It’s not exactly breaking news, but Seattle’s hospitality industry is having a real rough time. Over the past few years, our city’s restaurantscape has seen some of the nation’s highest minimum wages instated, justifiably. In its wake came a rolling wave of wage theft investigations and late-pay disputes. That’s alongside the issues that’ve been affecting restaurants across the nation: rent gouging, astronomical food costs, booze tariffs, supply chain issues, inflated insurance payments, and other Trump- and pandemic-related discombobulation. It’s why we’re seeing restaurant staff striking and unionizing, and why we’re losing our beloved James Beard–nominated darlings right and left. Restaurant owners are scrambling, as their business models don’t seem to pay the bills anymore, and the fallout has been hitting some unfortunate workers in the paycheck.
The problem’s not helped when there’s just one person or entity at the top of the restaurant pyramid to navigate these challenges, whom employees must trust implicitly, with zero visibility on what’s going on inside—or when the whole structure might crumble.
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Brothers, chefs, and biz partners Seth and Zach Pacleb had a better idea. After a decade and a half of co-running farmers market stalls, pop-ups, and catering operations together, they opened Pidgin Cooperative last fall, along with fellow industry pros Erica Reich and Spencer Rossman. Located inside Fishermen’s Terminal in a boaty, industrial area of eastern Magnolia, the worker-owned restaurant and bottle shop brings together the team’s values of collaboration, trust, and financial transparency in a way that could reshape the city’s whole hospitality industry.
Pidgin was built around a radically simple notion. Instead of a traditional hierarchy model—where workers get hourly wages plus tips, while owners make all the decisions and reap the profits, if indeed there are any—the whole staff is invited to be in the founder’s club. On day one, Pidgin employees are paid $25 per hour and given a clear pathway toward becoming co-owners. After 2,000 hours of service (roughly one year of FTE), workers can purchase a membership share for $1,000 that grants them voting rights in the business, visibility on its finances, and access to profit-sharing. They can invest that $1,000 through a payment plan, if they like, and prelim voting rights are unlocked after an initial investment of $200. The model also includes an equal share of the pooled tips for both front-of-house and back-of-house workers. Currently, Seth says, there are six worker-members at Pidgin, and one who’s on track to becoming the seventh.
This power-to-the-people restaurant concept began, appropriately, in the farmers markets. Around 2010, the Brothers Pacleb used their collective decades of fine-dining expertise to start a pop-up called Brothers and Co., first doing catering and one-off dinners. A few years later, they were selling handcrafted snacks at farmers markets, eventually pivoting to pan-Asian tacos and ramen but make it farm-to-table. Later restyled as Ramen and Tacos, they found themselves continually freestyling new dishes, often drawing from their Pacific Islander heritage—and whatever produce their fellow vendors had around.
Zach says, “The farmers would walk up to us, you know, like ‘We’re hungry,’ and we’d feed them, and then at some point one of them asked us, ‘Do you want to trade food for food?’ And then it just became a part of the model. We had regular farmers, we knew their orders, and then we would go across the aisle and pick stuff up from them.” That barter system soon became the norm, and the brothers eventually gave up trying to track who owed them how much or vice versa. “You’d have a farmer who has, like, a 35-pound bin of delicata squash that they just don’t want to take home. I’d be like ‘Yeah, okay! Totally! Looks like I’m feeding you for the next three weeks.’”
The Paclebs didn’t know it yet, but this squash-based currency system would become an important plot device in the genesis of Pidgin Cooperative. The network they’d formed with dozens of hyperlocal producers at the farmers markets meant they knew exactly when the best stuff was in season. Zach even created a detailed color-coded spreadsheet to record the names of their favorite farmers, what they sell, and what time of year their, say, asparagus was at its very sweetest.
Like so many other local culinary ghosts, Ramen and Tacos was slain by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Paclebs reverted back to the name Brothers and Co., focusing anew on catering. But all pandemic long, they and their team had a glimmering little idea brewing.
