By Bethany Jean Clement – Seattle Times food writer
After quickly making her mark on the Seattle dining scene with MariPili Tapas Bar, chef Grayson Corrales is in culinary collaboration with one of the city’s preeminent museums — in October, she’ll helm the reopening of the Frye Art Museum’s Café Frieda.
MariPili opened to hourlong waits for tables in May 2022, then six months later was named Seattle Met’s restaurant of the year. There, in the former home of Cafe Presse on Capitol Hill, Corrales makes updated takes on traditional Galician small plates, plus several larger-scale ones, including her polbo á feira, an orange-poached octopus with guindilla chili oil and pickled onion, and churrasco de cerdo, slow-roasted pork ribs with celeriac ensaladilla and peach and jamon salsa.
For the new endeavor at the Frye on First Hill, “we’re taking the same core identity, but we’re making the dishes and the menu as a whole very approachable,” Corrales said. The museum’s cafe will be known as MariPili at Café Frieda, and Corrales said flavors will similarly celebrate her family heritage in northwest Spain, but in a simpler format of snacks, salads and sandwiches. MariPili’s purveyors for local produce will come into play, with “the salads and what we put on the sandwiches — all those sorts of things certainly changing as the season does,” she said. Much of the menu will be gluten-free, vegan or both, part of a commitment to accessibility that includes a no-obstacles ordering system, with the additional welcoming aspect that admission to the Frye remains free.
Two popular menu selections are en route to MariPili at Café Frieda from the original: Corrales’ version of patatas bravas, cut into slab rounds, scored, baked and fried, served with spiced tomato-pepper sauce and a triple garlic aioli; and her Spanish-style churros, coated in cinnamon sugar and served with dark chocolate dipping sauce. A CLT sandwich will swap out the B in BLT for Spanish chorizo, and Corrales expressed excitement about featuring boquerones fritos, adobo-marinated-and-fried anchovies served with piparra tartar sauce. In an update to what she calls a Frye cafe classic, the Frieda’s favorite sandwich is set to become the open-faced Tosta de Frieda, with soft Spanish cheese rather than brie, fried walnut spread and thyme-marinated red grapes.
The sandwich and the cafe were named in honor of the late Frieda Sondland, an ardent supporter of the Frye who visited daily for years. MariPili bears the name of Corrales’ aunt, also paying tribute to her grandmother, who taught Corrales the cuisine of her native Galicia. Café Frieda and MariPili come together under the guidance of new Frye Art Museum director Jamilee Lacy. “We’re both very excited to be working together,” Corrales said, “and definitely to be creating a platform for these matriarchs that came before us.”
“We interviewed a number of chefs and restaurateurs,” Lacy said, noting that several candidates also came to the Frye and cooked as a tryout. “Chef Grayson and MariPili just brought the ‘wow!’ factor.”
Corrales grew up in rural Central Washington, north of the Tri-Cities, where her father farmed and raised Angus cattle; as a teen, she raised her own sheep and helped her father by driving tractor. Her paternal grandparents lived a field away and “I would just hang out with them all day, especially during the summer,” Corrales said. “They had a really big garden, and they would grow tomatoes and peppers and green beans, and [my grandmother and I] would spend some time in the garden and then cook a lot of the stuff that came out of the garden.”
Later attending culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Tukwila, Corrales counts renowned pastry chef Ewald Notter as a mentor, and she cooked at Seattle’s Eden Hill and interned at Spain’s double Michelin-starred Culler de Pau.
Citing the Frye’s “long-term commitment to the evolving identity of Seattle,” Lacy said that with MariPili at Café Frieda, “we’re getting something that’s both hyperlocal and has a big global perspective.”
The cafe space itself — shuttered since the outset of the pandemic — is undergoing a like-minded transformation, with an update under the auspices of international Print Club Ltd. that includes murals by local artists, design elements of Galician Sargadelos pottery, references to the Frye’s modernist architecture and founding collection.
To drink, MariPili at Café Frieda will also venture both near and far, with Estrella Galicia beer, Washingtonian and Spanish wines by the glass, and pitchers of sangria. Corrales and Lacy anticipate the grand reopening by mid-October.