Award-winning chef warns of oligarchy in Seattle food scene, says rising costs are killing culture
Sep 4, 2025, 5:29 AM
Two-time James Beard Award-winning chef and founder of Seattle’s Food with Roots, Edouardo Jordan, is sounding the alarm on the local restaurant industry, warning that Seattle is losing its unique restaurants.
“Farmer-driven, locally sourced, sustainable, minimally touched, neighborhood-focused, mom-and-pop and husband-and-wife operations, upscale and lowbrow options, takeout — all of it is disappearing,” he wrote on Instagram earlier this week.
Citing a 2015 article by The Stranger, he worries that Seattle will “be left with only smash burgers and the five owners controlling the remaining 40 restaurants in the city.”
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Award-winning chef on opening a restaurant in Seattle
Jordan underlined the dire conditions Seattle’s restaurant industry is facing on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio Wednesday.
“First of all, like trying to open up your space from the get-go is always hard, from loans to find investors, to finding the money, so you’re already either eating into your savings or your own risk to, you know, pay someone back,” he explained.
He added that finding labor now is tough.
“Our labor pool is very minimal, and then the skilled labor that we do have, they’re required to get over $20 an hour, and half of them have the skill set to actually do the work of one person,” Jordan said. “It takes multiple people to do what one or two servers or a cook did a couple of years ago. So now you’ve got to hire two people to do the job of one.”
Due to the cost of food, farmers, and transportation, many restaurants are buying processed foods to avoid hiring more people, he added.
One KIRO Newsradio listener said they avoid going out in downtown Seattle due to crime. Jordan emphasized other factors that make it hard to own a restaurant in that area.
“If you want to own a restaurant downtown, you’re going to have to have some leverage,” he explained. “You either have to have some skin in the game — meaning that you have multiple restaurants to say that you are a capable runner of restaurants, that you can run this restaurant that’s going to cost you $15,000 a month to lease. A lot of landlords don’t want to take a chance on someone who is not proven.”
Social media’s impact on the Seattle restaurant industry
When asked about how social media, mainly Instagram and TikTok, are influencing the restaurant scene regarding people coming just to post, Jordan responded, “I don’t understand it myself. I mean, that’s the influencer effect, and honestly, it’s not healthy for our restaurant community, because we’re losing our identity. We’re losing our culture.”
He said when there are only a few people left running the show, Seattle will resemble “an Italian restaurant city and a place that cooks only salmon.”
“We have more than that,” Jordan continued. “We have so so much identity here, from Filipino restaurants to Thai restaurants to amazing chefs that have traveled the world to cook their food. Now we have TikTok folks coming in saying, ‘Give me that special ice cream only,’ and you get buzz for a month, and then people are gone again.”
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Looking at the future of Seattle’s food scene
To revive the food scene, Jordan said he would have to pull together a committee.
“I think some of the restaurant owners and folks that work in the restaurant industry are some of the hardest and smartest people in the industry,” he shared. “We deal with so many curveballs on a daily basis. So I would recruit a committee to help navigate this.”
However, he believes the first step is reviewing the tip credit, where, before, restaurants didn’t have to pay $20 an hour if workers earned tips, but now restaurants have to pay both. He also recommended a cap on rent for commercial leases.
“Everything has gone up, but our revenue has not gone up,” he said.
Lastly, Jordan’s theory is that if tech workers put more money into the community, unique restaurants won’t struggle to stay afloat.
Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.