When asked why start a worker-owned restaurant in the first place, Zach says, “I think for Seth and I specifically, our bodies were really starting to hurt. So there was this desire to figure out something that’d be better for us as we move forward. I don’t know how many anecdotes we’ve heard from other chef-owners who just run their bodies into the ground because they have this vision. I think it terrified us!
“This co-op model allows us to not only give our long-term staff the opportunity to grow with us but also spread the labor of steering the direction of the business, so everyone can have input on making decisions. So it’s not just on the two of us. This way, there’d be more opportunity for workers to have agency over their work, and it would also allow us a little bit of relief.
“Obviously, this is a low-margin industry,” Zach admits. ”But since a co-op is essentially a profit-sharing model, as long as everybody is participating in the day-to-day operations, we’re all committed to having that skin in the game. With the help of our lovely lawyer, we developed the financial structure to make sure that everybody is getting what they’re earning.”
If you’re gonna start this kind of a thing, it certainly helps to be brothers. Originally from Bothell, Seth and Zach Pacleb got their start in fine dining, with Canlis, Crush, Restaurant Zoë, the London Plane, and other splashy restaurant names studding their résumés. They’ve worked together often, long before they co-owned businesses.
Erica Reich, who is also Seth’s life partner, sometimes gets left out of the origin story conversation, but she’s been on board since the farmers market days. A food service veteran with experience in marketing and arts org management, Reich is one of the four initial worker-members, and she’s Pidgin’s general manager. In fact, Zach credits Erica, along with his brother, with the idea to start the co-op in the first place.
The other O.G. worker-member, Spencer Rossman, is the Paclebs’ buddy since middle school who spent two decades as the beer and wine steward at upscale supermarket chain Town & Country Markets. He’s Pidgin’s beverage director.
Okay, but let’s talk about the food. Unsurpringsly, Pidgin is very, very good at vegetable dishes in general, and I fuck very deeply with their smoky eggplant tortang talong (Filipino omelet) and harissa-kissed black-bean noodles with fresh cucumbers and pickled mustard greens, whenever they cameo on the menu. The tingly, effervescent house kimchi is a serious contender for best in town, too—I can never resist taking a li’l box of that and their prickly ash popcorn, ’zazzed with Sichuan spices and nutritional yeast, home with me.
Pidgin’s also developed a devout fandom around their fried chicken sandwich: a crispy inasal-and-koji-marinated chicken thigh—flavors of calamansi, black pepper, garlic, coconut vinegar—on toasted brioche with ranch, shredded cabbage, and sumac onions. And you should never ignore the fresh sheet at Pidgin, largely brought to us by Zach’s elaborate Excel of PNW farmers. On my last visit, it clued me into a special, the stunning, savory nettle noodles: hand-foraged stinging nettles kneaded into a dough made with Washington-grown flour and then shaped in Pidgin’s custom noodle machine. Served with peanut-forward chili crisp, garlicky green nettle sauce, curry leaf, fermented corn, preserved lemon, hazelnut, and Parmesan, it was enough for two meals at just $16. Among other bangers, that day’s fresh sheet also listed tamarind-tamari grilled short ribs and tempura fish ’n’ chips made with rockfish, hijiki-enhanced batter, and Sichuan remoulade.
Whew. These folks are not playing.
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Pidgin’s in its first year, so it’s a little early to dream big, but Seth confesses he’s thinking of starting some kind of umbrella group of restaurant co-ops someday. The idea is that his team could teach other new businesses how to get up and running under a co-op model, with a pool of resources, lawyers, and maybe even capital to help them realize their visions.
Obviously, a cooperative isn’t a business model that every restaurateur can adopt, and if it’s not baked into the process from the start, a switch for an extant restaurant is gonna be tricky. You’ll also need to trust your team utterly or there’s no way, and you can’t be trying to build a shimmering empire of oyster shells. You’ll probably need to stick to one restaurant for a while. But if they can, every reasonably humble prospective new owner who hopes to build a restaurant concept with purpose and deliberation—and wouldn’t mind a few extra accountable helping hands in the process—should consider a cooperative model.
If enough of them do, Seattle could revolutionize its presently very dismal hospitality industry, dismantle a now-broken business model, and plant some hope in the process. It might just take a village.
