Hi, I’m Wendy!
Hmm…about me?
Well, truthfully I’m a product of the restaurant world-literally surrounded by food and marinated in hospitality. I worked at my family’s Seattle restaurant(s) from 10 yrs old to the end of my college years. My first job was folding paper napkins into hats for a penny each… and one day made $10!
In our family, feeding people wasn’t something we did at home. It was a chosen career.
After college I spent 15 years in corporate — buying at Costco, then employee communications. And if that company taught me anything, it’s that fewer, better choices beat endless options every time. Turns out that’s as true for your weekly dinner rotation as it is for a warehouse shelf.
But I kept getting pulled back. In 2009 I came home and took over our family’s restaurant. I ran it for 16 years. With forty+ employees and generations of loyal guests.
When the lease ended after 30 years at that location — 50 years of feeding Seattle — I wasn’t ready, even though I knew it was coming. We celebrated everything we built. We also grieved, because many of those goodbyes were really hard.
Around that same time, I had two health scares in three years. Yes, the kind that make you stop pretending you have unlimited time.
So here I am.
What I kept thinking about — through all of it — was systems. The restaurant never panicked about dinner. We had our dishes, our rhythms, our regulars who knew exactly what they were coming for. Home cooks don’t have that. Most people are starting from scratch every night, stressed, scrolling, wondering why it feels so hard.
It doesn’t have to.
And a little secret about me, I’m obsessed with finding recipes worth repeating. Not the trendy ones — the ones that become yours. The thing you bring every year to ‘those’ occasions. The meal your kids will eventually make for their kids.
That’s what The Pine Table is. A way to stop searching and start having a kitchen that actually works for your life.