It was the night of the nacho cheese fountain. That’s when Mark and Brian Canlis knew the family’s namesake restaurant was truly theirs.
Opened by their grandfather Peter Canlis in 1950, Canlis was a somewhat staid Seattle institution by the time the brothers took it over from their parents in 2005. The elegant dining room was a midcentury aerie overlooking Lake Union. The food was luxe surf-and-turf with Pacific Rim inflections. Glittering piano music accompanied martinis and mahi-mahi.
It was time for some changes, and a party.
“We had a giant nacho cheese fountain in the middle of the dining room, where you could put chips under it,” Brian Canlis, 47, said. “It was a big party for everyone. Every guest wore crazy wigs. We had a D.J., we took all the furniture out and it was this wild dance party at Canlis. And regulars were like, ‘What is this place?’
“That was a night where something clicked for Mark and I, when we decided to throw the party that we wanted to attend and not just the one we were supposed to.”
But soon, after nearly 20 years in which they ran Canlis together, the restaurant will no longer be theirs. It will just be Mark’s. Brian is heading to Nashville in June with his wife, Mackenzie, and four young children. He’ll be working on a yet-to-be-determined project with his best friend since college, Will Guidara, the hospitality guru who made his name at Eleven Madison Park in New York.
Canlis’s executive chef, Aisha Ibrahim, 38, is also departing, along with her wife, Samantha Beaird, the restaurant’s executive sous-chef. The couple, who have Michelin-level ambitions, are looking for a bigger market, maybe New York or Los Angeles. Ms. Ibrahim plans to draw on her fine-dining background and focus on regional Filipino cuisine.
“The dream has always been to open my own restaurant and have my own stars,” Ms. Ibrahim said.
Canlis is one of America’s great restaurants, but it is also unique. Very few restaurants make it to their 75th year, and arguably none in the United States that age retain the same relevance and culinary ambition.
Part of that longevity, the brothers said, is the Canlis ethos, a belief in hospitality and openness that sounds more like an ethical philosophy than a few paragraphs from a corporate handbook. In fact, the day before being interviewed, Mark Canlis was teaching a course at Cornell on the ancient origins of hospitality.
It can sound a bit high-flown, but part of those origins, he said, is embracing the humanity of customers and co-workers alike, “turning toward the other.” That includes letting the staff grow and move on.
The coming departures tested the devotion to that ideal, however.
“What we did early on was establish sort of the stuff that was really important to us, taking the way we were raised as kids and the way we saw the restaurant moving through the world. And sort of codify that,” said Mark Canlis, 50, with emotion evident in his voice. “And that worked for 20 years together, and now we’re asking the question, ‘If this is true about Brian and his life, then what? If this is true that flourishing for him looks like not being in the restaurant, then what?’”
Brian continued the thought: “We’ve been preaching the gospel of not being a talent prison and lifting our people up and celebrating people on the way out the door, but we really had to put our money where our mouth is when I had that moment of ‘Maybe it’s time for me to leave.’”
The brothers’ years in charge have been a procession of changes.
In 2008, Jason Franey took over as executive chef, after a stint as executive sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park. He brought with him a Eurocentric tasting-menu sensibility in an era when titans like El Bulli, Mugaritz and Pierre Gagnaire topped lists of the world’s best restaurants.
The transition was bumpy.
“We lost hundreds, if not thousands, of regulars who said: ‘You know, I’m not a big fan of change. I’ve been coming for 30, 40 years,’” Mark Canlis said.
Brian added, “We had people walking in the door saying, ‘I hate what he’s done with the menu,’ before we had changed a single ingredient.”
Mr. Franey’s menu did keep vestiges of the Canlis DNA, including a house salad recipe that had been on the menu since 1950. After the initial uproar, diners mostly came around and accolades followed, including three consecutive James Beard award nominations for Mr. Franey.
In 2015, he was succeeded by Brady Williams, who was just 29 when he came from Blanca, in Brooklyn. Mr. Williams’s food drew on Asian influences, specifically from Japan, where his grandmother, an early culinary influence, was raised. In 2019, he won a James Beard award for best chef in the Northwest, and left a year and a half later to start his own restaurant, Tomo, across town.
When Ms. Ibrahim came on as the restaurant’s first female executive chef in 2021, she had spent time in the kitchens of Manresa in the Bay Area and Azurmendi in Spain — both three-Michelin-star restaurants.
Her menu melded those experiences with the cooking of her Filipino heritage. “From a flavor perspective, we visit East Asia,” she said. “We visit the Philippines, obviously, a region that is a little bit more robust in flavor. We’re not afraid of acid. We’re not afraid of smoke from direct charcoal use.”
She also won accolades, including a spot on Food & Wine’s best new chefs list in 2023.
Even as the food has evolved so much over the last couple of decades, the place is still Canlis. The salad is still available — as a $24 supplement to the tasting menu — and longtime regulars are still gladly accommodated.
“We had this lady who was celebrating her 85th birthday, and she asked for a sirloin and a baked potato,” Ms. Ibrahim said. “And I was like, ‘Why would I be too cool to give this lady a sirloin and a baked potato?’ ”
In the age of time limits on tables and “Chef prefers you put in your whole order once,” this kind of customer-focused approach is more and more rare.
As for the next chapter of Canlis, the brothers are searching for Ms. Ibrahim’s replacement, and Mark is open to whatever may come.
“One key piece of this whole story for me is: Maybe the way through a tenuous time for our industry is exactly this: If we stopped putting the need for the business to make it first, maybe if we let go of that need,” he said. “Maybe Canlis makes it to 75 years, which will be December, and that’s it.”
Brian Canlis said he understood his brother’s doubts, but pointed out that 2024 was the restaurant most successful year.
“He has gone to the darkest place and said, ‘If I can’t do it on my own, and if this restaurant fails, then I will look back and say it was still worth it,’” Brian said. “And that’s a pretty awesome thing to hear from your brother.
“For the record, I think he’ll crush it.”
