Flying Fish: flying into the future

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Food

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Flying Fish: flying into the future

By HSIAO-CHING CHOU
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOOD WRITER

When a restaurant is neither new nor venerable, it finds itself in murky territory. Chef Christine Keff's Flying Fish swims in that middle space, where it's no longer trendy and not quite iconic.

"We're in our 10th year and we've been thinking about what that means," Keff says. She is sitting in a booth at Flying Fish at the end of a lunch shift, stirring her latte and staring at it as if it's going to reveal a truth.


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	When Christine Keff's Flying Fish started a decade ago, its Asian-infused seafood menu was new for Seattle. "When we opened, nobody had seen anything like it," she recalls.

Keff is not wearing chef's whites. Instead, she's dressed in a smart quilted jacket and black mock-neck sweater. She doesn't cook on the line as much as she used to, though when she gets the urge to step up, chef Steve Smyrstik, who runs the kitchen, makes room for her.

At the end of an eventful year and six months short of the 10th anniversary of Flying Fish, Keff finds herself in a perpetual reflective state. After all, she closed down her 4-year-old restaurant, Fandango, in May and returned to her older "child" with staff in tow. She started serving lunch at Flying Fish with the help of that extra staff and, for the most part, the business has been steady. Finally, on a personal note, Keff, who is 51, got hitched in September.

"The witness part is important," she says of the ceremony. "There's a comfort in it that I wouldn't have expected."

There's much Keff didn't expect in her career as a chef. When she started Flying Fish in Belltown a decade ago, Seattle was a different place. At the time, the Asian-infused seafood menu, 25 percent of which has remained unchanged, was considered very New York or San Francisco, certainly not Seattle.

"When we opened, nobody had seen anything like it," she says. "Now, (the restaurant) looks dated."

Keff is aware that there are many other places that specialize in unique seafood preparations. Not much is truly exotic anymore, though it's still possible to surprise even the savviest diner. But, she adds, Flying Fish has always been described as being hip.

"If there's anyone less hip than me, I'd like to meet them," Keff emphasizes as she considers the prospect of reinventing Flying Fish. "We've always had this hobnobby-rubbing-shoulders feel -- which is so not me. I guess I created it somehow."

In upcoming months, the interior of the restaurant will undergo minor renovations. The kitchen philosophy also will get honed as it attempts to transition to being nearly 100 percent organic. What would prevent Flying Fish from becoming certified is its dependence on imported Asian ingredients, which are difficult to trace.

Flying Fish has been subsidizing Whistling Train Farm with half of its produce budget with hopes that, eventually, the organic farm near Kent will supply half of the produce the restaurant needs. As many as possible of the seafood items will be sustainable, as well.

The reason for the effort is health.

"Processed and chemical (containing) foods are responsible for a large number of diseases. We can't afford to keep doing it to ourselves."

Keff recognizes that her business is at a place where it can concern itself with the provenance of every ingredient and insist on such scrutiny.

"It's good to be older. I think so in every way."

Being a sustainable restaurant was not something she could have imagined in the early years of Flying Fish. That time was spent establishing a place in Seattle's culinary hierarchy and figuring out how to run a business. Keff knew how to be a chef, and was good at it, but she had to learn how to be a businesswoman. Eventually she realized that she could pass the reins of the kitchen but she couldn't delegate being the boss.

Another unexpected journey was Fandango, Keff's Latin-inspired restaurant half a block away from Flying Fish. She had always been interested in the regional cooking of Mexico and decided she wanted to take a six-week sabbatical for a road trip through the country. A casual mention to a friend who conducts culinary tours resulted in what essentially became a working vacation.

"By the time I got back, there was a restaurant in my head," she says. "But there's a complexity of the (regional Mexican) cuisine that I still think people don't understand," which is partly why Fandango failed.

The business climate didn't help, either: Fandango opened 14 months before Sept. 11, which changed the dining public.

"You can believe I've thought this one through -- mostly at 4 in the morning," she says. "I tried everything I know, but it didn't work. We had to stop after a while."

Life experience has given her the sense to recognize when a relationship, in this case to a restaurant, had gone south. Once she shut the doors, it was a relief.

In the case of her new personal commitment, which she and her partner call a marriage, life experience has taught her to know when something is right. Less than a year after meeting her partner, Laurey Masterton, in San Francisco at a Women Chefs and Restaurateurs conference, Keff married her. Masterton owns a gourmet catering and takeout shop in Asheville, N.C. Keff has been splitting her time between the South and the Pacific Northwest.

For Flying Fish's 10th anniversary in July, there are a few surprises that Keff doesn't want to reveal yet. There also will be a big party for longtime supporters of the restaurant that will be held in a field at Whistling Train Farm. Those who attend will get to harvest ingredients and Keff and Smyrstik will do the cooking.

"I think it's good to celebrate," Keff says. "It makes you stop and think, instead of going headlong into the grave."