For our final edition of Bookkeeping and a look at the books local businesses love so much they keep them in easy reach, CHS ventures to Montlake for another chat with a member of the Lago family. Way back in July, we stopped through Portage Bay for a perusal of the shelves inside Little Lago. At sibling Cafe Lago in the lowlands of Montlake, owner Carla Leonardi and chef Lucas Neve reach high to draw on Italian classics served in an accessible style.
How does a book make it onto these shelves?Neve: A lot Carla has collected over the years. A number are the pasta chef’s [Justin Dissmore]. Most of mine stay at home…. Sometimes we need recipes that we borrowed from in the past. A lot of them are just reference points, especially pasta and bread books. We bake our own bread here so we need to troubleshoot sometimes or find a new pasta shape for this week’s special …. They are mostly all purchased for home use. You’ve read it a couple times, and then it ends up on our shelf here. Continue reading →
From affordable housing at Cal Anderson-adjacent Station House to a Union Street pedestrian bridge on the Central Waterfront, designs from architecture studio Schemata Workshops are fixtures on the Hill and far beyond. Co-founder Grace Kim shared some favorite volumes with us for Bookkeeping, our occasional series on the books local businesses love so much they keep them in easy reach.
How does a book make it onto this shelf? Most of the books in the office are reference books. So books we’re using for precedents or looking at typologies — other built examples with similar characteristics — to see kind of what else people are thinking about. And sometimes it’s not even the same type, like we might be looking at a compact home, but we might look at libraries, and how they might use condensed storage. Sometimes we’re trying to capture look and feel. A lot of that we can do on the internet. So a lot of the books that are here are actually much, much older, just because they’re from a time when we couldn’t search those things on the internet. . . . I guess a big way these books show up is when we’re looking for more information than what you would find on the web. So we might be searching for high density housing in Europe and find one or two projects with just a picture or two. And so then trying to dive in a little deeper and understand the project, we might see if it’s published in a book somewhere. And that will lead to other similar projects. Then we can look at what’s happening outside our area. Continue reading →
Bookkeeping is an occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines
We stopped in at Nasir Zubair’s 12th Ave Karachi Cowboy’s, one of the Hill’s newer eateries, where food is bound up in Zubair’s family traditions but unbound by the rules of restaurant trade.
How does a book make it onto this shelf? This is all just stuff that’s inspiring me right now. If we ever have a downtime and we want some inspiration for what to add to our menu next, we have all this to choose from. And everyone’s welcome to take a look if they want to. We’re not very structured here. It’s pretty chill. Continue reading →
Bookkeeping is an occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines
Since opening in 2011, SugarPill has been Pike/Pine’s stop for herbal remedies and time-honored health wisdom. CHS Bookkeeping made a visit to the Hill’s apothecary where Karyn Schwartz’s homeopathic prescriptions sometimes include book leaves.
How does a book make it onto the shelf? Half of them are books and texts that I used in school. I studied herbs informally by apprenticing with people and taking workshops and going to gatherings. That was very hands-on, like learning a language when you move to a place where that language is spoken. But homeopathic medicine I went to school for and so this whole [left] side is all my homeopathic texts.
The right side is all herb books. This is a fraction of what I have, but these are ones I refer to frequently. I always wanted to actually have a book section here, but I’ve never had room. And there’s always new stuff coming out. And since the bookstore is right around the corner, I’m like, let them sell the books. And we’ll give the advice. Continue reading →
Bookkeeping is an occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines
The two shelves of cookbooks at Portage Bay’s Little Lago are easily missed, stacked as they are back past the restroom and above gleaming cake pans and cookie sheets and plastic tubs of foundational ingredients like flour and salt. In this rendition of Bookkeeping, we talk to owner Will Steinway about the current go-to volumes that flavor his kitchen.
How does the book make it onto that shelf? For the most part, it’s books that we use on a more constant basis. Most come from my house library that we’ll bring in, and if we find we’re using it more than once or twice, then it’ll stay on the shelf. Sometimes they come back and then go back to the store. But for the most part, those are just our go-to books.
If you had to choose a favorite, which one would it be? Well, I guess it depends on what is being done, but I would say that my favorite book is The Flavor Bible, which is much more of a resource than anything else. When it comes to baking, I would say Bake, which we have all four volumes of. Continue reading →
Bookkeeping is a new, occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines
Small bookshelves are tucked into establishments all over Capitol Hill. What’s on them, and why? In Bookkeeping, CHS asks small businesses on and around the Hill to open their books to us. For this inaugural post, we spoke to Brandon Waterman, co-owner, with Jason Marqusee, of Good Weather in Seattle, one of the Hill’s collection of bike shop-slash-cafes. You can find Good Weather’s book collection on their bookshelf just inside the front door of their Chophouse Row shop.
How does a book make it onto this shelf? Most of those books are mine. Some aren’t there — we have more in the back — because not all cycling books feel inclusive, so to speak. Bike shops have traditionally been male and fast, and that space is really negative. And some of the books were all about how to be a dedicated, perfect cyclist. And it’s like — “Maybe it’s not about that.”
The bookshelf doesn’t get used much now that we don’t have indoor seating. Which will come back soon, hopefully. But the way that books show up, each one has their own unique story. It’s a little bit like looking through your closet….I can look at every single garment that’s in my closet and know where it came from and have like a story behind it like, “Oh, I got that at Crossroads, I got that when I went on vacation to Japan.”….Some of them come from friends. Some of them come from collections that we’ve had for a long time. And then some of them just magically showed up. There’s a series of maps, because a lot of cycling is finding your way around. And while there’s really good resources for that online, there’s also a huge amount of printed and interesting material….A lot of those maps came from a guy who was touring in the Pacific Northwest, from here up into British Columbia. He had a bunch of maps sent here before he arrived from Europe. And when he came back through to fly out, he left them with us. Continue reading →
