There’s a precision to this Eastlake pit stop, from the counter server methodically ripping butcher paper into perfect squares of sandwich wrap to the 30-some beer taps lined up along the wall like a squadron of soldiers in full salute. Indeed, Mammoth so telegraphs fastidiousness—the refrigerator case with its exacting presentation of international brews and sodas, the black wood tables set at right angles to the seats, the crisp white subway tile—your sandwich may come as a bit of a shock.
These are the same folks who brought us the untidy pleasures of Bitterroot BBQ in Ballard; this perhaps should’ve stood as warning. But consider the Predator, a French roll slicked with caper aioli, then overstuffed with warm fried chicken leg, hunks of pork belly, swiss cheese, roasted red peppers, and a fistful of arugula. That’s not a sandwich, that’s a dare. All 16 sandwiches are similarly juicy and overloaded (with bread that stands up!) and variously well conceived; aim into the warm ones like the smoky-pork-with-charry-onion Saber-Tooth.
Each comes with homemade chips and should be enjoyed with a rich Belgian or porter or strong cider; kids (who are allowed, but not behind the bar rail) may choose housemade root beer or vanilla bean sodas, which taste like sticky feels. All adding up to exactly what you want to eat and drink, together at last, in a neighborhood that’s on the way to everywhere.
This article appeared in the April 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
Manolin and the Sea Ceviche by the outdoor fire pit
When the archaeologists of the future pick through the layer we know as the present, in this waterscape we know as Seattle, they will undoubtedly conclude that the urban tribes of this era subsisted on small portions of fish and copious amounts of spirits, preferably together, ideally around outdoor fire pits. Manolin is the latest such site—the Stone Way endeavor of the Whale Wins and the Walrus and the Carpenter expats—and on its menu of small plates it trolls similar waters: the denatured, smoked, poached, and grilled seafoods one finds at these sorts of watering holes all over town. Bracing cocktails are big on tequilas and piscos and cachaças, and the food can evoke the same lower latitudes, like plantain chips (which longed for a dipping sauce) or rockfish ceviche lushly partnered with cubes of avocado and sweet potato and then lit bright as a Baja sunset with chilies and plenty of lime.
Seafoods, not surprisingly, shine brightest here; grilled romaine salad was better in flavor than texture, and the chicken thigh dish was plain boring. Plus the place is screaming for oysters. But the winning friendliness of these servers and the utter enchantment of the setting neutralize any disappointment. When those future excavators unearth this neighborhood haunt, clad in sea-blue subway tile and anchored with a rounded bar counter aiming out paned French doors to the outdoor fire pit—will they know it was Seattle’s hangout of choice circa spring 2015?
This article appeared in the April 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
Vietnam Via China Pork ribs crusted with a blend of cumin and Hunan chilies
When the waiter at Stateside set down our fried chicken—fried chicken for God’s sake, the celebrity porn of dinner—I couldn’t take my eyes off the cucumbers. They were sliced with mandoline precision, on the bias, lining the perimeter of the dish like a regiment of crisply ordered soldiers. There was more careful intention in this vegetable flourish than one might see elsewhere across five courses. And while exquisitely cut cucumbers may not seem like much in the scheme of things, they nearly made me cry.
Had I known at that moment that this particular chicken had been poached in a stock chef and owner Eric Johnson has been using and adding to and adjusting since he opened Stateside in December—the Chinese invention known as a master stock, which stays edible, thanks to salinity and a daily boil, and which Johnson dreamily describes as taking on “the flavor of the streets of Hong Kong”—I might actually have cried.
Instead I ate, devoured really, and discovered that chicken cooked this way has a depthless intensity unlike anything I’ve tasted. Yes, there was the magnificence of the textures—meat that was moist, nearly fluffy, and wrapped in an irresistible crackly skin—but it was the flavor, heady with the layered potency of months of stewing chickens, that grabbed me by the collar and shook. The chicken arrived with a trio of dips—spicy chili, a blend of soys with a pinch of oyster sauce, lemongrass ginger—but we wound up eating it au naturel in its bed of frizzled onions along with those artful cukes. Turns out the streets of Hong Kong taste complex enough without sauce.
Eric Johnson misses those streets, having spent the first decade of the millennium quietly making a name for himself across New York, Europe, and Asia. The Long Island–raised, classically trained chef scored gigs with Michelin superstars Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, opening restaurants for the latter in Paris, then Shanghai, and absorbing the ancient wisdoms of Chinese cuisines and their diaspora across Southeast Asia. “Living in Asia, I just always wanted to see what was around the next street corner, try that one dish in that one back-alley spot,” he reminisces. But when it came time to decide between permanent expat status or a return to the U.S., he chose the latter—with Seattle, home of extended family, his ultimate choice.
And a Vietnamese restaurant, the natural confluence of Chinese cuisine and French method, his ultimate vision. He didn’t want a destination or showy new construction—he envisioned a casual drop-in joint in a foot-trafficky neighborhood. He and his team found a storefront in Pike/Pine’s emerging gastronomic epicenter—down the street from Trove, around the corner from Mamnoon and Sitka and Spruce—and turned it into French colonial Indochina, with color-washed seafoam walls and paint-chipped metal chairs and bare filament bulbs, that minimalist cliche which in this room feels exactly right. A mottled antique-glass-backed bar is lined with rums and ryes and palmy greens; its stools lined with urban culinarians in place of the diplomatic -attaches and rum-soaked war correspondents. In a few months, there will be breezy sidewalk tables.
The tropical languor feels at once transporting and subtle, and it suits the food. Of all the global cuisines represented in Seattle, Vietnamese enjoys the most variation: You can eat it in the form of pho and bun thit nuong at holes-in-the-wall like Pho Bac and Huong Binh, or banh mi at bakeries like Tony’s and Q Bakery, or home-cooking-with-a-cocktail dinners at date spots like Tamarind Tree and Long, or upmarket Northwest-Vietnamese fusion like flank steak wrapped in la lot leaves or Idaho catfish clay pot from the astonishing Monsoons. You can even get bayou Vietnamese at the International District’s Crazy Pho Cajun.
Stateside fills a different niche, delivering an edible primer on the roots and branches of Vietnamese cuisine. Off a menu of small, medium, and large plates China shows up in a medium plate of pork ribs, moist and impossibly meaty, and ferociously crusted with a Hunan chili and cumin blend. (You didn’t need that layer of your tongue anyway, right?) France appears in the duck leg confit à l’orange, where flawless chicken lolls in an umami-rich broth, pungent with Vietnamese coriander.
The menu proceeds into classics of Vietnamese cuisine, like a little banh mi starter made on shattering Q Bakery rolls, the sausage perfumed with lime leaf and the sauce throbbing with lemongrass and the Swiss condiment Maggi. The Northern Vietnamese classic, green papaya salad, arrives as a happy chaos of the unripe fruit, brisk with lime, with chilies and peanuts and shreds of beef jerky, the way Johnson ate it across Saigon. His black cod preparation, for its part, was modeled on the cha ca la vong of Hanoi: a crusted hunk of the oily fish breathing gusts of turmeric and galangal and served on rice noodles with dill, cilantro, and mint.
Always elegant, reflecting the peerless execution of a pro whose kitchen cuts cucumbers as if they were diamonds, what these dishes may not always be is a thrill a minute. “I’d never use the word fusion to describe this restaurant, because of what that’s come to mean,” Johnson says, murmuring something under his breath that sounded a lot like blue cheese dumplings. “But I can’t tell you it isn’t fusion. Then again—I can’t tell you a restaurant anywhere that isn’t.”
Fusion is, in other words, knit into the very DNA of Vietnamese cuisine; knit, arguably, into the DNA of every cuisine. Still, if it’s thrills you’re after, opt for dishes where Johnson presses the playful interpretations further: embellishing shingles of amberjack crudo with tangy lime leaf powder and a perfumy ice of bergamot oranges, for instance, or pairing soy--lacquered beef short ribs with classic French sweet celeriac puree and a tart mix of green apple, ginger, and jalapeños—a textural and flavorful masterpiece, at once buoyant and down to earth.
Which brings me to service: as down-to-earth as exists in this town. Every server and host we encountered was adept, unaffected, kind, and funny without being hilarious. (Saints save us from hilarious waiters.) They were, in short, as careful as the kitchen. And that’s saying a ton.
This article appeared in the April 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
John Sundstrom recentlymoved his beloved Lark to the warehousey flank of Pike/Pine off Madison, spinning out a starlit space—indigo banquettes, white linens, a welkin of pendants overhead—as elegant as any in town. In the rafters: casual charcuterie and crudo bar, Bitter/Raw. Downstairs: Slab Sandwiches and Pie, where the daytime-only menu reinvents both genres. (The biscuity pie crusts exist at the corner of divine inspiration and butter.) Lark, that upstart pioneer of small-plate dining, is now the noble elder; grown-ups come for that disappearing species—relaxing high-end dinners—assembled from small plates or a combination of mains and Sundstrom’s famous grains.
The menu is speckled with old favorites (eel with saba, mascarpone-creamy farro) and executed, as in the crisped pork belly with a rye whiskey glaze, with Lark’s reliably sure hand. Alas, service can be sophomoric, throwing into bold relief the poise of this food. 952 E Seneca St, Capitol Hill, 206-323-5275
So stunning you can arrive for your initial visit on, say, the afternoon of an M’s home game, when it’s packed to the loft tables, decibels crashing as if the late great Dave Niehaus himself were belting “My oh my” directly into your ear—and the room would still be the thing you notice. The white-railed loft. The marble bar top with black tufted barstools. The vintage bank vault doors. Like other recent Pioneer Square openings, Good Bar reflects the urban neighborhood’s historical roots, but in an ubermanly way. It’s like the London Plane for boys.
When owners Josh and Nancy Kelly found the space, Josh, a chef, had been dreaming of a restaurant for nearly a decade—one that would satisfy the elevated culinary dreams he had developed working at Portland’s Wildwood, the Dahlia Lounge, and Marination Ma Kai with owners Roz Edison and Kamala Saxton (silent partners in this endeavor). Instead, Kelly ran into the strict standards enforced by the building’s National Historic Landmark status; standards which, in fact, wound up limiting his vision to two induction burners and a convection oven. “So I decided I wasn’t trying to win a James Beard award,” he says. “Now I was doing a bar with food.”
He set up a beer program with Stoup Brewing partner Robyn Schumacher and snatched up cocktail connoisseur Adam Kachman from Portland to mastermind the booze, with results you’d expect: impressive beer lists combining locally beloved drafts with global atypicals, and a merry glut of liquors, especially brown ones. One such, a bourbon, participates in the Kachman innovation called Joe’s Drink: an aromatic composition of bitter and tart and creamy, complex with cherry heering, with a tweak of burnt lemon for smoke. Intriguing and seamless.
Then Kelly put two smart things on the menu: an all-star and a deep bench. The former is the sloppy joe, a lush extravagance of Painted Hills beef sweetened with tomato and a drizzle of caramelized onion aioli, deepened with stout and a lengthy reduction. It all gushes out from between two halves of a Macrina ciabatta bun—which, hats off, masterfully stands up to the goo. But you’d be a fool to try this thing with your hands; this is knife-and-fork food. The accompanying wet nap looked laughably unequal to the task: a trowel for a lava flow.
