Little Beast in Seattle is one of a handful of new restaurants drawing inspiration from classic British dishes | Photo by Brooke Fitts There is an art to a proper meat pie, according to the Seattle chef and butcher Kevin Smith. The American pot pie frustrates him because it lets the pot do the heavy lifting. “The real way of doing it, for me, is to make a freestanding pie,” Smith says. The pastry should hold itself up, a technique cooks in England have honed over centuries. “That is so much more theatrical.” Those meat pies — densely packed with beef shank in Guinness gravy, or chile tinged-lamb korma — anchor the menu at Little Beast, Smith’s new English pub. For Smith, who also runs the butcher shop Beast and Cleaver and the restaurants the Peasant and the Beastro inside it, the venture marks a return to his South London upbringing. “It’s very, very classic English food,” he says. Both London and Seattle can be cold, gray, and gloomy. In both cities, one needs food that “warms the bones,” he says, and coziness is the impulse of the moment. Smith’s goal is to truly recreate a quintessential English pub. This, to him, meant rustic, a little dark, not at all fancy — just the kind of place where people can “come in and sling their coat over the back of a chair,” Smith says. So far, his homey pub has been a hit: Eater Seattle named Little Beast its Restaurant…
