Saint Helens

Saint Helens spotlights Henderson’s great gift as a restaurateur: crafting a sense of place. Saint Helens is a crisp and breezy fantasy of a French bistro, filled with checkerboard rattan chairs and those diminutive white marble cafe tables, lit with sunshine on four sides. A broad patio off the sunny west end—part covered and warmed with a fire pit—welcomes denizens off the Burke-Gilman Trail for coffee and apple fritters by morning, a revolving list of cocktails and wines—negronis on tap!—and noshes by afternoon. This is Henderson at his brilliant best: Just as his Westward exploits the quintessentially waterside Seattle view toward his vision of a seafood house, Saint Helens uses Seattle’s favorite bicycle path as shorthand for a casually French joie de vivre. In its soul Saint Helens is as carefree and come-as-you-are as a bike ride on a sunny day.

Diners head right instead, up the stairs, and enter a long narrow room that’s half bar, half seating area, divided by a metal shelving structure with window-like cutouts, some of which contain lovely decorative patterns made of wood, while others act as shelves for blooming green plants. The effect is both charming and modern. The dining side features a banquette in an arresting and rich citrine-yellow that runs the length of the restaurant and butts up to white and gray marble tabletops. Other seating is white with blue polka dots and vice versa, also paired with marble tables. The bar is a long slab of marble as well, the floors hardwood, the ceiling wooden and lofty, and the walls a clean, fresh white.