Good Bar’s signature menu item, gilded in caramelized onion aioli
This sloppy joe was perfect, a phrase I’m not sure I ever saw myself writing, and has in Good Bar’s six months become one of this city’s great craveables. In my visits I spied it on probably half the tables, with at least two solo diners, regulars by the look of their rapport with servers, who slunk in just to order it. That’s addiction behavior, folks. (Not to mention all the proof we need that this chef helped create the ridiculously craveable Marination Ma Kai.)
But there’s more on this menu, and much of it is very good, and that’s where the deep bench comes in. Potato salad deconstructions, all the rage in Seattle at the moment, don’t get much better than the egg-and-mustard aioli dip served alongside salted and gilded halved fingerling potatoes at Good Bar.
“When we experimented with this we thought, ‘This could be our french fries!’ ” Kelly told me excitedly, referring to his kitchen’s lack of a fryer.
Indeed—the kitchen’s lack of practically everything renders the triumphs well earned. A dish of steamed mussels swam in a delectably briny broth of roasted garlic, wine, butter, and kalamata olives. Besides the sloppy joe, the only other entree-size dish on the menu was a meaty hunk of pork loin offset with hints of mustard seed and bourbon and maple and served over a decadent wedge of blistered scalloped potatoes. An ice cream sandwich riff for dessert, with housemade vanilla ice cream between a drizzle of fudge and a chewy layer of brownie, was gloriously full flavored; sheer joy on the palate.
Gin, Salers aperitif made with gentian root, maraschino, lemon, honey, and grapefruit bitters
As for failures, I found none—unless you count the dishes I didn’t much want to eat. A tart tangle of crunchy marinated beets, dolloped with creme fraiche. Baked oysters, served in their shells with a pleasant 1950s-era topping of crisped ham with cream, bread crumbs, and chives. Fat sardines with sherry-vinegar-marinated corona beans and a puckery gremolata. Boiled peanuts.
“I didn’t not like them,” my companion remarked carefully about the beets, and I felt her. A good deal of Kelly’s menu holds mysteriously little popular appeal. The boiled peanuts, a nostalgic delight across the South, are an especially acquired taste and (soft) texture here in the Northwest, especially when you’re asked to fish them out of an Old Bay Seasoning swamp, then gnaw through their shells in order to enjoy them. (Er, another five wet naps please.)
Not bad, I repeat, in any critical sense: just lacking popular appeal. It points to a fascinating divide right now in this stadium-adjacent district, where the pursuit of spectator sports is crashing headlong into the pursuit of connoisseur dining. Here it should be noted that Good Bar’s staff was, to a person, affable and accommodating—but the ones serving us lacked the menu knowledge you might expect in a bar peddling artisan cocktails, charcuterie plates, radicchio salads, and nine-buck plates of three tiny baked oysters.
On the other hand, for every fernet-angostura collision in this noble room—there are a whole slew of beer cans. Good Bar has both elitism and populism in its DNA; perhaps it needs to know itself little better before the right balance can be struck. Marginally Better Bar, anyone?
Now that the gastronomically prolificTom Douglas is up to number freakin’ 18, it’s fair to say the man has developed a few reliable motifs. Comforting textures. Enlivening atmo. Signals to convey culinary authenticity. So it won’t be a surprise when you walk into Cantina Leña, his counter-service, casual joint in Belltown, to find crisp carnitas rendering the nachos irresistible, or metal chairs done up in a particularly celebratory shade of orange, or a bunch of folks (visibly) making tortillas in back.
But the thing is, authenticity isn’t the point at a place like Cantina Leña; vividness is. Achiote-rubbed pork shoulder for stuffing into tortillas comes bright with sour orange and pickled red onion; mescal smokes up caramel dipping sauce for the churros. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (smoky caramel sauce doesn’t). Sure, you may find a surfeit of grease in those carnitas-fundido-pickled onion nachos—but good luck pushing away the platter. 2101 Fifth Ave, Belltown; 206-519-5723
FROM THE MOMENT YOU WALK INTO THE PALLADIAN Hotel at the corner of Second and Virginia, the Seattle references fly. There are coded and not-so-coded music scene allusions, from the bar named Pennyroyal (recalling the Nirvana song “Pennyroyal Tea,” which might be about depression or might be about abortion, but if those are your choices it maybe doesn’t matter) to the lobby’s gilt-framed portraits of Seattle music notables—Jimi Hendrix, Dave Matthews—done up like eighteenth-century noblemen. Bill Gates and Frasier Crane get the treatment too. A gleaming bike stands ready for guests in the lobby.
Boy, oh boy, are you in Seattle now! screams all this iconography, which Seattleites will find cheesy and ersatz. (Frasier Crane?) But walk a little further in, and spaces convey an aesthetic much more authentically Seattle. Off the lobby, the gothically underlit Pennyroyal, all plush tufted sofas and artisan cocktails and brick barback, simmers with boho elegance, making it just right for after a concert at the Moore Theater across the street. Keep going, around the corner and down the stairs, and you’ll find its companion restaurant, the visually glorious Shaker and Spear.
Honestly, in a year of stunning restaurant design—Good Bar, Stateside, Lark—Shaker and Spear may trump them all on unlikeliness alone: a hotel restaurant that conveys a genuine sense of the local and the intimate. Woods warm and cool and smooth and rough conspire with steely sharp edges and glassy tall windows and exposed brick and a vibrant open kitchen to create surroundings as texturally satisfying as a rain forest. The room is on the small side, which may be why middle-of-the-room tables feel private. It’s as cozy by abundant daylight as it is after dark. There’s nothing touristy about it. A girl could get engaged in here.
A seafood menu boldly deepens this sense of being somewhere. For decades I’ve watched in frustration as independent restaurateurs underplay Seattle’s waterside bounty, so it’s been almost touching in the last couple years to see new arrivals proudly building whole menus around seafood. Executive chef Walter Pisano says he’s dreamed of a fish house for years, locked as he’s been in an Italian program at Tulio, his restaurant at Kimpton’s Hotel Vintage further downtown.
And so genuine excitement showed up on dishes like the grilled octopus starter, where thick-muscled, deeply purpled tentacles lolled in a bright salsa verde, with salted chickpea puree lending a bass note. Almost as good was a row of seared sea scallops, diver caught, attended by spinach, sweetened pine nuts, and dollops of golden raisin puree. Both were slightly overcooked, neither killingly so. A plate of true cod in a nicely acidic escabeche preparation was lavished with a confetti of diced peppers and squash, its crunching crust a smart counterpoint to the vegetables and the flaky flesh of the fish. All offered plenty of flavor.
“Local seafood—in a destination downtown!” I chirped into my notebook, thrilled to find a singular alternative to the touristy Etta’s or the canned Anthony’s or the mediocre Blueacre.
Copper River sockeye with baby artichokes, asparagus, carrot ginger puree
More than half of the cocktails were built on sherry, the “It” spirit right now, showing that someone’s sensibility here is hewing more to the dictates of fashion than vision. Well all right, that’s cocktails. But on my first encounter with the dinner menu, four of the six seafood entrees were imports—including tombo and opah, often seen on tropical menus. I chose the whole branzino—Pisano offers a whole-fish preparation every night—and it was fluffy and light, swathed in crispy skin, its plate drizzled with chimichurri, and beautifully paired with firm orca beans and petite red beans, which disintegrated almost to cream on the palate.
Still, branzino is about as Northwest as rhino meat: not a criticism of Shaker and Spear so much as it is a clarification that this place, which seems so much like a regional restaurant, eats more generic than that. What is a criticism are the conceptual missteps, most of which take the form of a dispiriting dearth of verve. A hunk of smoked black cod with a dice of pickled rhubarb—so promising!—tasted only marginally smoky and barely pickled at all. Pisano is going for simplicity in his preparations—the noblest goal when it comes to seafood—but simplicity shouldn’t be confused with blandness. A panfried hunk of yellowtail, translucently sashimi-like within, either redefined subtlety on its puddle of cream with English peas and wild mushrooms—or lacked the courage of its flavor convictions. I’m afraid it was the latter. Even the bread wanted flavor.
In my experience, Tulio trends lowest common denominator in a similar way, pulling punches by sacrificing innovation to please the masses. Service reflects the same obsequious superficiality, from waiters who are unfailingly smiling and charming and avid, but don’t know which fish—on a fish house menu—are local and confidently declare that XO sauce is African (it’s Asian). Where generic food and surface-level hospitality collide—besides inside hotel restaurants—is in the disheartening conclusion that a restaurant is willing to be whatever guests want it to be. Only here’s the pity: We want it to be reflective of an authentic soul. The glorious room is there. Here’s hoping the menu and service catch up.
When you stumble on the best tzatziki you’ve ever had, as I did at the Capitol Hill Greek taverna Omega Ouzeri, you ask your waiter to box up what you can’t finish. You have no shame about this, given that its fathomless richness made your pupils dilate, thank you Greek yogurt, and that in spite of or maybe because of its conspiring herbs it captured the cool essence of cucumbers better than a cucumber. What fool wouldn’t take it home.
Except I was traveling by Car2go that night.
Maybe the next lucky Car2go user found the doggie box. Maybe he even ate it. If so, he loved it. I left him some triangles of soft pita too, though the poor fella wouldn’t get the benefit of Omega’s genuine—“Oh you have just a little sauce left? Let me go warm up a few more pitas for you”—hospitality.
Which is all to say: There is a better place than the interior of a Car2go to savor what Omega Ouzeri has to offer. The word for this taverna is buoyant—in its flavors certainly, as in that tzatziki, or in wholesome herb-forward lemon-soused grain salad beneath a chunk of crusty seared halibut, or crispy zucchini fritters with feta-creamy interiors packing exquisite little detonations of mint.
But buoyant better nails Omega’s atmosphere, which may at first feel sparer than an American idea of Greek excess would demand: a blanched and minimalist hard-cornered room whose only departure from white on white comes from the occasional splash of Santorini blue, and the bottles of the Greek spirits ouzo and tsipouro lined up behind the bar. Oh, and the purpled octopus sprawling on ice behind the host station.
But as evening ripens along this restaurant-heavy block of Pike/Pine and the ouzo begins to flow and Omega finds its crowd—gay men, families, always one or two big reveling groups (including private ones in the loft above)—the spot begins to pulse with vitality. It’s noisy, public, open to the sidewalk, a little more brightly lit than one might crave on a date, gently controlled by a fleet of heartily hospitable staff, and across its expanse owner Thomas Soukakos affably roams, clearing tables and presenting plates and greeting his friends, who appear to be everyone in the room. He grew up in a village in the south of Greece and dreamed of recreating that country’s rousing ouzeria culture; much like our coffeehouse culture in its drop-in sociability.
