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Noma-trained chef Blaine Wetzel.

The chef places a cedar bentwood box at the centre of the table for the first of six amuse-bouches. Leaning over, I lift the lid and am smacked in the nose with a heady swirl of briny smoke.

"Woo hoo," I cry, slamming the lid back down. I feel like we're letting a genie out of the bottle, but I guess that has already happened.

This is Willows Inn on Lummi Island, the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago in the Pacific Northwest. Among all the islands in this lushly forested coastal paradise, Lummi is the most easily accessible - a six-minute ferry crossing from

Bellingham, Wash., only 1½ hours south of Vancouver - yet is also the smallest (pop. 822) and least well known.

"I've been to Bellingham a hundred times and I'd never heard of it," says Blaine Wetzel, the 25-year-old wunderkind chef who is changing the island's fortunes and putting the 15-room Willows Inn on the gastronomic map.

How? Although originally from this area, Wetzel spent 18 months in Copenhagen, where he was a protégé of René Redzepi at Noma (No. 1 restaurant in the world, according to the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants for 2010), before transforming the Willows Inn kitchen so completely The New York Times named it one of 10 restaurants in the world "Worth a Plane Ride" only five months into his tenure.

True to his training, Wetzel is taking a very Noma-like, hyper-local philosophy and applying it to the bounty of Puget Sound. He and his kitchen crew (dishwashers included) spend their off-days foraging for sea lettuce, wild herbs, mushrooms and berries. The restaurant menu follows the seasons, using only local ingredients.

The kitchen's beef is grass-fed, from the island's Skagit River Ranch. Fairhaven Organic Mill Flour in nearby Bellingham custom-mills the grain for the thick, crusty bread. The butter, also from grass-fed cows, is churned specifically for the restaurant twice a week. The fish is all caught in local waters. The produce is grown on the co-owned Nettles Farm 10 minutes away, where Rhode Island Red free-range, egg-laying chickens are also raised and a woolly Mangalitsa pig is fattened each season.

"The potential here is outrageous," Wetzel says, noting that he's not doing anything radical. "[Owner]Riley Starks has been following the same slow-food philosophy for the last 10 years. That's what attracted me."

Wetzel turned down several prestigious positions in Seattle and San Francisco to come to this rural outpost, where cars don't drive faster than 30 kilometres an hour and islanders wave to strangers.

"This is the way Orcas Island was in the 1950s," Starks says, nodding to Lummi's touristy neighbour, the largest of the San Juan Islands.

We're sitting on the inn's westerly facing deck before dinner, watching the fishing boats in Rosario Strait and soaking up the sun. Lummi Island sits in a rain shadow protected by the Olympic Mountains, making it much drier and sunnier than the mainland. The sun is so bright and hot, we roll down an outdoor shade and peel off our sweaters. It may be late March, but it feels like July.

Starks put the farm before the table when he came to Lummi Island in 1992 and started Nettles Farm, where agritourists could (and still can) stay in the farmhouse suite, cabin and yurt. In 2001, he and his ex-wife bought the waterfront Willows Inn, a historic boarding house and family resort that celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, to expand their dream of connecting diners to the dirt.

A lawyer by training and commercial fisherman by trade, Starks also founded the Lummi Island Wild Co-op, a sustainable reef-net fishery - the only one like it in the world - that uses the ancient native fishing methods to catch sockeye salmon without any fossil fuels, bycatch or lactic-acid-inducing trauma to the fish.

"I don't know of any 40-seat restaurants that have four full-time farmers, two committed reef-net boats and so many connections with other fisheries," Wetzel says after we are seated in the window-wrapped dining room with its breathtaking view of the southern Gulf Islands and Coast Mountains in the distance. As at Noma, the cooks help serve the meals.

Also like Noma, the regular, prix fixe tasting menu ($85 for five courses) is supplemented by just as many small amuse-bouches, which come out at a fast and furious, palate-popping pace.

Some of the small plates - tender baby radishes served in a crunchy bed of barley-malt and hazelnut "soil" and an exquisite piece of herb toast adorned in edible cherry blossoms and white powdered vinegar - will be familiar to those acquainted with Noma's cuisine and cookbook.

But over all, it's a highly original meal that is specific to Lummi Island in the spring. Drawing on Noma's philosophy of "Time and Place," six of the 12 courses are seafood. Wetzel says he was hesitant about creating menus with so much fish (on some nights, it's 10 courses), yet upon further reflection it made perfect sense. "The farm isn't producing right now, but it's high season for fish. We have to use what we've got."

As at Noma, Wetzel doesn't torture his food with complex preparations and heavy reductions. One course is roasted beet - just beet - served with a light tarragon cream and dillweed seeds. It's clean and sweet and pure and, according to several diners here this weekend, the most delicious beet they've ever tasted.

To connect the food to its place, the chef uses textures, scents and flavours found near the main ingredient. The Penn Cove oysters, for instance, are presented on a bowl of frozen beach pebbles and garnished with seaweed.

"It keeps the oysters chilled, yes," the chef explains. "But it also smells like the cold Pacific Ocean. I hope it evokes in the diner the memory of walking on the beach, maybe in their childhood or on their way here tonight."

And then there's the hot smoked salmon, two moist, meaty cubes sitting on smoking cedar chips inside their wooden treasure box. "Salmon is a way of life here. During the summer, you'll see house after house with smoke billowing out of the smokers in the yard. I want to connect our diners with this island. When they eat here, I want them to know that they're in the San Juans."

Locals may call Lummi the "undiscovered" island. But if Wetzel keeps conjuring such magical flavours from its fields, fish and forests, the secret is bound to escape.

Special to The Globe and Mail

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