'Everybody has a kitchen and everybody eats'

Renee Behnke -- grace 'Sur La Table'

Not as stable a Table as Renee Behnke might have wished. But then no one's was on Wednesday when the quake shook Seattle. Click here for an interactive gallery of looks at Behnke's Sur La Table headquarters after the big jolt.

In this story: Going strong Grandma's cookie press Checking the list Cooks know RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Michele Dula Baum
CNN.com Writer

(CNN) -- Early last week, Renee Behnke had just returned from an extended European buying trip. She'd been searching for new products for her company, Sur La Table. Which is based in Seattle, Washington.

Days later, she was standing in an earthquake-shaken warehouse, counting her blessings and stepping carefully through large puddles of olive oil and glass shards.

QUICK VOTE
	Renee Behnke is the sort of careerist many would envy because she appears to have made a great place for herself in a world she loves -- culinary retail. When you go to work each day, are you doing what you love? Yes. Like Behnke I'm one of the lucky ones. Almost. My field is great, it's just my job in it that isn't right yet. Losing heart. I thought I'd gotten into the work I loved but I've been disappointed now that I'm there. I missed. I thought I was going for what I loved, only to realize there's something else I'd rather do. On the way. I'm doing something temporarily to get me closer to what I love. Bottoming out. I hate it, it hates me. Gotta make a change. View Results

"Everybody's fine," she said Thursday on a cell phone from the remains of one of the retailer's two warehouses in downtown Seattle. "A lot of merchandise just got thrown around."

Sur La Table's store-replenishment warehouse has been partially condemned because half of a back wall and ceiling collapsed, breaking a water main and flooding the building. Still, much of the company's upscale cookware and kitchen gadgets were saved from a drenching by shrink-wrapped containers. And earthquake-resistant storage racks were for the most part undamaged.

"Things just need to be relocated," said Behnke, confidently predicting a return to business as usual by today. "We're in pretty good shape."

As luck would have it, Sur La Table had just finished doing an inventory less than a month ago so the warehouse was less full than normal. "Now we've got to inventory everything that fell off the shelves!" the owner said with a hint of a sigh mixed with laughter.

It's clear that Behnke's reserves of enthusiasm and creativity also came through last week's quake undamaged. These gifts -- coupled with the shrewd sense of a seasoned trend-watcher -- have helped her to grow Sur La Table from a one-shop enterprise to a 21-store, catalog and Internet retailing powerhouse in six years. Sur La Table operates stores in eight states and the District of Columbia.

Going strong

Sur La Table's revenues were "in excess of $70 million last year," according to Behnke, a former buyer for the Nordstrom and Bon Marche department stores. She also developed product import programs for Allied department stores and Bon Marche's corporate and catalog businesses.

"Everybody has a kitchen and everybody eats," Behnke -- also a skilled chef -- says of her reasoning in buying the original Sur La Table, located in Pike Place Farmer's Market. "The passion that I had for food, setting the table and cooking, I saw in a lot of friends."

A Sur La Table retail center

At the same time, magazines devoted to gracious living - House and Garden, Martha Stewart Living, Gourmet, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Cooks Illustrated and their ilk -- were spreading the gospel of elegance to ever-larger audiences.

While many cookware companies did a good job with basic saucepans and soup bowls, Behnke noticed a startling lack of cultural diversity on catalog pages and competitors' shelves. She saw a niche and went for it.

"I spend a lot of time trying to understand where people are traveling, and what they're dragging home," Behnke says. "And then, of course, it's wonderful how culturally diverse our communities have become."

Large metropolitan areas including Seattle, New York and Chicago, Illinois, have long been destinations for immigrants. But in 21st-century America, even mid-size and small towns are seeing an influx of settlers just in from the global village.

"The general commonality is that each different culture has unique things that (customers from that culture) are looking to recreate," says Behnke. "Before, they didn't have a way to find the tools."

Grandma's cookie press

People looking for "grandma's cookie press" from Germany -- or a lava-rock molcajete (a Mexican mortar on short legs) to hold the perfect guacamole -- need look no further than Sur La Table's Web site or catalog.