Instead he opened the acclaimed El Greco on Broadway in 1994, which was Greek but known mostly for its breakfasts; then the even more acclaimed Vios in 2004, which was Greek but known mostly for its surfeit of children. Soukakos launched that second restaurant raw with grief: His wife Carol, who suffered postpartum depression, had died by her own hand. Vios, Greek for life, became not just home away from home for his young child, but his means for and tribute to the seemingly simple business of going on.
Omega Ouzeri, it appears, is his arrival. He’s married again—Rebecca Soukakos handles the front of the house—and this restaurant isn’t as much a personal path to redemption as it is a cultural one. He hired Greeks to construct the website, the wine list, even the buildout plans, toward an end of telling “a different story about Greece” than the financially bleak one all over the news. Each table has a medicinal-looking little tube of Greece’s famous Kalas salt, which lends a mineral savor to the food and is particularly winning lavished over the herb-and-cheese-speckled Greek fries.
You won’t use it much. In fact the professional finish of Omega’s preparations may even confound expectations: It’s a (primarily) small-plate drop-in nosh spot, after all, and not a destination. The vibe is youthful informality: A toddler might be squishing something at a nearby table. So you probably aren’t expecting the beef-pork meatballs to be this fine, ditto the Mykonou kopanisti—a red pepper dip with a spark of goat horn chili fire and a sly blend of manouri and briny feta cheeses—or the frisky starter of grilled halloumi with sliced grapes, pine nuts, and drizzles of the grape syrup petimezi.
A shellfish special was a masterpiece of calibration, its clams and mussels lolling in a tomato sauce enlivened with fennel bulb and laced with ouzo, whose licorice notes arrived in just the right proportion. (Ouzo is employed all over this ouzeria, from cocktails to food preparations; one realizes when it’s whipped into the cream atop a lemon custard dessert that it may be too assertive a flavor to show up in so many dishes.) Soukakos prizes freshness—when the village you grew up in had no refrigeration, farm to table is no tagline—so blistered shishito peppers have that fresh-off-the-stem crunch, grilled lavraki (branzino) is fluffy and cloudlike of flesh, and robed in those Greek stalwarts of lemon and oil and garlic and served with the only real dud of my visits, a flavorless fava bean puree.
My only other complaint concerned that purple guy on ice near the entry, whose tentacles had been marinated and grilled, then arrayed across a field of bitter greens and fried Yukon gold potatoes. Flavors were transporting—the marinated octopus meat a bona fide revelation—but textures, including mushy potatoes and a coating of slime across the octopus, were troubling. Probably the cooks had left the octopus skin on, which is common in Greece and perfectly acceptable. And slimy.
As we were being served our loukoumades—fried dough balls, thickly crunchy crust giving way to dense, moist pastry within, alongside a dipping pot of spiced honey and another of dark Valrhona chocolate, constituting the very Platonic ideal of this dessert—we spied a tattoo winding around our server’s forearm like a snake bracelet. “Happy Humble Grateful Conscious,” it read, as if it were a business plan.
Really good Mexican restaurants—by which I mean restaurants attending carefully to Mexico’s regional cuisines—genuinely move me, given the astounding success one can enjoy running a bad one.
Lately for reasons of fate I’ve been to a slew of bad ones, loaded with happy people growing happier, in the way that tequila reliably enables. But let’s not call them bad ones, shall we, because there’s a time and a place for bland guacamole and Lip Smacker margaritas and undulating carpets of gilded cheese—all legitimately enjoyable under the right conditions. (Exhibit A: Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, may she rest in peace and may her walls never speak.) Problem is, those bad ones aren’t always readily discernible from the good—especially in a place like Capitol Hill.
Some of the neighborhood’s astonishing glut of newish Mexican joints are seriously impressive—I’m looking at you, Tacos Chukis and La Cocina Oaxaqueña. Others are so beautifully designed, so jammed with appreciative Lip Smacker/cheese carpet lovers, they just seem impressive.
And then there’s Chávez.
Fifteen years ago, the 21-year-old Gabriel Chávez followed family from Mexico to Seattle, whose surrounding mountains recalled his native Durango. He got a job washing dishes at Boat Street Cafe, where Renee Erickson gave him his first cooking lessons outside the ones his mom delivered every time she made her famous chile en nogada. He moved up to line cook at Serafina, then sous, then hopped over to Cantinetta, all the while providing staff meals of his hometown moles and posoles and tacos. “The staff gave me compliments,” Chávez admits modestly. Before long his Cantinetta bosses, Trevor Greenwood and Wade Moller, gave him a restaurant.
The whitewashed box with the roll-up garage doors opens breezily onto 12th Avenue, but it’s a few blocks north of the Pike/Pine frenzy, and therefore degrees more chill than Barrio, say, or the hyperactive Poquitos. Slackers from the ’90s, now Amazon execs—the men all post-hipster close-cropped haircuts, the women all loose-belted chic with artistic shoes—are here in force, adding further polish to a place whose subdued tile work and plain pine accents already brought aesthetic restraint.
Chávez’s classy brevity reinforces this. The bar along the south wall features an abridged list of mescals and tempranillos. The menu—just small-plate antojitos, eight varieties of taco, and two entree plates—bucks the uncurated excess that marks so many Mexican menus, thereby communicating connoisseurship.
And so it’s no surprise when you order the snapper ceviche that it arrives firm and bracing and bright, alive with aromatics and lime—simple bliss to eat. Durango is landlocked but only three hours from Mazatlán, so ceviche is available there on every corner. Chávez’s menu features fish in a few other preparations—as a main dish of snapper wrapped in banana leaf, as a mahi mahi taco crowned with slaw and chipotle cream, as a fat shrimp taco bursting with chilies and citrus—and only one we tried was flawed: a banana leaf tamale with not nearly enough of its tasty crab and langostino filling.
Chávez learned to make these in the mountains near his home, using the lobsterlike shellfish, langostinos, from a local river. Indeed much of the winning nature of this enterprise derives from the folksy provenance of its dishes, and the nostalgia they hold for the chef. Chávez grew up eating carne deshebrada tacos made of braised short ribs with roasted tomatoes and onions and dried peppers, then served with a dollop of the mousselike aguacate (avocado) and tomatillo sauce that’s native to the region. They are sweet and very meaty—a taco in the hand has about the size and heft of a tennis ball—and intricately flavorful, served three to an order.
The silken aguacate sauce should not be confused with the mighty guacamole Chávez serves in a few versions (including his grandmother’s, rajas, with roasted poblanos). Another is spangled with pork belly cracklings, which is actually, oddly, not as purely delectable as the traditional version—a plain marriage of avocado and pico de gallo, explosively flavorful and served in a dish atop a flat crispy corn cake called a totopo.
Totopo, about as visually appealing as drywall, takes about seven seconds to become the superstar of happy hour: a sturdy, earthen, plate-size corn chip with distilled corn flavor (somewhere between popcorn and corn nuts) intensified further thanks to salt and bits of char. Dredged through guacamole or one of Chávez’s complex salsas, totopo brings the indigenous peoples and arid mesas of central Mexico straight to the cocktail tables of Capitol Hill. Chávez actually imports them from Oaxaca.
The kitchen is a small one: an open corner you’ll see on your way to the restroom. Its size kiboshes the bigger, more complex menu Chávez sometimes dreams of creating. (A sweet corn puree swirled with roasted poblano oil and festooned with huitlacoche, bits of the funky corn mold Mexicans savor like truffles, got me dreaming right along with him: Could this be the chef to bring Seattle its first multicourse Mexican restaurant?) On the other hand, get through the totopo and a few tacos and the salsas and guac and terrific yellow and blue corn chips—here more like curly strips—and profound may be your need for no more food.
Mom’s Chile en Nogada A poblano chili stuffed with pork, beef, fruit, and nuts
Except for Chávez’s mom’s chile en nogada—that you mustn’t leave without trying. When he was a kid, his mom and other relatives competed to produce the best version of this dish, which hails from a region further south in Mexico but avails itself well of Durango’s abundance of fruits and nuts. A poblano chile is roasted and peeled, then stuffed with a mix of ground pork and beef with pine nuts, capers, walnuts, apples, pears, and candied cactus, then (in season) garnished with pomegranates. Bursting with fruit and crunch, suspended between savory and sweet, lavished with a rich walnut cream—this aromatic creation is one for the ages.
Believe me or don’t—but after you’ve been to that mountaintop, an ice cream sandwich built on moist, crispy churros will just be too much. At a certain kind of Mexican restaurant, you might just nurse another marg until you felt like, urp, dessert. At this one—by any measure one of the finest Mexican restaurants in Seattle—you’ll simply return for it, again and again.
When we bought a house in Columbia City in the late ’90s, bullets had just weeks before ripped across its backyard. Only one destination restaurant—the great La Medusa—had taken a chance on a stretch of Rainier Avenue perhaps best characterized by Angie’s Tavern, a bar so notorious its dealers and prostitutes didn’t even bother sneaking around.
One juice bar, one designer clothing store, the city’s best bread bakery, more new LEED construction than you can shake an FSC-certified stick at, and about a thousand restaurants that neighbors actually want to visit later—those blocks of Rainier have done a 180. Argue if you will over whether it’s an improvement—many of my acquaintance turn up their noses at the gleaming new PCC down the street, preferring the folksy, undersize original to the underground garage and sparkling new acreage—but this much is not debatable: The neighborhood tastes better.
Take the new Salted Sea Seafood and Raw Bar, which restaurateur Huy Tat opened earlier this summer in the husk of, whaddya know, Angie’s. (Let’s all take a moment and imagine what that renovation unearthed.) Tat grew up in the Rainier Valley, the son of immigrants whose family had owned restaurants in Vietnam and who opened the noodle house Hue Ky Mi Gia on Jackson in 2009. (You may know it as the place with the insane garlic fried chicken wings.) Two more noodle houses would follow, but young Tat had a different dream: namely, to open a place serving the mussels, sea scallops, and fresh oysters he couldn’t find in the South End. Yet.
He began chatting up Allyss Taylor, who came in to Hue Ky Mi Gia all the time for its noodle soup. Taylor was sous chef at the Harvest Vine, where she was honing a craft she’d learned under mentors at places like Mona’s and Elemental. Soon she was consulting for Tat and gave her boss an assignment: Eat in restaurants from the most accessible end of Seattle’s fish house spectrum (Ivar’s, Anthony’s) to the most sophisticated (Westward, the Walrus and the Carpenter)—and decide what you want your restaurant to be. With that Tat made two decisions: to strike a balance between approachable and creative, and to make Taylor chef.
The first thing you notice is that the spirits of Angie’s have been thoroughly exorcised, replaced by a welcoming tableau of rustic dark woods, driftwood appointments, sleek windows, and shiny accents. An oyster bar in back welcomes connoisseurs; two big screens over the bar bar welcome everyone else. The feel is populist, staffed up with the sorts of servers who might call you Hon and will hurry to wedge a piece of cardboard beneath the leg of a wobbly table before you even ask. Night and day the place simmers with South Seattle’s signature gumbo of humanity: solos and couples and families and groups, along the continuum of classes and colors and ages.
Four types of freshly shucked oysters from Salted Sea’s oyster bar, with garnishes like seasonal mignonette, tarragon pickled mustard seed, housemade mushroom Worcestershire.
