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Reem Assil — the chef, restaurant owner, activist, cookbook author, and streaming show star — is coming to Seattle for a two-night fundraiser at Capitol Hill’s Mamnoon.
Her Oakland restaurant, Reem’s California, specializes in mezze and Arab flatbread, which matches up well with Mamnoon’s Levantine cuisine. On Thursday June 1, Assil is taking over the whole restaurant, working with Mamnoon executive chef Nicco Muratore to put out a family-style tasting menu with items like grilled asparagus with fava green garlic aioli and hummus with local mushroom bi-zeit. There will also be wines on offer, including some unique Lebanese library wines from Chateau Musar and Ixsir. Tickets for that are $125.
The following night, June 2, Assil will be serving another tasting menu to a more intimate group in Mamnoon’s lounge with wine pairings and a Q&A session with Assil afterward. Those tickets are $300.
In both cases, proceeds will go to the White Helmets and the Karam Foundations, groups working to help victims of the earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria earlier this year; that disaster has fallen out of the news but those affect by the widespread loss of life and property are still struggling. For more information and to buy tickets, go here.
Mendocino Farms comes to Seattle
California fast-casual chain Mendocino Farms, known for its sandwiches and salads, is doing the traditional California thing of moving to Seattle. This week it launched its first-ever Washington State location in South Lake Union on Westlake Avenue. This is good news for the Amazonians who had to return to their Bezos spheres earlier this month and could use some more lunch options.
PCC posts a loss and won’t pay a dividend to members
Here’s some bad news for PCC members: The local high-end organic grocery chain posted a loss of $250,000 — its first annual loss since the 90s — and won’t be paying out any dividends to members. The Seattle Times reports that the main causes for this are rising costs and also a struggling store in downtown Seattle, which hasn’t seen the expected amount of customers as many of the area’s white-collar workers are still doing the whole Slack-and-Microsoft-Teams thing from home. The PCC hopes that the return to the Bezos spheres will boost sales.
Cool fermentation pop-up is brewing
One of the more inventive pop-ups on the scene just did its first tasting event at Ballard’s Beast and Cleaver and the menu is eye-catching: “pepperoni sticks” made from salsify, grilled strawberries with dill and strawberry rhubarb tamari, and black cod with black garlic and a type of koji mold. Called Amino, this fermentation-focused pop-up is from chef Jaimon Westing, who was named a Rising Star by StarChefs in 2020, along with Deep Dive’s Jen Rae and Symbiotic Cultures, a.k.a. Michelle Pogostkin, an alum of Noma’s fermentation lab. Sorry to tell you about a cool thing that you can’t go to because it already happened, but Amino should be announcing new events on its Instagram soon.