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RONALD HOLDEN awaits the promise of pleasure Peter Lamb Bets His Bass Sitting amidst construction paraphernalia at Second and Wall, site of the mysterious En, longtime restaurant guru Peter Lamb is on the phone with suppliers. In conjunction with En's owner, Wei Fu, Lamb is getting ready to open Branzino. (Branzino is the Italian name for Mediterranean sea bass.) Lamb expects to serve his first piece of fish by the end of April. "An informal, seafood, butcher-paper-on-the-tables kind of place," he says. En-the Japanese word for destiny-opened to high hopes six or seven years ago, but the space has rarely been open full-time in recent years. We've enjoyed some of the appetizers at happy hour prices, early on, and grateful that En left the sushi franchise to Shiro's, at the other end of the block, but lately it's been more of a lounge and weekend music venue. Lamb has a really good track record. He opened Il Bistro, he opened Queen City Grill, and though he stumbled a bit with a joint in West Seattle, he's still considered the go-to guy if you're serious about opening a one-off (i.e., not corporate) restaurant with a unique concept. ---  Meantime, at First and Blanchard, in the space occupied by the unlamented Jai Thai, carpenters are hard at work fixing up what will become Cellars Restaurant & Lounge. Cellars as in wine cellar, yes, but with a full bar. Chandeliers are already in place. Standard question: When will you open? Standard reply, "Next month."
Joseph Conrad, the new chef at Qube, adds à la carte menu of small plates ($7-$15) with Asian ingredients in every dish, broadening the restaurant's original concept of "Qubed" sets.
And finally, you read it here first, literally (last month, in Front Page Fodder): Icon Grill at Fifth and Virginia will disappear... next year.
Projects on hold: the bizarre 1 Hotel and its blandly named restaurant, Ocean. Starwood Hotels magnate Barry Sternlicht was in town last year to announce the ambitious plans and to introduce restaurant wizard Stephen Hanson of BRGuest (get it?). Turns out they misread the market for mixed-use projects, didn't realize that there was a Hotel 1000 just down the street and, gee, a restaurant called Earth & Ocean, in the Starwood portfolio, just a few blocks away.
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 Three weeks after every Starbucks in the country closed down for "retraining," the company's held its annual shareholders meeting, where the brass tried to spin the results of the, ahem, "transformational initiatives."
"I humbly recognize and share both your concern and your disappointment in how the company has performed and how that has affected your investment in Starbucks," Schultz told investors. "I promise you this will not stand."
So spake Howard Schultz at the annual shareholder meeting. Then he announced the solution: Starbucks is buying Clover, a
Ballard company that makes coffee machines. And it'll maybe start serving energy drinks.
Not enough. Schultz-like Bush-doesn't seem to understand that he has squandered his goodwill, that no amount of fair-trade, shade-grown coffee is going to bring harmony to the espresso battlefield, no amount of shiny new hardware is going to win back the loyalty of stockholders.
And did you have to sell the Sonics out from under us?
Schultz-like Bush-seems to suffer from hubris, from a sense of entitlement that victory should be his because he has the best narrative. So what happened?
"You have an economy that is really in a tailspin," Schultz admits.
But the small pleasures of a latte were supposed to be the antidote to hard times; Starbucks was supposed to be recession-proof. A shame, a real shame that the green Starbucks dot, like Gatsby's green light, is tarnished, now forever out of reach.
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 A disturbing preview of the new initiatives emerged at an industry gathering known as the Culinology Conference, the trademark name for the annual meeting of the Research Chefs of America.
These are the Frankenfood people, the ones Michael Pollan is warning us about ("Eat real food!"). On the surface, these folks appear quite human; they appreciate good food themselves and probably feel they're contributing to the betterment of humankind. In fact, they're processors, middlemen in a conveyor belt that begins with genetically engineered corn and ends up in your already obese gut. As the keynote for their annual confab, they heard from Denny Marie Post, senior vice president for Global Food and Beverage at Starbucks.
