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RONALD HOLDEN has a lesson for the Pesto of Cities Slip Me Some Tongue 
THE SPACE OCCUPIED BY LAMPREIA, in Belltown Court at First and Battery, is up for sale. The restaurant is moving to the Gallery building, under construction at the corner of Second & Broad.
Scott Staples says he always wanted to be on Capitol Hill but couldn't find the right spot. That was before Quinn's, which opened late last year. In the meantime, the restaurant he opened as a second choice, Zoë, has become a Belltown fixture.
At the bar, the original drinks menu has evolved to more contemporary cocktails ("Spring Flowers" of Ciroc vodka, St. Germain elderflower liqueur, lemon sour and Moscato d'Asti, $9.75). Hold off on that homemade sour mix, though; it really doesn't belong in a Negroni!
 In the kitchen, Staples and chef-de-cuisine Daniel Newell stick to elegantly presented classics: halibut, scallops, duck breast, lamb loin, braised short ribs,
pork chops.
But if the devil is in the details, it's also in the small plates. Delicate white asparagus from Walla Walla, asking for nothing more than a simple steaming, is instead poached (barely! barely!) in a broth of salted white wine, and served with an egg foam (classic sabayon), lemon, and fried (why?) capers. Five stalks for $13, you wonder what they're thinking.
But then comes redemption, in the form of a $10 plate of beef tongue. The base is French green lentils, softly cooked. Next, a layer of crunchy, bitter frisee. Then a slice of tongue, an unctuous meat so tasty you really have to wonder why it's shunned. Now comes a spread of complex marmalade: a sour cherry mustard. This is topped with another slice of tongue and capped with a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt.
Pause for a moment to imagine the last time you enjoyed a hamburger. Was the ketchup on the top, the bottom, or did you dip? Was the lettuce on the bottom? Where in that construction did the kitchen place the tomato, the onion? The architecture of a burger is crucial, since it affects how it tastes when you take a bite.
Well, the tongue at Zoë is like that: the elements should be savored together, all at once. You forgive all sorts of minor sins when you're in bliss.
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First Mistral, temple of gastronomy, hushed inner sanctum of the molecular, closed six weeks ago. Then Lampreia, sacred (and almost secret) destination for Seattle devotees of haute-cuisine, put itself up for sale. Now Cascadia, that hardy and trendy hybrid, is out as well.
All three owner-chefs have their reasons, and they're not even the same reasons. Mistral's William Belickis is on to a more ambitious project, a suite of restaurants that needs more space (and more investment) than his 32-seat Chapel. Scott Carsberg of Lampreia has long wanted a space he can actually own, and is moving to the Gallery building, under construction at the corner of Second and Broad. And Kerry Sear, having hit his stride by combining popular mini-burgers with high standards of Northwest cuisine, is leaving Cascadia's grand, high-ceilinged space after ten years and returning to the fold of the new Four Seasons at First and Union.
So, by the end of summer, Belltown's top three dinner houses will be g-gone. What will come in their place? The rent's too high for mid-range chains like Red Lobster or Applebees... though not for dance clubs and lounges. With food costs skyrocketing and labor shortages climbing, it makes less sense than ever to fill the menu with $20 tuna tartare and $30 salmon en papillotte. But a super-premium cosmo for $15, shaken by an $8/hour bar dude with a dollar's worth of booze, that's a no-brainer.
Between Lampreia and Cascadia stands Del Rey, a Capitol-Hill-style lounge (dark inside, live music, tequila) with a line out the door. Could this be the future of Belltown? Or, indeed, of fine dining everywhere?
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Two blocks from Seattle's iconic Pike Place Market, in the basement of the historic Kress Building, Tyler Myers is trying to make history by building a 17,000-square-foot urban supermarket. He's a grocery guy from a grocery family on Whidbey Island, and he thinks he knows what his customers want: a full-service store (not just shelves of ramen and canned tuna), with fresh produce, meat, takeout.
Escalators will glide customers from the Third Avenue sidewalk to the terrazzo-tile lower level, where flowers, fruit and vegetables await, along with wines, desserts, artisan breads, gourmet cheeses, sushi, fresh sandwiches, a deli, a salad bar, and a full-service butcher. Not much baby food, nor giant packages of toilet paper, however. An everyday place with supermarket prices, not mini-mart ripoffs.
