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Seattle Vacation

May 29, 2012 //
2

Even though Seattle is a fun, interesting, happening city, once you live somewhere it kinda becomes just where you live, where you get stuck in traffic and buy boring groceries and sleep. So you have to have your parents come visit every once in a while, so you can pretend that you’re on vacation in your very own city. M & D came over for the weekend and we went right into Larkwood travel mode. Aka: All meals out and much coffee drinking and pastry eating. Day One: obligatory Pike Place visit and lunch at Cafe Campagne. Much walking. Then. Dinner. It was tricky picking just two restaurants to take my beloved P’s to… pasta at a Stowell joint? Revel, my Korean favie? The winners: Walrus and the Carpenter and Sitka and Spruce. First up, Walrus. No rezzos, and I knew there’d be a wait. We showed up at 6. 2 hours they said. Not willing to give up the promise of a bowl of icy oysters, we waited it out at Bastille down the way, slowly slowly eating a little plate of rabbit pate and pretending that we were really still deciding if we’d stay for dinner. The call finally came for us and we scurried back to our hard-won table. First order of business, oysters. Yum. A dozen and a half, four different kinds. Yum. Briny bliss. Here we are, in blurry oyster-slurping form. (Are you supposed to use those dumb weensy forks? A good portion of the joy is the somewhat sandy shell slurp…)

And what else: bread and olive oil and butter and olives. A weensy wedge of Dinah’s cheese, which I have to say was good, but just in a regular ol’ buttery brie way. Then the real business: grilled sardines with a walnut gremolata kinda thang. Sheesh, sardines, where have you been hiding? Meaty and fishy in a good way. And I secretly love eating whole bony fish…something nice about that weird little calcium crunch. Speck with ricotta and candied pumpkin and balsamic. Candied as in pumpkin candy, not as in sweet-ish pumpkin. Awesome. A salad of watercress and lardons and fried egg. Egg yolk, extra points. My favorite dish: raw prawns with their roe alongside their deep-fried shells. Raw prawn? Yes. Fantastic. Snappy roe, just-tough-enough shrimp, ultra salty crunchy weird shell. Da bomb. And then, just for good measure, two more oysters each for Dad and I, just to make sure we really knew our favorite. (Treasure Coves from Case Inlet.) Then dessert, because, you know, we’re on vacation here. A cherry clafoutis, which was good, but erm… ours was better that one time we made it. Not quite custardy enough. But hey, covered in creme fraiche so pretty durn good. And roasted dates, which somehow remained about two trillion degrees for twenty minutes. Really yummy, once they cooled to the temp of just molten lava, roasted and caramely in salt and oil–definitely stealing that one. Walrus: worth the wait.

The next day: well, I’ll lay it out for you. Macrina for breakfast, Homegrown for lunch, Sitka for dinner. And Le Pichet for dessert. Ok, here we go. Macrina: I had a morning glory muffin and two perfect sunnyside up eggs. Dad had yogurt and fruit and granola. (He hadn’t realized that he was indeed, on vacation, and should take advantage by having french toast and bacon.) Mom got the salmon bialy, hands down the best thing on the brunch menu. We had a great waitress who kept getting cursed with whiny (“Are the eggs cooked with oil? Is the toast buttered? Is there sugar in the chocolate cake? Could you bring me just one slice of cucumber and an ice cube?”) tables and I tried my best to send her good vibes. After that we moved north to the Seattle Center for the King Tut exhibit which should in fact be re-named “The Exhibit of Egyptian Crap that does not include King Tut. Or his sarcophagus. Or his mask that is on every poster around the whole city.” Ok, there was some good stuff, but there were also a lot of brats running around and NO KING TUT. No mummy. Nothin. Some fans and wicker chairs from his crappy little cave-tomb. I might be bitter. But then we went to Homegrown for lunch and things looked up. Dad and I got turkey avocado bacons and mom got a killer Reuben. And we each got a really yummy pickle. And then I bought an old wood heating grate at the market, which is cooler than any dumb ol’ mummy anyway. Then we had to go home and take naps because we had a big dinner ahead of us.

So Sitka and Spruce. I have been dying to go for, oh, like, a year. And Matt Dillon, the chef, just won a James Beard. (He also has The Corson Building, my number one dream must go to resto at the moment, and a farm and a cute little bar. And everything good.) I was not on top of things and by the time I called, we could only get in at 6. Which was fine. Because the light is better at 6.

