Scandal at Willows Inn, Lummi Island

Expose in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/dini ... abuse.html

The usual... local sourcing is a lie, chef is abusive (misogynist, racist, homophobic, ableist, etc.), wage theft, the whole nine yards.

Yes, I read that. It's amazing how many industries tolerated such bad behavior for so long. We're getting inundated with stories like this from the more celebrity-oriented industries, but I'm sure this was the case throughout society. That said, not sure if this was more common or more accepted in 'creative' industries where the leader's eccentric fury could be framed as part of his/her artistic genius.

Either way, it will be an improvement for society if people are held accountable.

[Robin Garr]

As the old saying goes, believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see. That's a very sad story. I had seen the headline but hadn't read it yet. Thanks for posting, Jeff.

[Jenise]

So as someone who's stood in the Willows kitchen after dinner and yacked with Blaine and staff, who knows many of the people who know him and is friendly with the somm quoted in this story to the point of having her and her lover (a wine distrib I'm close to) over for dinner and an overnight stay (due to distance) twice, let me weigh in:

Blaine Wetzel is a good man. He's no Mario Batali, groping the staff and taking hookers upstairs.

While my friend worked for him, she seemed delighted to be there. I did not know her before she worked there but got to know her while she worked there. "Best job in the world" and all that. She never had anything bad to say about him. She left because her local relationship broke up and she had an offer to work in Portland.

She did not, however, like his then-partner Rachel, who ran front-of-house, and who apparently was disliked by ALL female staff. Since racism has played into the accusations let me add what I wouldn't otherwise need to, that Rachel was dark-skinned and from Uruguay. I have to wonder if this didn't play into the failure of promotion for female chefs there until very recently.

The Willows is a remote island location. The only local inhabitants who want/need jobs are relatively young/impressionable and skew female. And there you have this staff of relatively young and mostly male chefs at the prime of testosterone with very few outlets. Hookups happen.

A friend of mine, Jeremy, is a local fisherman with a fine palate for food and wine who supplies most of the local seafood to restaurants here in Bellingham. He has dined at The Willows numerous times and told me yesterday he never saw or was served anything that was suspect. He was never asked to supply anything that didn't fit the restaurant's goal. He's shaking his head over the singing scallops part of the story but otherwise defends Blaine as honorable and true to his commitment. And he tells the story of heading into the kitchen after dinner one night (apparently a lot of us have done that) and everybody was talking except one guy who was on his knees cleaning the floor. That guy was Blaine.

We've eaten the food there. We've eaten the douglas fir tips in April, cherry tomatoes in August, green strawberries in November and the tea made from Birch bark. We've eaten the salmon, the halibut, the oysters and clams. The food is marvelously appropriate to the place and time of year.

We've also eaten, apparently, the product of Costco chickens. That is, a popular course is bread, wherein the butter comes with hot schmaltz. I once asked where are all the chicken meat goes: family meals and lunch things, sandwiches etc, sold out of the downstairs pantry to local residents. The only red meat I've ever been served there was lamb heart (gasp! Jenise does not like to eat heart!) from a whole animal procured somewhere in the county. It was not claimed to be Lummi Island sheep. So the chickens are acquired at Costco? I'm sorry, but fair enough. NOBODY ON LUMMI ISLAND RAISES CHICKENS. Lummi is credited here with having a local population of 1000. That's true--but those aren't year-round. Many are summer-only.

Which brings up a question. If a restaurant based on food grown and foraged locally during the ten months a year it's open occasionally has to make a Costco run bulk up the larder for two out of the 16 small courses served to 32 guests per night, has a crime really been committed?

I am shocked to hear that he has had the staff issues he apparently has. I can't explain or defend that. Blaine is a perfectionist, and toxic cultures are created over time. But does he have a local rep for being a bad boss? Not that I'm aware of. Did employees I know and have hung out with after hours ever complained? No. Has anyone I know ever thought the food didn't meet his high standards? No.

