How this Seattle James Beard Award finalist started small in Montana

TO SAY HE WAS SURPRISED by the announcement at the end of March would be an understatement. Aaron Tekulve was up for a James Beard Award - a finalist in the regional category for best chef, along with four more chefs from Washington, Oregon and Alaska, with the winner to be named at a red-carpet ceremony in Chicago on June 15.

"It's very surreal," says the chef and owner of Seattle's Surrell. When they got the news, his daughter instigated a celebratory family dance party. In seven years, he'd gone from being Seattle magazine's best pop-up to a brick-and-mortar Beard nominee.

Surrell is one of Seattle's most high-end restaurants - serving a $225 tasting menu with up to a dozen courses, plus a $150 five-course version, in the intimate setting of a 123-year-old house on Madison Street. Here, Tekulve seeks to "define modern Pacific Northwest cuisine," with each course introduced by a staffer's explanation of ingredients and their local provenance, accompanied by an all-Washington-state wine list.

But growing up in small-town Montana, Tekulve wasn't set on becoming a chef - he was an aspiring musician, first coming to Seattle as the drummer in a rock band.

STRAWBERRIES FROM THE FAMILY garden are Tekulve's first food memory. This was in Coram, in the mountains of Montana near Glacier National Park, where after a long winter blanket of snow - and with grocery options so limited then, Tekulve describes it as a "food desert" - the home produce of summertime was precious. He and his brother ate quantities of berries and sugar snap peas as they picked them, to his mother's chagrin. She was a great gardener and cook, Tekulve says, like her mother before her; both carried the family middle name, Surrell. She encouraged his early teenage fixation with making fajitas, sourcing the variety of spices that, he says, "at that time was a really foreign product - you would only find it in taco mix."

While he worked at the Spruce Park Cafe in high school for gas money, from dishwasher to short-order cook to server, that wasn't Tekulve's focus. "I was very heavy into music," he says, "it was my absolute passion."

When the band Tekulve was in at the University of Montana - Your Divine Tragedy, or YDT - decided to go for it, he was on board, leaving school and Missoula for the bigger music market of Seattle in 2006. Fast-forward to shows at Neumos and the Showbox, touring, recording - working away at it, maybe about to make it. Then a bandmate sustained a back injury. "We decided to make the tough call to call it quits," Tekulve says.

Tekulve returned to a previous day job at FedEx. Prosaically, it was a move to an apartment with a nicer kitchen, along with seeing shows like "Chopped" that "showed this new phase of what cooking could be - there could actually be a career in cooking." He enrolled in culinary school at the Art Institute of Seattle (since closed), then sought experience in the kitchen at Lark (where chef/owner John Sundstrom won the Beard for best chef in the Northwest in 2007). For a time, he was pulling shifts there, taking classes and working as a private chef and at FedEx. At Lark, he went from line cook to lead line cook to sous chef.

"I loved it," he says. "I learned so much."

In 2015, Tekulve arranged a three-week stage at Michelin-starred Coi in San Francisco. At that time, he says, every component of each dish was tasted by chef Daniel Patterson (2014 James Beard winner) or his chef de cuisine - for every plate. "It was fairly intense," he says. "Everyone just owned everything they were doing there. It was really impressive."

By the next year, Tekulve was working as a chef de partie at Canlis during Brady Ishiwata Williams' run as head chef (during which Williams won a Beard for best chef in the Northwest). That was, he says, "a really fun environment … I'd only really worked in really small kitchens up to that point, so it taught me a lot." He noted that private dining did great numbers for Canlis. But when it came to the scale of the place, "it also kind of taught me a little bit about what I didn't necessarily want," he says.

Continuing as a private chef and doing some catering along the way, he started a pop-up, first at Issaquah's Capri Cellars. "This is where I began my love of Washington wine," he says, with early pop-up pairings including Two Vintners, Sparkman Cellars and Darby Winery.

TEKULVE COMPARES BECOMING a James Beard Award finalist with a band that makes it big - it looks like it came out of nowhere, but years of grind are behind it. Bits of recognition came along the way: an appearance on "Chopped, the local best-pop-up win.

Tekulve scored an affordable lease on a restaurant space - crucially, the 123-year-old house had a modern kitchen from its time as Crush. In tribute to his matriarchal training, his place would be called Surrell, opening date: March 19, 2020.

The pandemic could have been an insurmountable setback, but Surrell got work via World Central Kitchen, making delivery meals for healthcare workers and the unhoused. Eventually, socially distanced dining was possible thanks to the outdoor patio, two tables at a time - ironically, a stroke of luck, Tekulve says, at a moment when Surrell may have been the only high-end restaurant open on the West Coast and got business because of it.

Postpandemic, Tekulve briefly ran a wine bar on-site in addition to tasting-menu dinners, with Surrell named one of Wine Enthusiast's 50 best restaurant/wine bar hybrids in 2023.

Today, Surrell's two adjoining dining rooms, chef's counter and patio accommodate just a couple of dozen patrons for multicourse experiences. Entitled "a night when winter met spring …," an early May menu represented the latter with hickory-smoked sablefish with nettles, asparagus, cipollini onions and more; the former, braised lamb from Oregon's Wahl Family Farms with coffee-roasted beets, pumpkin seeds and red wine. Dinners last two-plus hours, punctuated by staffers' discourse on each course and stopping by tables for check-ins.

Surrell does only one seating per night, four nights per week. Tekulve wanted diners to never feel rushed and a pace that was sustainable for the team. Catering and private dining account for about a quarter of the restaurant's revenue, a setup under which lives outside of work can thrive. "Quality of life in this industry," he says, "that's really important to me."

"The responsibility that we have to our employees is immense," Tekulve says. He offers benefits including holidays and paid time off, retirement matching, a no-cost dental program and health insurance that's first partially then fully paid.

Tekulve calls his current team "truly unique," the Beard nomination "a tremendous affirmation of their work and the model that we have here." It affirms his philosophy of "really believing that the best thing to do is help lift from below, not shout from above."

Family matters at Surrell, too. Tekulve's mother, Teresa, is listed under "Our Team" on the menu as "Gardeners," along with his dad, Tom. They live in Seattle now and tend to the foliage of Surrell's patio. They've supported his decisions all along the way - including dropping out of college for the band.

More ongoing support comes from Tekulve's wife, Sarah, and daughter - her middle name is Surrell. Another dance party is sure to occur if there's a Beard win, but more will happen in any case.

"I already feel we have won," Tekulve says, regardless of the outcome in June."

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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 4:48 PM.