South Perry's Best Chef Award Didn't Surprise Anyone Who Already Eats There
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
"It's just the way in India, like you'd never send back a plate empty." Noreen Hiskey told the Inlander.
That's how chef Noreen Hiskey describes the food traditions she grew up with, shaped by her parents' roots in Mumbai and a stretch of family life in Saudi Arabia before they moved back to India, where neighbors traded dishes across cultural lines as a matter of course. It's also, as it turns out, a decent description of how food works on Perry Street. Earlier this year, the Inlander named Hiskey Best Chef in its 2026 readers' poll, the first woman and the first person of color to win the award in the publication's history. Her restaurant, Indicana, had already taken Best New Restaurant the year before. Two citywide titles in two years, both earned by a restaurant blending Indian and Mexican cooking in a neighborhood that isn't exactly a downtown food-hall address.
Ask around South Perry and the reaction to Hiskey's win wasn't shock. It was recognition. This is a district that has spent close to two decades turning small storefronts into places people drive across town for, and the pattern behind Indicana's rise is the same pattern that built the block around it: when a room in South Perry changes hands, what replaces it tends to be better, not just different.
An Inlander profile describes the building at 928 S. Perry St. as constructed around 1910, with exposed brick, a dark wood floor, and 13-foot ceilings that have outlasted three different identities.
As The Spokesman-Review reported, Casper Fry, a Southern-inspired restaurant opened in 2012 by Ben Poffenroth, his mother Deb Green, and his sister Megan VanStone, the same family behind downtown's Madeleine's Cafe & Patisserie, occupied that address for a decade. Casper Fry closed for good in April 2022, not from financial trouble but because the owners chose to sell and spend more time with family. The business went on the market with a $350,000 asking price.
What happened next says something about how this neighborhood treats turnover. As The Spokesman-Review reported, chef Adam Hegsted, who runs Eat Good Group's roster of Spokane restaurants including Baba and the Gilded Unicorn, bought the space within weeks and opened Française, a French-style neighborhood bistro, that summer. Hegsted's team kept Casper Fry's rough-plank tables and the old bar in back, the physical bones of the room, and repainted around them in a soothing blue-gray with linen curtains. General manager Nicole Bronkema, a French speaker who studied wine, and chef Kayleigh Wytcherley, who'd previously cooked at Bark, A Rescue Pub and Craft & Gather, built out a menu of country pâté, confit de canard, and a Monte Cristo Français layered with duck liver and gruyere.
"We love the neighborhood and community."
That remark, which Hegsted shared with The Spokesman-Review when he bought the building, reads less like a sentiment and more like a business thesis. South Perry doesn't lose a restaurant so much as it recasts one, in the same room, often with the same furniture.
The South Perry District proper runs along Perry Street roughly between Eighth and 12th avenues, spilling about a block east and west. That's a small footprint to be generating the kind of recognition it has. Within a few minutes' walk of Indicana and Française, the district holds:
None of these are large operations. None of them are chains. What they share with Indicana and Française is a willingness to bet on a small, specific idea rather than a broad one, and a customer base within walking distance willing to follow that bet.
Hiskey's own path fits the mold. She moved to Spokane 15 years ago and struggled to find the Indian food she'd grown up on, calling her mother overseas for recipes written without measured quantities and reverse-engineering them from memory. She spent 11 years running a food blog and YouTube channel before she and her business partner opened Indicana in fall 2024. Within months, readers had already voted it the city's best new restaurant. On her tasting menus, where she gets to push furthest from the regular lunch counter of tacos and bowls, she's served chicatana ants sourced from Mexico. Of roughly 50 guests at one such dinner, only two politely passed.
That's the kind of specificity that built this district's reputation long before any single award. It isn't that South Perry has more restaurants than other Spokane neighborhoods. It's that a disproportionate number of them are doing something a visitor wouldn't find replicated ten blocks over.
None of this happens in isolation from the calendar. The Thursday Market at Grant Park, 1000 S. Perry St., runs Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m. from May through October, and by the time it wraps for the year, the district has already shifted into its fall rhythm. Fall Into Perry, the newer of the neighborhood's seasonal gatherings, brings a raffle, vendors, and live music to the same stretch of Perry Street once the market season closes, giving residents one more reason to be outside before the weather turns for good.
It's a smaller event than the South Perry Street Fair, which drew more than 130 artisan and craft booths and three stages of music this September for its 24th year. But Fall Into Perry serves a different purpose. The Street Fair is the neighborhood's showcase. Fall Into Perry is closer to a shift change, the moment when the market stalls come down and the restaurants that have spent the summer feeding fairgoers and market shoppers settle into the slower, colder months where reputation matters more than foot traffic.
That's exactly the season Indicana and Française are heading into now, the one where a restaurant survives on repeat customers rather than passersby. It's also the season where an award like Hiskey's actually gets tested. Readers' polls are won in the spring. Whether a kitchen keeps its footing through a Spokane winter, with a smaller crowd and a harder commute, is a different question, and one South Perry's veterans, from The Shop to Perry Street Brewing, have already answered by simply still being there.
It would be easy to read Hiskey's Best Chef win as an isolated story, a talented cook getting her due. It's more accurate to read it as confirmation of something the neighborhood has been demonstrating in slower motion since long before Hiskey moved to Spokane: that a single block of Perry Street, without a downtown budget or a national chain's marketing reach, keeps producing restaurants that outperform their size. Casper Fry ran for a decade and closed on its own terms. Française took the same walls and built something French out of them. Indicana took a different risk, blending two cuisines that don't usually share a menu; Hiskey won the city's top chef title within two years of opening its doors.
The building at 928 S. Perry has been a pharmacy, a Southern kitchen, and now a French bistro. The neighborhood around it has had one identity the entire time.
If you're already walking Perry Street on a Thursday evening, or you know someone who talks about this neighborhood the way Spokane talks about South Perry, SpokaneREAL would be glad to talk through what it actually takes to buy or sell a home on these blocks. Schedule a private market consultation whenever you're ready.
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