[Jenise]

Well, I have to take back some of what I said above. Here's what my friend posted on Facebook:

I worked at the Willows Inn for three years, and that time was complicated. Working as a Sommelier there allowed me unique opportunities and experiences I would have otherwise only dreamed of. It also took a huge toll on my mental and emotional well-being, and these wounds I am still patiently mending. My self-esteem while employed at that restaurant was undoubtedly lower than it has ever been in my life. I felt stifled and scared, like I was always walking on thin ice during my tenure there. As employees we were expected to adhere to a web of lies that not only encompassed the reality of living and working at The Willows Inn, but also of what we were serving guests. The only saving grace was that we existed somewhere stunningly gorgeous, where certain pristine and dreamlike moments could make us feel like perhaps all the suffering was worth it. After I chose to leave the Willows Inn, it took me months to feel like myself again.

Good for you (and us), Jenise
When I first saw this headline in EATER, I thought it was about the Willows Inn in Woodinville. Any relation? I think this article might be what is referred to as a “cancel culture” hit? (I also don’t really understand what the word “woke” means.) I read about a quarter of the article and abandoned it. Personally, I’m tired of all the grousing and sniping that seems to be America’s constant communication diet right now. I have great empathy for those who have experienced abuse of any kind at the hands of another. But I am beginning to feel burdened by the incessant need for all of us to “share” not only trauma we’ve experienced but in the telling also include the perceived shared experience by others to whom we are connected by time and place. Are we supposed to walk away feeling, thinking or doing something? If so, what? Glad you had the energy to take this on.

[Jenise]

No relation. The Willows was a little Inn on Lummi run by Riley Stark, who did the occasional winemaker and visiting-chef dinners. I went to many of them. Then suddenly it re-invented itself with a new chef/partner--the Craigs List story--and was being named among the best restaurants in the world. There are some very very wealthy people who travel the world to dine, and many showed up here, including a London-based Russian oligarch in a 300 ft submarine-shaped yacht that there famously wasn't room for in Bellingham harbor.

Which is perhaps the only reason someone from New York decided to do what kind of amounts to a hit job on a west coast restaurant.

As I read people's comments, even that of my friend, I thought back to the year I worked in a lawyer's office in my home town, and later the year I spent in the executive offices of the May Company department store. Cold, toxic, ulcer-inducing, self-esteem killing, horrific times where the person at the top was a maniacal dictator and the rest of the staff a bunch of back-stabbing vipers.

I don't think Blaine's a maniac, I'm sure he's not. More like an introverted perfectionist. He's probably lost his temper a few times too many and done things he's very sorry about. I can't explain the lack of promotion for female chefs except to say that I hardly remember any female chefs, only the one who was in charge of the breakfast service for those who stayed over the one and only time we stayed for breakfast. Btw you do see/meet all the chefs because guess who serves your food? They do, including Blaine himself. It's the most humble dinner service I've ever witnessed.

But I am beginning to feel burdened by the incessant need for all of us to “share” not only trauma we’ve experienced but in the telling also include the perceived shared experience by others to whom we are connected by time and place. Are we supposed to walk away feeling, thinking or doing something?

You are always free to skip the article, as you have done. (Is it old news, by now? Approximately. But it feels a lot different when it happens to you and I do not begrudge the people involved having a chance to sound off.)

Which is perhaps the only reason someone from New York decided to do what kind of amounts to a hit job on a west coast restaurant.

Is it really a 'hit job' if your friend substantiates it?

Her comment reminds me of research into the self-esteem of graduate students... plummeting the entire time they are transforming into academic professionals.

Why do you assume I have not experienced bullying behavior and being demeaned publicly and quietly had any attempts at upward mobility blocked by persons with the power to do so?

I didn't. My point was that it's OK to let people sound off, even if I've heard the kind of story before. I have no insight into what your experiences are.

