Star of The Northwest
The Daily - Arts and Life - Saturday, February 5, 2011
In Seattle, people stare at a 360 area code like it’s from a foreign country. Heading north from the city to Lummi Island is a two-hour drive on I-5 and five minute ferry ride. Near Anacortes, vacationers peel off the highway toward the other San Juan Islands. Keep going and urban life falls away. It gets greener. Birds get bigger. There are seasonal waterfalls and floods, and visitors wonder whether the body of water under the mountains is a lake or an ocean inlet.
Quiet Lummi Island is a world apart, and the place where chef Blaine Wetzel, 24, will make his mark. The Olympia, WA, native arrived at the island’s The Willows Inn in late summer, fresh off a chef de partie gig at Copenhagen’s noma, voted best restaurant in the world by San Pellegrino while he was there. The inn will close in January for a kitchen remodel and when they reopen, the chef wants to give diners the meal of their lives.
... read the rest here in The Daily.
