WRITTEN BY GREG ATKINSON PHOTOGRAPHED BY KEN LAMBERT

	In five years, Cascadia chef Kerry Sear and his wife, Heidi Grathwol, have broadened their refined, regional fare to include such accessible offerings as, clockwise from left, calamari, french fries, hummus with chili oil and "happy hour" mini-hamburgers.

Riding an unprecedented wave of local prosperity, Sear and Grathwol served up some of the most innovative — and intimidating — fare this city had ever seen. Since then, some of those boom-time restaurants have gone. But fresh air continues to flow through this dining room. The place has evolved into a comfortable, classy neighborhood favorite where the surprises are more subdued and the seductions are more affordable.

Born on a dairy farm in Warwickshire, England, and apprenticed at the De Vere Belfry Hotel near Stratford-upon-Avon, Sear earned his stripes by serving for more than a decade as executive chef with Four Seasons hotels in Vancouver, Toronto and Seattle. Grathwol learned customer service as a flight attendant. With financial backing from a communications tycoon, the couple spared no expense in making Cascadia as polished as the cherry-wood paneling that adorned its walls.
 

The asparagus "bouquet" is just one of many artistic touches that add an air of whimsical sophistication to the scene at Cascadia in Seattle's Belltown.

The restored Austin A. Bell Building, on First Avenue between Bell and Battery streets, was in the very heart of hot-hot Belltown. With its artists' lofts, coffeehouses and nightclubs, the area was drawing both newly settled locals from a swath of freshly sprouted condominiums and a host of curious boomers from the 'burbs.

Cascadia delivered all that crowd was looking for and more. In a neighborhood where dark bars pressed against crowded eateries featuring trendy fare, here was something different. The soft-lit, sophisticated, 150-seat dining room was appointed with upholstered chairs and tables topped with hand-blown stemware. Behind an artistic wall of water and etched white glass, silhouettes of the cooks could be seen gliding back and forth while a piano player provided lively background music for a series of surprises that popped out of the kitchen like so many jesters from a jack-in-the-box. Wow! There's soup in a can! A partridge baked in wild grass! Dessert wearing a spun-sugar hairdo!

That summer, the local papers gushed. USA Today, Food & Wine and Esquire magazine were enthralled. The very essence of the new Northwest seemed to be distilled in this historic brick-front building. The food was rustic and regional but highly refined.

Items were available a la carte. But fixed-price tasting menus, ranging from $55 to $90 per person, drove the menu with options like "The Garden" or "Wild and Gathered." "Think game birds," wrote Seattle Times restaurant critic Nancy Leson, "wild watercress, Oregon truffles."

Then, in a series of events no one could have predicted, the world into which Cascadia had emerged began to crumble. The summer of 1999 was the summer of the WTO riots, and Belltown was virtually closed during what should have been some of the busiest weeks of the year. Next, fear of millennium mayhem made the restaurant's first New Year's Eve less than perfectly festive. Then, of course, came the worst: Sept. 11, 2001.

"The restaurant was completely booked that week, and virtually all reservations were for out-of-town guests," Grathwol says. With air travel suspended, the restaurant was empty, and it dawned on Sear and Grathwol that their business had become overly dependent on out-of-town diners.

"We did have a certain local following," says Sear, "and so we listened closely to what they wanted." What the locals wanted was a more accessible Cascadia.

As the partner who had from the beginning put her focus on guest services, and then had become a mom, Grathwol looked at the place from a diner's point of view and from a mom's perspective. "I had not come up in the restaurant industry like Kerry," she says. "But I have always loved restaurants, and I know what I'm looking for when I go out. With young people, older couples, families and singles, our demographic was all over the board, and we were targeting only a small percentage of those people."

Grathwol worked closely with Sear to give the dining room and menu a warmer profile. She ordered colorful striped aprons to replace the formal gray tunics worn by the servers and brightened the room with saturated colors in some of the details like flowers and candleholders. She persuaded Sear to soften his strict policy of using only ingredients from the Northwest; he opted for a more casual approach, "allowing for Midwest beef and a lemon or two."

"Originally," says Sear, "we didn't even have olive oil from Italy; I only purchased oil from a couple of small producers in Northern California." And while diners could still have a fixed-price menu if they wanted, a la carte items became the norm. When various Seattle-area restaurants pooled their marketing efforts to promote $25 tasting menus, Grathwol and Sear joined in. They discovered that with careful attention to ingredients, they could produce a stunning three-course menu that would highlight Sear's talent and satisfy the guests' desire for a more "accessible" (read affordable) dining experience.

"Now the $25 tasting menu is a year-round option." Items on the menu — Roasted Minted Halibut with Grilled Asparagus and Lobster Sauce, Pork Tenderloin with Nettle Butter — are still distinctively Northwest and cutting edge, but they're no longer intimidating or expensive. And there's one more thing:

"Originally," says Sear, " 'happy hour' was not in my vocabulary. Now, it's a huge part of our business." Indeed, Cascadia has sold more than 20,000 delectable $1 mini-burgers, ground in house and served in the bar on doll-sized buns. "One customer ate 16."