Sundstrom - Lark: Cooking Wild in the Northwest

To all the moms and chefs who

showed me the way, thank you

JOHN SUNDSTROM

W HEN I BEGAN WORK ON THIS COOKBOOK , I knew it needed to be firmly located in the Pacific Northwest, my chosen home. It feels to me that we have three distinct seasons of food: Mist, Evergreen, and Bounty. Within each, there are waves of seasonal foods; there are fewer in the long gray months of Mist and we treasure them dearly. Evergreen comes on slowly, the forests and farms waking up from a long wet winter to unfurl their leaves and hope for some sun. Then for a brief window in the late summer and early fall, we struggle to keep up with the season of Bountythe choices are overwhelming, and in the kitchen we try to stay out of the way and let each ingredient sing.

I love the Japanese idea of micro-seasons: appreciate the cherry blossoms for a week in the spring or eat eels at their best during six midsummer days. I bring that idea to the restaurant by changing our menu every week. It means I can work with suppliers even at very small scale. If a farmer has twenty pounds of the most perfect fingerling potatoes, or one beautiful lamb, then I can make it work. And for the weeks in June that our local strawberries are incomparable, I dont mind using them two or three ways.

It takes a lot of people to run a restaurant, and a lot of guests to make it last. When we opened Lark in 2003, it was thrilling when guests flocked in for dinner, and deeply gratifying when so many returned. We had been confident that we could make ends meet; being a success was a dream come true. Before long, people started saying, You ought to write a cookbook, and I knew I wanted to. I started organizing my recipes, figuring out how to make them work in home kitchens.

The kitchen was pretty top-heavy then, with three cooks that had the talent to be chefs themselves. Our restaurant was packed most nights, my wife and I had our son a month after we opened, and there was so little free time. It was exhilarating to run a new, successful restaurant. Lark got great reviews, and I won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest, which brought in guests from around the country. Being congratulated and celebrated by our guests gave me a big personal boost too.

To go with the grain is to do the expected, and I can certainly do that, but in many ways with Lark we went against the grain. I chose Twelfth Avenue for Lark because the potential of the space and the neighborhood inspired me, and now we have many great shops and restaurants as neighbors. After more than ten years in our original location, its been a thrill settling in to our new building just a few blocks away. Lark has been shined and brightened up just a bit, and sharing the space is Bitter/Raw, our crudo, shellfish, and amaro cocktail lounge, and Slab Sandwiches and Pie, for coffee, slab pies, sandwiches, and JMs salted chocolate chip cookies.