Our friends Jesse Koji Fukumoto & Haley Jane Hancock are two wonderful humans & equally wonderful creative geniuses who love food & wine as much, if not more, than we do. The duo has started their own Japanese/Cascadian locally sourced pop up dinner series called Kids Table Food. We wanted to check out what they were doing, report on it, and share with you our experience. In addition, we just wanted to support our friends in their ventures! Below is a slideshow of our dining experience, as well as our thoughts & descriptions about the 8 dishes prepared. Just make sure to hover over each photo for a description of each dish. Scroll further down to read an interview from the curators themselves & read the list of products featured!
Tell us a little about yourselves and Kids Table!
Koji grew up cooking Japanese food with his dad and on rare occasions when he could travel to Japan, with the master of Japanese cuisine and comfort food, his grandma. He has worked in fine dining and sushi restaurants but prefers cooking for his friends and family when they're in need, specifically late at night when their stomachs need a bit of relief.
Haley Jane is a physics and science nerd but she loves drinking wine, or should we say, therefore, she loves drinking wine. One cold winter night during a Doc Martens and black denim phase she drank a Barolo and never looked back. Now she's working her second harvest at W.T. Vintners, trying to figure it all out.
The Kid's Table was born in Berlin when we were gallivanting around Europe and drinking too much without real jobs. We put our bed out on the porch of our one room apartment in Berlin and turned the bedroom into a magical dining room with candles and stolen tree boughs from the Christmas trees outside of the subway station. We invited people over and fed them our experimental courses with wines that we enjoyed and told them to pay if they wanted to or just simply enjoy the food and give us whatever creative advice they could offer.
Since then, we've continued to experiment and make food. Over time we've become a lot more deliberate with what we're doing, but we're still putting weird stuff on plates and hoping people will get a kick out of it.
Can you explain a little bit more the behind the scenes of putting this pop up together?
In our exploration of the region we happen upon really cool people and things, usually by chance. For instance, we met the ceramicist (Jeff Wofford of Mollusk Clayworks) who made some of our plates when we were sailing around the San Juans. We were sharing beers and he got us really excited about his soda fired dishes. We chose one of our main farmers, Taki, because he is one of the only people growing mostly Japanese ingredients. We generally walk around with our feelers out and our passions on our sleeves, so when we see things or meet people we are quick to connect on common interests. Koji spends an obnoxious amount of time pestering markets and farmers about the specifics of their produce. Haley chooses the wine producers that she thinks are honestly representing this place that we love so much. She favors small pacific northwest producers and single practicing low intervention winemaking. We choose wines that we want to drink and pair well and say what we want to say.
What inspired your dishes for this menu? How do you conceptualize each dish?
I generally take a dish from my childhood or an ingredient from the pacific northwest that I really want to play with and start building from there. Sometimes I sub northwest ingredients into Japanese dishes when I think they'd make an interesting combination of flavors or I take a humble Japanese dishes like Tamago Kake Gohan, which is raw egg over hot rice, and I try and change it and adapt it to the Kid's Table.
Did you have a favorite dish to make or taste?
Every week we change the menu based on how we feel about the dishes, diner feedback or availability of ingredients. The dishes go through a soft evolution as our pop-ups go on, and it's fun to experience. Whenever we tweak a dish, it tends to be our favorite for the coming week. But TKG, tamago kake gohan, is effin awesome. We cure an egg yolk in miso and dehydrate it and then shave it over a daikon mochi cake. It looks like a plate of crumbs. It’s so simple and tasty and it pushes all of our buttons.
Or, most recently, we got really excited about a dish we called "Birthday Cake". Like every spring born kid all I wanted for my birthday was halibut cheeks and artichokes, but this last week we had a dinner on the same night as my friend's birthday, and he was there. So we took black cod which is not only delicious but sustainably caught and we marinated it in sake lees and then baked it in a shio-koji dough and put a candle it in and sang happy birthday. It was cool because it was a fish cake and kids usually don't want fish cake but when I was a kid I probably would have pooped my pants for one of those. We then served it with sunchokes and a sauce made of artichokes. It was pretty neat.
When are your next series? What can we expect?
Our next series will be in New Zealand. For real. You can expect new ingredients we don't even know of yet. Keep up with us during our travels. We will likely be working another wine harvest down there in the Spring and farming and cooking along the way. We're not sure when we will be back in Seattle doing a pop up series but it'll be after our stint in New Zealand. Keep up with us and our travels and if you want to come visit us in New Zealand we will make you dinner, bring your whole family.
Who are your culinary inspirations?