If the Pike Place Market is first and foremost a tourist attraction, the new Kress IGA is a neighborhood grocery. "They'd recognize
it in New York," Myers says. He expects to open in June.
Several Belltown vendors will be featured, according Myers: Dahlia Bakery and Boulangerie Nantaise will supply bread. The Market's Piroshky Piroshky will have, duh, piroshky; Sorrentino's, on Queen Anne, will provide lasagna-to-go; and Ladle Soups, in Wallingford will supply fresh soup.
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Sidewalk table for lunch at Le Pichet: Salade verte, the cafe's signature green salad with hazelnuts, goat-cheese tartine (on country bread from Tall Grass Bakery) with cornichons on the side,
a glass or two of Muscadet. Feels like France, even more so because I've brought along the new
memoir by Patricia and Walter Wells, We've Always Had Paris... and Provence.
Walter, a former New York Times staffer, was editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune for 25 years, turning it into one of the most prestigious publications in the world. He was honored with the French Legion d'Honneur last summer. Patricia had been a Times staffer in New York as well, but worked freelance in Paris until she was hired as the Trib's restaurant critic. She's written almost a dozen bibles for foodies, starting with the Food Lover's Guide to Paris. Along the way, she also became the first woman to review restaurants for l'Express, where her translator ended up marrying the paper's editor.
So, wait, isn't this latest tome just another self-serving memoir? (Hardly.) Another collection of recipes? (Nope.) Self-indulgent food porn? (Nothing to see here, literally. Nothing but black and white snapshots.) Au contraire, it's a joyful scrapbook, a shoebox full of postcards from globe trotting friends, delightful emails and late-night phone calls. Reading their book is like strolling down the boulevards or driving through the French countryside; you can open any page and be enchanted.
Walter on the American character, seen by the French: "We're alarmingly incurious, blithely unaware... not the land of liberty but of puberty." And the French, seen by Americans: "Arrogant and ungrateful. Lunch lasts three hours and the rest of the time they're
on vacation."
Meantime, Patricia turns out a steady stream of fully researched articles, interviews, cookbooks, travel pieces, reviews. There's a whole subplot about how to watch your weight under those circumstances. Even teddy bear Walter loses 35 pounds. Yet at one point Patricia admits that she feels like a fraud, supposedly an authority on Paris even though-like bloggers!-she seems to spend every waking moment in the same tiny room. (Except for the trips, except for the dinners.)
So they buy a studio apartment on the Left Bank to give Patricia a kitchen where she can teach cooking classes in Paris. And they buy a rundown property in Provence, Chanteduc, where Patricia enthusiastically harvests grapes from their vineyard. Walter, having picked cotton for a penny a pound in the deep south, is not to so enchanted. Of course, they have the same misadventures with local tradesmen that we've come to know from Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, but without Mayle's condescension. The place becomes a mecca for foodies.
Disclosure: Back in the days before internets, my travel company, France In Your Glass, represented Patricia's cooking classes at Chanteduc. That was then. Now you can sign up online at PatriciaWells.com, and everything through 2009 is waitlisted. It's a "retirement" career beyond all expectations.
Generous of spirit, curious, thoughtful and tolerant, Walter and Patricia are still leading a fantasy life. They hate the term expat, so let's call them exports. The best of America, exported to Paris.
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For two days last month, over 10,000 restaurateurs swarmed into the Convention Center, where some 500 exhibitors at the Northwest Foodservice Show were offering samples (deep-fried churros, prepackaged burgers, imported desserts), showing off new equipment and point-of-sale systems, offering consulting services. The keynote address was from Anthony Anton, CEO of the Washington Restaurant Association, who took us on a quick tour to show off ecologically-correct green packaging (forks made of corn starch). "We have to get ahead of the regulators," he maintained.
The R-word was never spoken. Other parts of the country might be in trouble, he says, but not this state. Instead, Anton talked about rising food costs (not getting better anytime soon) and the growing labor crunch (going to get worse if there's an immigration crackdown this summer).