That populism shows up on the menu in the form of dishes you’ve seen on countless menus—starters like crispy calamari and curry mussels and crab cakes, mains like crusted king salmon with mashed potatoes, pan-seared sea scallops, and Pacific cod and chips. Tat clearly took good notes at Ivar’s and Anthony’s. But preparations mostly transcend cliche—partly because of their Asian accents, partly thanks to Taylor’s unique vision. Squares of cod for the fish-and-chips are breaded in a novel, thick baguette crumb, and potato wedges stand in for chips, finished in salt and vinegar. Salmon arrives crusted with ground jasmine rice, over potatoes lushly mashed with taro root along with sauteed mustard greens and drizzles of scallion oil. In both cases the fish itself held too little flavor—odd in this house, which pays attention to sourcing—but their supporting players were vivid and intriguing.
Here is where Tat’s second decision, to hire Taylor as chef, reveals its smarts. Even when interpreting old chestnuts she executes them with expertise and translates Tat’s ideas brightly to the plate. Curry mussels arrive in a bath of coconut, green chilies, and cilantro, a lighter touch than one typically sees with this dish. A starter of calamari, fried in a wok with restraint, arrives cloaked in Hue Ky Mi Gia’s fried chicken breading—oops, just set off a rush on Salted Sea—but again it’s a lighter version, forefronting the flavor of the squid and drizzled with a sweet chili-garlic gastrique that’s unnecessary but fun.
And so it goes, across dishes that by Tat’s approachable-versus-creative metric score solidly higher on approachable. A plate of muscovy duck comes in a rich five-spice reduction with a heap of cress and halves of grilled apricot. A sparkling mizuna salad is loaded with smoked trout and slices of striped chioggia beet. (Taylor’s platings are visually lovely.) My favorite was a crab and sweet corn soup featuring chunks of crab and fish sauce–marinated cod. Vegetables, sweet corn, and onion frizzles lent crunch to a concoction brothy in the Vietnamese way, but swaggeringly so—all bold ginger and serrano chili and herbs, married with a confident hand. Brilliant.
There are times Salted Sea seems like it’s being almost intentionally uninteresting—as with a crab cake banh mi at lunch that tasted like a bread sandwich, its pickled vegetables charged with supplying all the flavor and all the texture; or a tedious Full Tilt ice cream sundae for dessert, with too few toppings and chocolate instead of hot fudge—but this is not the rule. It’s simply the predictable pitfall of a place conceived to be a crowd-pleaser.
And a crowd-pleaser is, in the end, what Tat wanted to give Columbia City. Sure, Salted Sea offers elements of highbrow—fresh oysters, ingredient sources credited on a board over the oyster bar (many, tellingly, from the Rainier Valley). And, of course, Taylor’s evident talent. But Tat and Taylor ultimately forego culinary innovation in favor of the broader appeal it takes to unite a neighborhood this diverse, and this evolving.
Congee is savored across Asia; boiled rice porridge that either embraces its essential nature—er, boring in a good-when-you’re-down-with-a-cold kind of way—or overcomes it altogether.
Put Kraken Congee in the second category. Masterminds Garrett Doherty and Shane Robinson (no relation) spent a few years popping up in temporary locations until they struck reality-TV gold, winning funding for a brick-and-mortar outpost of their congee operation on a new CNBC show called Restaurant Startup. Here it is: a flight belowground, fittingly bricked and mortared, stocked with a bar and a satisfying menu—and about as intense a sense of cozy as one can find in this town. If a measure of a restaurant’s success is the extent to which place matches plates, Kraken scores big.
These plates—bowls actually—are cozy too: The tabula rasa of the congee topped with, say, slices of rare hanger steak, marinated in nuoc cham and embellished with blistered cherry tomatoes, sprigs of cilantro, toasted peanuts, and pickled shallots. The fan favorite is pork belly adobo, its meat unctuous and winning with Chinese broccoli, green onion, and crunchy corn nuts, along with aioli made with the Filipino citrus fruit calamansi. You mix it all around and spoon up a different global blend of flavors and textures each time, each offering its commentary on the last.
Kraken offers some seven congees daily along with small plates and wok fries. It’s all, to a dish, marked by serious intention from very smart culinarians, and some of the best bang-for-buck creative value Seattle’s got going right now. For dessert, the purple disc of ube cheesecake offers light, almost frothy textured richness over a coconut-graham crust atop a drizzle of mango sauce. It’s lush, globally inspired, gastronomically intriguing—and, like everything else at Kraken, just what you want to eat in fall.
In contrast to the novelties now trending in Seattle dining stands the lovely Pomerol, the latest from prolific continental classicist Vuong Loc. From his erstwhile Portage on Queen Anne he’s brought an emphasis on archetypal French cuisine; from his dearly departed June in Madrona a reverence for meats—achieved at Pomerol on a wood-fired grill. The results are highly composed plates of unapologetically traditional fare—glistening short ribs over cauliflower puree with shallot confit, slices of lamb leg on an anise-fennel-carrot braise, moist pan-roasted chicken in a lush sherry sauce—executed with a seasoned hand and near-perfect consistency. (And when it isn’t, as in a tragically overcooked starter of chili-rubbed octopus—it’s graciously addressed on the bill.)
Service on our visit was a little green and stilted, but all in all, the mood is high and the vibe informal in this sleek and modern and crisp-edged room, which looks like Fremont but cooks like France. Desserts are busy and delectable; get ready for the breezy back deck, which will be most pleasant in, oh…about six months.
Ten bucks for banh mi, that Vietnamese baguette sandwich you can grab at delis all over town for under $4? Welcome to Alicia Fusion Bistro at Leschi’s lakeside—the polished, candlelit antidive whose banh mi is a warm, crusty baguette crammed with a moist, pulled version of roast Carlton Farms pork, along with crackling pickled veggies and silky garlic aioli. It’s notably fresh and terrific—as are the brisket pho, grilled lemongrass chicken vermicelli bowls, and other Vietnamese classics of the sort you might find at the Kuang family’s fanatically beloved original restaurants, the Green Leafs in the ID and Belltown. But the real glories of Alicia are its mad forays into successful Vietnamese-Continental fusion: dishes like gilded scallops over sweet corn and a savory, cilantro-flecked onion sauce; or a petite burger crafted of Mishima Ranch beef and pickled vegetables and brisk lime aioli; or Willapa Bay clams in a ragù lit with the unlikely triumvirate of tomato sauce, pork, and lemongrass. Yes, these small-plate presentations add up to more than you’re used to paying at the Green Leafs of the world. But Alicia is wholly more ambitious, from its kumquat cocktails all the way through to its dessert malasadas, Portuguese fried dough balls with coconut and chocolate dipping sauces.
This article appeared in the December 2014 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
There may be no bigger contrarian in Seattle restaurants than Josh Henderson.
“Nope, no burger on our menu,” our waiter announced with pride. There we were in Henderson’s new sports bar: spitting distance from the CLink, all done up like a shiny locker room, aglow with the radiance of 20 TVs—one of which was, at that very minute, broadcasting great moments in lady wrestling. And here on the menu were esoterics like quinoa salad and braised lamb neck. Grilled squid, shaved ham, five flippin’ veg plates.
Noburger.
“There are at least eight other places around here you can go for a burger,” she explained. “Why would we want to be like everyone else?”
Henderson is savvy; in less than two months he answered demand with a bacon-cheddar burger. Still, Why would we want to be like everybody else? could be stitched onto the waitstaff’s baseball jerseys. Henderson confounds expectations, like when he turned kale into comfort food at his Skillet empire (now in other hands) or launched Hollywood Tavern way out in Woodinville, or blew up the waterside fish house cliche by building Westward out of Greek food and ironic decor.
But Quality Athletics is his unlikeliest yet: A bona fide postmodern sports bar. The crisp windowy space is clean and contemporary with bright green banquettes and long team tables with old school chairs; a shelf of gleaming trophies at the entry and a wall of lockers lining one side of the bar (which can be sealed off into a party room by a clever vertical-slider Ping-Pong table). Even so, it wasn’t until I spied the Astroturf carpet that I got the wink. This isn’t a sports bar; it’s a commentary on a sports bar.
Which, of course, a glance at the menu sealed. This is the sort of kitchen that makes its own ginger beer, for goodness’ sake. I ordered a minimalist green bean salad—smoked almonds, rocks of sea salt, curls of pecorino—whose beans were grown in the rooftop garden upstairs. And crisp-on-the-outside, silken-on-the-inside potato croquettes accoutered with house-made bacon, lacy crisps of cheddar cheese, and—bien sûr—green onion creme fraiche.
You get the idea: Not your daddy’s sports bar. Problem is—it might not be yours either. Yes, the place delivers the highest-quality food you’re likely to eat while watching ladies wrestle. But in essential ways, Quality Athletics is more about its kitchen than its diners.
Just Your Typical Sports Bar Fare Smoked salmon collar “wings” come with pickled shallots and peppers and a coriander-honey glaze. Vanilla funnel cake is topped with macerated peaches, whipped sour lemon cream, and Aleppo-powdered sugar.
Take eatability—a word that doesn’t exist in everyday conversation for a concept that should. In a rare nod to the sports bar genre, Quality Athletics offers three takes on wings: charred sweet chili chicken wings, jerk-spiced duck wings, and coriander honey–glazed smoked salmon wings—the last a cheeky preparation of salmon collar bits with the fins attached. Colorfully spangled with shallots and peppers and delectable in their briny-sweet way, they also made somewhat ridiculous eating—requiring clamping one’s jaw upon each sticky, angular joint and scraping back whatever isn’t cartilage or bone.
Athletic indeed. An open-faced sandwich—on my visit topped with unctuous braised lamb with a novel Philly cheesesteak treatment of provolone cheese whiz, pickled serrano and Fresno chilies, pickled shallots, and mint—was richly flavorful (loved the lamb with fresh mint), but delivered amidst a puddle of juices in a cast-iron skillet. Soggy bread, fork required, drip drip.
Fish tacos arrive as a platter of whole trout to share among three or four diners; it’s boned (and in our case, partially gutted) at table. The diner wraps morsels of the fish in tortillalike roti, then dresses them with pico de gallo and pickled peppers. Swell in theory—but the combination of cooling fish, jaw-challenging roti, insufficient intrigue from the accompaniments, and an imperfect boning job added up to a dish that was not worth the labor required. (And painful.)
Henderson’s revision of the sports bar depends on these sorts of shared platters, of which the menu offers four or five a night. To him, it’s not the burger that makes a place a sports bar—it’s the gathering, in front of the game or around the patio fire pits, to share. In that sense Quality Athletics’ culinary style plays ideally to his vision, because flavors here are so bold, even the nonshareables are more likely to be passed than completed. A coconut curry with butternut squash and charred fennel and terrific housemade pappardelle, was intense and one-note for one diner—but made a fine side dish for all of us.