S&S has probably the most open kitchen on earth. I literally could’ve reached over and snacked on their mise en place. And I was tempted. The two chefs have a big deep sink where the cold ingredients are iced down and a nice big workspace, which is just a continuation of the long table we were sitting at. And a big wood fire. As you do. We kicked it off with bread (thanks to them, foccacia has a new place in my heart) and salami and olives. Shortly thereafter a salad of bright little lettuces and shaved asparagus and carrots and the best sheep’s cheese I’ve ever had. Ever. See ya Manchego, I have a new best friend. And farm-to-table, fresh, blah blah; that salad seriously had that magic taste that only things from your own garden has. (The Dillon farm/resto family is in fact the creator of the best CSA ever created…and the most expensive, but now I’m thinking it might be worth it…)

Then the mains. Rabbit leg, roasted on that fire, and sturgeon. Both with emmer (a grain…I didn’t know either) and turnip greens and yogurt and maybe a little hit of mustard with the rabbit and paprika with the fish. So simple and SO perfect. Lord. Thoughtful and homey and good. Nothing out of place or over-reaching. Everything all nested together and good. Didn’t even cross my mind that maybe it was sad that the dishes had the same sides. Cause there’s the cook, right there, making it for you. Keeping it as simple and just right as they would in their own kitchen, cooking for their friends. Then, lord almighty, the desserts. I’ll ease you into it. A simple little Basque gateau. Almond crust, pastry cream, Drizzled with caramel and salty (the salty was the crucial kicker) almonds. Good, lovely, yummy, great. Then. THEN. Wild ginger ice cream with honey. Ginger but not even ginger. It sung of ginseng and brightness and earthiness and sunlight all at once. Drizzled with honey and a handful of slivered almonds. The best thing I’ve tasted in a while.

Then a walk up to the Elysian Brewing Co, then a trip downtown in search of a view, settling (“settling”) for Le Pichet on First where we drank cider and ate delicious cheese at 11 pm. Because we were on vacation.

Did you think that was all? Then we went to Cafe Presse in the morning with Logie, where we all ate variations on the omelette and pastries and delicious housemade yogurt. And I ate almost an entire baguette with butter and rhubarb-vanilla jam. Because….I was on vacation! Stay-cation. Then we popped up to Taylor Shellfish where mom packed up a few pounds of clams and oysters to take home and we went for a walk at the beach at Discovery Park then they had to go home before the oysters got tired and next thing I knew the vacation was over, dangit. But how lucky am I, to have these parents who’ll take me out to dinner (around the world) and put up with my food rambling and even join in the rambling with me, wondering how, how!? does a raw prawn taste so dang good.

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Categories Restaurants

Vancouver Trip

May 14, 2012 //
1

I love Vancouver. When I first moved there, I did not. I thought that Canadians were weird and putting on fake accents to irritate me specifically and everything was ridiculously more expensive and my university campus was bigger then the town I grew up in and looked like Lenin picked the architect for half the buildings. Aka, I was really lonesome the second my dad left and I feared for a friendless semester in a just-foreign enough to be even more lonesome country. But things perked up pretty quickly. Good and plentiful Asian food, a somewhat ugly campus situated in maybe one of the most beautiful places on the continent, a constant pizza-eating TV-watching girl party in my giant packed-like-sardines house, a fun garden internship, tons of yoga and biking home from yoga at sunset in a bliss state, my favorite coffee shop in the whole wide world (and the best muffins in the whole wide world,) and a volunteer gig at the UBC garden with kids, where I met Nicole, yet another fantastic friend I’ve been lucky enough to snag along the way. This weekend I popped back up to BC for a weekend visit, and lucked out with the warmest loveliest sunniest weekend of all time. Nicole and I walked and walked and talked and talked and ate and ate and ate. Nicole took us to Via Tevere, a impossibly cute Neapolitan pizza place just off Commercial Drive, tucked into a neighborhoody little street– like it just so happened to have landed there. Nicole said I’d love it; she was so right. Cozy and tasty and good in so many ways. I keep getting so lucky with friends– I meet these fantastic people and we have the bright friendships that keep on keepin’ on even after we’re apart. And they become a big part of my fuzzy memory-imagination of the places I’ve lived, which is wonderful.

And this pizza, it too is now a part of my own dreamy version of Vancouver. All Neapolitan pizza is amazing. This was really amazing. For one, the place was toasty, which only seemed appropriate as there’s a 900 degree oven smack in the middle. Sweaty pizzaiolos throw together the pies and slide em in for 90 seconds a piece, the pizzas reemerging like phoenixes from the fires, ashy and amazing. We got: one with cheese, cherry tomatoes, and basil, a margherita plus broccoli rabe, and a fantastic one with spicy Italian meats. Yum. The crusts were maybe the best part, dipped in spicy oil… Yes. We ate the leftovers with much much joy later on.

