Former Canlis Chef Brady Williams To Open ‘Tomo’ in White Center

WHITE CENTER — Tomo is the brainchild of chef Brady Ishiwata Williams, developed mid-pandemic in 2020 as a restaurant that rejects the trappings of fine dining while remaining dedicated to the noble pursuits of thinking through your hands and providing pleasure to others. The Tomo team is interested in preparing food and serving wine reverent of land, history, aesthetics, and erotics. To put it more plainly, the restaurant serves micro-seasonal Pacific Northwest cuisine with heritage references from Brady and the whole culinary team.

Tomo offers a mindful, vegetable-focused menu with subtle meat and seafood inclusions, as well as a vegetarian menu. Dinner menus are fixed but change daily. Lunch is offered on the weekends and is a la carte. Tomo sources exclusively from integrous producers, farmers, fisherpeople, foragers, artisans, and friends. Their wine list, while highlighting small producers, low intervention, and/or natural selections, is vast and focused, accessible to all palates and budgets. 

MENU: Five-course set dinner menu ($68) with two options per course (one always vegetable), and additional supplements offered. Lunch is always a la carte, as is the menu at the bar. 

Tomo works with a proprietary farm in the North Cascades that will raise most of the (land) animals that are served in the restaurant, with future plans to develop a research kitchen on-site. Tomo will also offer selections from The Bread Lab in Skagit Valley.

Brady Ishiwata Williams began his career at his grandparents’ diner, Phillip’s Pot Pies, in Southern California before cooking in restaurants across the country. He served as executive sous chef at Roberta’s and the two-Michelin starred Blanca in Brooklyn and was executive chef at the iconic Seattle restaurant Canlis for the last six years. His Canlis tenure was marked by regional and national acclaim, including a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northwest (2019), Food and Wine Best New Chef (2018), and a James Beard Nomination for Rising Star Chef (2017).

Tomo’s cocktail program features both classic and original cocktails with a focus on small production spirits. The wine program, which is just as important as the food at Tomo, focuses on low-intervention selections that reflect the diversity of the wine world. The list of approximately 200 wine selections features honest, unique wines made by creative, principled people in harmony with their land and their communities.

The restaurant White Center is located 10 minutes SW of downtown Seattle, in unincorporated King County. While Seattle remains an overwhelmingly white city, White Center is among the most diverse areas in King County, with 60 percent communities of color, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. In addition to English, dozens of languages are spoken, including Spanish, Vietnamese, Khmer/Cambodian, Tigrinya, Thai, and Somali.

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