Koji: My dad, Keiji Fukumoto. When I'm struggling with a dish I usually ask him about food. His mom and Japanese obaachans the world over. I spend a lot of time gawking over the works of the chefs in the San Juans and Canadian Gulf Islands. I love their ability to capture the character of the region. For wine inspirations, shoutout to Marc Papineau, thanks for being uncompromisingly Marc and having really neat ideas about wine and helping us explore.
Haley Jane: This current harvest at WT Vintners has taught me so much. Working with Jeff Lindsey-Thorsen has taught me to keep an eye out for the subtle mischief of wines and pulled the Kid's Table wine list into something more stable. Every day at the winery reminds me of the unexplored worlds of wine that await me, there's so much to learn.
When you’re not cooking, where are your favorite places to eat in Seattle?
L'oursin, they're badass and super kind, just dope humans. We like to sit at the bar and pester the bartenders, Katheryn and Zac. They're great and it’s only a few blocks away from our house which means nobody is driving which means we can spend even more money; technically it comes out of the R&D fund but so does our gas and beer. With family we love to go to Suika on Capitol Hill, the food is tasty and the people are lovely. They always have time to treat us like family we appreciate the heck out of them.
We don't eat out a ton, so when we do it’s kind of an occasion and we try to get inspired and support folks and we tend to spend our budget for the month in a single sitting. Most recently we went to Hitchcock on Bainbridge and Kamonegi in Fremont. You should too!
Thank you so much for reading & engaging in our content.
Thank you to Jesse & Haley Jane for being such rockstars & taking time to share their passions with everyone. Thank you to the other diners who made Sunday night a blast!
Below are the featured products & wine listing.
Le Commezcial Break:
Jeff Wofford, makes dope plates, whiskey decanters, olive oil containers and other cool stuff.
Sound Spirits, provided spent gin grains. They make a really nice Old Tom Gin.
Cherry Valley Dairy, provided yellow butter
Haley Jane's Wine Pairing Menu:
Annalemma Traditional Method Blanc de Noir, 2012 This guy is made in two fermentations, the first makes a still 'base' wine and the second occurs in the bottle trapping all the little CO2 bubbles of delight. Made from Pinot Noir from one of the oldest vineyards in the northwest, Atavus. This is the stuff of dreams, rich and sumptuous with bad ass flowers and bready funk.
Weinbau Paetra 'K' Riesling, 2015 This wine is made by Bill Hooper, a midwestern boy turned German winemaker. He was trained in Pfalz and brings his old world techniques to Oregon. I think this wine is a great example of New World folks making wine naturally that is committed to Old World tradition. It's true to it's Riesling birth, like a gas station the sells lime candies and Peach-O's.
Eyrie Vineyards Pinot Noir, 2014 God Damn, I love this wine. When it comes to honest expression of Oregon terroir, this is the one. Tastes how wind through aspen leaves feels. Delicate and tense, with red fruit and earthy funk that goes deep.
Big Table Farms Chardonnay, 2015 The folks at Big Table are really doing a wonderful thing. Their Chardonnay sees 20% new oak, which gives it a definite buttery softness, but it's so well integrated into the honeyed minerality of the varietal that it makes me want to squeal. Drink with scrambled eggs and thank me later.
R. Lopez De Herdia Vina Tondonia, 2004 This is where I got weird and nerdy on you. Vino Tondonia is aged in barrel for 6 years. 6 years is a really long time. But that's 6 years of developing those wild dope smells of apricot depths and the inside of a tree you climbed as a kiddo. Traditions of Rioja that are new to us. What a magical way to experience a place.
W.T. Vintners Damavian Syrah, 2013 My feet were in this wine! Okay, not technically, but they were in the 2017 vintage! Jeff Lindsey-Thorsen uses old world techniques to create absolutely elegant wines. This Syrah glides through your mouth like Death Eaters in Harry Potter, graceful and dark. Cascading layers of dark berries and pepper moves into flowers drying onto the dirt that bore them. Really stinking pretty.
Tears of Vulcan, Day Wines, 2016 Brianne Day is in the thick of the natural wine scene, and this wine is en trende in that world. It's a blend of Viognier, Pinot Gris, and Muscat fermented on its skins. Skin fermentation gives structure, color, and savory flavor. The nose is off the chain funky, but the palate is surprisingly clean. Above all, this wine pairs like crazy with Graham's Birthday Cake. The two things need each other. Neither is complete without the other. Hot damn, I'd say it's love.
La Garracha Oloroso, Bodegas Grant Sherry gets a bad reputation, but it's well worthy of exploration. One of my favorite meals is hard cheese, cured meat, crusty bread, and super chilled Fino Sherry (for decadent days only, often requires a post-meal nap). This Oloroso is not my usual style of sherry, as it is not aged under flor and is more oxidative than yeasty in style. But it pairs really nicely with dessert and is absolutely delicious.