The next day: brunch at Dunlevy Snackbar. Mother’s Day brunch traffic? Not an issue here. Too hip for regular moms. A rad little Chinatown storefront (Note: Vancouver’s Chinatown is not like Seattle’s “International District” where takeout boxes blow down the street like tumbleweed and the same Peking ducks have been hanging in the windows since 1995. Vancouver’s is bustling and lively and full of shocking dried things and pungent fish shops and old ladies haggling.)

And then Dunlevy Snackbar, full of true Van Hipsters. But in a good way. It still feels like a “find,” like you too are awesome for being there. The owner, Theo, is running around the place, making coffee, taking orders, and giving you the verbal menu. Three choices. Euro Brunch, arepas, or baked eggs. What a rad idea. Only one meal a day, only three things a day. Makes picking easy, makes prepping easy. Makes changing the menu really easy. Keeps things interesting. For us: one Euro brunch, one arepa. Do you loyal readers remember arepas? The dance party break snack of Florida, bought from a young couple frying up masa with one hand and feeding a baby with the other in a dorm kitchen. Arepas, griddled corn cakes topped with a slice of guava paste and a slice of white cheese and a big dose of pure joy. Dunlevy of course did it differently: topped the corn cake with chipotle black beans and potatoes and scrambled eggs, accompanied by a bright little carrot slaw. Yum.

And the Euro brunch. Ok, so my favorite part of Germany is frühstück. Breakfast. At the oddball little hotel we always stay at in Frankfurt (frequent flier miles get you to Frankfurt…) theres this glorious place called the fruhstuck raum. Fruhstuck fairies fill it every morning before dawn with baskets of fluffy white buns covered in seeds, platters of holey cheese, plates of smoky meats, soft boiled eggs, joghurts of all varieties, a tray of sausages, and all the teeny Nutella containers you could ever dream of stealing. You fill up a plate (or three, if you’re me. Hey, you don’t get a trip to the Fruhstuck Raum too often) and sit down and delight–delight–in the German version of breakfast.

Dunlevy’s take was pretty darn similar. A soft-boiled egg (which I am going to make a part of my life, if only for the ultra cute egg cups,) rye bread, a croissant, jam, cheese, ham, fruit, almonds, olives, and hummus. Inclusive of all the EU nations. Delicious. And we had a good chat with Theo after, and what makes you feel cooler than a chat with the owner. Dunlevy Snackbar, also now a part of my version of Vancouver. Then we spent the afternoon at the beach in Kitsilano, my old ‘hood, making bracelets and saying over and over how good the sun felt on our cold little northwestern bodies. After a delicious little front porch barbeque to round out the day, I headed back down to Seattle, dreaming of Vancouver the whole way back.

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Categories Restaurants, Travels

Marigold and Mint

March 26, 2012 //
0

I took another class, this one at pretty much the other end of the gory-lovely spectrum from my last class experience. …Flower arranging! At sweet Marigold & Mint in the Melrose Market, home to Sitka and Spruce (someone please take me there) and a cheese shop, meat shop, sandwich shop, and oyster bar. Aka: I could very happily live in there forever. Aka: the epicenter of Cap Hill cuteness.

Katherine, head flower honcho, started thing off by throwing together an arrangement as an example for us beginners. (And telling us about her flower farm out in the Snoqualmie Valley…can I live there? In a little tent made of petals?) Flower Arranging 101: Start with thick branchy things, then get progressively lighter. Make a little nest for the later, lighter flowers to snug into. Fellow florist Brita (name envy…pronounced all rolling R-y, not like the filter) showed us how to add just one orchid to an arrangement. Another florist, Ayako, told us about branches, spare little branches that can be so beautiful. (Reminded me of this.) Katherine talked about the current trend in the flower world of loose arrangements, kinda thrown-together looking bouquets with lots of airiness and gentleness and nonchalant-ines, as opposed to the 90s flower-ball style where blooms were squashed up against each other in tight little symmetrical bouquets.

