Seattle Chef is mad you don’t like his ‘creative’ food, quits restaurant

Chef Travis Kukull is stepping aside at his South Lake Union restaurant Mollusk after patrons decided they didn’t quite like his menu.

“Most of the feedback was: ‘Could you please make it so we understand this?’ ‘Could you make it cheaper?’ ‘Could you make it more conventional?'” Travis Kukull told the Stranger. “That’s what the neighborhood wants. Some of the larger companies like Facebook and Amazon, they want to come down here for their after-work parties, but they just want conventional pub grub.”

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What couldn’t patrons understand? He featured “Nachos Picasso” on his menu — though not any nachos you’d expect. They were made with delicata squash chips and Indonesian garlic crackers, topped with smoked avocado crème frâiche. Likewise, his “Seattle Dog” was quite inventive and unexpected: house made Malawi curry lamb sausage with smoked paprika cream cheese in house sauerkraut.

I’ve been to Mollusk a couple times and enjoyed it. But, as I walk pass it pretty frequently, the dining room is almost always mostly empty. Restaurants sometimes fail and as Kukull is stepping aside for another chef to make a more understandable menu, there was something about his interview that rubbed me the wrong way.

“The food I create is the way I want Seattle to be and eat,” Kukull said. “I want it to be weird and creative and individualistic. When I eat someone’s food, I want to know that that it’s specifically that chef’s food. I want this town to be supportive of things that are different, not just the traditional idea of ‘success.'”

The subtext of his comments and how they’re portrayed by the author of the feature, scream of a bizarre arrogance; bizarre in that they don’t seem to quite understand why some of his food isn’t connecting with the customer base. Arrogant in the snarky judgment of the neighborhood culture.

I don’t want to pick on Kukull. I like his food and being a chef is not an easy thing. But his quotes, tied with the author’s mocking tone, comes off as whiny and condescending to an entire neighborhood and it’s inhabitants (the author of the feature seems upset that Amazon employees are spending $1,800 a month on a tiny studio; why does she care?).

And Kukull doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the communal feel of the SLU apartment complexes. While Kukull compliments the apartment communal areas that residents congregate in, he then complains: “While there are a lot of people coming into this neighborhood, they need time to develop a sense of safety, of wanting to go out, being part of a culture, and helping create that culture. But right now, they’re not sure what they should do.”

He’s mad that a community of mostly 20-something computer programmers aren’t eating his Picasso Nachos? He seems annoyed that they’re not “being part of a culture” but they are; you just don’t like their culture.

That’s not to say I like the culture; I stay away from communal spaces and go out to restaurants (I enjoyed POPPY this past weekend).

But, I’m not the one complaining about people who choose to stay in their communal spaces and eat food they find comfort in. Kukull and the Stranger, instead, seem to take a position that they’re somehow better than those who don’t quite understand the Mollusk menu and concept. They seem petty in their judgment of a neighborhood that rejected this restaurant. They may have better taste in food, but, if no one is eating it, does it matter?

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