This Olympia eatery is set to close, but the food will live on in new cook book

Chicory Restaurant, known for its local and sustainable ethos and chef Elise Landry’s award-winning cooking, is closing.

But in many ways, the beloved restaurant will live on. Landry and Adam Wagner, her husband and Chicory’s co-owner, have a new downtown restaurant in the works. There’s not yet an opening date for Gold Standard, at 302 Capital Way N., Olympia, but the windows already list menu items including fried chicken, biscuits, beignets and local vegetables.

They’ve created a cookbook showcasing some of the restaurant’s most popular recipes, including gumbo, grilled carrots with salsa macha and whipped feta, and the Chicory Manhattan.

And Chicory (https://www.chicoryrestaurant.com/) has made a lasting impression on its many regular customers — particularly Greg Saunders of Olympia, who makes a convincing case that he is the restaurant’s no. 1 fan.

When the pandemic hit and schools closed, Saunders, a teacher at Ridgeline Middle School in Yelm, started getting takeout for lunch every week at a downtown restaurant. Once he tried Chicory, which opened on July 29, 2020, Saunders kept coming back for more.

In September 2024, he celebrated his 100th reservation at the restaurant with a t-shirt on which he’d used duct tape to form “100,” and he’s still at it.

“I’m going on the very last night,” he said, “and that will be my 150th reservation.”

Saunders, who twice traveled to the Ruby June Inn (https://www.rubyjuneinn.com/) in White Salmon for Chefs Collective dinners created by Landry and Wagner, said he’s met many other frequent customers who also considered themselves to Chicory’s biggest fans — until they hear his story.

It might seem surprising that Chicory is closing given its adoring fanbase and the accolades it has received, including Landry’s victory on “Chopped: Next Gen” in 2021 and the Snail of Approval it received from Slow Food of Greater Olympia (https://www.slowfoodgreaterolympia.org/snail-awardees).

However, the restaurant’s business model just wasn’t sustainable, the couple said. Running a small and elevated restaurant in a city the size of Olympia has many challenges.

Costs to operate the restaurant have risen between 30 percent and 40 percent since 2020, Wagner said.

And while the chicken sandwiches first offered during the pandemic remain a fixture on the menu, Chicory has served for most diners as a special-occasion restaurant, and that’s left too many seats empty.

“People see us packed on a Friday or Saturday night and think, ‘Those guys must be doing great,’ but the truth of it is that being busy on the weekends isn’t enough,” Landry said. “You have to be busy all the time.”

At Gold Standard, Landry and Wagner will keep their dedication to local and sustainable ingredients while switching to a counter service model and focusing mostly on more casual food, like the kind they’ve been serving at special events focused on fried chicken, barbecue and crawfish.

“The response to those events was overwhelming,” Landry said. “Those resonated with people. And we were having a lot of fun doing them. The response to that helped to shift our ideas.

“We opened Chicory within a year of moving to Olympia,” she said. “We’ve learned a lot more about our market and the kind of food that people want to come out and support.”

The pair expect to open the Gold Standard in March or thereabouts. Between now and then, Landry might do some pop-up dinners, and sooner or later she expects to offer more events at the Ruby June and cooking classes at Bayview Thriftway.

She and Wagner, too, are thinking about how to offer occasional events with more adventurous menus.

Meanwhile, fans can comfort themselves with the cookbook, “Gratuity Included,” which includes stories as well as recipes. One-quarter of proceeds from sales will be divided among the restaurant’s staff, all of whom chose to keep working till the restaurant closes.

“From the beginning, Chicory has been a love letter to the land and the people who sustain it,” the couple wrote in the book’s intro. “We built menus around what was growing nearby, celebrating each season’s rhythms and surprises. … We put this cookbook together so the spirit of Chicory can live on.”

Chicory Restaurant

The restaurant, at 111 Columbia St. NW, Olympia, is closing at the end of the year. Here’s what’s happening in its last days:

Regular hours: Dinner and weekend brunch will be served through Sunday, Dec. 14. Reservations (https://www.chicoryrestaurant.com/reservations) are all but gone, but there might be space for walk-ins at the bar. (Fixed-price holiday dinners, happening Dec. 17-27, are sold out.)

Provisions sale, with pickles, hot sauce, produce and more: 2-7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 16

Cookbook sales: Buy a cookbook or pick up a pre-order (https://www.chicoryrestaurant.com/store) from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 20-Tuesday, Dec. 23.

“Chico’s Flea Market and Discount Liquors” sale: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 30, and Wednesday, Dec. 31