Seattle, WA
The Man Behind Saint Bread, the Wayland Mill, and Tivoli
Yasuaki Saito often hides in plain sight at his restaurants.
Yasuaki Saito’s restaurants are more famous than he is. Saint Bread, his University District waterfront bakery, was called one of the country’s best bakeries by The New York Times and got longlisted for the James Beard Awards last year. This year the Wayland Mill, his Japanese-inspired all-day café and restaurant in Wallingford, is up for the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. If you’ve eaten at Saito’s restaurants, you may have unknowingly met the shaggy-headed fortysomething when he greeted you at his Fremont pizzeria, Tivoli, or made your coffee at Saint Bread.
Saito has a way of fading into the background. He resembles a kind-eyed roadie who’s happy to lend you his dog-eared copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The kind of guy who, in a notoriously potty-mouthed profession, will respond to accidentally breaking a plate by exclaiming, “Biscuits and gravy!”
He doesn’t curse in anger, Saito says, because he doesn’t want to demonstrate to his team that that’s how you deal with challenges and mistakes. “He is so intentional and really believes in everything that he does,” says chef Sam Smith, who worked with Saito in Portland and consulted on Saint Bread.
When the Wayland Mill opened, Saito spent a lot of time working the register to set the standard for how he wanted guests to be greeted. He often hires people based not on skill level, but on how much they care about hospitality. It’s all part of a formula that has made him one of the most successful Seattle restaurateurs of the past decade.
Saito’s low-key version of leadership shapes his restaurants.
Saito grew up hanging out in the St. Louis teppanyaki restaurant his Japanese immigrant father owned. From age 7, Saito loved the communal, bustling vibe and always wanted to work in restaurants.
It didn’t actually happen until he burned out after a decade working at Borders, quit his job, and wound up helping some friends open the era-defining, now-classic Nopa in San Francisco. In 2014, Saito and his wife moved to Seattle, where he took a job managing the London Plane. Then still relatively new, the ambitious café, bakery, and flower shop in Pioneer Square owned by restaurateur Matt Dillon and florist Katherine Anderson was the ideal landing spot for someone with Saito’s wide-ranging interests.
“He has so much energy and also expertise in so many different things,” says Cassie Woolhiser, who has worked for Saito off and on in various roles for more than a decade. “Like calibrating an espresso machine, but also writing poetry and talking about humanism and how it affects his day-to-day work.”
In 2018, Anderson and Dillon brought Saito on as a partner in London Plane. The following year, he bought Post Alley Pizza, near Pike Place Market, with his longtime coworker Andrew Gregory. They didn’t announce the ownership change publicly, but stealthily reinvented the hole-in-the-wall slice shop, making pies with 24-hour leavened dough and orienting specials around seasonal produce. That transformation would set the tone for Saito’s future ventures: understated but quietly innovative.
Tivoli serves the same pizza as Post Alley, with a few extras.
The London Plane closed in late 2022 when Saito and Anderson declined to renew the lease. By then, Saito had opened Saint Bread, which retains some of that maximalist spirit. It’s a bakery but also a brunch restaurant where the food gleefully borrows from Japan and Scandinavia; an omelet comes topped with pickled ginger and fishy bonito flakes, an egg sandwich on sweet melonpan instead of a roll. In the warmer months, Saint Bread hosts a cocktail stand (Heave Ho) and a wood-fired food cart (Hinoki) in the unassuming space—a repurposed boathouse and a gravel lot—that manages to be so many things at once.
Saito followed up Saint Bread with Tivoli in 2023, which anchors its menu on the same style of pizza as Post Alley, but adds dishes like a Caesar salad livened up with chicories and chilled pistachio noodles. Then, with last year’s the Wayland Mill, he leaned further into the mash-up concept: a coffee shop where you can work while sampling a pastry or a date-night spot where you can get sake and Buffalo chicken karaage. Saito dubbed the food “yoshoku Americana,” borrowing the term for Japanese versions of Western dishes and injecting it with homegrown nostalgia. It’s a cuisine that has been back and forth across the Pacific a few times but is instantly recognizable. “The yoshoku idea is something I grew up really enjoying,” says Saito. “[It] allowed me to be that hafu, that liminal space of being a Japanese American kid, it helped me maybe come to terms more with my upbringing and my heritage.”
Saito and chef Jim McGurk infused their shared Midwestern backgrounds into Tivoli.
Nostalgia is something of a North Star for Saito’s operations, says Woolhiser. Customers likely didn’t grow up eating the gochujang snickerdoodle at Saint Bread, but they probably recall being warmed by a cookie on a chilly fall day. People haven’t had anything like the delicate biscuits slathered in umami-rich miso-chashu gravy at the Wayland Mill, but all the elements of that dish are familiar—diner fare filtered through Saito’s experience, interpreted by baker Ellary Collins and chef Jim McGurk.
Unlike many star restaurateurs, Saito didn’t start out as a chef. He describes his role as an “operator,” someone who has done practically every job in the restaurant but also handles payroll and balances the books. A chef puts together ingredients to make dishes; Saito puts together people to make restaurants.
