By Jackie Varriano Seattle Times food writer
(SEATTLE TIMES) It isn’t lost on Aisha Ibrahim that she ticks a lot of boxes. The first female executive chef at storied Canlis is, yes, a woman, but she’s also Filipino. An immigrant. Her family is Muslim. She’s gay. During an initial phone interview with Mark and Brian Canlis in January, the brothers asked Ibrahim what it would feel like to be the next chef for Canlis.
“My response back to them was something like, you know, I’ve been a female and a person of color my whole life. What would it feel like for you guys?” she says.
Mark Canlis recalls that Brian instantly answered, “If our mission is to inspire all people to turn toward each other, it sure seems like we’d do that better if you were at the helm than if another white male were at the helm. An outside perspective that we’ll never have, and never be able to have, would help this restaurant speak out and serve the city.”
But Ibrahim, 35, isn’t just the boxes she ticks. She’s the oldest of three kids and has two younger brothers. Her family moved from the Philippines to Evans, West Virginia, when she was 6 years old.
She played college basketball at Elon University, shifting to the culinary world after an injury. Her middle brother still won’t play her in basketball (they’re way too competitive with each other). She’s a dog mom and was a kid who loved inspirational posters.
Her favorite one read: “Success always looks easy to those who weren’t around when it was earned.” She sets goals, not only yearly ones, but each month, in her notes app, she writes things to herself as a reminder of those goals.
She’s spent the past 15 years in kitchens across the globe, from San Francisco to the Basque region of Spain to Thailand. Prior to the pandemic, she spent two years preparing to open her own restaurant.
In January, while she was working as a consultant for a restaurant group, it became clear things with investors in Thailand weren’t going through.
She began to entertain the idea of exploring job opportunities back in the States, or even in Taiwan.Out of the blue she woke up one morning to a direct message on Instagram from Brian Canlis asking if she would want to talk about possibly becoming the next chef at the iconic Seattle restaurant.
She hadn’t lived in the U.S. for the majority of the past five years. She’d been to Seattle once — for a night — on her way to the San Juan Islands while on a coffee tour of the Pacific Northwest. She had only driven by the Pike Place Market sign.
