How Seattle-Bred Chef James Huffman Is Leading Canlis Into Its Next 75 Years

By Eric Barton | Nov. 10, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

James Huffman tells a story about the unglamorous way he got his start at Canlis, the bastion of Seattle fine-dining. It was 10 years ago, and Huffman was walking past the place when a cook just happened to step out of the side door. “I asked if there was a chef I could speak with about turning in my résumé,” Huffman recalls.

There are a lot of ways that story could end, many of them with Huffman having a door shut in his face. But the cook was kind and took him to the executive sous chef.

Walking through the kitchen, Huffman noticed its pace. “Cooks moving with precision and purpose — quick, focused, intentional,” he remembers. A quiet, unsmiling sous sized him up. He didn’t get the job that minute. He left with something else: a definition of the standard.

Fast-forward: same corridor, different role. Service is rolling, the room humming over Lake Union, and James Huffman is the one setting the tempo. After applying and finally getting that job on the line, and then spending the next nine years there, he’s now executive chef at the 75-year-old Seattle institution. Huffman is the first Seattle-born chef in a place that has always insisted the future matters more than the lore.

The job fits his backstory and his ethos for cooking. Rigor without theater. Hospitality without fuss. A pantry drawn from the Pacific Northwest, expressed with the confidence of someone who grew up here and earned the right to represent it.

James Huffman

Huffman’s story begins north of the city, in Lake Forest Park, where creeks run to Lake Washington and the evergreens feel endless. Huffman talks about a childhood of crawfish and scraped shins, nettles and barbecues, a log-cabin home that drew people in. “We’d take Lake City Way to Mariners games or dinner downtown,” he said, and the details explain the compass he still cooks by: community first, then place.

He found kitchens as a teenager and realized they quieted his brain in the way sports used to. The spark came partly from a low-key bar and grill, partly from a Filipino family table. “Tasting Filipino dishes for the first time — that richness, soul, and depth of flavor — opened my eyes,” he told me. The kitchen’s noise did something gentler: “The rush and chaos of a restaurant had this strange ability to quiet my busy, loud mind… I fell in love with the pursuit of repetition, efficiency, flavor, and adrenaline.”

Wagyu-wrapped oyster

The throughline, though, is people. “The team, the human element — that’s the heart of it,” he said. Restaurants gave him a vocabulary for curiosity: learning a cook’s favorite record and their grandmother’s recipe, then translating both into how the line runs at 7:45 p.m. That empathy met discipline under Williams and Ibrahim. “Both chefs are champions of people first and foremost,” he said. From Williams he took a minimalist modernity—clarity as power. From Ibrahim, a ruthless organization that lets technique and ingredients speak cleanly. Also: fish. “She’s a master of fish and seafood,” he said, a sentence that tells you as much about what you’ll eat as how the day’s work is planned.

Clams, geoduck, and kasu

Chef James Huffman Calis Restaurant English pea flan

English pea flan, mint, morels

Ask him what “Northwest food” means and he answers with seasons and names. King salmon when it’s king. Oysters in December. Mushrooms when the forest allows it. “For me, ‘Northwest food’ starts with ingredients that are grown, raised, harvested, or caught right here,” he said. He’ll talk about knowing the rancher, like Pure Country in Moses Lake, before he’ll talk about grading. The relationship comes before the labeling.

Chef James Huffman Canlis Restaurant Seattle Beans

He is also spelunking the archives, drawing from the restaurant’s mid-century past and Hawaiian ties without treating either as museum pieces. “Using the history of Canlis as fuel for creativity has been a lot of fun,” he said. The point isn’t nostalgia; it’s continuity. “We’re looking into the future, asking what’s the best way to take care of somebody with our cooking, with our presence, with this entire place.” Then he adds the line that sounds like a promise: “At 75 years old I don’t see us slowing down.”

Mayocoba beans, chanterelle, and chicory

There’s a family lesson under all of this. “Through every hard moment, I witnessed the power of optimism and a can-do spirit,” he told me. That optimism shows up in how he runs service—calm first, speed second—and in the way he answers a question about leadership by talking about stewardship. The kitchen still moves like that instrument he once admired from the doorway. Only now he’s the one keeping time.

Cherry and hazelnut