On Saturday night, August 10, Tamara Murphy, the 63-year-old owner of celebrated Capitol Hill restaurant Terra Plata, died after suffering a stroke.
Murphy was one of the leading lights of a generation of chefs that defined Pacific Northwest cuisine. She focused on local and seasonal ingredients at a time when that was an unusual approach, and ran some of Seattle’s most influential restaurants, including the now-closed Campagne, where she won a James Beard Award; her first restaurant, Brasa, which also closed, and Terra Plata, which she opened with her partner in life and business, Linda Di Lello Morton. She was a legend and remained at the top of her game until her death: The New York Times recently named Terra Plata one of the top 25 restaurants in Seattle.
She was also known for her commitment to charity. She founded An Incredible Feast, an event that raises money for local farmers markets, and Burning Beast, a “culinary Burning Man” where top Seattle chefs cook in fire pits at Snohomish County’s Smoke Farm, raising money for the Rubicon Foundation, an arts and conservation nonprofit. In 2016, Murphy and Di Lello Morton were named Community Leaders of the Year by the Greater Seattle Business Association, a chamber of commerce made up of LGBTQ people and their and allies. When the COVID pandemic began, the couple started Food Is Love, which partnered with restaurants to distribute 38,000 meals to food-insecure families.
Murphy’s sudden death sent shockwaves of grief through the Seattle restaurant community, as captured by an obituary in the Seattle Times. In that obit, famed restaurateur Tom Douglas described her as “proud, opinionated, talented, thoughtful, fighter, dynamo, philanthropic, fabulous chef, loyal friend.” Smoke Farm director Stuart Smithers told the paper, “She was always thinking about others — how to help, how to make life bigger and better, whether it was an immigrant dishwasher, her community of chefs or a struggling nonprofit.”
As the Times recounts, Murphy was born in Pennsylvania, and grew up in North Carolina and Peru. She worked at restaurants in New York (Anthony Bourdain was once a coworker) before moving to Seattle in 1988. Once there, she spent time at Dominique’s Place, one of the city’s top French restaurants, before taking over the kitchen at Campagne (another top French restaurant). She ran the cafe at the original Elliot Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square and opened the celebrated tapas restaurant Brasa in 1999. (It closed in 2010.) After that, Murphy focused her energy on Terra Plata, opening it inside Capitol Hill’s Melrose Market in 2011 after a legal battle with the landlords.
Along the way, Murphy mentored countless chefs, among them Jim Drohman, the first owner of legendary French restaurant Le Pichet — he once called her “the hardest-core line cook I ever saw” — and Holly Smith, who owns the celebrated Cafe Juanita and who helped open Brasa. “Her trust in me — at that time and forever after — was empowering and shaped me professionally. A bright flame, so outrageously talented, with a stellar palate, and a breadth and depth of experience that she was open to sharing with all she met,” Smith told the Times. “She was everything all at once.”
Some chefs of Murphy’s caliber build empires, but Murphy stayed put at Terra Plata, establishing one of Seattle’s most well-loved restaurants. It is maybe best known for its secluded rooftop — a sanctuary improbably close to I-5 — with a garden that grows herbs used by the kitchen. The Greater Seattle Business Association described Terra Plata in an Instagram post following Murphy’s death:
At Terra Plata, we came to celebrate our birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings; we gathered on that magical rooftop to commiserate about the state of the world; we fundraised for countless nonprofits and candidates running for office; from city council members to Presidential nominees. Intense conversations and belly laughing stories at Terra Plata always were shared over mouthwatering foods from Chef Tamara’s famous homemade potato chips, blistered shish*to peppers, famous roasted pig and those indescribable churros.
There were many signature dishes at Terra Plata, from those chips to Monday night paella, but the roast pig may have been Murphy’s specialty. In 2006, when she still owned Brasa, Murphy started a blog called Life of a Pig, which documented her experiences raising, slaughtering, and cooking several pigs. In it, she described something close to her philosophy as a chef, which cut against the molecular gastronomy trends dominant at the time.
“In an age where chefs are reaching to their chemistry books to create food from things that aren’t, I am reaching back to the farm where things have been mostly forgotten. I won’t be turning back... Perhaps NEW can be found in the almost forgotten,” she wrote. “Less than half of a generation ago, many more of us ‘knew our food’ and perhaps a new purpose for me, is to teach or at least inspire a NEW way to remember what food is about and WHERE it comes from. When we reach into the uncomfortable areas of food, we can find information about ourselves and what we as eaters, chefs and cooks are about and what we and the animals are capable of.”
Murphy suffered the stroke that killed her on Wednesday but was kept on life support for several days so her organs could be donated per her wishes, the Times reported. On Terra Plata’s website, it says that “a celebration of her life will be announced at a later date.”