Can’t help but make a correlation to food trends there, especially when I was looking over her shoulder at the Sitka chefs doing Sunday prep at the big long kitchen table the whole time. There’s definitely that same feeling in the (un-)composition of plates these days. Kind of, you know, rustic and simple and “Oh, it just happens to be lovely, I didn’t work too hard.” That look. You know. Anyway, turns out flower arranging is indeed hard work. Challenge #1: Starting. Choosing blooms from the dozens of vases set out for us. These bunchy little roses are nice… these big weepy purply ones are so very nice… these teeny waxflowers are so so very pleasing… oh, the teensier rice flowers though…. Then you have a colossal pile of branches and stems and leaves and blooms and an empty vase. Start shuffling them together, layering branches, weaving in little sprigs of whatnot. (All the while eating very many very good little slices of sesame seeded baguette with creamy cheese from the shop down the way and dreamy jam made by one of the sweet florist teachers.)

Then, challenge #2: Stopping. Cannot stop. One more daffodil? Oh sure. One more purply thing? Well of course. Little holes show up in our arrangement every time you look down at it and there is a compulsion to fill. them. immediately. The other five students all  carefully made lovely arrangements with just one or two main colors, with a perfect little frond drooping over one side, a couple tall blooms reaching upward… Mine was an explosion of ruffage. Pinks of all shades. Big blotches of purple. Little spots of yellow. Thick branches reaching out in every direction. I love it. (It is filling my house with JOY, capital letters joy right now.)

Best part of all: carrying it next door to be my dinner companion for a half-dozen oysters at Taylor Shellfish. Not unlike flowers, oysters fill me with delight and love for the world at large. How could anything bad exist in the universe when something this good exists too? I think as I slurp a teeny Shigoku, grown north of here in bags slouching around at the bottom of the sea, attached to buoys, getting tumbled around with the tide. Two little ridge-less shigokus, two small Pacifics, and two something-or-others. Flowers and oysters, solid Sunday. (And did I have a Besalu brioche for breakfast too? And maybe wood fired pizza for dinner? And maybe a smidge of rice pudding for a midnight snack?)

 

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Categories Restaurants

Skillet

February 29, 2012 //
8

Brace yourselves: I am going to criticize this restaurant. The other day, after I told Stuart about Little Bird and “the best meal ever” he said, laughing: “You say every restaurant is the best one ever.” True. Very, very true. I generally love on everywhere I eat. Partly because if it’s not wonderful, I don’t have much to say. Mostly because I plot and anticipate and plan everywhere I eat. And Skillet has definitely been anticipated, its menu read over, its Urban Spoon carefully interpreted. I even like them on Facebook. But in real life? Not such a fan. After a Sunday “hike” (aka Discovery Park walkabout) Logan, Talia, and I headed down to Skillet, the diner born out of the super successful food cart of the same name, for brunch. We waited outside for half an hour, gazing drool-ily, dreamily through the window at the lucky people already mowing down waffles and chicken and dinner plate-sized cinnamon rolls doused with frosting. Skillet is doing this dressed-up diner thing, riding the “comfort food” trend in a big, big way. Fried chicken plays a very prominent role, pork belly makes an appearance, milkshakes are brought out in mason jars alongside the butter-drenched pancakes. All the waitstaff wears plaid. (Really.)

As someone who reads food news more than the average human being, I can tell you, without a doubt, that gussied-up comfort food shtick is no longer new or creative. It’s lazy. My friend Jackie (you long-time readers remember her: Bali then Ottawa) said that cooking with butter and cream is cheating, because it’ll taste good no matter what. I’ll never give up on creamy pasta, but she’s totally right. Bacon jam, deep fried chicken thighs, and maple syrup–it’s going to taste good. Salt, fat, sugar; all in high quantities. Amp up those things and the creativity and skill can fade away. As evidenced by our brunch. Logan got a burger and fries. Both of which were tasty. Because they were a burger and fries. Given, a better burger, probably made with nicer beef, topped with arugula instead of iceberg, wedged between brioche rather than dry white buns, but still, a burger, and probably not worth $12 more than a burger from Dick’s down the road.

Talia got a fried chicken sandwich and a salad. Was the fried chicken good? Take a guess. But the salad? Dry braising greens. It’s way harder to make raw kale taste awesome than it is to take come protein, batter it, fry it, and get a smile. Me: I got the special, chilaquiles (chips soaked in salsa verde till pleasantly smushy) served with 2 eggs, tomatoes, avocado, and bacon. This was lacking those magic ingredients. No deep frying (unless you count the chips, but that was kind of negated by the salsa), no sugar. They tried to get in on the salty fat aspect with the bacon, which merely laid limp on the sidelines, a weird addition to the plate. The rest of the dish? Well it was good(ish), but I could’ve made it in my 15 minutes allotted for breakfast before work. Chips, poached eggs, a couple slices of tomato, a couple wedges of avocado. Okay, but kind of plain, pretty ugly, and certainly not worth a thirty minute wait and fourteen bucks.

