terroir

Welcome to the liberal arts section of a catering website!

searoot supper club is a project by sustainability obsessive and culinary instructor Eli Sadow-Hasenberg, dedicated to the concept of making food from Seattle. Whether you’re a life-long Seattlite or stopping through for the weekend, our food is designed to evoke Seattle’s unique palette and ecology. Eli was repeatedly told that terroir was too pretentious of a name for his company, so instead, it’s the name of this page which defines the terms and concepts behind this project.

Seattle’s terroir

searoot’s food is a love-letter to the flavors of Seattle. Maybe while eating with us you’ll think of old indigo blackberry stains from the brambles on Kite Hill, cedar-plank Coho that flakes when you so much as look at it, or the ripest Rainier cherries getting warm on a pallet at the Fremont Farmers’ Market. Maybe you’ll taste hints of your favorite restaurants, and the unique blend of cuisines that make our restaurants, from Ballard to the ID to Columbia City, shine. Maybe you’ll just remember how lucky you are to be savoring local, sustainable food in a beautiful city with people you love. We’re not gonna tell you what to do.

human/nature

The future is here, and it sucks. Our post-pandemic world is growingly isolated, algorithmic, and synthetic. searoot suppers should feel like a joyous opportunity for human connection, and a reminder of our deep interconnectedness. Humans are weird, wonderful mammals with a tremendous capacity to care for each other. Eating in community builds compassion and resilience, and reminds us that we are not alone, as individuals or as a species. We are nature; part of a massive web of interdependence that encompasses all life on Earth. What a blessing! What a responsibility!

unseasonable

Seasonality is part of searoot’s mission for place-based dining. It’s a fun concept when used to sell poinsettias and pumpkin spice candles, but what does it mean in a moment of global climate precarity? Human society has developed around an annual cycle of weather we understood as steady and unchanging. What does it mean to eat a ripe strawberry in April or dine outside on a 70º day in November? Our menus explore this complex dynamic and strive to be just the right amount of unseasonable. You can read more about our approach to sustainable dining here.