Making pizza at Saito’s restaurants is just one part of making a guest feel welcome.
“He’s very good at finding great talent, bringing that talent together, and letting people’s talents speak,” says Nicole Sakai, an art director whose agency, Factory North, built the stained-glass window at Saint Bread, among other projects for Saito. He looks for people who have “hospitality in their hearts,” or the Japanese idea of omotenashi, which he roughly defines as “hospitality for the sake of it.” He wants people who understand that baking bread or grilling hamburgers or pulling espresso shots is all in service of making a guest feel welcome. Even people who are exceptional cooks or bakers may not care about that second layer of the work, but Saito needs them to.
It means saying “welcome in” and meaning it, a bit of sincerity you can’t quite describe but feel when you walk in. It means that when a construction worker wanders into the Wayland Mill when it’s closed, Saito will (politely) pause the interview with the journalist he’s conducting to make a coffee. It means that if you say how much you love a cup at the Wayland Mill, as a friend of mine recently did, you may find yourself being given one when you leave.
That hospitality extends beyond paying customers. At the London Plane, people from the neighborhood would wander in from the street in varying degrees of distress. “Sometimes people were destructive, and Yasu had to ask them to leave,” Woolhiser says. “But most of the time, people would just come in and sit down and be like, on their own mental journey, and Yasu would offer them a cup of coffee or ask if they wanted anything.”
The sainted glass window at Saint Bread.
Saito’s philosophy around those interactions is to show up for the world the way that he thinks the world should show up for him. With a glass of water, directions, simply a place to sit for a while. “There’s a version of that help that could actually put that person on a different path,” he says. “And I’m not going to say that I’ve done anything to save anybody’s life or any of those things, but oftentimes it’s small things like that that can help somebody understand that they’re not alone in the world.”
Some guests might notice this spirit of hospitality, all these layers of meaning. Some of them probably don’t, just as some glaze over the custom stained-glass window at Saint Bread. They don’t need to see any individual action, any tangible evidence of Saito’s hard work. His kindness, his attention to detail, the way he cares about so many things, it all seeps into his restaurants. A vibe, something in the air, the way customers feel after a visit. They might not notice it, but it leaves a mark anyway.
I have always been in love with cities. I joke with friends that I have crushes on cities the way they have crushes on good-looking strangers. Sometimes—as with Paris and London—my unrequited crush meant finding an excuse to move there. With Seattle, however, that initial attraction grew into a long-term relationship.
Liz Dunn
Phot by TRAVIS GILLETT
I arrived here as a “tech baby,” coming from Canada to work at Microsoft as a college intern. For a long time, I felt as though I were living in a bubble—until I realized I could pivot my career and work in and on the city I’d come to call home. Through my company, Dunn & Hobbes, I’ve done just that, spending more than 25 years building and renovating spaces for retail, restaurants, and creative work. I love old buildings—but what I love more is what happens inside and around them. I love making space for creative people and then watching them fully inhabit those places and thrive. I also love how a collection of structures on a block can become an economic and artistic ecosystem.
Working in real estate is not just about making deals—you’re crafting pieces of the city, and that comes with both impact and responsibility.
Small businesses are the heart and soul of any neighborhood. Research shows that locally owned businesses generate a much higher multiplier effect in the regional economy than national chains. Beyond economics, the independent shops, restaurants, and designers that comprise the core fabric of a city are the secret sauce that makes it feel unique.
Nowhere is that more evident than Capitol Hill’s Pike/Pine corridor, where I’ve conducted most of my work and lived out large chunks of my adult life. During the past 25 years, it has become a case study in what happens when you preserve character and invest in small business. The area was once filled with old auto-row buildings that had fallen into disuse. Instead of wiping the slate clean, local developers, including me, saw an opportunity for creative reuse. Those buildings turned out to be perfectly scaled for independent retailers and restaurants, creating a unique critical mass that offers a popular destination for locals and tourists alike.
What makes Pike/Pine special is its texture and grit—the layered history you feel in both the physical architecture and the spirit of the shops and restaurants. A large percentage of businesses are owned by members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, immigrants, and people of color. The density of independent retailers and studios—and the inclusive community that supports them—creates omething you can’t replicate with a formula. It evolved over decades, shaped by artists, musicians, designers and small entrepreneurs willing to take risks and plant their flags.
Today, neighborhoods like Pike/Pine face challenges that threaten the tightly woven ecosystem that makes them thrive. There’s a difference between gritty and too gritty, and during the past six years, it’s become harder to attract people. Foot traffic in neighborhood retail districts is dropping, even as downtown begins to recover with tourism. Small businesses are dealing with crushing cost pressures, many tied to public safety concerns and well-intentioned policies with unintended consequences. Public safety has been the elephant in the room—though I do believe we are starting to see improvements. At the same time, our habits have changed. Seattleites have been hibernating, whether because of repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic or the convenience of delivery apps, streaming, and gaming.
And yet, people still deeply crave connection.