Still, culturally diverse kitchenware represents just some 20 percent of the company's business. The bulk of Sur La Table's offerings is made up of serviceable, high-quality household pieces that can complement the kitchen of any serious cook. Or any cook who wants to be serious.

Renee Behnke

Celebrity chefs including Julia Child, Jacques Pépin and Alice Waters have been known to stop at Behnke's stores to have a look around.

"I had a dinner at my house and Alice Waters was there with a couple of other well-known chefs," Behnke recalls from early days in her involvement with Sur La Table. "We started talking about our favorite meals, and one said it was a picnic that a friend had in an olive orchard. It was a simple thing, but people will remember the smallest detail" of such enjoyment.

Behnke fondly recalls her grandmother's spicy German potato salad, and other standard "comfort" foods of the 1950s such as pot roast, fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.

And because others remember those foods too, Sur La Table isn't all --frou-frou porcelain and copper-bottomed stainless steel. Along with a $170 All-Clad paella pan, shoppers find a $26.95 cast-iron Dutch oven made by Lodge Manufacturing Company of South Pittsburg, Tennessee.

"Our customers understand the sensualities of life," says Behnke, no stranger to the sensualities of travel and good food.

Checking the list

"I make a list by country of every meal that people eat," she explains of her planning process for a buying trip. "Sometimes they don't translate well."

Americans, for example, generally don't eat multiple-course meals in the way that many Europeans do. For this reason, dishes dedicated to a particular course -- say, olives or pasta -- aren't necessarily the big sellers at Sur La Table.

Even so, they're an essential part of the variety that makes the company unique.

"We have a tremendous number of items," says Behnke. "Where Williams-Sonoma might have six or 10 wooden spoons, we maybe offer 60, and in many different woods." Sur La Table's merchandise includes flattened Japanese rice spoons and left-handed olive wood spoons.

Then there are the French white porcelain dishes, linens in a rainbow of colors and you-never-knew-you-needed gadgets -- a chocolate tempering machine, stainless steel dish rack, green stone mortar and pestle and Christmas tree-shaped tart rings.

"Different pans do different jobs," Behnke says. "And overall, the goal is really to have our employees well trained and educated on how each piece functions."

For example, a slightly domed lid allows for condensation and a self-basting quality, says Behnke. "A flat lid doesn't get the same condensation because it normally doesn't fit as tight."

Want a steamer? Get a dome. Making spaghetti sauce? Use a flat-lidded pan.

Cooks know

Sur La Table is a serious store for serious cooks. But it's also a great place to pick up a few kitchen accessories.

And Behnke is the one finding those accessories, looking for "quality, diversity and newness" on those global buying trips. She has explored Vietnam, Provence, Morocco, Croatia and Mexico. Just weeks before the Seattle earthquake, she was shopping for cookware in Italy, Portugal, France and Germany.

	AFTER THE QUAKE

In Dresden, it was wineglasses. Then there were days of touring factories in northern Portugal. In France, it was a visit with Sur La Table's copper vendor.

"It's exciting and stimulating to see all the new colors and all the new things," says Behnke, who estimates she gets as many as 60 e-mail messages a day. "It can also be a grind."

Finding a unique couscoussiere to make the Middle Eastern pasta dish couscous ("If you steam it properly, the flavor is just so rich -- nutty and light") or a trove of olive oil from Tuscany can make the grind worthwhile, though.

Behnke understands the harmony of olives and olive press.

"Where the olive is grown, the way it's pressed, whether it's cold-pressed or heat is applied to extract more oil -- all these things make a difference," she says.

Setting a fine table is part of the good life that Behnke wants to share with her customers.

But first, she has to finish damage assessments.

Thursday, she searched for post-quake open roads to get from one store to another. "I'm wet to my knees," Behnke said.

Time for a hot bath and glass of wine later? Hardly.

"I have to go to a black-tie thing at Bill Gates' house."

Where, undoubtedly, one can expect to find a splendid table.

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