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The gray-brown sauce dripping off the lamb neck pie at Little Beast matches the shade of gloom that so often graces the skies in both Seattle and London. As in the sky above the cities, this hue gives no indication of the vibrance beneath it; the toasted almonds and cardamom layered with garlic, ginger, and chili purees cooked in butter with chopped onions.
The lamb neck korma pie became a sleeper hit for Little Beast.
In the pie, Kevin Smith marries his many obsessions—with meat, historic cooking techniques, and fermentation—into a monochrome opus, a move nearly as brave as proudly presenting the oft-maligned cuisine of England without apology or selling steaks at triple-digit prices in an era of economic uncertainty.
Kevin Smith and his team at Little Beast point to sourcing as the source of their power.
Opening a restaurant has always been a risky proposition, a form of gambling chefs and restaurateurs do with their hearts, often against the advice of financial advisors. In a year when the odds seem particularly stacked against those bets paying off, Smith has opened a fascinating restaurant unlike any other in the city.
Little Beast’s secret is that it as safe as it is daring. It’s new, but with a built-in audience from Smith’s long-cemented reputation as a meat master, thanks to Beast & Cleaver, his nearly six-year-old Loyal Heights butcher shop where lines still regularly snake down the block. A $115 dry-aged steak seems less extravagant when the 20-ounce portion arrives sliced and ideal for sharing among a quartet. Most importantly, Little Beast is backed by a marriage of convenience highlighting the reality of the restaurant business in Seattle in 2025. “You have to be doing something 24 hours a day to utilize the space, and you have to have multiple revenue streams,” says Smith. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a real struggle.”
Three days a week, the restaurant is actually a butcher shop, so meat shows up everytwhere, including the pastry.
Smith originally took over the former Ballard Pizza Company space as a production facility for Beast & Cleaver’s butcher boxes. “Within a month of having the walk-in cooler and everything fixed up in there, it was pretty evident that it would be stupid not to open a restaurant,” says Smith.
Three butchers break down a cow and a couple pigs in the space at the beginning of each week, some of which goes out in delivery boxes and the rest of which goes onto the menu at Little Beast when it opens on Thursday. This is, literally, how the sausage is made—specifically the currywurst wrapped in pastry for the sausage rolls and the Cumberland sausage gently patted around the fudgy-yolked scotched egg.
Smith imitates the English pubs he grew up at, where there was always a scotched egg on the menu.
The egg comes up repeatedly when Smith talks about the rosily nostalgic pubs of his English youth that inspired Little Beast. Places where pensioners pop in for their midday pint and families come for roast dinners; where kids can get onion rings. The eggs’ crispy edges and jammy centers demonstrate Smith’s technical skills, but the rather photogenic dish came with a scene-stealing sideshow: pickled nectarines.
Little Beast is, of course, designed around meat—in pie, on egg, or as a dry-aged, sliced, diva entrée: Bold beef, tempered with expertly manipulated fire, arrives alongside its own rendered juices, recouped and reanimated. But that greatness was predictable, and Little Beast—and Smith—are anything but. Far more interesting are the pale fermented turnips that accompany the lamb neck pie and the heirloom tomato salad sharpened with mizuna, eternally crunchy hazelnuts, and pulled together with Samish Bay Cheese’s creamy Vache.
Meat, unsurprisingly, is the big draw. But it shares the spotlight.
“We’re letting nature be the star of the show,” Smith says. “The sourcing of the food is at the root of everything we do.” Buying straight from trusted, quality-focused local farms does wonders for flavor, for both Little Beast’s whole animal butchery and its produce. But turning away California fruit and Arizona greens adds a lot more limitations—to refuse avocados and embrace kohlrabi instead.
Smith makes it look easy and, it seems, can do almost anything—except bread. A Filipino friend of mine quipped that the rolls were what happened to pan de sal when left out overnight, and there was not enough herbed butter in the world to rescue them. The wondrous candy bar–shaped foie gras terrine, buoyed by lacto-fermented beets and white currants, did its dire damnedest to save a triangle of toast. The bone marrow and parsley salad lived up to my recollection of the dish to which it pays homage at London’s St. John, but the kindest thing I can say about the dry slices next to it is that they squared precisely with my memory of bread served at pubs in England.
The small menu changes with the seasons, but the scotched egg and steaks stick around.
The other thing Smith can’t do, he freely admits, are cocktails. Thankfully, he got help on Little Beast’s beverages from one of Seattle’s most acclaimed hospitality professionals: former Canlis wine and spirits director Nelson Daquip, asking “Nelson, what do we drink in England?” Daquip’s answer became the darling of the cocktail menu. In his artful take on the Pimm’s Cup, heralded by an elegant ribbon of cucumber, the sweetness of summer strawberries mellowed the warm ginger bite.
Smith’s love of dessert shows in creative, challenging, and fun finishers.
It provided one of the only refreshing blasts of color in a restaurant that otherwise leans into the dark wood and heavy-toned decor of the pubs it aims to emulate—leather bound menus, a giant map of London on the exposed brick wall—until the end of a meal. “I love dessert,” Smith says. “Like, love love.” Inspired by Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, Smith gilds his technical nerdery with sparkly gothic vibes in the showstopping floating island. The skeleton’s head—sometimes with gleaming apricot eyes—drifts in a sea of lavender custard, berries streaking it a delightfully macabre red and purple. The similarly imaginative take on Eton mess trades out the antipodal passion fruit for cantaloupe and huckleberries, with the surprising, intriguing addition of tarragon oil.
There was no question that Little Beast would hit a home run—or perhaps a six, for the cricket crowd—with its steaks. But what makes it most notable is how Smith’s meaty philosophies wind their way into every aspect of the restaurant. Literally, as in the chocolate pudding dressed in kelp mousse and beef fat caramel; and figuratively, in its commitment to sourcing and perfecting obscure English techniques. Little Beast’s ability to make parsnips and rutabagas as exhilarating as porterhouses and rib eyes roars loudly that playing it safe is not the only way to survive—and it should be a rallying cry for local restaurants.