Pioneering Seattle chef and restaurateur Tamara Murphy passed away at age 63 on August 11 after a recent stroke. The co-owner of Terra Plata (which she ran with her partner in life and business, Linda Di Lello Morton) leaves behind a legacy of championing Seattle’s local, organic foods, the farmers who grow them, and anybody else in her community in need of support.

More recent arrivals to the city might know Murphy only from her current restaurant, Terra Plata, where the rooftop patio, bordered with plants, crowned the idyllic urban culinary complex of Melrose Market. In the kitchen, Murphy cooked odes to the farmers, fishers, and ranchers of the region, seeking out underutilized ingredients such as singing scallops and highlighting local treasures like the albacore tuna from FV St. Jude. But reducing her story to a single restaurant (if one with an impressive 13-year-run through tough times) is like saying Burning Beast was just another food festival.

Back in 2008, a time when lighting a giant wooden animal on fire during the height of summer still sounded like a reasonable idea, Murphy created the annual event to bring together the minds behind some of the city’s best restaurants in celebration of outdoor whole-animal cooking on a farm in Snohomish County. For the public, it was a chance to see local chefs get creative while putting their money to good use—Burning Beast was a fundraiser for the foundation that ran the property.

But for the participants, it served as something of a retreat, a time to connect with each other away from the pressure-cooker kitchen environment and have a great time making food. The event brought together Murphy’s love for live-fire cooking, the people who supplied the meat, and supporting good causes. She worked her ass off to make sure that every part of her community benefitted, and the result was an unvarnished celebration of skill combined with a bacchanalian multiday party; absolutely fun as hell.

As loud as Murphy was about social, community, and political causes, she was often quiet about her pioneering role in Seattle’s restaurant scene. The self-taught chef from Charlotte, North Carolina, started working in kitchens as a teenager and landed in Seattle in 1988, just as our restaurant scene gained footing on the national stage—an evolution in which she played a large part.

As the chef at Campagne through the 1990s, then at her own restaurants, Brasa, Elliott Bay Café, and Terra Plata, Murphy championed local ingredients and translated European techniques and flavors into sophisticated but never fussy dishes. At a time when the upper echelon of the industry was still heavily male, Murphy, along with Monique Barbeau and Christine Keff, made clear through national recognition why that needed to change. She was the first Seattle chef to be named to Food & Wine’s annual Best New Chef list and won a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Pacific Northwest and Hawaii in 1995.

At the turn of the millennium, having newly opened the sprawling Brasa in Belltown and faced with the dot-com crash and recession, she basically invented the Seattle-style happy hour, luring people downtown and into her bar with ultra-discounted access to her famous paella.

Her innovative ideas, both in the kitchen and out kept Terra Plata for more than a decade, a grand feat in the restaurant world, leading it through numerous struggles with funding, developers, and then the pandemic.

Despite that, at every turn, Murphy looked to include more people in her community, and she saw her food and restaurants as an ideal way to do that. She encouraged diners to know where their food came from and cooks to revere those who produced it, leading Seattle into an era where farmers were name-checked on menus. In 2005, she created An Incredible Feast, a fundraiser that paired local chefs with farmers to make a dish. Subtitled “Where the Farmers are the Stars,” it raised money for farmers markets and organizations that helped farmers through tough times.

Murphy fought fiercely for what she believed in, using her voice and restaurant to advocate for many causes, particularly those relating to LGBTQ+ rights. With Di Lello Morton, she was honored as a Community Leader of the Year in 2016 by the Greater Seattle Business Association—Washington state's LGBTQ+ and allied chamber of commerce—for their support, which always included a star-studded Pride party on Terra Plata’s patio. Even after her stroke, Murphy continued to help others live their fullest lives: she passed on Sunday following a successful organ donation that could help as many as 125 people.

Many members of Murphy’s community were already grieving this week after the unexpected passing of another chef who shaped the food landscape we know today. Seattle lost Wayne Johnson on August 4, at age 66. The former head chef at Seattle restaurants Andaluca and Ray’s Boathouse inspired class after class of cooks at FareStart. The combined number of lives that these two chefs touched through their mentorship and commitment to the Seattle restaurant community seems nearly unfathomable.

News of Murphy’s stroke came less than a week after the Seattle Times reported Johnson’s death from “A traumatic brain injury due to bacterial infection after a brief hospitalization.” Johnson, like Murphy, was generally quiet about his accomplishments, even as he received acclaim for his role as head chef at top restaurants.

His love for food and constant quest for improvement lead him into mentorship roles in his own kitchens, and in that of FareStart, the nonprofit where he started volunteering when he first arrived in Seattle in 1999. In 2015, he began working for the nonprofit that provides restaurant industry skills training to people who have experienced houselessness, first as executive chef, then in a variety of roles that included mentoring staff and fostering connections with local food producers and the broader community.

Johnson’s family suggests that anyone wishing to honor his life and work donate to The Bronze Chapter, a nonprofit for which he served on the board that helps POC experience the outdoors and Black Seed Farm, which supports connecting BIPOC people to land, farming, and agriculture.

Seattle was lucky to have two chefs as skilled and passionate as Johnson and Murphy who built Seattle’s food scene long before there was any glitz or glamour in being a chef, and even more so because both realized that best way to use their talents was to share them with others and gather their communities.

As devastating as the week has been to those who knew them, it’s promising to see just how many people in the industry had their own philosophies shaped by Murphy and Johnson's mentorship, allowing their legacies to live on and their lights to shine on infinitely.