Seattle has a new obsession, and it starts with shokupan toast, black garlic miso soup, and a concept the team calls yoshoku Americano.
Wayland Mill opened just over a year ago in Northlake, and it is unlike anything else the city currently has to offer. The all-day café blends the spirit of Tokyo’s Showa-era kissaten, the intimate, unhurried coffee shops that defined mid-20th century Japanese café culture, with an American diner sensibility. The result is a kitchen that serves western food done entirely in a Japanese way, a description that sounds simple until you see what it actually means on the plate.
The tamagoyaki omelette arrives with house-made rhubarb jam on Saint Bread shokupan, the dense, pillowy Japanese milk bread that has become one of the most talked-about ingredients in serious café circles. Canadian bacon steak is glazed with teriyaki. A bacon ginger scallion scone sits alongside a nerigoma chocolate chip cookie and a peanut butter shoyu icebox pie that lands somewhere between familiar and entirely unexpected. The hojicha canelé, made with the roasted Japanese green tea, is the kind of pastry that makes you rethink what a canelé is capable of. All of it is served alongside Kambur coffee.
Behind the concept is owner Yasuaki, who grew up in the American Midwest eating Japanese and American food side by side, two culinary worlds that lived in parallel rather than in conversation. Fifteen years ago, he and his wife moved to Seattle and found what he describes as their forever home. Wayland Mill is their love letter to that journey, a place that does not choose between the two cultures that shaped it but insists on holding both at once.
Wayland Mill is located in Northlake, Seattle.
