gelato has thickened and so has the crowd. Smith happily sets to scooping mounds of gelato into biodegradable bowls.

Women make up only a fraction of professional chefs across the United States. According to a 2007 Starchefs.com survey, women constitute 22 percent of all culinary professionals. But only 15 percent of those women are executive chefs. And these numbers are probably optimistic. Maureen Pothier, president of the Association for Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, last year told the online magazine Santé that although 50 percent of workers in the hospitality industry overall are women, a mere 3 percent are executive chefs.

Some chalk it up to the crazy hours, the intense demands of the work, a dearth of investors. Others call it sexism.

Of those few women who make it into the highest ranks, even fewer are mothers. Smith, 41, is the exception. She’s a single mom who recently took home the prestigious James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Northwest. (She was on the shortlist for the past three years running.) Her win was no surprise to those familiar with her restaurant, a converted midcentury house in the Juanita neighborhood of Kirkland, where Smith serves mouthwatering food rooted in northern Italian cuisine.

Raised in Monkton, Maryland, Smith had an early appreciation for locally acquired fare. “I grew up with hunters — duck, geese and dove mostly,” she recalls. “We were on a farm and in farm country, so ‘field to plate’ was natural for me. I was routinely fed sweetbreads, kidneys and game birds. Going to the stream for watercress to accompany shad roe, in season, and bacon was normal.”

A political science major, Smith dropped out of college and began her culinary career at the age of twenty-one at Au bon Pain in Boston. At the time, she was their youngest manager ever. She later trained at the Baltimore International Culinary College and at the Park Hotel in County Caven, Ireland, with chef Peter Timmons.

She waited tables, bartended, baked and cooked for almost a decade before debuting her culinary savoir-faire for Seattleites in 1993 at Place Pigalle. She was subsequently sous-chef at Dahlia Lounge and Brasa.

She purchased Café Juanita in 2000 and has drawn attention to the restaurant ever since. It was named one of Esquire magazine’s “Twenty-Two Best New Restaurants” in its first year, and in 2002, Forbes.com acknowledged Smith as one of the “Ten Most Interesting Up-and-Coming Young Chefs in America.” Smith has been featured in Santé and Gourmet, as well as in the Wine Spectator, which bestowed Awards of Excellence on Café Juanita for several years. Recently Marion Oliver McCaw Hall — home to Pacific Northwest Ballet and Seattle Opera — invited Smith to design menus for its café, lobby concessions and catering operations.

Poco Carretto, her most recent culinary endeavor, seems destined for similar acclaim. Certainly, Smith is thinking large. “The potential for Poco Carretto is endless, really,” she declares. Her plan is to eventually expand sales of packaged pints of gelato up and down the entire West Coast. A Web site for ordering online goes live in a few weeks.

By eleven forty-five people are lined up ten deep at the Fremont Market. By noon customers are returning, friends in tow, for seconds. Smith seems relieved. “Didn’t I see you earlier?” she asks a father and daughter. She’s doing brisk business when a family of four arrives requesting nondairy options. Smith deftly offers up three without skipping a beat: strawberry sorbet or Lillet sorbet or vanilla soy gelato.

There is one area, entirely unrelated to food, that Smith hasn’t quite mastered. The cash register, with its myriad buttons, is posing a challenge. She hauls out the instruction manual. “I was always very good at math,” says Smith, “but I wish I’d taken accounting.” She would have been a good MBA. She masters the information quickly, gives quick instruction to her staff and turns back to serving the throng of customers.

Nothing seems to faze Smith. Perhaps that has something to do with her routine of juggling various tasks, including, very importantly, that of single mother. Oliver, now three, steps behind the cart to act as Smith’s little helper. She bundles him up into her arms. “Hi Bean,” she says, snuggling up close. Oliver was eleven months old when Smith divorced after thirteen years of marriage. Those were hard years, says Smith. “Haaard. I was cooking with Oliver on my back. Haaaaaard.”

Has motherhood changed you? I ask. “Oh yeah,” says Smith, “I’m a kinder, gentler, nicer, more balanced person, for sure. But I’m not as good at multitasking as I used to be. Let’s put it this way: in the old days, the gelato freezer would have been plugged in.”

With multiple culinary operations prospering under her watchful eye, Smith seems inured to the kinds of stress that might make the less steely-willed wilt like day-old lettuce. She’s the first to give credit to those who support her at home and at work — arenas that often overlap. Nick, one of Smith’s line cooks at Café Juanita, was also employed as Oliver’s nanny last summer. With mom’s busy schedule, Oliver must have the occasional PB&J, right? Wrong. “He’s a gourmand,” deadpans Smith. “Yesterday he had pasta with porcini. And he loves foie gras.”

Onstage in New York, upon receiving the Beard Award, Smith offered heartfelt thanks to her staff, many of whom have been with her for nearly a decade, starting at the bottom and working their way up. Heidi Gates, operations manager for Poco Carretto, began by busing tables. Hannah Curtis, the newest member of the kitchen crew, has been dining at Café Juanita since she was a tween. This summer she asked Smith if she could be hired as a kitchen intern. “You know that means ‘for free,’ don’t you?” responded Smith.

Smith leaves the gelato cart in Gates’s hands to head back to Kirkland. She has a staff meeting before the restaurant opens for the evening.

Lavender and a sprinkling of calla lilies decorate the cream-colored façade of the split-level restaurant. Inside, a brown leather banquette stretches the length of the room, allowing views into the garden below. The surrounding trees give the dining room a soaring feel, as if the restaurant is floating in midair. Smith darts downstairs to check e-mails and grab a glass of water while the staff vacuums the floor and sets the tables with stark white tablecloths and single votive candles. Sounds of sizzling and the dull thud of chopping emanate from the kitchen.