Don’t mistake this for comfort food: The unmitigated punches of flavor at Quality Athletics frustrate a comfort jones more than satisfy it. No, this is the food a kitchen makes when it’s laboring on every cylinder to make a statement. A charred pork shoulder salad featured two generous hunks of the meat soused in sweet Korean barbecue sauce—along with apple slices, ruffles of kale, knobs of cauliflower, and a scattering of chewy wild rice. The apples and the saucy meat intertwined sumptuously; the rest shared a plate but not a purpose. Desserts were similarly eager to impress, including an ice cream sundae whose players—peanut butter ice cream, peanuts, salted caramel, chili-spiced Cracker Jacks, flakes of nori—added up to something more sassy than smart.
Chili and seaweed on peanut butter ice cream? Like I said, contrarian. My favorite story about Quality Athletics is one that another friendly waiter (the servers here are sweethearts) shared when she set before us the very best dish we sampled: a piquant tostada with braised lamb, black bean puree, avocado cream, and cotija cheese—tasty, coherent, conceived with a temperate hand on the originality meter. “This went on the menu as a substitute for the nachos we opened with,” she told us.
And why were the nachos replaced? “Oh, they were too popular!” she said. “Everyone was ordering them!”
This article appeared in the December 2014 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
On a weekend morning you’ll invariably find a baby crying in this overcrowded Ballard brunch shack, possibly a clutch of feral toddlers and the coffee-swilling adults who are avoiding them, several pairs of finger-twining lovers—all tucking into biscuits that pretty much define the Platonic ideal of biscuitude. This is Morsel and Bean, the newer outpost of Morsel on the Ave, which inherited its biscuit mandate (if not its recipe) from the much-mourned Nook—and whose product is every bit as exceptional. Think craggy-crunchy on the outside, angelically fluffy and just-over-the-border of sweet within. And—as luck would have it—enormous, whether as a buttermilk or a daily special biscuit, perhaps carrot cardamom, sliced and warmed with just a wash of honey butter; or as an overstuffed, melting colossus of bacon, scrambled egg, cheese, and chili-piqued tomato jam. Lovers of that biscuit sandwich, the Fast Break, are locked in fierce rivalry with lovers of the Spanish Fly (Mama Lil’s pepper aioli, prosciutto, arugula), but everyone agrees that the coffee is terrific and the servers are sweet, both of which ease the sting of the inevitable wait. There’s even a drive-through window, but then you’ll miss the feral toddlers.
Here is James Beard award–winning chef Maria Hines’s third property—this one Sicilian, and every inch as nobly organic as her first two (Tilth, Golden Beetle). In a gracious and comfortable space warmed by the leafy limbs of a ficus tree, patrons savor the sunny citruses and olives and capers and tomatoes of Sicily—perhaps in a heaping herby salad, or a briny tangle of housemade tagliarini pasta with clams and pine nuts, or an impossibly moist half chicken topped with a caponata of Brussels sprouts and golden raisins (a dish that embodies the “sour and sweet” of Agrodolce’s name). Some dishes suffer from insufficient innovation or, at brunch especially, size—limitations of an organic mandate, perhaps, that organic food appreciators will be all too happy to overlook.
Altura
Small yet generous, modest yet gloriously self-assured—Altura (which in Italian means both “height” and “profound depth”) spins its delicate web of opposites in a candlelit space on North Broadway. Chef and owner Nathan Lockwood hails from the private dining club the Ruins, where he developed an eye for rococo decadence—one formidable angel hangs from the rafters—and a gift for making diners feel like treasured guests. Service is notably stunning. All this praise and we haven’t even gotten to the food: Northwest seasonal ingredients gone Italian rustic—then pushed through an elegance sieve. So off a weekly changing menu, slices of Muscovy duck might come fanned over red cabbage with crumbled amaretti and caramel-roasted turnip; scallops may be dusted with fennel pollen alongside grilled radicchio and fennel. In a refreshing departure from convention one can assemble three-, four-, or five-course meals from all parts of the menu—three starters, for instance, or four mains (apportioned accordingly)—along with an a la carte option. But whatever you do, don’t skip dessert.
Anchovies and Olives
Everyone looks deadly chic against the windows and cement of this minimalist corner room in Pike/Pine, but the most seafoody of Ethan Stowell’s empire (which also includes Tavolàta, How to Cook a Wolf, Staple and Fancy, and Rione XIII) is surprisingly down-to-earth and welcoming. It’s all about the food, after all: a broad crudo menu featuring the freshest local shellfish (often swimming-that-morning oysters) and rarely seen seafood flown in from exotic offshore locales, highlighted with Italian embellishments. When the kitchen’s on, it’s off the charts, presenting wonders like Arctic char over fregola pasta with nettles, currants, and speck; and trafficking in the same acerbic, briny, and tangy flavor families that dominate dinner at his other joints. (If you don’t like anchovies or olives, in other words…this may not be the place for you.)
Andaluca
The snug russet room off the lobby of the Mayflower Park Hotel presents downtown’s most intimate face for a business lunch, most convenient for a shopping stop, and one of its most alluring for an amber-lit dinner. The food can be majestic—from paella to one of the city’s best meat dishes: Cabrales-crusted tenderloin with grilled pears—prepared so lushly it can at times overreach into overrich. Though all this makes it feel like a special-occasion destination, Andaluca remains a hotel restaurant, obliged to do the near-daily breakfast-lunch-dinner duty that can at times tax service and dull a kitchen’s consistency. Considering complimentary valet parking at this central downtown address…all is forgiven.
Artusi
A mod shot of Italy in the heart of Pike/Pine, Artusi is Cascina Spinasse’s sister aperitivo bar; stocked to the nines with grappas and amari and the stuzzichini (“little nibbles”) to offset them. Spinasse chef Jason Stratton is the artist at the helm (that’s his art on the walls too, believe it or not), presenting the occasional echo of next door—do not pass up the salsa tonnata, or tuna mayonnaise, in either house—but mostly staking out territory that’s more minimalist and contemporary than Spinasse’s. If it’s on the menu, go for the tripe with bone marrow and black truffles, in which the tender braised tripe plays a pastalike role in a superrich sauce.
Assaggio
Boldly overseen by larger-than-life proprietor Mauro Golmarvi—benevolently regarded by the cherubim and seraphim painted all over the wall and ceiling murals—Assaggio may at first seem a throwback to the more cliched conventions of Italian restaurant dining. Not so fast. There’s a reason this room, graciously high ceilinged and partitioned to resemble a European streetscape, sustains the devotion of midtown business-lunchers and evening pasta twirlers alike. (Hint: It comes out of the kitchen.) Execution is steady and impressive on classic pastas—linguine vongole, a beautifully briny capellini donato, fettucine swathed in a meaty Bolognese—and wickedly rich specials. But the Northern Italian place is quite capable of a lighter touch, as in a crisply refreshing fennel-and-green-apple salad with pecorino Romano and truffle oil. Classic Italian desserts are sumptuous.
Bar Cotto
Empire builder Ethan Stowell built this nosh bar next to his Anchovies and Olives as an overhead diffuser—but the sleek, modern Italian room with its raw bulbs and stainless tables adds up to a fine destination by itself. One can pretty affordably assemble a giddy repast from some 10 varieties of salumi, several vegetable nibbles, a half dozen bruschetta, and a dozen or so pizzas. Toppings are beautiful on the pizzas—particularly housemade guanciale, mozzarella, and a sweet dusting of fennel pollen—but the crackly-pillowy-blistery crusts are too oily. Instead, try some salumi with torta fritta (the hot, savory beignets Northern Italians melt their salumi around) along with a perky toss of, say, marinated beets with pistachios and golden raisins, and a nice, stiff (exquisite) cocktail.
Bar del Corso
Lucky Beacon Hill, that its pizzeria so embodies the soul of the neighborhood restaurant. The place bubbles, from the sheer crush of devotees inside its tidy, clean-lined quarters to its wood-fired pizza crusts—crispy and flavorful like Neapolitan with a little more tooth to the chew. These pies are the province of master pizzaiolo Jerry Corso, who delivers a short list of European antipasti, seasonal salads, and terrific Italian desserts—along with cocktails, wines, and beers—to round out the main event. If it’s on offer, don’t miss the sassy anchovy-lit puttanesca, or whatever garden special he’s got going.
Is it all the beautiful male waiters in their Italian trousers? The Murano glass chandeliers and candle-waxy romance and pulsing music? Whatever it is, Barolo (from the family who brought us the U District’s Mamma Melina) has overcome an initial lukewarm critical appraisal to achieve beloved status with the People. They crowd the long windowy room for $6 ahi carpaccio and $7 hanger steak at one of downtown’s most overcrowded happy hours, and love it up for business lunches and evening dates behind seductive sheers. The Italian food is satisfying, particularly the admirable tomato-oiled bean soups and meat entrees. And if pastas are at times too lavishly oiled, it’s all of a piece with the overall sexiness of the room.
Bizzarro Italian Cafe
If it were a stock film character, Bizzarro would be the quirky best friend with the zany personality and the novelty hair. And for these last 20-some years, that’s exactly how most serious food people have regarded the giddily alternative Wallingford ristorante, home of the red brick walls and flea market chandeliers and ceiling-suspended furniture and gilt-framed everything. But a recent revisit revealed a more serious culinary enterprise than we’d remembered: excellent handmade pappardelle pasta in a gutsy elk Bolognese; Yukon Gold gnocchi in a moist, porky sugo di maiale, exotically cinnamoned; a lamb shank, famous across Wallingford, served in a figgy demi-glace atop a polenta cake and braised kale. The food was serious and intentional—most derived, admirably, from within 300 miles—and delivered by the friendliest crew of pierced people in town. No wonder it’s so bloody hard to get a Saturday-night table.
Branzino
One of the last serious dinner houses in Belltown is this square room with high-backed booths and cozy spaces, swathed in autumnal hues—a bona fide warm restaurant in a city smitten with the stark and minimal. Here the friendly welcome, rustic fare, and affordable price tags (most entrees under $20) all lack pretension. The chef’s hand stays firmly on the Italian tiller, turning out housemade pappardelle Bolognese, panzanella starring handmade mozzarella, branzino with frisee salad, and perfect pizza crust.
Cafe Juanita
It’s the classiest standby on the Eastside, where Holly Smith dances in the footsteps of the venerable Peter Dow. What he began in 1977 she refines and perfects, with high-end Northern Italian food rendered consistently and innovatively. Vivid dishes—like grilled squab with seared foie gras or mushroom-stuffed rabbit leg wrapped in pancetta and served with a chickpea crepe and fennel and green salad—showcase fastidious attention to perfect ingredients and dazzling creative verve in the kitchen, a verve that stands in appealing contrast to the slightly time-worn room. Warning: Unless you’re familiar with Kirkland’s lakeside community of Juanita, you will not find this hidden spot without help.
Cafe Lago
This exemplary streetside Italian cafe is run with a perfectionist’s standard, from handcrafted pasta to fabled gnocchi, featherweight lasagna, and crackle-crusted wood-fired pizzas. The result is a destination restaurant masquerading as a neighborhood joint, with a neighborhood joint’s clattering aesthetic. (And miserable parking.) So take the bus already; just get there for a plate of the best butternut squash and sage ravioli you’ll ever taste. Cocktails too.