When we left Skillet, I wasn’t that unhappy. But the more I thought about the meal, the more irritated I got. Skillet is popular, and they know it. Its obvious–there’s literally a line out the door. So it seems like they’re riding on that, slinging fancified ultra-sugary super-salty diner food that we all want but are too ashamed to just go to a freakin Denny’s and order. And the mason jars and mismatched silverware make us feel like we’ve found some cool joint, let us imagine that we are indeed in some funky diner that we’ve cleverly stumbled upon, some low-key home of the world’s best chicken and waffles that our inner radness has somehow drawn us to. And hey, the line says we’re all willing to buy a $15 burger if it comes with that experience.

(I forgot to mention that we shared a chocolate milkshake. Best part of the meal.)

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Categories Restaurants

Walrus

February 24, 2012 //
1

Last night I finally, finally, finally went to The Walrus and the Carpenter, after pining for the place for truly almost a year. Beautiful Ballard oyster bar, tucked behind Staple and Fancy and a bike-slash-coffee shop. Went with my dear new friend Madeline, a smart oyster-loving gal with a bourbon drink named after her. We kicked things off with a dozen oysters, all tiny and perfect and tasting of the not-so-faraway sea.

Four each: kusshi, malispina, and effingham. From not-so-briny, small and soft, to big, brackish, and just chewy enough. Shallot vinaigrette or fresh horseradish (or nothing at all) on top. Delight. We slowly ate them, savoring and discussing the goodness, making it all the better. (And deriding those who have dismissed the oyster…)

After the oysters, duck prosciutto with pickled huckleberries. You had me at duck, you really had me at prosciutto, you really truly had me with huckleberries, the sweet gem-berries of my homeland. See-thru-thin prosciutto, bright sweet berries; a great earthy counter to the icy oysters. Then a mound of swiss chard marinated in lemon and mingled with feta, topped with a soft sunnyside egg. Hearty in the exact right way. Then the very best bit of all: white anchovy tartine. What is tartine? We don’t know. A baked thingy? Anne suggests. The toast and jam French kids eat every morning? says Madeline. Yes, toast. Thinnest of the thin rye toast, with a slab of butter (served like cheese– see, I’ve been saying butter is a cheese and should be eaten in quantities as such all along), one perfect anchovy, more of that buzzing fresh horseradish, and a few glowing orbs of salmon roe. Pure Scandinavian-ish bliss.

And long, leisurely savoring and sharing of it all, chatting with our Vancouver table-neighbors about the restaurants I loved (and the ones I sadly missed out on). Chatting about the weird girly joy of putting dry goods in mason jars and being poetry-reading college students and all the good things we love to cook and eat and share.

It seems like a good many of my posts are half about food, half about loving food and loving people and loving eating with those people. Which is kind of the more important part anyway. Food is great, people are better. At the magazine we have a grammatical policy of referring to restaurants as singular (Canlis’ new pastry chef, not their new pastry chef) and that just feels a little odd to me. Plates don’t materialize from some mystical place, they aren’t brought to the table by some silent force, the whole thing isn’t a self-sustaining concept–-a restaurant is a big bunch of people making something happen. And we’re a big bunch of people enjoying it. In my interdisciplinary degree-carrying way, I’m finding myself more interested in the spaces between us and food, in the ways that we understand food and invite it into our lives, than just the food or the eater itself.

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Categories Restaurants

Portlandia

February 21, 2012 //
8

My weekend: homemade cinnamon rolls, shooting off rockets, salmon, clams, risotto, Powells, chocolate chip cookies, foie gras. All these good things, all with beloved folk. Joy and sweetness and over-eating-ness. My M and D and I converged upon the Redmonds in Portland for the weekend, where we ate and laughed and ate some more. We love the Redmonds and they love us and we all love to eat and when we’re all together it’s pretty dang joyful. The first night we were there we had pasta with clams and about eight chocolate bars between the seven of us. The next day we “hiked” Mt. Tabor and did the requisite Powells Pilgrimage, where I got a bunch of food-lit books.

Then Pearl Bakery for sandwiches and cookies, before another beautiful dinner of asparagus risotto and salmon and roasted cauliflower. Kate knows how to do a dinner. Plus Craig and Dad’s “bad things I did with/to my brothers when I was little” stories and Dawson’s film ideas and Gabey’s cleverness. Good times around the Redmond table. Then Sunday. Began the day with a Reed campus walkabout, in preparation for the brunchy feast to come. Homemade cinnamon rolls, the dough made the night before to maximize both goodness and anticipation. Salmon scrambled eggs, the real reason you make salmon for dinner. And sweet spicy bacon. I ate three cinnamon rolls, I am proud/ashamed to say.

