Fifty-five years ago on this date, (Alvar Aalto’s birthday), I was the day chef at Das Gasthauw, a very popular Pioneer Square restaurant on Occidental Square. I had only been in Seattle for two months and had not the slightest notion what the weather might be.
I had been laid off from Garfield High School, teaching English, in a budget cut. They were wonderful about it, and offered me several other positions, in carpentry or automotive, but I only knew English literature.
It started to snow as we were prepping for lunch and then it got very serious about snowing. The lunch was over-packed, and people stood outside with umbrellas. Each table was served a fresh baked small loaf of bread, fresh fruit and butter, on a wooden tablet. The prep people (Rick Simonsen was the best of them, before he went on to great fame at The Elliott Bay Bookshop) were in overdrive. I made extra rice and chopped everything I had. The lunch was quite wonderful and festive and went on past 2 — a lovely, deep snow.
Owner Marvin called from an auto shop in Ballard to say he could not budge, the roads were gridlocked, and I would have to do dinner. I had never seen dinner at the restaurant, so he said just make something that looks like the menu.
Sure enough, by 4:30 people were coming for dinner and filled us again and stood outside again. I told Tina, the only remaining waitress, we will do steaks and we will do pasta and we will serve the bread and that is the menu. Everyone had a good time, we lost a little money on the supplies (I used the crabmeat and the New Yorks), but it was the center of this town, this Pioneer Square.
Ten days later, the temperature went to 70 degrees, and we pulled the tables outside for lunch and added daffodils. There were no stadiums and Boeing was in distress but it was a sweet intimacy for Seattle.
What a lovely story about ‘making do.’ Thank you! I’d lived in Seattle for a little over a year then, in the U District, and I don’t remember anything about what I had for lunch or dinner, though I wish I’d known about Das Gasthaus. That came later.
Ate many a lunch (and quite a few dinners!) there. We would come by mid-morning for coffee and help the German waitress write the day’s menu on brown paper bags. (The bags were later used by customers taking home the remaining bounty from the “Fruit, sausage and bread luncheon special). My dad took over the upstairs for my mom’s birthday dinner. Marvin surprised us with his specialty souffle for dessert. Good times.