Cantinetta
A couple of rustic Italian ristorantes delight the crowds of Wallingford and West Bellevue with fresh, constantly rotating antipasti, contorni, housemade pastas, and mains—some rarely seen, like tortellini in brodo, and a stunning casoncelli with pancetta and amaretto crumbles—and some classic crowd-pleasers. Earthy studies in farmhouse minimalism with plank tables and wrought-iron chandeliers, the places are constantly slammed, owing about equally to the no-reservations-for-parties-of-fewer-than-six rule, the affable neighborhood ambience, the reasonable price tags, and the hard liquor.
Cascina Spinasse
Here in Pike/Pine’s rustic Piedmontese farmstead (trestle tables, wood beams, wrought-iron chandeliers, lace curtains), diners feast on robust platters of slow-stewed venison with currants and buckwheat polenta or heirloom chicory salad with chunks of marinated rabbit and extraordinary aged balsamic vinegar—all lovingly oiled and seasoned. The pasta achieves density and delicacy at once, in ravioli of rapini with pine nuts or hearty cavatelli lavished with chanterelles. A plain ragù featuring rich rolled Piedmontese egg-yolk noodles called tajarin is a masterpiece, giving Seattleites their first taste of pasta the way it’s done in Italy. A neighboring bar, Artusi, lets us drink like Italians too, in a room adorned with chef Jason Stratton’s art and featuring a menu of sophisticated Italian noshes and aperitifs.
Nobody spins sexy ambience out of four walls and a kitchen like Susan Kaufman, whose Italian Serafina has played stage set now to two decades of pasta-twirling foreplay. She’s done it again, in a George Suyama-designed building just across the leafy courtyard from Serafina’s back door. It’s called Cicchetti (chi-KET-tee), after the social style of small-plate dining in Venice. With the exception of the showstopping Venetian chandelier commissioned for the entryway, Cicchetti plays modern, angular sophisticate to Serafina’s older-world rusticity. And from upstairs, the sweep of the Seattle skyline will send a Manhattanesque shiver down the spine of any urbanite. Look for stunning cocktails and noshes reflecting the myriad Mediterranean influences the Moors hauled with them to Venice, from clams in fennel-saffron broth and prosciutto–goat cheese pizza to flatbread dips and crispy polenta cakes.
Cuoco
The 15th food-service enterprise that Seattle mega restaurateur Tom Douglas has crammed into a single square mile of downtown real estate is all about fresh pasta, crafted by hand at a station near the door and showing up on your plate in the form of items like (very) buttery cappelletti with gnocchi in nettle pesto or delicate seven-layer Bolognese lasagna. Robust secondi are better, including slices of smoky bistecca on bread salad: far and away the most fun steak is having in this town. The place is a looker, carved out of a South Lake Union brick-and-timber warehouse and sprawling into several private dining alcoves befitting different occasions and moods. Still it feels a little “seen this before,” missing the bracing originality that Douglas pretty much invented in Seattle.
How to Cook a Wolf
It’s Ethan Stowell’s lowest-ticket restaurant yet: a tiny neighborhood pocket on the top of Queen Anne whose barrel-vaulted ceiling and coppery light imparts a sense of a glowing hearth. The name honors M. F. K. Fisher’s 1942 paean to eating simply; a fitting benediction for a restaurant that celebrates small plates and uncomplicated pastas shimmering with earthy precision. Dishes like blush-perfect duck fanned across a plate with beets and mandarin oranges is about as wacky as Wolf’s kitchen gets; the rule tends to dishes more like a plate of orecchiette pasta with cauliflower, screaming with garlic and anchovies; or rolls of trofie pasta, intensely brightened with parsley-walnut pesto.
Il Corvo Pasta
The order-at-the-counter, lunch-only relocation of a beloved pasta popup has hit its stride, serving three to five daily plates all made from pasta cut, extruded, or hand formed in house that morning. By about 11am, chef and owner and pasta geek Mike Easton emails a photo of the headliner dish to his slavering fans—a money shot of beet spaghetti in a caramelized garlic sauce perhaps, or conchiglie seashells wet with meaty ragù, or gnocchetti with sweet corn, fresh sage, and cream—and that one will sell out by 12:30 easy. His repertoire is bottomless, his seasonality admirable, his passion winning. A couple of salads and a dessert round out the offerings, making this ticket to Italy no more than $15.
Nothing trendy about this timeless landmark, where the Smeraldo family—now without its patriarch, the late Carmine—has been serving sumptuous Italian classics for over two decades. If pressed, the establishment regulars will praise the peerless ossobuco, the garlicky rack of lamb, the noble cioppino—but nobody wants to cultivate competition for their favorite tables. Which, incidentally, are formally sheathed in white and arrayed handsomely in a windowed room, with a courtyard off the back for urban (um, loud) summer dining.
La Medusa
The bold, briny flavors and Moorish influences of Sicilian food were unrepresented in this town till La Medusa took a chance on Columbia City. The place is now on its third set of owners, but they’ve retained the classics—the salt cod fritters in tomato sauce bright with capers and garlic, the spaghetti con le sarde studded with sardines, raisins, pine nuts, and olives—and even bettered a few things, like crispy-crusted pizzas. In summer try the prix-fixe Market Dinners when the Columbia City Farmers Market is in full bloom. Though the restaurant can make legitimate claim to culinary pretension, it’s just-folks enough to give the kids a hunk of pizza dough on arrival. It’s small, but uncomfortable chairs keep the waits short.
La Rustica
When a fire temporarily shuttered this ristorante, West Seattleites acted like they’d lost their own homes. Their kitchens and dining rooms, anyway. La Rustica is the kind of place all its neighbors (and a few of its not-so-neighbors) regard as home away from home—so much that its size is no match for its fan base. (“Please be sensitive to waiting guests during peak hours,” the menu simpers.) Whether they praise the undersize place as “cozy” or pan it as “cramped,” they generally agree that the mottled walls, interior streetlights, and dripping grape vines cast an appealing Roman luster over the room. Straight-up Italian food completes the picture—bruschettas, pizzas, pastas, a robust toss of gnocchi and housemade sausage, a deservedly renowned lamb shank special with risotto and grilled vegetables; all served with addictive pillowy fingers of herbed garlic bread—providing happy sustenance and wistful homage to what life was like before Dr. Atkins came along and ruined everything.
La Vita è Bella Cafe and Pizzeria
The Sicilian proprietor named this Belltown cafe for the heartwarming Roberto Benigni film, and the place is warming as well—thanks to the brick oven behind the bar, the dimly lit intimacy of the terra-cotta-tiled room, and inevitable after-work revelers. Start with the just-right caprese salad of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil in extra virgin olive oil; for a zesty counterpoint try the caponata, a tangy eggplant appetizer. If the oven beckons, order one of 22 thin-crust pizzas. Otherwise, slightly spicy spaghetti di mare with tiger prawns, clams, mussels, Roma tomatoes, garlic, and white wine will serve well. And the pepper in the gnocchi al forno, served with Roma tomatoes and spinach, is moderated by chunks of fresh melty mozzarella.
Mondello Ristorante
Magnolians are wild about their merry trattoria, swathed in the hues of clear skies and rosy sunsets and accented with the homespun sorts of tchotchkes that give restaurants soul. Not that Mondello needed help with soul. Native Sicilians run the place, bringing a background burble of Italian to the house, which, combined with the lingua franca of classic Italian food (housemade pastas and zuppe and meaty secondi), makes Magnolia Village feel like a neighborhood in Palermo. We love the spaghetti gamberoni, served reliably hot with juicy prawns and layers of flavor, and the fish specials, lemony and elemental.
Osteria da Primo
You have to want to find Osteria da Primo, tucked into an anonymous wall behind an unreadable sign it shares with the Ramlyn Engraving and Sign Co. (Look for the red oval.) Clearly, lots of folks around Burien want to find it. Clearly, Burien knows Italian. Carlo Guida gives scrupulous care and minimal fuss to a menu translated as intact as the chilled desserts he flies in from Milan. He’s Calabrese, and the South shows in arancini di riso (fried, mozzarella-stuffed rice balls), trofie allaputtanesca, and piquant seafood linguine “diavolati” (the Devil likes frutti di mare with his pepper). Plus sinfully juicy chicken cotoletta and veal saltimbocca and a spinach-and-white-bean contorno that could stand alone. Add a Sicilian pizza master who knows a wood-fired crust is never to be crisped. Maybe it’s the effect of the wine-red walls, but every Southern vintage seems to taste better here.
Osteria la Spiga
A lot of people adored the rustic La Spiga on Broadway, and a lot of people adore its sprawling replacement on 12th. They just aren’t the same people. The menu offers the same simple housemade tagliatelle and tortelli and crisp flatbread piadina, augmented now with more meat plates and enough vegetable sides to bliss out the herbivores. It’s the setting that’s grown up, much the way freckle-faced girls grow into tawny sophisticates. Once a hangarlike garage, the renovated Piston and Ring Building stands as a shrine to urbanity in shades of concrete and warm wood, with windows, which extend from the floor to the soaring ceiling, overlooking La Spiga’s broad deck. A loft raises private parties into the rafters. Beneath it the young and the old and plenty of the black clad, along with chefs wielding sheets of fresh pasta, buzz as if they had located the very epicenter of the Capitol Hill scene. (Which they have.)
Perché No Pasta and Vino
The Greenlake branch of the late and much-mourned Queen Anne Perché No is about three times bigger than the original and determinedly child friendly, with a sunny multilevel interior, a noodle-heavy kids’ menu, the musical strains of “Funiculi Funiculà” bouncing through the room, and owners, the Kongs, who are as welcoming as long-lost relatives. Grownups will be more interested in the vast list of housemade pastas, which are sometimes just fine, like the squid-ink fettuccine with white beans, anchovies, and garlic; and other times underseasoned. You’ll also like the wine list, which includes a whopping three dozen wines by the glass. Servers, aside from those friendly Kongs, can sometimes lose control of the enormous space.
The Pink Door
A quarter century ago, it was Seattle’s original cult restaurant: The enigmatic entrance (no sign, just a pink door off Post Alley), the Parisian flea market decor, dripping chandeliers, and—after a few years—the burlesque cabaret that if you timed it right would send Tamara the Trapeze Lady soaring over your bechamel lasagna. But more than any of these charms, the city owes its fondness for the Pink Door to the deck. Along about half past 80 degrees on a July afternoon, the ordinary Pike Place Market rooftop magically transforms into a slice of sun-dappled heaven. It’ll be so packed you’ll feel lucky just to be there, swizzling a pink vodka cocktail and twirling linguine and lazily watching the sun as it crashes into Elliott Bay. In short: The Door has never been about the food, a list of pastas and seafoods that unreliably satisfy. But we dare you to stop going.
