Seattle restaurateur Ethan Stowell debuts his popular pasta-centric eatery Tavolàta in the heart of downtown Spokane | Food News | Spokane | The Pacific Northwest Inlander
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Tavolàta’s signature Rigatoni.
Tavolàta’s namesake – a long communal table – has not yet adorned its airy, bright dining room.
In the meantime, the staff at the restaurant, which hopefully opened at the end of the coronavirus pandemic, are eager to greet guests to enjoy the Italian-inspired food and drink, initially at tables one meter apart.
Tavolàta, a Seattle-based restaurant owned and operated by the large Ethan Stowell restaurants group, quietly opened in early May in a prime location just across from Riverfront Park, which last housed an olive garden.
While Grissini are not free and unlimited at Tavolàta, the quality of the ingredients and the attention to detail – all pasta are freshly made in-house every day – are far above the chain quality when it comes to Italian-inspired dishes with a north-western flair.
“We’re definitely more of a progressive, light Italian place,” says chef and owner Ethan Stowell, who traveled from Seattle to Spokane to oversee the opening.
“For example, you know how classic Italian sauce cooks for hours? We don’t,” he continues. “We have a fresh sauce where we basically put all of these ingredients in grandma’s tomato sauce that she cooks for 25 hours, and we use it like a broth and cook things with it. It looks the same, but it’s not that heavy Feeling. “”
For guests who have eaten at one of Towolàta’s three branches in Stowell, Seattle, the Spokane menu is familiar and almost identical. A typical dish is the best-selling rigatoni ($ 24) with spicy sausage and fresh parmesan. Other pasta on the Tavolàta menu, each dish with different sauces, proteins and spices, are spaghetti, linguine, pappardelle, paccheri, ravioli, pici and two versions of gnocchi (semolina and potato).
Appetizers range from salads and bruschetta ($ 16) to burrata ($ 16) and fried oysters ($ 15). The Tavolàta menu aims to encourage family dining with generous portions. Three hearty no-noodle appetizers are a double-cut pork chop ($ 32), a rock steak ($ 26), and halibut ($ 32).
Happy hour, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily, has the best deals of the day with pasta dishes for $ 12 each, about half the price of the dinner menu. A selection of house cocktails is $ 8 to $ 9 each, with $ 6 glasses of house wine and $ 5 draft beer.
Happy hour is served in Tavolàta’s spacious lounge and on a sidewalk terrace that can be used all year round.
“We have a few important things for Tavolàta,” says Stowell. “We want a cool, good bar with the best happy hour in town. We’re consistently rated the best happy hour in Seattle, and we want that. It gets people there early and brings the party – the atmosphere of a restaurant – to go early.
“The other thing is that we’re great for groups and sharing,” he continues. “You come here and the portions are a decent size and it never breaks the bank. We want people to feel like it’s great value for handcrafted food.”
Young Kwak photo
FROM LEFT: Chef Scott Siff, General Manager Tania Siff and Owner Ethan Stowell.
Ethan Stowell restaurants have grown exponentially since Tavolàta opened in Belltown, Seattle in 2007. In addition to the now four Tavolàta locations, the list of restaurant groups includes: How to Cook a Wolf, Staple & Fancy Mercantile, Ballard Pizza Co., Rione XIII, Mkt., Rote Kuh, Frelard Pizza Co., Cortina, Cortina Cafe, The San Juan Seltzery and Goldfinch Tavern. Outside the Northwest, Wolf Wolf also operates in the Nordstrom flagship store in New York City.
Stowell and its restaurants have received numerous awards from the start, including several James Beard nominations. The self-taught chef honed his craft while working.
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“I started my first day of cooking in 1995 and started as a prep cook like everyone else. I worked my way up and kept working and opened my first restaurant, Union, in Seattle in 2003,” says Stowell.
“We opened Tavolàta and How to Cook a Wolf in 2007 and kept opening restaurants,” he continues. “We got known and found we were good at opening and running restaurants, so I started a journey as a chef and restaurateur.”
Stowell says he and his team thought long and hard about expanding beyond Seattle and considered Portland and Boise as well.
“Tavolàta has always been a very busy place for us. It’s accessible and people have fun when they come here, so we really wanted to take it elsewhere,” he says.
Spokane was the winner when Stowell discovered the space that Tavolàta now calls home, in the historic building of the Old Town Hall on Spokane Falls Boulevard. The olive garden was closed in 2015 and the space was completely gutted and remodeled.
To run the restaurant, Stowell tapped two employees who have been with his company for about five years, General Manager Tania Siff and her husband, Chef Scott Siff, who most recently ran Wolf in NYC.
The couple moved here invisibly and still love the city of lilacs.
“We want to show Spokane what we do and provide good service and good food to the community,” says Tania Siff. ♦
Tavolata • 221 N. Wall Street • Open Sunday through Thursday 4pm to 9pm. Fri-Sat 4 pm-10pm • ethanstowellrestaurants.com • 509-606-5600