It’s the end of year, thus time for annual Belltown Bravo awards. Don’t get too excited; I’m not. It hasn’t been a particularly good year for restaurants in this nabe, in my view. We lost some good ones (Cascadia, Qube, Marjorie), got some interesting new ones (Branzino, Kushibar, Tilikum Place) and the very promising Taberna del Alabardero; but overall, it hasn’t been mouthwatering. Best promotions are still coming from the shoebox-sized Txori (the Tamborada, the San Firmin festival, the monthly Txoco dinners). For consistency and value, previous winners Steelhead Diner and Black Bottle contiue to lead the pack. The real restaurant action these days is in Ballard, Capitol Hill, and (gulp) Bellevue.

That said, Tavolata has a new happy hour, 5-7 weeknights. For $2, you get a bowl of that wonderful beet salad, or garbanzo bean salad, or roasted chestnuts, or a plate of prosciutto. Txori, for its part, starts happy hour in January, 4-6 every night. A buck off wine or Basque drinks like Kalimotxo (red wine & coke), $4 wells. Food specials not set at press time. And at Taberna, an abbreviated happy hour (5-6 at press time, though that barely brings a smile to Belltown these days) with half-price wines, $4 glasses of delicious red or white sangria, and half-price appetizers. Some great values here, especially the skewered prawns and octopus, the peppers and anchovies, and the jamon iberico, all under $2.
And value we’re looking for, folks. That $65, two-pound T-bone at Tavolata? Don’t count on selling too many. Nor the $45 (up from “only” $42 two weeks ago) veal shank at Branzino. For two, you say? Funny, the menu doesn’t.

Five years after it opened, in the 2300 block of Second Avenue, Viceroy is no more. In its place, Rob Roy. Linda Derschang, the nightlife entrepreneur who owns the place, made the call. She blames it on the sophisticated Rob Roy cocktail, a Manhattan that’s made with scotch.

Derschang’s latest project is in Capitol Hill’s Pike-Pine Triangle: an empty dance studio with 18-foot ceilings in the Oddfellows building at 10th and East Pine. It’s the latest in a 15-year string of successful ventures under her belt: Linda’s and Smith on Capitol Hill, and King’s Hardware in Ballard in addition to Rob Roy
Her signature is spot-on decor. At Oddfellows, everything looks original and some of it really is (wainscoting, portraits); but the benches along the walls are former pews from St. Joseph’s on 19th, the classroom chairs were found in Massachusetts, and the tables were custom-built with locally salvaged lumber.

Derschang’s partner at Oddfellows is Ericka Burke of the Volunteer Park Café. Her food at Oddfellows isn’t as complicated as her classic menus for the denizens of North Capitol Hill’s elegant mansions; after all, it’s just a neighborhood café. Starting at 7 a.m. with coffee (from Stumptown), baked eggs, homemade oatmeal and pastries baked on the premises, moving through lunchtime BLTs to comfort-food dinners like Shepherds Pie, braised pork shank and rotisserie chicken. “The food will be be great value, delicious and comforting,” Burke promises. Simple, rustic, locally sourced.

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows originated in early 19th century England, a charitable organization whose members shunned recognition for their good works. Active in the United States, it became the first fraternity to welcome women as members, and in fact named its highest honor the Rebekah Degree. The Seattle chapter built its grand lodge at the turn of the 20th century, leasing space to—among other tenants—the Faurot Academy of Dancing. When developer Ted Schroth finished renovating building this year, he kept the academy’s well-used hardwood dance floor and expansive windows overlooking 10th Avenue, the space Derschang and Burke will now infuse with savory new life. And life before dark at that.

You want to tinker with that recipe you found online? Go right ahead. Anyone can edit Foodista.com, it’s a wiki. It’s also a comprehensive directory that links ingredients, techniques, tools and pictures. Designed and built by three local entrepreneurs, the Seattle-based site launched in mid-December.

Foodista is the brainchild of three veterans of Amazon.com, Barnaby Dorfman, Sheri Wetherell, and Colin Saunders. Dorfman, who’d also worked at Internet Movie Database, realized that people looking for information about movies, say, tend to use the web, but that people are still inclined to use cookbooks when it comes to recipes. Sure there are a couple of big sites for cooking: allrecipes.com (based in Seattle, recently purchased by Reader’s Digest) and epicurious.com being the two biggest. But those sites aren’t particularly user-friendly, and anything but “interactive.”

So the trio came up with a different model. Their physical space is a collaborative loft in lower Queen Anne. There’s no giant server platform; they use Amazon Web Services. The site’s privately owned with no outside funding. And if the Wikipedia model of collaboration is any guide, they’ve got a million foodies ready to turn the wonders of cloud computing into the Next Big Thing.

Cristiano Creminelli’s family has been in the salami business for literally hundreds of years, for the last century with a thriving little company in Piedmont, 50 miles northeast of Turin in the foothills of the Italian Alps. But exports (to the USA, at least) proved impossible. When the 2006 winter Olympics were held in Turin, Cristiano crossed paths with Seattle marketing exec Jared Lynch, and the stage was set for an international expansion: a manufacturing facility, a website, distributors nationwide and a retail outlet at the Pike Place Market (93 Pike Place, #2). It’s a story Cristiano (with snapshots) tells on the Creminelli website’s blog (creminelli.com).

The product line is limited to “artisan meats.” Six kinds of sausage you have to cook, seven or eight that have been air-dried. Number 8 is a salami made with white Alba truffles that’s only available for a short time every winter.
ase these delicacies at the Pike Place Market, you might wonder where this actually comes from. No, not from Italy but from a town called Springville, Utah, an artsy community of 20,000 on the shores of Lake Utah, some 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. Why Utah? Pleasant scenery aside, its location provides easy access to a consortium of sustainable farms of in northern Utah, eastern Oregon and southern Idaho. No less important is its exceptionally dry climate, because Creminelli’s sausages aren’t cooked; they’re conditioned for at least three weeks, a time when the parameters of humidity and temperature determine your salami’s future. Get it wrong and it’s unfit. Get it right and it’s heaven.

You may have thought a turkey-and-gravy-flavored soda would be disgusting. No, it gets worse. A Christmas-season four-pack of Seattle-based Jones Soda features bottles labeled Sugar Plum, Eggnog, Christmas Tree, and Christmas Ham. (There’s a Chanukah pack, too, complete with dreidel: latke, applesauce, chocolate coins and jelly donut.) But we’re not here to be disgusting, we’re here to be informative.

Jones Soda, you may recall, made a big splash with its quirky flavors and off-beat promotions a few years back. While assiduously courting taste-making skateboarders, they also managed to be named “official soda” for assorted big league sports teams, including the New Jersey Nets. Then their stock started to tank, the board threw out the founder (with a $20K a month severance), installed a new CEO (who even happened to be named Jones) and started cutting costs. Nothing helped. The stock price is three-for-a-buck, down from $20+ just 18 months ago. And now Jones wants out of the NBA deal.

The whole sad story is on downtowndispatch.com, where publisher Alex R. Mayer admits his posts are opinionated, to say the least. He claims to be inventing a new style of journalism that combines investigative reporting, infotainment and hatred for big business. “Unchecked corporate greed has helped destroy our country,” he says. “I feel we should start becoming aware of the useless products and insulting marketing being spoon-fed to us.” Spoon-fed like turkey and gravy.

Ronald’s blog: cornichon.org