Rione XIII
Ethan Stowell’s tribute to the delights of Roman cuisine hit the corner of 15th and Harrison so old souled and vibrant it felt essential from its first week. It’s urban cozy with medieval notes—stone walls, clerestory windows, warm wood-burning hearth—that strike a winning contrast with the mod mix of Hillsters who pop in for lunch and dinner. They’re chewing golden pizza crusts topped with things like Padrón peppers and pickled red onions; they’re spreading terrific salted housemade mozzarella and peach mostardaonto crusty toasted baguettes; they’re swooning over pastas like the smoky guanciale with chili pepper. Look for big meat plates, Roman-style gnocchi (made with semolina not potato), and a killer fried artichoke appetizer.
Go to the frenetic corner of Pine and Melrose. Step inside the bustling wedge of a restaurant. Enter Brooklyn. With only 14 tables, you will wait, but Machiavelli’s shadowy little bar is a very appealing place to do it, over some people watching par excellence—the whole spectrum of Capitol Hill’s monde and demimonde—and a terrific cocktail. Seasoned servers, who can turn a table without a whiff of a rush, can likewise turn a table on to some fine saucy classics—creamy Alfredos, kickin’ marinaras, and a fine carbonara. The veal is a house specialty and a guilty pleasure; the steak, known among cognoscenti, is a triumph.
Salumi
Yeah, this is the place you keep hearing about: the sliver of a Pioneer Square salumeria where the Batali clan proves, sandwich after savory sandwich, that scion and New York celeb chef Mario Batali isn’t their only claim to greatness. The fresh and cured meats are why. The Batalis’ old family recipes and apprenticeship with Tuscan butchers have resulted in a product quite unlike any other in town. It’s only open at lunch—there’s a line nearly every day waiting for them to unlock the doors—for meaty two-fisters of porchetta or prosciutto or aromatic meatballs, and much more. You may eat at a communal table; probably you’ll have to take it to go. You can also carry out the coppa or prosciutto or fresh sausage. Of course the best way to experience the glory of this food is to reserve one of the twice weekly private tables for up to 10—off a long waiting list.
Salvatore
When Salvatore opened its doors at the corner of 61st and Roosevelt, it was one of dozens of neighborhood Italian joints with reasonable price points and a joyful excess of chianti. Now, nearly 20 years later, Salvatore has proven itself an establishment of substance and staying power, thanks to Sal’s careful watch over every plate of clam linguine and vitello al limone that leaves his kitchen. Yep, that’s Sal over there at the grill; the guy all the regulars—and everyone’s a regular—like to saunter up to when they want extra anchovies in their aglio e olio. And a darned sure aglio e olio it’ll be, served by a crack old-school waiter with an impenetrable accent, a packed section, and a sheen of perspiration. He’s been working at least since the crowd began to gather on the sidewalk at quarter to five, and he’ll be running at least till the last diner stumbles home, drifting away on a fragrant cloud of sauteed garlic.
Serafina Osteria e Enoteca
It’s rustic Italian cuisine, in a setting so unabashedly sexy it makes raging lust look just a little uptight. To the strains of live jazz vocals, against a backdrop in all the sultry colors of a Tuscan twilight—or alfresco in a charming vine-entwined courtyard—lovers can feed one another lush forkfuls of dishes like pumpkin ravioli in brown butter-sage sauce or braised rabbit with parmesan polenta or vermouth-simmered Penn Cove mussels. A vibrant bar and perhaps a velvety panna cotta bookend your evening in a way that altogether explains why it was so hard to get a table.
Hard to say which is more effervescent, the place or the plates, at restaurant magnate Ethan Stowell’s (How to Cook a Wolf, Tavolàta, Anchovies and Olives, Rione XIII) giddiest enterprise. Even when its windows aren’t open onto the sidewalk, the dim, brick-lined, open-kitchen space in the historic Kolstrand Building seems to spill all its sexy cosmopolitan energy out onto Ballard Avenue. The modern Italian food is just as excited: velvety pork liver mousse spread thickly on crostini, perhaps, daurade over eggplant puree speckled with cherry tomatoes and kalamata olives, or mussel brodo with controne beans and green chilies. Flavors are big and bold—sometimes excessively so—and anchored in freshness and seasonality. And “staple” and “fancy” are more than just a nod to the old general store’s name: You can order a la carte—the staple way—or get, well, fancy, putting yourself in the kitchen’s hands for four courses of its choosing, just $50 per person, served family style to the whole table. Do we really need to tell you which one to pick?
Tavolàta
Belltown’s hottest spot is so coolly Italian it practically has a Vespa parked out front. Wait—that isa Vespa parked out front. It’s owner Ethan Stowell’s, for zipping between here and his other restaurants (How to Cook a Wolf, Anchovies and Olives, etc.) Few chefs comprehend exactly what it takes to wow a palate like Stowell does. Here he wows with fresh housemade pastas, tossed simply with elegant enhancements like veal brains and brown butter, or short ribs and parsley. Truth be told, we prefer the main dishes—richly braised meats like lamb shank with eggplant, a masterful plate of branzino—since the short-order mandate of the pastas can get the better of its bustling open kitchen when the place gets slammed. And here we should note that we’ve never seen this concrete-and-wood, lofted urban hot spot with the windows that open onto the sidewalk not slammed: The big communal table in the center fills up fast, and the energy is irresistible.
Tulio
This handsome white-linen, wood-paneled ristorante off the downtown Hotel Vintage Park might appear the product of a hotel-restaurant cookie cutter, from waiters with Continental accents to busers in neckties. But closer inspection rewards with inspired-Italian-with-a-flourish fare—preparations like a melting braised pork shank over fat corona beans crowned with horse-radish gremolata, crispy duck over farro studded with marinated figs, or a distinctively seasoned pasta alla-chitarra with braised pork, rosemary, and ricotta—pulled off with consistency rare in a hotel restaurant. The centrally located room is intimate, warmed by a wood-burning oven, and upstairs boasts a private room resembling an aristocrat’s library.
The sweet potato gnocchi has been on the menu since 1992. Photo via Tulio.
Volterra
How do a pair of Italian restaurants with the same names, menus, and owners manage to feel so very different? By virtue of addresses on rustic Ballard Ave and newfangled Kirkland. Atmospherically the Ballard original’s ruddy, romantic charm feels Tuscan while Kirkland’s glassy, generic sophistication feels more Milanese—but both of the relatively unchanging menus offer Northern Italian menus favoring the tried and true over innovation: dishes like tender nuggets of wild boar tenderloin with lush gorgonzola cream, polenta custard oozing fontina and poured over with wild mushroom ragù, or pork jowl, wild mushroom, truffle-butter pasta. Blandness can beset the kitchens (particularly Kirkland’s), and service can swerve between chilly and obsequious.
Concept Peruvian charcoal-roasted rotisserie chicken served in quarters, halves, or wholes, with choice of sides.
Named for Mom (nickname: Chickie) of Matt Stubbs, who launched the place with his wife, Sara, as homage to the Peruvian rotisseries all over his greater DC hometown.
The Chicken Hormone- and antibiotic-free, and utterly delectable: beautifully marinated, notes of citrus, moist clear through.
Sauce Choices Yellow mayo sauce, green jalapeño-lime sauce, pickled onion salsa.
Carb load Choose among steak fries, black beans, yellow rice, cheesy potatoes, corn salad, lime-glazed sweet potatoes, corn muffins, and plantain chips.
Best Side Soft cubes of savory-tart sweet potatoes, brisk with lime. Or maybe the wicked cheesy potatoes.
Yep, there’s kale salad A good crunchy slaw with carrots, cabbage, edamame, and golden raisins in a lemony dressing.
Bevs A few wines and local beers
Service Careful and sweet
Cluck for Your Buck $8 for a light eater (quarter chicken with two small sides); $16 for a half chicken with two large sides
Atmospheric bummer Technically all the seating is outdoors. Sheer plastic sheets in place of walls leave this tidy new structure on Rainier pretty exposed in winter, heaters notwithstanding.
Dessert Full Tilt Ice Cream; killer chili-spiced brownies.
Overall verdict Hillman City’s wildest dream come true.
Nate's Wings and Waffles
Concept Fried chicken, by the half pound or strips, with waffles—a Southern classic. (What? No “Nate’s Nuggets”?)
Named for Nate Robinson, local boy–gone–Denver Nuggets star, who owns the place with Darren McGill (Happy Grillmore) and another partner
The ChickenOrder either naked or breaded wings, the latter featuring crisp crust—appealingly mild—and moist, juicy meat. All the meat is hormone and antibiotic free.
Carb load Sides include salt and pepper fries, sweet potato fries, onion rings, supercreamy (but bland) mac and cheese, potato rolls, and of course, waffles—savory, bacon, or plain.
Best Side The “Not So Plain” waffle—$4 of crunchy and tasty, with honey rosemary butter and maple syrup
Yep, there’s kale salad With cabbage and carrots in a sweet dressing—a deal for $3
Bevs Soft for now; liquor license pending
Service Cheerful and quick
Cluck for Your Buck Split a pound of wings with one sauce, two waffles, and one side for around $10 per person.
Atmospheric bummer The former Lake Route Cafe, still tiny and a little doleful, is nobody’s dream destination—hoops posters notwithstanding.
Dessert Are you kidding? You just ate waffles.
Overall verdictI’ve had fluffier waffles, but never in such a happy neighborhood hangout.
One of Seattle’s more prevalent restaurant tics right now is the switch-up—restaurateurs closing their business under one name, then reopening in the same space under a different one, sometimes with a new chef or concept. The benefits of this are clear in the era of Yelp, whose reader evaluations live on into eternity. Changing names has a certain wipe-the-slate-clean appeal.
Restaurateurs Sumi and Michael Almquist got word last spring that Shaun McCrain, the chef they’d hired to launch their Book Bindery, would be leaving to open his own place. With McCrain taking his general manager and beverage director with him, the Almquists were looking at a fresh new start for the classic space appended to their winery in the office-park district across the ship canal from Fremont. They ate around town and found at Artusi Nico Borzee, a young Frenchman who had worked in Michelin-starred restaurants including San Francisco’s Coi. They closed for a couple of months, painted creamy surfaces a more contemporary blue, rewrote the menu, and in October Hommage was born.
They weren’t looking to recreate the Book Bindery, it of the elegant appointments and modernist meat-and-potatoes preparations and Seattle Tennis Club guest list. No, Hommage was going for something more youthful, more everyday in its appeal (even, as Sumi Almquist has said in interviews, a place to bring the kids), more comfort-food oriented, more accessible. Indeed, we walked into a room both darker—against which the twinkling bar seemed to loom larger—and louder, pulsing with chill music. More youthful, absolutely.
More accessible…not so much. Speaking literally, the restaurant’s lack of a sign ensures that. (Already one of Seattle’s guaranteed U-turns, finding Hommage without a sign all but guarantees a long overshoot, then a U-turn.) The menu is organized not by course, but by type of food—Dairy, Seafood, Animal—which delivers another layer of obscurity as you work out how to put a sensible meal together. Study the menu awhile and you’ll see by the prices that two of the Seafoods and two of the Animals must be entree-sized (waiters are supposed to mention that; ours did not). Less dinner house than nosh bar, Hommage is the restaurant a winery built—loaded with fromages and terrines (including a terrific rabbit terrine with onion jam and potent mustard and sea salt on the side) that beg for fat cabernets.