Then a walk to the park for the most thrilling hobby ever that I really am desperate to take up (and have lots of friends who excitedly take it up with me): model rockets. You go to the park, and you shoot off a rocket. And it flies a bazillion feet up into the sky and you frantically run around underneath to catch it. So thrilling! I want to have rocket launching picnics! Then after all that excitement died down, more excitement right away, with a dinner at Little Bird, the new restaurant by the Le Pigeon crew. the chef just crowned by the James Beard Foundation as Rising Star Chef, the beautiful bistro lived up to the expectations.

We started off with oysters… (“nietard” oysters? We couldn’t hear our shockingly hip waitress so well in the bustly restaurant… we made a lot of borderline jokes and laughed real, real hard.) Then we ate the most perfect little oysters ever, the sea-blessed goodness nestled into tiny little shells, just the right size. After the oysters, the charcuterie. Which involved: pickled fennel, something kind of spam-colored and textured, but incredibly un-spam like in all other ways. Deep-fried duck. Clearly awesome. Some other little tidbits that I can’t remember because included in this particular charcuterie plate was: foie gras brulee. Goodness on top of goodness. I… I don’t know what to say about it. Just think about it. Caramelized sugar crust (best thing ever) on top of creamy foie gras. Spread on toast-lets with a bright little daub of apricot jam. If foie gras ever gets banned nation-wide, I will have to move because I will die of sadness otherwise.

Moving on. (Gabriel has awesome hair.) After the charcuterie: crab and celery root remoulade, a tangy cilantro-tinged heap of crunchy celeriac and carrot with salty crab. Butter lettuce with more carrots and “saffron-infused garlic.” This was the one thing that was an eensy bit of a letdown. The menu said “carrot dressing” so I was imagining the roots made liquid, a light orange dressing for the best lettuce ever. Instead, carrots and lettuce, both still in their regular ol’ solid form. But still good (and now I have an idea for dressing and all the carrots I’ve been hoarding in the crisper.) Then on to the main courses. Get excited. Hanger steaks for Kate and Dad (with perky watercress perched in the plates), salty pork shoulder for Craig, the famous square Le Pigeon burgers (with killer fries and perhaps-maybe-housemade ketchup, the origin of which called for much taste-testing and speculation) for Dawson and Gabriel, lamb navarin with goat cheese gnocci for Mama (I need goat cheese gnocci in my life, stat), and beef tongue for moi.

Usually tongue is all chopped up beyond recognition, looking more like pulled pork than ex-taster. Not here. a generous hunk of tongue, with crispy roast broccoli and topped with teensy potato chips. I had a big pang of hanger steak order envy when they brought the plates, but that vanished instantaneously with my first bite. Tongue rocks. I’d love to learn to cook intimidating things like tongue and liver and sweetbreads…partly because I love them and partly because I’d feel so incredibly cool buying them at the butcher. After all this deliciousness, dessert. Of course. Coconut cake with passion fruit sorbet (I remembered having my first actual passion fruit in the Redmond’s Jakarta kitchen after years of having passion fruit flavored things and being shocked by the weird shell-like fruit, filled with seeds and slime), creme caramel with raspberry sorbet, and a butterschotch pot de creme, shockingly ordered at the last minute by non-dessert-Dad and shockingly my favorite one of the desserts. All beautiful and delicious, followed up with the good bitter ao a tiny cup of coffee in a beautiful little cup. And with the bill: tiny (teensy tiny) darling little oatmeal macarons.

Love to Little Bird, love to family, love to Redmonds, love to Portland!

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Categories Restaurants, Travels