Over 50 percent of all food dollars are being spent outside the home, Anton points out. Five meals a week, on average. And the economic drivers in this state remain strong: Microsoft, Boeing, agriculture (the weak dollar helps exports), ports (again, exports), and construction (with transportation projects picking up the slack of the weak housing market).
Two solutions for restaurants: Sell lottery tickets (seriously), and buy labor-saving equipment.
Oh really? Our inbox gets a flurry of press releases from restaurants, and the theme past month has been downsizing: Simpler food, comfort food, even (at Veil) TV dinners. One longtime restaurant operator, facing skyrocketing food costs, lack of qualified staff, high gas prices, and an increasingly nervous clientele, says "the industry's response is head-in-the-sand denial."
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Everybody's got a stereotype, and Italians are no different: Wildly passionate one moment, indifferent the next. Political corruption? Cynical indifference. Matters of the heart? Passionate but fickle. Matters of the table? Ah, passionate to the core.
My Italian restaurant friends get particularly incensed when American chefs misappropriate Italian culinary language and apply a name like "carpaccio" to a plate of sliced raw meat, or "pesto" to any old green sauce.
So let's be clear: the word "pesto" comes from the Latin and means "crushed." Not chopped to smithereens by a whirling blade. We're not trying to stand in the way of progress here, but running parsley through the Cuisinart produces an industrial sludge that you might as well call milk of magnesia or castor oil; pesto genovese it ain't.
The distinction may seem trivial or irrelevant, but not for a few True Believers, purists, conservators, Keepers of the Flame. In this particular case, Italian cooks from Italy. With theological intensity, they argue that if you call something pesto, it has to be pesto. Not some metaphorical version of pesto, but the real thing, what Italians of all regions understand to be the genuine, traditional Ligurian recipe for pesto: the small leaves of Genovese basil, crushed by hand in a pestle, with garlic and olive oil, just before serving. Pine nuts optional.
Unfortunately, there's no legal protection for pesto or carpaccio or amatriciana, the way there is, say, for Chianti Classico-made from San Giovese grapes grown in a specific zone between Florence and Siena. (Notwithstanding that California's Gallo winery actually won a trademark infringement action against a Chianti Classico consortium for using the traditional logo of a black rooster, the emblamatic gallo nero.) The Italians' point is, don't call a parsley-walnut sauce made in a blender (with water, yet!) "pesto." Yes, I'm looking at you, Ethan.
All too often, Seattle dumbs it down. We compromise, we fudge, we dilute. In the end, we pretend it doesn't matter, we're left with a shiny surface. Looks like chicken, tastes like dog food. Beware.
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We humans are delusional; we think we have free will and immaculate perception. We don't rob Peter to pay Paul, we borrow from our friends so we can buy oil from our enemies. We turn our food supplies into even more fuel, and we'd grow yet more if only we could
afford to import still more fertilizer from our neighbor to the north, even as we build a fence to keep out our neighbors from the south.
In this climate of public mistrust, we are encouraged to rely instead on the personal and
private: our own sense of taste. Especially when it comes to wine, that most variable of beverages, we're told to "drink what you like." In this bottle, in that glass, we seek salvation.
Salvation from bad wine? No, improvement of good wine, but subito, vite, schnell, quickly! Can't wait for the subtle ravages of time to smooth tannins and ameliorate acids, gotta getta gimmick and, presto! The wine doesn't breathe, the glass breathes. So say wine gurus Robert Parker and Ronn Wiegand. Braiden Rex-Johnson, in the Seattle Times, similarly impressed. Sez me, not so much.
We tried this new Breathable Crystal stemware with a second-tier Bordeaux, a Beaujolais and a Chinon, all decent wines that showed promise of improvement with time. Yes, tannins were tamed, but the wines seemed to lose their balance. In growing up so fast (two or three years in two or three minutes), they lost their youthful intensity.
We see the future with no more clarity than any mortal; but through this glass, our conclusion is, "Don't grow up too fast." Live within your means, live within your time.
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Restaurant critic Ronald Holden was dubbed "Belltown's Boulevardier" by Seattle Magazine. See his blog at Cornichon.org |