Food Stuff: Feast Master

"I’ve always been a supporter of the arts.”

You might think that local chef Tamara Murphy is talking about plate presentation, or perhaps about the art that has hung on her restaurants’ walls. You would be wrong, since Murphy’s vision of the arts, as displayed in Burning Beast, her annual large-scale cookout at Smoke Farm near Arlington, is much more festive. “I wanted to create an outdoor event that supported the arts and local farms by using whole animals,” she says of the outdoor cooking bash, now in its third year.

The protein list for this year’s event will include creatures that have become staples: cow, pig, lamb and salmon. But it will also showcase bison, rabbit, geoduck and an array of fresh local vegetables. “No vegetarian will go hungry!” Murphy promises. “There will be enough food for everyone.” In addition, music from the bands Pickled Okra and Swamp Soul, along with performances by Ms. Honey Suckle Hype and Tamara the Trapeze Lady (not Murphy), will round out the event, which ends with an evening burning of a wooden beast (last year they burned a twenty-foot-tall goat). The result will be what Murphy envisioned back in 2008, a festival that embraces the arts as enthusiastically as it does food.

The musical acts should only help an event that has seen ticket sales double since its inception and now welcomes a growing number of the city’s greatest culinary talents. With a lineup including Matt Dillon of the Corson Building and Sitka and Spruce, Josh Henderson of Skillet, Angie Roberts of Boka, Tyson Danilson of Marjorie and Garrett Abel of DeLaurenti, this year’s Burning Beast should be the best to date. Yet the success of Burning Beast “has been a process of trial and error,” according to Murphy.

Through it all, Murphy, along with Stuart Smithers and Mike Katell, who own the 360-acre former dairy where the festival takes place, has kept the event true to its original conception as a laid-back celebration of food, art and music. “Burning Beast is a relaxed festival with no pretensions,” says Murphy, “and the chefs involved all have a similar vision as I do about supporting local farms and food." •

Murphy’s Law? After a rough start, an accomplished Seattle chef looks forward to a fruitful summer.

Burning Beast founder Tamara Murphy has been taking it on the chin of late. So far this year, she has witnessed the closure of her Belltown restaurant Brasa, the uprooting of Elliott Bay Book Company, from which her Elliott Bay Café drew many of its customers, and repeated troubles in securing a home for a new restaurant called Terra Plata. These setbacks, though, are trivial for the accomplished Seattle chef. In addition to Burning Beast, look for Murphy’s name on an upcoming book titled Tender: Farmers, Cooks, Eaters. This summer will also bring another Elliott Bay Café at the eponymous bookstore’s new Capitol Hill location, and, the chef assures, Terra Plata will finally find a home. In addition to all that, Murphy’s Incredible Feast, held August 22 at the University District farmers’ market, will pair twenty-five local chefs with twenty-five local farms to cook up a storm from the best that the Pacific Northwest has to offer your taste buds.