A CULINARY ROVER TRIES THE GOOD LIFE IN SEATTLE

“I moved here a year ago,” says Kevin McKenzie, “because there was too much pressure in L.A. Down there, to open a new restaurant you have to practically think up a whole new cuisine--and then it’s out of style in six months. Besides, I was tired of being the roaming Los Angeles chef.”

And that is exactly what he had been. The Los Angeles native (Fred Astaire is his step-grandfather) is only 28, but he began working in restaurants when he was 14 and since then he has passed through the kitchen of almost every restaurant that is cooking California cuisine.

His career began at the Hard Rock Cafe in London. By the time he was 20 he was working at Michael’s. “One day I went to him (Michael McCarty)and said, ‘What do I do to become like you?’ He told me to go to restaurant school, so I did. Mostly what I learned there was business, but it was useful.”

McKenzie next went to work for Jeremiah Tower in Berkeley and San Francisco. He became the chef at Morton’s, went back to Michael’s as the lunch chef, moved on to become executive chef at Santa Monica’s American Bar and Grill. By then he was in his mid-20s and thinking of opening his own place.

But he wasn’t sure that Los Angeles was the place to do it. “I wanted a real life,” he says. “I wanted to have a little house, grow my own herbs and see my family. I wanted to be able to sleep in in the morning. If I had opened a restaurant in Los Angeles I would have had to work all the time; the place I was planning would have cost half a million dollars.”

Instead McKenzie moved to Seattle and, for a mere $95,000, opened Rover’s and ran it for a year. But economics were not the only appealing thing about the city. “I was hoping I’d be in the right place at the right time and grow with the city,” says McKenzie. “You know, what I’m doing is considered avant garde here. But by L.A. standards it is very conservative.”

Not conservative exactly, but certainly familiar. In a cozy, little restaurant decorated with paintings by friends and family (his father, who ran the McKenzie Gallery on La Cienega, painted the portrait in the adjoining photo), McKenzie serves dishes like pasta with fresh crab, golden caviar and chardonnay cream or pan roasted quail with oyster and chestnut stuffing. He grills free-range chicken and serves it with polenta cakes, and tops a white bean soup with roasted red pepper and cilantro butter. The food is beautiful and tasty, but hardly radical.

“People here are different,” says McKenzie. “They are real fanatic about seasonal stuff. When berries are out people just eat berries like maniacs. In L.A. you can get everything year round, and people are willing to pay for it. Golden raspberries may cost $10 a box in the winter, but down there you can sell them. Up here people are just not willing to pay for raspberries in the winter. It’s interesting to me. I’m not as spoiled; I’m learning about seasonal ingredients.”

The ingredients themselves are a big part of the attraction of the Pacific Northwest. “The fish,” says McKenzie, “are wonderful. All that salmon and halibut is better than what you can get in Los Angeles. The mushrooms are amazing; just walking through the woods outside of town you find 70 or 80 different kinds. And for me, going to the Market (the Pike Place Market) is a big part of the fun of being here.”

McKenzie is also happy with the customers. “They’re real loyal. If they call you their favorite restaurant they stick around. In L.A. people move in herds from one new restaurant to the next.” He has kind words too for his purveyors. “People up here are incredibly honest; you don’t need to be real careful about weighing things in.” Why is it then, that a wistful note comes creeping into McKenzie’s voice when he speaks about Los Angeles?

He won’t say much more than that Seattle is still “a very young town in food,” and that despite rave reviews from the local papers and the loyalty of his customers there are nights when only eight people show up for dinner. Costs are lower here, but so are prices; one of his major competitors serves a prix-fixe 3 course dinner for only $18, and McKenzie’s prices, moderate by Los Angeles standards, are considered high in Seattle.

Then too there is the quality of the reviews. Although, for obvious reasons, none of them was willing to be quoted directly, many Seattle chefs complained that the local restaurant critics were not rigorous enough. The one really respected critic in town, the Weekly’s Schuyler Ingle, is no longer reviewing restaurants.

So it was not Ingle who wrote the Weekly’s review of Rover’s. This one ended by calling McKenzie “a genius.” Unfortunately, the same review began this way: “If palate abuse were a crime, I would be sent up for life. My idea of gustatory pleasure is the one-of-a-kind combination of tastes, sounds and sugars you get from washing down peanut M&M;’s with canned beer. . . .”

McKenzie shrugs. “San Francisco used to be like this,” he says. “So much has happened there in the last five years. Five years from now, a lot will have changed here in Seattle too.

Rover’s, 2808 E. Madison, Seattle ; (206) 325-7442. Dinner for two, food only, about $30-$50.