Celebrated Salare Debuts Takeout This Week with Jamaican Food, Burgers, and Playlists

After nearly five months of being closed to the public, James Beard Award-winning chef Edouardo Jordan’s first Ravenna restaurant, Salare, is readying takeout service and delivery. On the menu will be a la carte items — including jerk chicken, goat curry, and trout escovitch — as well as the option to order three-course dinners that rotate monthly, along with some to-go cocktails.

Jordan tells Eater Seattle that, in keeping with his penchant for culinary storytelling, the curated meals will trace the history and influences of African cuisine around the world, complete with a Spotify playlist to enhance the narrative. For August, the focus will be on the Caribbean, with dishes such as flat iron steak with Jamaican cabbage slaw, jerk summer squash, and fried plantains.

The chef — who is the father of a six-year old — also plans to make school lunch kits available: about four day’s worth of sandwiches, snacks, and sides at $36. Also, for the first time, Jordan’s putting a burger on the Salare menu, a decadent one topped with pimento cheese, heirloom tomatoes, pickled onions, and applewood smoked bacon. He calls it the “180 burger,” given that it’s a 180 degree turn from what the restaurant was — and there will be kit options for those who want to cook them at home.

Jordan says the staff is excited to tackle the new challenges and roll with the pivot. When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit the area hard, the chef turned Salare into a community kitchen, serving nearly 25,000 free to-go meals for restaurant workers who had been laid off or who experienced a significant reduction in hours. That effort will continue is some capacity.

He has also kept Salare’s sibling restaurant JuneBaby going for takeout over the past few months, and tried to avoid having two restaurants on the same block offering similar services. But, as the coronavirus crisis continues — and Seattle stalls in phase two of the Washington’s reopening plan — Jordan says he needed to develop to-go options at Salare in order to stay afloat and bring back more staff. “I just want us to be back in people’s minds and souls,” he says.

• Salare [Official]
• Salare [Toast]
• Acclaimed Chef Edouardo Jordan Turns Salare Into Relief Center for Restaurant Workers [ESEA]
• All coverage of Salare [ESEA]