Matt Dillon

Matt Dillon grew up in Seattle — not in a food family, exactly. Dinners at home with his mom were Costco chicken and Bernstein's Italian dressing. But at twelve he started working in a café run by his mother's friend, and stayed for six years. He enrolled in culinary school at Seattle Central Community College, briefly quit to go on tour with his band, then returned and completed the program. What followed was a run of foundational kitchen positions: Salish Lodge, then The Herbfarm — where he started as a dishwasher, having previously been a sous chef, just to be inside a place he considered the Noma of its era. Within three weeks, he was sous chef again.

In 2006, Dillon took over an old donut shop in Eastlake and opened Sitka & Spruce. Twenty seats. Strip mall. No reservations. The menu changed daily around whatever Dillon could find — whole animals, obscure produce, forager relationships. Food & Wine named him a Best New Chef in 2007. The James Beard Foundation gave him Best Chef Northwest in 2012. By then he'd already opened the Corson Building, moved Sitka & Spruce to Capitol Hill's Melrose Market, launched a wine bar, started baking his own bread in a wood-fired oven, and bought 20 acres on Vashon Island.

What makes Dillon unusual is the direction of travel. Most acclaimed chefs expand outward — more restaurants, bigger platforms, TV deals. Dillon worked his way backward, toward the source. By 2018 he was cooking four nights a week at Bar Ferdinand, commuting by ferry, carrying buckets of restaurant food scraps back to the farm on his way home to feed the pigs. By 2020 he had closed both his flagship restaurants — citing not just economics but something closer to a philosophy. His closing note for Sitka & Spruce read: "At this mesmerizing juncture of our world, continuing Sitka's relationship in Seattle does not make me a better father, partner, activist, employer, or friend."

Today Dillon lives full-time on Vashon Island, where he remains a partner in The London Plane and The Corson Building, runs Old Chaser Farm's CSA and event programming, serves as the recurring chef for Farm to Crag's regenerative agriculture gatherings (including Yosemite 2025), and is now pivoting toward oyster farming and a new public-facing venture on the island. His wife, Brita Fisher, is a floral designer who works with material from the farm and land. He has two kids.

The throughline — from foraging porcini under Sitka spruce trees before he opened his first restaurant, to growing Vashon's first pimentón, to hauling compost on the ferry — is a refusal to separate the cooking from the growing. For Dillon, the farm isn't supply chain management. It's the same act as butchering a fish or peeling a carrot. It's all part of making people food.