Lunches

January 28, 2012 //
0

I did some serious lunch-ing this week. Little Uncle on Wednesday, then Bitterroot BBQ on Thursday (which was photographically neglected… return visit necessary) and Le Pichet today. After reading and reading about Bitterroot’s opening (and hungrily mentioning it a bajillion times in Met blog posts) I had to go. Met with a sweet new friend for a light lunch of: buffalo chicken livers, kale, cornbread, and a half rack a’ ribs. Lawdy. I thought I had experienced good barbeque in my quasi-Southern Florida life, but no. Nope. This was a whole world better. The chicken livers were… buffalo wings but with livers instead of wings. Crispy, spicy. Countered with a delightfully dressed little mini-salad of bright greens and lemony mayo-ish dressing. Then the kale, always a winner. With bacon, double winner. And… I have such a gigantic soft spot for cornbread. I crave it every time I think of it. During the snowstorm that forced us all inside to stuff ourselves, I used a half-cup of chili as an excuse to eat about six cornbread muffins. Cornbread, my sweet. And then the crowning glory of our ladylike lunch: RIBS. Oh; yes. I am kind of getting the food equivalent of misty nostalgia about them, just a day later. Caramelized to a crunchy, maple-y crust on the outside, incredibly tender and rich and mmm-I-can’t-even-think-of-a-good-enough-word on the inside. We both kind of did a how-can-that-taste-that-good double take, then polished ‘em off. The waitress kept trying to take our bone-strewn tray away, but we shooed her off till we gnawed off every little rib remnant, talking about restaurants and food and all the while. Then I went to yoga and spent the entire class wondering if I could maybe go back to Bitterroot for dinner.

Then today: Le Pichet, the 1st Ave cousin of Cafe Presse, home to the best omelet in the city. The two other new-girl interns and I decided it was high time we all had lunch together. Plus, we’re all January babies, so we had to celebrate. So up to Pichet we trekked, taking a place at a sunny little table in the sweetly bustling and surprisingly truly Paris-y little cafe.

Thankfully, all of us are sharers, so I didn’t have to go through the agony of choosing one little thing off the menu. For us three workin’(ish… if you aren’t paid can it count as work?) girls: calamari, pork belly, and a charcuterie plate. The calamari, light and airy and one of my favorite things on earth, atop its opposite, the earthy lentil, all lightened by lemon. Pork belly, cooked into crispiness, set atop a haystack of bright celery root, squash, and greens. Then the charcuterie, all delicious, especially the terrines and pates. Smooshed onto slices of delightfully airy white baguette (…with butter). And then a roasted pear brioche, to cap it off. Obviously.

Jessie and Amanda, my intern compatriots, in blurry form.

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Categories Restaurants

Little Uncle

January 25, 2012 //
2

I was in a rush this morning, and all I packed for lunch was a kinda stale whole wheat tortilla and what I thought was a hard boiled egg and a forgotten back-of-the-fridge pear. So…I had to go out for lunch. I was feeling that I needed a smidge of work day adventure, salt, and spice. The kind of salty spicy adventure that only a walk-up Thai joint could offer.

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Jammed into a 3 ft x 15 ft closet on Madison is Little Uncle, kickin little 5-item-menu street kitchen. Run by a husband and wife team, half which used to be the sous chef at fancy Cap Hill restaurant Lark . As foodie intern girl, I’d read lots about Little Uncle, and knew that they now took cards, thanks to that iPhone card scanner new-fangled thang.

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So braised beef cheek bun and pad Thai for Anne it was. Pounded the soft bun stuffed with tender beef and a mini-fistful of cilantro while I waited for my noodles…no time to take a photo. (Wouldn’t want it to get cold or anything.) Then my pad Thai, wrapped in brown butcher paper, secured with a rubber band. Planned to take it back to work, but I honestly could not wait. Stepped up to the stand-and-chow counter, ripped open the steamy package. Inside: noodles tofu eggs bean sprouts shallots green onion, all just a little bit deliciously burnt in that hot wok way. Slice of lime. Packet of crunchy sugar. Packet of hot hot crushed chilies. Smashed the lime on top, getting every last molecule out. Tasted the sugar (sugar? Yes, it’s sugar) dumped some on. Cautiously dipped pinkie in chilies. Yes. H O T. Dumped half of that on. Ate like a frenzied puppy.

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Categories Restaurants

Revel and Sweetness

January 20, 2012 //
4

I have been dreaming of Revel for a long, long time. I read about it in my usual pre-move restaurant lurk session; I read about it almost every day in my perusing of all things Seattle food while being an intern. Best Restaurant, Best New Restaurant, Best Dish. I wanted it. Dumplings, rice bowls, noodles, savory pancakes, KIMCHI. Yes. I needed it. I finally had it. Genia (my foodie sidekick) very sweetly took me out for a night-before-birthday dinner. (Food is the best gift.) Too scared of the icy hills to drive, we bus-trekked from our respective neighborhoods through the snowy “wonderland” that is slush-and-ice-plagued Seattle all the way to Fremont to get ourselves some Korean fusion.

