Budd Bay Cafe is ready to reopen for dining -- and with a familiar new chef as well

Chef Billy Brownlee — whose Southern roots and dedication to local, fresh Northwest cuisine earned raves for the now-defunct Cicada restaurant a decade ago — is back at the helm of an Olympia restaurant.

Brownlee, who changed his last name six years ago, is now executive chef at Budd Bay Café, where seated dining is resuming as Thurston County moves into Phase 2 of the governor’s plan to reopen the economy during the coronavirus pandemic.

The café is opening with a combined lunch and dinner menu that mixes longtime favorites — fish and chips, salmon dinners and award-winning clam chowder — with a few new dishes and some recipe refinements.

There’s a new weekend brunch menu, too, set to launch on June 6.

“There are some things we were forced to change,” said co-owner Pam Oates. “We used to have an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch that was very popular, and we’re unable to do that now.”

What won’t change in either the short or long term is the focus on seafood.

“Lots of places have great seafood, but nowhere has the variety and the bounty of seafood that we have here in the Pacific Northwest,” Brownlee told The Olympian.

He learned that appreciation for Northwest seafood while working in Olympia — including at Budd Bay, where he worked in 1995 when he first moved here.

Among his menu additions are red curry shellfish linguini, bouillabaisse, and halibut served grilled, Florentine (with a spinach-Parmesan crust) or blackened.

Budd Bay’s blackened salmon has long been popular, and it’s on the new menu, too, but the chef, who grew up near New Orleans, has made a few adjustments to the seasoning and technique.

“Since Paul Prudhomme blackened the first piece of fish in his restaurant K-Paul’s, that process has become ubiquitous,” he said. “When I blacken a piece of fish, I want it to be as close as possible to that first piece of redfish that Paul Prudhomme blackened.”

No matter what kind of food he’s cooking, Brownlee’s thoughts are never far from the Cajun and Creole food he grew up eating.

“I can’t really cook without having that influence,” he said. “I grew up in the deep South, very close to New Orleans, with classic dishes like étouffée and jambalaya and red beans and rice. … That cuisine informs a lot of the decisions that I make, and it also blends well with what the Pacific Northwest is all about, cooking seasonally and using what’s available.”

It also will inform the way the menu evolves as restrictions change and as the chef settles into his new job. (He was interviewing before restaurants shut down in March but didn’t start work until May 1.)

He envisions incorporating new dishes that follow the model he and co-owner Lisa Smith used at Cicada, which closed in 2011.

“We were taking classic recipes and familiar recipes and updating and reinterpreting them so they were just as delicious as somebody would remember from their mom’s kitchen or their grandma’s kitchen but maybe just a little bit more refined,” he said. “People have come to expect that of me over the two decades that I’ve cooked in Olympia.”

That’s good news for those who’ve missed Cicada — as is Brownlee’s return to serving as executive chef in a South Sound restaurant.

After spending the past decade mostly in Alaska, with stops in Italy and New York City, he moved back to Olympia more than a year ago.

He’d taken up snowboarding and wanted to devote more time to that, so he worked in the kitchen at Octapas Café, taking weekends off to hit the slopes. “I snuck back into town,” he said.

Budd Bay Café

• Where: 525 Columbia St. NW, Olympia
• Current hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11-8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; planning to open at 8 a.m. Saturday and Sunday for brunch beginning June 6
• Want some? Seated dining — including outdoors, weather permitting — begins when Thurston County moves to Phase 2 of reopening the economy. The full menu is still available for takeout and for delivery by Uber Eats and Grubhub.
• More information: 360-357-6963, http://www.buddbaycafe.com