Although in summer usually my wife and I are not far from Lummi Island we have never been there. We know someone who travelled from Santa Barbara mainly to go the Inn there, and he raved about it. (I saw something once about it being the second best restaurant in the U.S.)
When I was 18 I learned to be skeptical of reporters. One of them asked a candidate for political office if he agreed with something-or-other and the answer was a simple "No". The next day in a local paper that reporter had a story about the candidate giving reasons why he agreed with the something-or-other!

I have never known a lot about a story that was reported completely accurately, other than of course sports stories. I am sure that some reporters make an honest attempt to get stories right. Richard L

[Jenise]

An update:

First, here are most of the first 2 paragraphs in the NYT article: The chef Blaine Wetzel first came to Lummi, a tiny island near the San Juan archipelago of Washington State, in 2010. At age 24, he was fresh off a two-year stint at the vaunted Copenhagen restaurant Noma. He could have found a job in any kitchen in the world.

Instead, he’d answered an ad on Craigslist, posted by a chicken farmer who owned a century-old inn on Lummi Island, 100 miles north of Seattle and reachable only by ferry. Sight unseen, Mr. Wetzel had fallen for the island’s ravishing isolation — fewer than 1,000 people live there full-time

So yesterday we went over to Lummi Island to participate in an Argentinian backyard barbecue (a whole lamb roasted over an open pit) at the home of The Willows' former owner, the man who hired Blaine when he answered the Craigslist ad referenced above and whose farm supplies much of Blaine's produce. We'd dined at The Willows former incarnation a few times--the owner, not a chef himself, would pair a visiting chef with a visiting winemaker--and we'd always book a room for the night. In that way we became distant-friendly and when I ran into him in town recently we got invited to this small soiree.

Interestingly, another guest was the Seattle writer who co-wrote Blaine's first Willows Inn cookbook.

So of course, the current scandal was discussed. Several interesting factoids: Julia Moskin actually contacted my friend for her article. He was able to tell her that "Blaine's a poor leader, but he's a good man" and provide a number of examples that testified to the latter. He knows other people who had positive things to say about Blaine and expressed disgust that the article included none of that testimony.

Also, he attributed a lot of Blaine's failings to the fact that "Blaine is out on the spectrum" and just doesn't connect with others in the same way non-autistic people do. Several other people at this barbecue, including a wine distributor who sold wine to the restaurant back in those earlier days, nodded in agreement.

Meanwhile the restaurant survives. There have been some protests by local islanders where, among other things, they grill weenies and hold up signs saying "we don't need no $500 dinners". It's becoming less an issue of right vs. wrong than a contest between the haves and the have-nots.

[David M. Bueker]

How long until all that is left is Olive Garden and McDonalds?

[Jenise]

That's about right, David.

Also, he attributed a lot of Blaine's failings to the fact that "Blaine is out on the spectrum" and just doesn't connect with others in the same way non-autistic people do. Several other people at this barbecue, including a wine distributor who sold wine to the restaurant back in those earlier days, nodded in agreement.

Also from the original article: "Former employees who grew up on the island told The Times that as teenage girls, they were touched inappropriately, given drugs and alcohol and pressured into having sex by men on the kitchen staff and visiting chefs."

This is not excusable via autism.

Meanwhile the restaurant survives. There have been some protests by local islanders where, among other things, they grill weenies and hold up signs saying "we don't need no $500 dinners". It's becoming less an issue of right vs. wrong than a contest between the haves and the have-nots.

Indeed. There is pretty obviously a failure on the part of the Inn to maintain good relations with its neighbors.

[Jenise]

No it's not; I wasn't offering excuses, merely a fact that in part explains Blaine's poor leadership.

This AGAIN?! Uuuggghhhhh!
I was still grappling with this one!
What is it???

[Jenise]

I had not heard this about Edoardo! Not about the allegations, his admissions, or that he'd been in the Top Chef finale and was edited out. Maybe it's time to reconsider castration.

I'm thinking we should consider editing that Y chromosome in utero. It seems to be clearly defective in some ways!!