That’s why what’s happening in Pike/Pine right now is inspiring and hopeful. Many of the people who helped shape the neighborhood are still here, investing their time, money, and creativity because they care deeply about its future. We’re doubling down on what makes it special—art walks, a slate of new murals, the On The Block street fair, and Capitol Hill Block Party—all invitations for the community to come back out and re-engage.
This spring, on Saturday, May 16th, we’re launching something new: the Pike/Pine Spring Fashion Walk and Social. It’s designed to be an annual celebration that stretches across the neighborhood, anchored by a collection of activations at Melrose Market, and a runway show on the “catwalk” at Chophouse Row that will include Seattle fashion apparel leaders Glasswing, JackStraw, the Refind, the Finerie, and Flora and Henri. Neighborhood-based designer and brand activations up and down the corridor will include open studios, DJs, wine tastings, in-store pop-ups, and involvement from local college students—bringing in the next generation of designers and entrepreneurs. One of the goals is to remind everyone that Seattle still has amazing fashion “game,” offering a scene that is just as creative and diverse as anything you might find in New York or LA. At its core, this event is not about shopping. It’s about creating a reason for people to come together, to reconnect, and to experience the neighborhood as a shared space.
Because that’s the point. Cities work best when we show up—for them and for each other. Seattle’s culture is not something that exists just for us to consume; we are all participants in shaping it. So, my call to action is simple: come out. Walk around and meet your neighbors. Engage in what’s happening. It feels good—and it does good.
SEATTLE — Memorials are growing outside popular beer garden The Growler Guys in North Seattle, as friends and family honor the life of a young employee found dead at the business Saturday morning.
Seattle police said coworkers found the victim’s body with apparent fatal gunshot wounds inside The Growler Guys around 9 a.m. Saturday. Authorities have not publicly identified the victim yet. He was in his 20s.
PREVIOUS COVERAGE | Seattle beer garden employee found shot to death inside workplace
The young man’s death has shocked and shaken the surrounding North Seattle community.
Dozens of family members, friends, and regular customers surrounded the taped-off homicide scene for hours throughout the day Saturday. Several people who knew the victim described him as a friend to all, a family man, and a stand-out employee to his boss, Kelly Dole.
“He was a part of my community at The Growler Guys,” Dole said. “It’s been a joy just to see them together day after day, and for him to lose his life this way is just a shame and such a loss.”
The victim was also a close friend of Dole’s son for years.
The Growler Guys is closed for the time being, but many people stopped by on Sunday to drop off flowers, cards, or to stop to take a moment and reflect.
A note left at the corner of NE 85th St. and 20th Ave. NE was written by a family that had the victim serve them at The Growler Guys. “While we were only lucky enough to know you for one evening,” the note reads, “I know there are many, many more lives you have made a lasting impact on.”
Left next to the note was a child’s apple juice box. Coworkers of the victim said he always gave kids free apple juice.
“Don’t tell my boss,” they said the victim would say with a smile.
He really was important to the guests and always had a smile, Dole said of his young employee. He had worked at The Growler Guys for about a year.
The victim was killed sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, and police are still investigating a possible motive and suspect. So far, no arrests have been made.
People living nearby, who wanted to remain anonymous, said they didn’t hear any gunshots but called the death shocking: “Well, my heart breaks. My first thought is that it’s a tragedy,” one man said.
Anyone with information or surveillance video in the surrounding Lake City area should contact Seattle police or 911 immediately.
Dole said he hopes justice is served to offer a small piece of closure to the victim’s grieving family.
“My heart goes out to his mom and his dad, his brother and other family members,” Dole said. “It’s just so tragic.”
Seattle, WA
‘Do you care more about the kids or the drug addicts?’: Jake calls out Seattle for potential homeless shelters near schools – MyNorthwest.com
After the Seattle City Council moved forward with legislation that would expand temporary homeless shelters without buffer zones near schools, KIRO host Jake Skorheim questioned who the city really cares about.
Jake wondered aloud about what goes on in a Seattle City Council member’s head, assuming they even read the proposal.
“They see the thing, they go like, ‘Well, what do we think about this one here, about school zones?’ They’re like, ‘I don’t know about that. Let’s scratch that out. We can have homeless people around school zones, drug addicts, people who are trying to get their fix,’” he said on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio.
Seattle legislation would increase shelter capacity by 50%
If approved, the legislation would let temporary shelter sites, including tiny home villages, RV safe lots, and tent encampments, increase capacity by 50%, raising the maximum from 100 to 150 residents.
Approved amendments would require sites with more than 100 beds to maintain public safety plans and around-the-clock staffing. Another amendment would require shelters to establish agreements with surrounding neighborhoods outlining expectations for resident behavior and site management. A final amendment mandates at least one manager for every 15 high-needs residents.
Still, several nonprofits urged council members to pass the bill without amendments, arguing the added restrictions could slow resources to people experiencing homelessness and further stigmatize them.
Jake had a question for city leaders: “Who do you care more about? You care more about the kids or the homeless drug addicts?”
Watch the full discussion in the video above.
Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
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