General Manager and co-owner Robin Corbett prioritizes the work-life balance of staff by being open only Monday to Friday. “Weekends are pretty great,” Corbett says with a smile when asked why Niwa is closed on weekends.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Niwa opens the space for others to use. The choice made by Corbett, along with partners Chef Darren Gee, Stephen Whiteside and Miki Ellis reads as care. For their staff and their community. The team, all formerly with Ugly Dumpling, also hails in part from Dachi and Tall Shadow Bakery.

That same care extends to their producers, farmers, and the earth. 

Niwa, Japanese for garden, is like the stillness just before rain. The dining room is stylishly unadorned and faintly luminous—blonde wood, filmy lights, a frill of curtains. There are window booths and a kitchen counter; not a bad seat in the house. Past that counter Gee, who also cooked at Le Crocodile, Farmer’s Apprentice and in Japan, moves with the meditative restlessness of someone always observing, always thinking.

The menu is an ode to the Pacific Northwest, its stanzas plucked from what’s fresh and fleeting. A plate of rousing pickles: yellow carrots, cucumber in rice bran, white turnip with yuzu. A spring cabbage salad with gauzy zucchini rounds, house chili crisp, sweet soy, and fresh dill in abundance. Braised Wagyu and quail egg on koshihikari rice with a lawn’s worth of fresh scallions. The mochi sourdough is as soft as it sounds.

The drinks exist in harmony. Sake, low-intervention wine, clarified cocktails with umeshu and sancho pepper that taste like citrus on stone. 

In minimalism at its most magnetic, Niwa fosters trust between diner and kitchen, plate and place. It makes weekdays pretty great, too.