Family-owned Seattle restaurant Canlis was opened in 1950 by Peter Canlis and is now run by his grandchildren, brothers Mark and Brian. It describes itself as “a modern restaurant with a sense of history, place, and time.” Occupying a striking cantilevered building high above Seattle, its glass facades afford stunning views of the city, Lake Union, and the Cascade Mountains.

The heart of Canlis

Canlis is credited with having invented what is now known as Pacific Northwest cuisine, which puts an emphasis on fresh, local ingredients including seafood, game meats, and wild plants, and is influenced by Native American and Asian traditions. Indeed, four of the seven Executive Chefs in the restaurant’s seven-decade history—including the woman who currently holds the position, Aisha Ibrahim—have Asian heritage. She sees her role at Canlis as “exploring the region’s indigenous ingredients, the nuances of its micro-seasons, and the city’s historic role as a gateway to Asia.”

The atmosphere in Canlis reflects the building itself: storied but forward-looking, refined but simple, formal but open to the world. It is a place to dress up (suits or jackets are requested) but not to stiffen up. Instead, diners are encouraged to relax to the laid-back live piano music, enjoy the fantastic food, and savor the world-class service for which the restaurant is famed. One of the aims of the Canlis brothers and chef Ibrahim is to get away from the idea of fine dining as stuffy, serious, and detached, instead seeking to make a human connection with diners, whom Ibrahim often invites into the kitchen to meet the team and see behind the scenes. As she puts it, “fine dining can be fun.”

Ibrahim was born in the Philippines and raised in West Virginia. She discovered her passion for cooking after being obliged to give up a college basketball career following a serious knee injury. She dropped out of college the following year, enrolled at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and has never looked back. Stints in various well-respected Bay Area restaurants culminated in a job as Sous Chef at Manresa, where she met chef Eneko Atxa. After training with him at his restaurant Azurmendi in the Basque Country, Spain, she was offered the job of Chef de Cuisine at Atxa’s restaurant in Thailand, Aziamendi. She gained further experience in some of Tokyo’s top restaurants, including Kagurazaka Ishikawa, Kohaku, L’Effervescence, and RyuGin. At this point she intended to open her own place in Thailand, but the Covid-19 pandemic scuppered her plans. That’s when the invitation to take over as Executive Chef at Canlis arrived, and despite only having visited Seattle once, Ibrahim was inspired to take the plunge.

In 2023, she received a Best New Chef of America award from Food & Wine.

Canlis was ranked one of the top 20 restaurants in America by Gourmet Magazine, while Food & Wine has listed it as “one of the 40 most important restaurants in the past 40 years.” It has received 22 consecutive Wine Spectator Grand Awards. Over its history, Canlis has been nominated for 15 James Beard Awards, winning three, including an Outstanding Wine Program award in 2017 and a Design Icon Award in 2019, a tribute to the remarkable building that houses it.

The Chef

Born in the Philippines, Ibrahim immigrated to the US as a child and grew up in West Virginia. She attended university on a basketball scholarship, but in her first year a serious knee injury sidelined her from the sport, which is when she discovered a passion for cooking. She dropped out of college to attend the Le Cordon Bleu program in San Francisco and remained in the Bay Area after graduating to launch her culinary career. She worked at a number of esteemed restaurants including Aqua, Commis, and Manresa, where she met chef Eneko Atxa. He would become an important influence on both her cooking and her non-combative approach to running a kitchen. After a period working for him in Spain at his restaurant Azurmendi, he invited her to move to its sister venue Aziamendi in Phuket, Thailand, as Chef de Cuisine. She also gained experience working in various elite kitchens in Thailand, Singapore, and Japan, for example at Kagurazaka Ishikawa, L’Effervescence, and RyuGin. Her plans to open a restaurant in Bangkok with her partner Samantha Beaird fell apart during the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving her free to accept the position of Executive Chef at Canlis in Seattle, where Beaird also now works as R&D Sous Chef.

In 2023, Ibrahim won a Food & Wine Best New Chef award.

Restaurant

Standing high above the city for seven decades, offering superb panoramic views of Lake Union and the Cascade Mountains, Canlis is a celebrated Seattle institution. Created by Peter Canlis and architect Roland Terry in 1950, the striking cantilevered glass building is one of just a handful of places in the city where male diners are requested to wear suits or jackets. The restaurant has always been a popular purveyor of Pacific Northwest cuisine, but under the third generation of the Canlis family to run it—brothers Mark and Brian—it has evolved into a serious player in the world of fine dining.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Canlis repeatedly reinvented itself, becoming a bagel shop, then a crab shack, and finally a drive-in movie theater. When the restaurant reopened in 2021, Ibrahim took over as Executive Chef.

Although she is the fourth Executive Chef at Canlis with Asian heritage, she is the first Filipino, as well as the first woman and the first queer person to have taken on the role. In the words of Mark Canlis, “What makes Aisha the best chef for this restaurant has to do with caring for people, leading people, and creating a culture.”

Recipes and dishes

Ibrahim’s cooking is influenced by many of the culinary cultures she has encountered during her globe-trotting career but above all by Japanese cuisine, for which she has expressed a deep love and respect.

Inspired by the kaiseki philosophy, she likes to prepare micro-seasonal ingredient lists and is known for putting sustainability at the heart of her process, sourcing wherever possible from biodynamic farms in the local area.

She knows, however, that Canlis is at heart a Pacific Northwest restaurant, so the underlying perspective is always an American one.

Among her signature dishes is her miso eggplant omelet, also known as 'eggplant Rita' in tribute to her mother, who used to make it for her. In this dish, Ibrahim gives the tortang talong—a traditional Filipino breakfast omelet—a Japanese twist, in the form of succulent charred eggplant fried in whisked eggs, served with umami-rich miso sauce. She describes it as having a “custardy souffle-like texture,” crunchy on the outside, smooth on the inside.

Another of her iconic recipes is an exquisite sablefish dish, in which she turns black cod into an elegant work of art with the help of dashi and a variety of mushrooms.

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