First off: the corned lamb salad, which I never would have normally ordered (especially when there’s salad nicoise up for grabs…) but I saw about ten go out while I read the menu, and they looked dang good. Leftover steak salad’s swanky cousin. Mizuna, see-through thin radishes, falling-apart-tender salty corned lamb, and really really spicy hot dressing. By really spicy hot I mean straight chopped little green chilies hot. By really hot I mean G had to ask for a glass of milk hot. By really hot I mean my Sriracha-loving self was feeling the burn hot. Hot. (But in a good way.)

Then the shrimp and bacon dumplings, which I had dreamed of most (shrimp dumplings are my number one favorite dim sum item) were sadly the least interesting. Just dumplings. Good, not great, Genia and I decided. But next up the mussel pancake, with fennel and coconut. Sounds funky, was delicious. Salty, crispy, sea-y. With the tangy pickled fennel, yeah.

Then the rice bowl: white rice topped with spicy kimchi-ed daikon, lemony greens, and heaven-sent short ribs. Genia and I agreed white rice is such a simple, delicious treat (since we force ourselves to love brown rice the rest of the time.) The daikon was cruncy, the short ribs were killer, the greens were a welcome change from the fried goodness. Topped with little spoonfuls of all the condiments–ginger soy sauce, spicy fish sauce, chili sauce, red bean paste.

Then, stuffed, we debated dessert, coming to the obvious conclusion: Yes. And soon a sweet little bell jar was in our lives: red velvet cheese cake, made pink and earthy with beets, nestled in a crumbly walnut crust. “Really too full for dessert” thoughts faded away quickly. Sweetness. I am developing a terrible sweet tooth. Last weekend I had a cinnamon roll and a waffle for brunch. I cannot stop buying Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups. I walk by the Pike Place muffin guy every morning on the way to work and just “have” to buy a muffin. And to top off all this sweetness in my world, Genia gave me a packet of dark chocolate Tim Tams, sweet sweet Aussie gold. And just a little more sweetness, my sweet new roommate Laura baked me a carrot cake birthday cake, topped with almond flowers. Sweetness abounds.

Since Seattle has pretty much stopped functioning with the snow, I was misled by bus schedules and after dinner I found myself waiting for a bus that would never come. So I tromped on home, over the river and through the woods, up a lot of hills and through a lot of slush puddles, thankful for my Idahoan blood. The walk was sweet in its own way–there’s that weird lovely pink snow-glow outside and everyone has their makeshift sleds out, careening down the closed streets. And pretty train track shadows:

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Categories Restaurants

Benvenuti a Seattle

January 5, 2012 //
2

I’m milking the “new in town” angle before the “I’m a poor intern” reality sets in, and went out for lunch and dinner yesterday. Lunch at Homegrown after yoga and before nannying in Queen Anne (which is becoming my favorite ‘hood) and dinner at much-hyped Bar del Corso with much-missed Genia in Beacon Hill. It was pouring (not raining, POURING) all day, and I was starving after yoga, and as luck would have it, Homegrown was right across the street. Meant to be. Got an avocado breakfast sandwich: grainy whole wheat bun, habanero sauce (pow!), greens, avocado, and a fried egg. Good choice. Spicy, salty. Yolky. Yummy.

Then a few hours playing with my 2 little charges (You can call me Nanny Annie) and their new favorite thing (…and my new favorite thing) in the whole wide world:

Then later on to Bar del Corso. In preparation for interning at Seattle Met, I’ve been doing Seattle food scene research, and everyone is all about Bar del Corso. So we trekked on down to Beacon Hill to see what it’s all about. It is so nice to have foodie friends, friends who get equally jittery about the prospect of a good meal. We arrived to a full-ish restaurant, full for a Wednesday night, and took a couple spots at the par, peeking over into the small open kitchen.

We ordered one of the irresistible specials: deep-fried roman artichoke, then grilled octopus and the requisite margherita pizza. Artichoke… deep-fried, elevated. Crispy leaves made into arti-chips, the heart salty and soft. The octopus was smoky and not chewy, the twirly little tentacles atop a generous handful of warm peperonata, which I of course schmeared on the crusty white bread with joy.

Soon our pizza arrived: thin thin thin, chewy, and charred. That dreamy light sauce made milky by mozzarella. Just enough wrinkled basil. Mmm. I ate my half before Genia even finished her first modest slice. And then, in celebration of Genia’s return from Auz and my relocation and really just becasue we wanted it: buttermilk panna cotta with huckleberry compote. I have a special warm little place in my heart for: A. panna cotta, B. huckleberries. Served simply in a little bowl, with just a touch of buttermilk tang and that special huckleberry magic of sunshine and Idaho mountains and achy backs and stained fingers from a long day picking.

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Categories Restaurants
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