Smith reappears a moment later looking all business in crisp chef whites, a pair of scissors in hand. I traipse after her into the restaurant’s shade garden — a sprawling combination of decorative and edible plants bordered by a babbling brook. “The garden,” explains Smith, “is a nod to keeping our hands in the dirt.”

Smith strives to use products that are local, seasonal and organic. She is on the lookout for cavolo nero, a type of black kale, featured in this evening’s soup. She quickly locates it in a nearby bed and nimbly cuts off a number of dark green leaves.

Growing her own food and herbs has both culinary and economic benefits. “We haven’t had to buy rosemary in over a year,” she asserts. She scans the garden for more kale before heading back inside, where she deposits her find in the kitchen. She grabs a spoon and dips it into recently prepared vinaigrette sitting on the counter. “Needs more lemon,” she tosses over her shoulder before heading downstairs.

It’s time for the daily staff meeting. “We could do it early if you guys are ready,” says Smith.

Sitting around the meeting table Smith lets the night’s specials — a long stream of elaborate dishes, sauces and desserts — trip off her tongue. The staff listens attentively and unblinkingly. Not a single note is taken. “They’ve been around awhile,” explains Smith. “They just memorize it.”

They’re going over service details while simultaneously folding napkins just removed from the dryer when the new pastry chef pops in with a question about the gelato machine. Smith follows him into the back room. He pushes a button and kiwi sorbet begins to ooze forth. “Got a spatula ready?” Smith asks. The fellow’s eyes reveal utter terror: he races out of the kitchen. Smith waits unfazed next to the machine, holding a stainless-steel canister to catch the pale green stream. The sorbet has just reached the top when her employee, breathless, reappears wielding the utensil. “It’s his third day,” says Smith, shrugging as she heads upstairs to the kitchen. “He’s having a rough time but he’ll get the hang of it.”

It’s chef de cuisine Stuart Lane’s night off and Smith is doing the cooking. The first customers show up the minute the restaurant opens. By six o’clock most tables are filled. Orders come into the kitchen and Smith calls them out, loud and clear, for all the cooks to hear. One young couple — first-timers — shows up half an hour early. Smith suggests they take a stroll through the garden. “You have a garden?” the woman asks incredulously.

She’s presiding over at least six flaming burners when a waitress approaches to ask about the correct pronunciation of cavolo nero. “Ca-VO-lo . . .

CA-volo . . . ” intones Smith to herself before responding with authority: “CA-volo.” The waitress, satisfied, turns on her heel, and heads back to the guests at her table.

When she’s not being sought after with questions, Smith busies herself wiping counters — and keeping the half-dozen dishes on the burners from going up in flames. But these moments of relative calm don’t last long. An order for Porcini Roasted and Raw comes in. “I’m very proud of that dish,” says Smith of her signature mushroom appetizer in which half the fungi are served raw as a salad, the other half roasted in olive oil, butter and thyme. Smith holds it up appraisingly before placing it on the counter where a waiter whisks it silently and efficiently away.

Smith explains that at the moment six of her twenty-two-member staff — including a number of line cooks — are still in training, which generally lasts eight months. Kitchen staff typically start with salads, or on what’s known as the cold line, and progress to stovetop, or the hot line.

“Those who work the cold line,” notes Smith, “are known as salad girls, regardless of their gender. Hot line cooks are traditionally considered more macho.” Apparently shirking convention, Smith has given a hot line position to a woman — and one of the youngest in the restaurant, at that: eighteen-year-old Kylie Smith (no relation). “She’s unbelievable,” says Smith. “She’s going to be famous one day. Just wait.”

The pastry chef is back. Smith dashes downstairs to have a look at the troubled gelato machine. She quickly diagnoses the problem. A gasket has been put on backwards. She deftly adjusts it and heads back upstairs.

Anyone who has watched a cooking competition on the Food Network has a fair idea of how quickly things heat up in the kitchen. But Smith stays pretty cool. A waitress makes sure that the chef has a steady supply of water and Smith, in return, politely proffers thanks each time her glass is refilled.

She dips a spoon into one of the many rapidly boiling sauces and brings it to her lips to taste, apparently impervious to the temperature. When a spoon falls into the open flame on the stove, Smith plucks it from the fiery depths with nary a grimace.

She’s just put the final touches on an antipasto dish — Grilled Asparagus with Fried Dog Mountain Duck Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano — and proudly displays it. She hastily takes it back from the waiter and, with a slightly furrowed brow, plucks out what she perceives to be a slightly overcooked asparagus spear. Satisfied with her edit, she sends it out to the floor.

The chaos of the kitchen, with its fire and din, is in stark contrast to the dining room a few feet away, where piped-in Lucinda Williams and candlelit tables combine to create an ambiance of utter calm. Diners gaze lovingly at their partners and their food in equal measure.

A restaurant is a precarious venture; having dedicated, knowledgeable and efficient employees doesn’t hurt. As much as Smith gives kudos to her staff (profusely and often), the credit, in every sense of the word, is all due to her at Café Juanita. In a business where having a backer (or many) is not only the norm but also often an imperative, Smith is the sole investor here. “I wanted to be accountable to myself, my guests, my employees and no one else,” she explains. “There are certainly times that I wish I had a partner to help implement the things I like to dream on, but I have resources and a great staff and great guests.”

Cooking may be about combining separate ingredients so that the completed dish is more delectable than the sum of its parts. But in the best restaurants in the world it is also an exercise in individual expression, where the personality of the chef reveals itself in her culinary creations. Here, the personality is all Holly Smith. “Someone has got to be the leader,” she says, “and that’s me.”

Portrait by Sherry Loeser, Food photography by Tom Barwick