Let's just accept the fact that our homegrown coffee chain even has a senior VP for Global Food and Beverage. Get over it. Our biggest concern is that she was hired away from Burger King, where she held the title of Chief Concept
Officer, and her winning concept was obviously huge. On her watch, the biggest successes at BK, menu items that lifted the company out of the financial doldrums, were the 1,000-calorie Quad Stacker and the 1,230-calorie Triple Stacker With Cheese. BK execs knew that there were a lot more Bubbas out there than Jareds.
Now that she's on the Starbucks team, though, Post claims everyone wants to lose weight, and she chides her former BK bosses for being out of touch. Hence the displays of tasteless, low-fat, low-calorie, high-fiber snacks Starbucks has been tempting you to buy with your latte. (Duh, it's not the oatmeal cookie that makes you fat, it's the 700-calorie Frappuccino, my dear.) How can Post swerve from killer burgers to healthy snacks at Starbucks? We can hear her in the job interview: we're getting older, she's telling her board, and we're confronting our own mortality. We want to stay healthy! Vitality trumps vanity.
So here's what we can expect from the new Starbucks marketing campaign on healthy eating: Make it easier, make it positive, make it delicious. Not the absence of guilt but the promise of pleasure.
Make it delicious! Music to the ears of industrial chefs. They put down their copies of Food Processing and Food Product Design and gave Post a standing ovation.
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 The timing couldn't be better: As Bear Stearns collapses, as
financial chaos looms, what's more reassuring than comfort food? Reassuring staples like meatloaf, mac-and-cheese, or chili. Especially chili.
Every culture has ways of cooking meat in an aromatic liquid till it falls into tender pieces. Think of all those stews and casseroles, think of pot-au-feu and daube, goulash and carbonade. Add beans and it's cassoulet; add seafood and it's bouillabaisse. Maybe not in Belltown, but there are plenty of places that cook squirrel and possum. Hunters go into the woods and return with bear, or maybe a few bunnies; it can all go into the stew pot.
Which brings us back to chili... just a highly seasoned stew, after all, although one with infinite variations. Ethan Stowell, the owner and chef at Union, has been sponsoring charity cook-offs for
a while now, featuring food that everyone loves... in his or her
own way, whether it's southwest chili or Cincinnati style or something altogether original. Two years ago, Steve Smrstik (then of 35th St. Bistro, now at Pink Door) won the inaugural chili cook-off using cuts of pork. Sunday night, the eve of St. Paddy's Day, the eve of the Bear Stearns apocalypse, eleven local chefs gather to
prepare steaming pots of their own secret-recipe chili. Three pros, eight enthusiastic amateurs, a sold-out house.
One recipe is kinda soupy, one
is outright burned, a couple taste almost like spaghetti sauce, another like paprika. One is just too mild, another way too spicy, one is made with shrimp and squid (go, Oyster Bill!), one comes with dilled sour cream like a German pot roast. But three or four have a satisfying balance of juicy meat flavors and spicy chilies. Turns out that one of them used lamb and another entry, by Mangetout Catering, used venison.
Not just any venison, either, but an animal bagged by an enthusiastic employee. Mangetout's owner, Jane Hummer, added flavor by smoking the onions and spices, giving the dish additional depth and sweetness. Enough intensity, at any rate, to win the cook-off.
Probably just a coincidence, but Hummer also happens to be on the board of trustees of the evening's beneficiary, Seattle Children's Theater. Psst, Jane: don't tell the kids you cooked Bambi.
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Finally, just announced, the 2008 James Beard award nominations. Tom Douglas one of five nominees for outstanding restaurateur in America, Canlis for best restaurant service, and four Seattle chefs in the running for Best Northwest Chef: Maria Hines (Tilth), Holly Smith (Cafe Juanita), Ethan Stowell (Union) and Jason Wilson (Crush). Winners announced early June.
Also, William Belickis has closed Mistral, the temple of haute cuisine in Seattle. In its place, Belickis promises an upscale, Vegas-style food emporium. Mistral's longtime chef de cuisine, Charles Walpole, decamped a year ago, touching down briefly at Tavolata before heading the in-house kitchen at the new Januick winery in Woodinville.
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