After the last tickets come off the rail, floor mats are hauled out to be hosed down, oven hoods are scrubbed, aprons come untied, and someone counts the drawer. It’s a familiar ritual in restaurant cities everywhere. When the shift ends, cooks and servers go looking for a drink and something to eat. For three decades in Seattle, one of those places has been Palace Kitchen in Belltown, where the industry slides into booths alongside wired tourists and buzzed bargoers—and what lands on the table is wood-fired trout, rotisserie chicken, French onion soup, and goat cheese-lavender fondue.

“I was determined to be open till 1 a.m. for food every night, cocktails till two, a real downtown New York-y kind of place,” says founder Tom Douglas, the Delaware-born, James Beard Award-winning chef who runs the Seattle restaurant group Tom Douglas & Co. with his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross.  “And that really resonated with the restaurant community.”

When he opened Palace Kitchen in 1996, Belltown was beginning to change. Through the ’80s, the epicenter of Seattle dining had moved from Capitol Hill to Pike Place Market, where he worked as chef and general manager at Café Sport. By the early ’90s, he could see another shift coming. Condos were planned for Belltown and the population was set to grow. More residents would mean more restaurants. And soon, Belltown would become the city’s new dining epicenter.

Tom Douglas with his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross, at Palace Kitchen. They signed the leases for Palace Kitchen and the Café Sport space that would later become Etta’s Seafood on the same day.

Photo courtesy of Tom Douglas

Chefs Eric Tanaka and Matt Costello with a rotisserie hog fired on Palace Kitchen’s signature applewood grill in the early days.

Photo courtesy of Tom Douglas

Douglas had already opened Dahlia Lounge (1989) in Belltown, though the restaurant was struggling to make money. “We were paying our bills, but it wasn’t great,” he says. Looking for another opportunity, he started exploring vacancies in the neighborhood. The Palace space—previously a fabric store—came with a year of free rent to open. He signed that lease the same day he signed for the Pike Place Market space that would become Etta’s Seafood (now home to the oyster bar Half Shell). “I ended up with two restaurants in one day,” he laughs.

The new space was grand, defined by four large columns and an open kitchen. Douglas came up with the name on a flight back from New York. It felt palatial to him, but he never intended it to be formal or stuffy. “I’m not egotistical enough to call it the Palace,” he says. “For me, life begins and ends in the kitchen. Hence the Kitchen.”

Douglas and artist Jennifer Carrasco with her 30-by-6-foot mural of a 17th-century palace kitchen crew celebrating downstairs after a banquet for the royals upstairs.

Photo courtesy of Tom Douglas

A large gold-framed mural stretches across one wall of the dining room. Douglas commissioned artist Jennifer Carrasco to paint a 30-by-6-foot scene of a 17th-century palace kitchen staff celebrating after serving royalty upstairs. It was clear from the start: the kitchen is where it all happens. Palace Kitchen was also the first restaurant in his group with an open kitchen, and the staff needed a dress code. He never liked the classic chef uniform. Early in his career, after being whistled at by fishmongers while walking through Pike Place Market in chef whites, he decided to ditch them for good. At Palace, they would wear blue mechanic-style jumpsuits inspired by the Starbucks technicians he saw downtown. Though it wasn’t intentional, those choices likely signaled something to the city’s restaurant industry: Palace Kitchen was their kind of place.

Chefs hanging out on the restaurant’s back steps in their mechanic-style coveralls, a longtime gathering spot for the crew.

Photo courtesy of Palace Kitchen

At the center of it all was a $20,000 applewood grill Douglas bought in Mesquite, Texas—a major investment at the time. “It became the heart of our kitchen,” he says. Thirty years later, it still is. For the anniversary menu, he made sure every course touches that grill.

Douglas talks about restaurants like poker hands—location, rent, staff, timing, financing—and says you never fully control the outcome. He has opened restaurants he believed in that failed. He has watched strong concepts collapse under the wrong combination of circumstances. Success, he suggests, is an alignment of people, timing, and luck. It’s not superstition, but something closer to awe.

Then came March 2020. Palace Kitchen closed as Covid-19 shut down restaurants across the world. It remained shuttered for three years before reopening in April 2023. “The fact that the government came out with their PPP plan is the only reason my restaurant group is back,” Douglas says. “You just never know what it is that can take a place down. It’s often not the food.”

The shutdown also scattered much of the team that had built the restaurant over decades.

“When I look back at how many years of restaurant experience we lost, how many friends and family we were forced to put on unemployment, it still makes me super sad,” he says. It brightens his day when he runs into former employees working around the city, and some have since returned.

Whole Idaho rainbow trout stuffed with lemon and thyme, ready for the wood-fired grill at the heart of the restaurant.

Photo courtesy of Palace Kitchen

“It was always about the joy,” Douglas says. “Restaurants are transient by nature. Talent comes through, then moves on.” What mattered most was building a staff filled with people who made the business better. He liked hiring chefs who were smarter than he was, who brought different backgrounds, skills, and ideas to the menu. Inclusivity, curiosity, and a sense of community were always part of the culture he wanted to build.

Over the years, Palace Kitchen has also drawn its share of famous diners. Barack Obama visited while he was still a U.S. senator, and Bette Midler stopped by around 2015—prompting a story Douglas still loves to tell.

What keeps a restaurant alive for 30 years is hard to quantify, and Douglas doesn’t romanticize legacy. “I didn’t build them to last forever. I didn’t build them to hand down to my family. I just build ’em for me.” He still gets stopped in grocery store aisles by customers who tell him their favorite dish. “We work every day [at Palace] for that kind of recognition,” he says. He recalls families who claimed the same booth year after year, children who ran past the host stand because they knew exactly where they belonged.

To mark the anniversary, Palace Kitchen is offering a five-course tasting menu for $30 throughout March. Expect sheep’s milk grill toast with roasted hazelnuts, fire-wilted escarole, Manila clam broth with two-year-aged miso, applewood-grilled lamb chop with turnip and fennel gratin, and Basque cake with vanilla whip and anise hyssop. The cult-favorite olive poppers are back as well with a new twist—Kalamata olives stuffed with herbed cream cheese and wrapped in a Beecher’s Flagship cheese crust, originally inspired by a Betty Crocker recipe.

In a downtown that has cycled through boom, collapse, and reinvention, the kitchen—just as Douglas intended—remains the center of it all.

The anniversary tasting menu will run throughout March alongside the regular dinner menu, except March 19-21 during Taste of Iceland events. More information here.