edible seattle | Spring 2025 21 Above: Chef Evan Leichtling and coowner Meghna Prakash of Off Alley in Columbia City see their work as partly about preserving culinary history. Opposite: This Dungeness crab will contribute its delicious tomalley (crab fat) to dishes at Fremont’s Local Tide, like their popular crab roll (below), only available on weekends. Tomalley is considered a delicacy by many. “I feel like this generation is the offspring of people who were forced to eat offal and then kind of or swore off it,” says Taylor Thornill, executive chef at Bateau, Renee Erickson’s steak house in Capitol Hill. “But then [my] generation is like, oh, there are these great ingredients and great restaurants are preparing them, and I want to know more about it.” While Bateau’s specialty is dry-aged, grass-fed steaks, Thornhill makes sure to punctuate the menu with the rest of the cow. Instead of butter, his bread course includes a beef liver mousse to spread on toasted beef fat brioche with fruit paste and fermented wholegrain mustard. Thornhill often includes beef kidneys on the tasting menu, an ingredient that is still polarizing at times. “I think there is that inevitability that no matter what it is or how it’s presented, you may never change certain people’s minds,” says Thornhill. “But for us, it’s about utilizing the whole animal, and eating offal is part of that.” Reducing waste, increasing taste Evan Leichtling at Off Alley in Columbia City echoes this sentiment with a mind for cultural preservation. “One part of the conversation is about sustainability and not throwing things away or wasting food,” says Leichtling. “But the second part of the conversation is preserving or recovering forgotten techniques, knowledge and history—how to clean and prepare sweetbreads, making a proper sausage, working with livers, cleaning and cooking sea cucumbers, how to harvest lamb brains, working with blood. The list goes on and on.” At Off Alley, Leichtling and co-owner Meghna Prakash prepare imaginative yet approachable dishes with plenty of offal. The handwritten chalkboard menu might feature a collection of things like fried duck heads, blood sausage, rabbit kidneys on toast, monkfish liver, grilled lamb tongue, beef tendon, sweetbreads or foie gras ice cream. Many of these ingredients were historically cheaper than premium cuts of beef. However, cheap cuts are often more labor intensive to prepare. “Basically you save money buying it but you then have to put the labor into manipulating it and preparing it,” says Leichtling. “It’s really heartbreaking right now. I’m having a really hard time procuring a lot of these ingredients. Right now it’s cheaper for most slaughterhouses to throw away the organs than make them sellable. It’s getting to a point where offal is becoming more expensive than meat, even if it might require double the labor compared to preparing a steak.” Yenvy Pham, whose family has operated Phở Bắc Sup Shop in Little Saigon for the past four decades, has also witnessed the price of offal increase. “Bone marrow, tendon, tripe, they all used to be extremely affordable but now the prices are just skyrocketing,” says Pham. “In the early 2000s, the price of bone marrow shot up by around 400% because the American market started to eat roasted bone marrow.” Pham isn’t exaggerating; prices on bones, for marrow and for bone broth, have continued to rise. Even as recently as 2017, ranchers and farmers struggled to get anything in exchange for bones, before demand had a dramatic uptick that often exceeded supply.
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