Renee Erickson Sets Her Sights on Amazonia

Renee Erickson, the renowned Seattle chef and James Beard Award winner behind Bateau, The Whale Wins, and Walrus and Carpenter, will expand to Amazonia with a bar and an Italian restaurant in spring or summer of 2018. And she’s gifting Amazon workers with three dining options accessible only to those with a company badge, available starting in late January. All of these new businesses will land in the Amazon Spheres in the Denny Regrade.

Erickson and business partner Jeremy Price haven’t named the new venture that will sit within the massive glass-and-steel domes on Lenora Street, reports Seattle Met. But the food will be inspired by Erickson’s stint in Rome in college, and it will be open day and night. There will be quick meals like pizza bianca, salads, and salumi to suit the working crowd, plus “a fritti menu of small fried bites and plenty of sparkling wine and spritzes” at happy hour.

Dinner will cast a wider net, drawing inspiration from Rome and south to Sicily. But don’t expect a strictly pasta-based menu; Erickson promises to draw from the country’s many diverse flavors and dishes.

The bar will be a separate entity, and it will remind visitors of high-end Manhattan hotels, with bites like smoked oysters and beef carpaccio. It will skew toward dim lighting and a dark color palette, a noticeable departure from Erickson’s tendency to open airy, light-filled restaurants.

And Amazon employees will have three Erickson options of their very own: a General Porpoise doughnut cafe, a salad counter, and a sandwich shop, all of which will be known as Rana e Rospo, “frog and toad” in Italian.