Chef Billy Roberson prepares to place a prawn on the Cicada Surf-n-Turf entree at Cicada Restaurant in Olympia. The dish combines New York strip steak, asparagus-potato hash, prawns, and corn-tomato butter sauce. (Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

By Craig Sailor
The News Tribune

The scene: Occupying a corner spot on Olympia’s main drag and kitty-corner from the new City Hall under construction, Cicada is an intimate dining destination. Big windows look out to the street while local art fills its interior walls. The restaurant is named after the big, vociferous bugs native to the southern United States.

People in the kitchen: Billy Roberson is the chef and co-owner of the almost three-year-old restaurant – and a native of New Orleans (thus the name choice). Roberson spent five years with the Ramblin Jacks restaurant group in Olympia before striking out on his own. While Roberson concentrates on food and wine, general manager and co-owner Lisa Smith is the genius behind the restaurant’s inventive cocktail list. “She has a furious martini following,” Roberson says.

The food: Roberson says the two most important aspects of his cuisine are making everything he can from scratch and using as much local food as he can. All proteins on the menu are from the Northwest except for the occasional tuna, he says. Roberson has cooked on every coast from Maine to Alaska and “seafood is what I care the most about,” he says. He struggles to describe his cooking style but ends up calling it “a South by Northwest approach.” He leans more Italian than French, but “the basis of my cuisine is definitely rooted in the South,” where food was taken very seriously when he was growing up, he says.

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