The chef at Sky City (the restaurant at the Space Needle), Jeff Maxfield, will present a seven-course "Savoring Seattle" dinner at James Beard House in New York next month. The news leaked out while Maxfield and 21 other Seattle chefs gathered for a charity dinner, Cooking with Class, at Salty's on Alki last night.
Maxfield and his team will serve up a selection of Seattle-centric appetizers (Shigoku oysters pickled Coho salmon, Quinault razor clams, Muscovy duck, and pork-spot prawn potstickers) paired with Domaine Ste Michelle's "Space Needle" cuvée.
That's just for openers. Six courses to go!
Butter clams, corn soup, wild salmon, roast lamb, braised short ribs, and a whiskey-chocolae pot-de-crème, each course paired with an award-winning wine (Christom, SparkmanAndrew Will, Betz, etc.) For the full menu and reservations, please click here.
Maxfield's appearance on behalf of Seattle caps a season of local and regional dinners at James Beard House that included guest chefs from Chicago, Phoenix and New York in a series titled Taste of America. Local chefs have done well by the Beard Foundation's awards and dinners: Canlis is regularly on the list of the nation's top restaurants; chef Tom Douglas was named JBF's outstanding restaurateur just last year.
It's obviously an honor to be invited to cook a dinner at JBH, though it's an honor one pays for. Chefs pay all their own expenses and all the food and wine is donated. And yes, if your memory goes back that far, a fomer JBH president did go to jail for embezzling the proceeds of all those dinners. All in the past. New game now. Chef Maxfield and his crew are off to the Big Apple, expenses gladly underwritten by the Space Needle, and will no doubt offer up their menu to local diners before they leave.
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