“Like every other restaurant owner in this city, we’re just trying to figure it out.”
So says Edouardo Jordan, the chef and restaurateur behind Ravenna destinations JuneBaby, Salare, and Lucinda Grain Bar. Except that Jordan is, of course, not like every other restaurant owner in the city. The chef—a multiple James Beard Award winner featured by everyone from the New York Times to Esquire to People magazine—enjoys a form of national restaurant prominence that comes along only once, maybe twice in a generation for a Seattle chef. He’s part of a continuing vanguard of Black restaurant excellence with deep roots in the American culinary tradition, one that’s put him in rare and lauded company. Put simply, Jordan is a star.
So when a chef like Edouardo Jordan tells you, in no uncertain terms, that this is a wild and terrifying moment to be in the restaurant business, we should all be listening. “We’ve had discussions with landlords, reviewed all of our books, and we’re trying to determine next steps,” Jordan tells The Stranger, “but there are just so many unknowns.”
