By Hanna Raskin for the Seattle Weekly
The restaurant-soon-to-be-formerly-known-as-Chimayo takes its clientele from Tex-Mex to Tuscany.
“We’re kind of hard to find,” confesses Bill Patterson, the pasta virtuoso who offers nightly recitals on Orcas Island at his restaurant, Chimayo.
Patterson is given to understatement— he believes the communion of eater and Dungeness crab shouldn’t be interrupted by anything other than butter—and his assessment represents the square root of the situation. His restaurant is maddeningly hard to find, in this world and its virtual equivalent.
There’s no website for the restaurant, tucked into the rear corner of a shabby indoor arcade that houses a consignment clothing shop and a realtor’s office, nor is there any sort of signage that would magnetize a diner craving lardo and guanciale. A shingle hung above Eastsound’s Main Street boardwalk points to Chimayo, a name Patterson kept when he bought the 9-year-old New Mexican restaurant from local restaurateur Karen Campbel lin 2010.
Patterson didn’t hang onto only the name. He kept the menu intact, continuing to sling the tortillas, chiles, and beans that had acquired a following he was loath to unsettle during a fierce recession. “When you know 90 percent of the people who walk in the door, it’s hard to look them in the eye and say they can’t have what they want,” Patterson says. “It would be perverse.”
To read the full review, go to seattleweekly.com/2011-09-28/food/chimayo-s-orcas-noodling
Thanks to Carol Marcin and Michel Marshall
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Sadly, it sounds like one more affordable place for the local residents to eat is disappearing. In this case it isn’t closing, it is just shifting its focus to “well-healed” customers. Those of us on Orcas that aren’t “well-healed” have fewer and fewer options for a night out.
Congratulazioni, Bill.
I strive for authenticity with my dinner menu. Amatriciana, arrancini and involtini are not household names here in America. But to people that are “well-travelled” (in Italy) they are. People that are “well-travelled” are typically “well-heeled”. These folks tend to recognize what it is that I am trying to do and respond favorably. That is the gist of what I was trying to explain to Hanna.
As to my dinner prices……..they are quite reasonable and reflect a very competitive market in a soft economy. Anyone that GETS OUT knows this.