It’s precious and meant to be; the kind of place where the bread plate is listed under Dairy as beurre, and not just any butter, but butter that has been cultured with charred corn husk. (Bring the kids?) Hommage is aiming a straight pitch at the young cosmopolitan connoisseurs who roam the world’s cities photographing their plates.
Some of Borzee’s food they’ll love, like his clever potato salad (unhelpfully listed on the menu just as pomme de terre) mingling halved potatoes with slivers of Granny Smith apple, a lush aiolilike egg sauce called a gribiche, and speckles of leek oil: stylish and satisfying. Similarly, Borzee’s sea scallops in two sauces—one a caramel of star anise, the other a lush cauliflower-coconut puree—were tons of fun, spangled with cauliflower bites. A dessert—a cloud of foamy chocolate mousse surrounding a dense cold core of bitter chocolate sorbet and a dulce de leche fascinator that ate like the textural love child of a crackling wafer and a chocolate bar—was a magnificence of saturated flavor, brilliant in execution: the best dessert I’ve had in ages.
And then there was the boeuf Bourguignon with mushrooms and truffle potatoes gratin: so overrich and overdone it had no business in a restaurant, period. Ah inconsistency…perhaps the most youthful quality of all. The folks seated next to us, young tourists from Japan, took avid pictures of all their dishes, both the ones they enjoyed and those they didn’t, decamping after entrees to Uber it up to Capitol Hill. “That’s where the nightlife is,” they told their waiter.
Across town, Borzee’s former boss Jason Stratton (Cascina Spinasse, Artusi) presides over his own switch-up, the Italian Vespolina (nee the Spanish Aragona) on First and Union. Much attention was paid that turn-on-a-dime conversion last September, wrought after Stratton and his investors realized nobody understood the arcane Catalan dishes he was producing there. Folks would sit down, scan the menu, then stand up and leave—a shock of cold water to the face of the chef whose Italian Spinasse and Artusi on Capitol Hill were nightly turning folks away.
It is to Stratton’s great practical credit that he swallowed his ego and let the market drive him back to the Italian lineup of antipasti, housemade pastas, and crowd-pleasingly meaty mains that work so well at Spinasse. A turn, as at Hommage, for the accessible. Mind you, Vespolina is no Spinasse redux—the decor of the high-ceilinged, high-windowed room, virtually unchanged from its gig as Aragona, is airier and colder than the burnished-wood warmth that is Spinasse.
Moreover Vespolina lacks Spinasse’s pasta—and not just its signature rich tajarin. No, it lacks Spinasse’s way with pasta; detectable on several visits in the form of a gummy lamb ragù cavatelli, a bland and bloodless guanciale carbonara, a cliche of a squash ravioli with sage butter and amaretti.
Vespolina's strascinati pasta with pork ragú, olives, and a ricotta of Meyer lemon
Let the tourists order these—for Stratton has figured out that that’s who he’s cooking for in this Four Seasons Hotel district. Stratton fans should aim instead into the ragged chicory salads and antipasto plates and sagey glazed-carrot contorni and, mostly, really fine meats—from a braised duck leg with pears and vivid taggiasca olives to a killer plate of slow-roasted pork ribs over tuna sauce. This last is a Piedmontese leitmotif from Stratton’s other Italian houses, for delectable reason. He also has no qualms about reprising stuff from the old Aragona card, only in Italian garb—the same stuffed trout, only now with prosciutto and Marsala; the same fried dough dessert with truffle salt, now called bombolini, and every bit as sexy a triumph.
From the look of it, guests are liking Vespolina better than they ever did Aragona. Does that mean it is better? Well, now we’re in the realm of philosophy. Two restaurants, both of which reinvented themselves in a more populist direction, are currently taking stock. Hommage isn’t as solid or as compelling yet as Book Bindery was, while Vespolina is much more satisfying than Aragona—but for these establishments’ owners, the proof of the success will be a matter of butts in seats.
And butts in seats ultimately comes down to three things even more important than menu organization or pasta proficiency: location, location, and location. Hommage wants a young hip demographic, but can offer neither the buzzy neighborhood nor the foot traffic to draw them in. Vespolina knows it needs tourists and has offered the centrally located, accessible Italian menu no tourist in history has ever been known to resist.
In the end, perhaps that’s the only verdict needed.
This article appeared in the February 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
The occupants of maybe two dozen apartments can glance out their windows to see if Single Shot has an open table. It won’t—this joint is the hottest ticket in town—but its location in the midst of North Capitol Hill’s densest density is woven into its rather epic appeal. It feels like a twinkling little rabbit hole you’d tumble into off a sidewalk in Brooklyn. And whatever intangible it takes to invest a place with a sense of place—Single Shot has it, with an understated white-on-white elegance from marble bar to starry votives, and a 12-foot antique rifle stretching across the mirror-backed bar for arch counterpoint. Best, you are welcomed by the sincerest guy in the restaurant business, Altura’s former front man Guy Kugel—all of which conspires to make this the most enviable neighborhood in Seattle…and we haven’t even gotten to the cocktails yet.
So with all this in the plus column, it’s a little deflating to pronounce the food improvable, from a hamachi tuna starter whose avocado and grapefruit embellishments aren’t interesting with it, to a pork chop fanned over spaghetti squash that doesn’t add up to anything beyond the sum of the parts. Now and again you can taste the gastronomic IQ of chef James Sherrill (Restaurant Zoë, Re:public)—roasted cauliflower and kohlrabi in a smoky romesco sauce had me scribbling OMG all over my notebook—but consistency evades him.
He can, however, cook a piece of Arctic char to within a millimeter of perfection. And the good sense he demonstrates by showcasing that fish on a menu that defines the perfect neighborhood gastropub—a flatbread, a mac and cheese, some charcuterie, a pub cheese, four entrees, a few sweets—heralds good things, one hopes, to come. Allow time to find parking, though moving to the neighborhood may be faster.
This article appeared in the March 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
When Heong Soon Park was scripting the followup to Chan, his Korean-fusion jewel box in Pike Place Market, he knew the restaurant he wanted to open. He just needed permission.
So he emailed Stuart Brioza, his friend of a friend who co-owns State Bird Provisions, the San Francisco sensation which applies the dim sum delivery model to small plates of East-West fusion. “I want to introduce a similar concept in Seattle, but I don’t want to be disrespectful,” Park wrote Brioza—who thanked him for the tribute but demurred on the permission. It’s not my concept, Brioza told Park. They’ve been doing this in China for some time.
To be fair—not precisely this. The cart at Tray Kitchen, which Park opened along Leary Way late last year, features little plates of things like kimchi falafel and deep-fried-pork-belly salad with beets and jalapeños and citrus—nary a dumpling in sight. Indeed the doughy excesses of dim sum are overridden by a clear bias away from starches (you can’t even get a bowl of steamed rice) and, for that matter, away from dim sum’s traditionalist directives.
For Park, seasonality and innovation are more important than strict cultural adherence; he even leases an Eastside patch of farmland so his kids can see that carrots get pulled out of dirt, not Whole Foods produce displays. The result at Tray Kitchen is a United Nations of seasonally sensible small plates, many of which are very nice, like beautifully marinated Moroccan lamb, a traditional preparation with housemade yogurt and sprightly puckers of preserved lemon. Those fresh carrots, pulled out of the ground, arrive roasted and served among chunks of French feta and toasted fennel and sunflower seeds; butter-poached shrimp, fat ones popping with juice, repose upon sauteed broccoli and red onion in a round Thai vinaigrette; Korean fried chicken wings, lacquered red as antique Chinese chests with fierce Korean chili sauce, are fried to maximum craveability.
Messy, but Worth It Korean fried chicken wings (aka KFC) from the a la carte menu
Each of these we chose off a passing cart, which trundled up every 10 minutes or so on a crowded Friday night. In Tray Kitchen parlance this is a push, a term that can feel particularly apt if your server is avid. “This one’s awesome, you have to get it!” ours commanded, pointing to a small dish of kale salad—and indeed it was, redolent of a toasty sunflower-seed nuttiness along with juicy bursts of apple and chunky almonds and the luscious cream of sheep’s milk cheese. But the concept itself breeds doubt: Did the pusher just need to unload it? Whatever goes out on a push, after all, has only one chance to be sold before it’s deemed unserveable; a reality that in Tray’s early days freaked Park out. “I wasn’t sending out enough food, so we were getting complaints,” he said. “My wife sat me down. ‘You have to play the game! You can’t be scared to waste food!’ ”
He’s now down to “wasting” some 10 plates a night, for which he credits a restaurant design affording the open kitchen full view of the house for optimal pacing. The space is small, yet high ceilinged and barny, all contemporary blond grays and unupholstered surfaces, and about as loud as a restaurant gets. You can’t converse in here, really, which is okay once you realize you’re going to be interrupted all night anyway—and not just at pushing time. “Liking everything so far?” we heard, oh, eight or nine times that first night alone.
“Jeez,” my companion grumbled. “It’s like Nordstrom in here.”
Indeed, the concept has its limitations. My second visit, on a slow Tuesday night, featured just two pushes, which they reduce when numbers are low, and which effectively transforms Tray Kitchen into plain old regular kitchen. In lieu of the cart you order off a fresh sheet—an option even when the cart is rolling—and which yielded at least one dish we liked very much: fried rice enriched with duck confit and a soy-cured egg yolk.
But when nearly every dish attempts some sort of concept, there are lots of opportunities for going wrong, a phenomenon Park dolefully admits he’s learned reading Tray’s Yelp reviews. Among problems we encountered were overcooked meat, as in the generous hunk of brisket over yams and onions and the rubbery grilled Alaskan octopus over ancho chili aioli; well-meaning but unintegrated innovations like the pork belly salad melange mentioned above; and way too much blandness, from the smoked trout mousse with housemade potato chips (who’d think this would need salt?) to grilled spareribs bored out of their minds with tame sauteed kale and citrus glaze.
All that tepid conception, along with too little clever fusion, tells me someone in Tray’s kitchen is pulling punches, holding back on the intrigue and boldness and vision such a place can uniquely deliver. (Indeed, many of these dishes are thinly veiled recastings of dishes at Chan.) Desserts are a richly flavorful exception, especially stunners like the matcha green tea semifreddo and the chai creme brulee.
In the end, it’s a matter of expectations. Growing up in Korea, Park recalls his family would go to restaurants when their pantry was low. When he moved here, he was surprised to see that people go to restaurants to linger and enjoy themselves. Tray Kitchen falls into the first category. There are those interruptions. Dishes don’t always bring out the best in other dishes; diners are pairing flavors, after all, that would be best done by the wiser palates in the kitchen. Juicy things like Tray Kitchen’s steamed mussels in coconut milk or black cod over dashi broth are ill suited to the dim sum setup, being nearly impossible to split.
Alas, those problems beset nearly every other small plate restaurant, tapas bars to happy hours—of which Tray Kitchen is, for all its fanfare as groundbreaker, simply another iteration.
This article appeared in the March 2015 issue of Seattle Met magazine.
