It was mid-morning on a Tuesday, and Luciano Bardinelli had just lit his first cigar of the day, On Sunday, Mother's Day, he'd served a full house; on Monday, he'd packed up his files and belongings. After a lifetime as an owner, headwaiter, manager, occasional line cook, waiter, busboy, Luciano was not going to work in one of his own restaurants. "My first day as a free man."

Luciano (no one calls him Signor Bardinelli for long) had come to Seattle exactly 30 years ago, in 1982. There was no Tom Douglas, no Ethan Stowell. There were no websites to chronicle the comings and goings of platoons of energetic young chefs, no Eater.com, no Voracious, no ChowHound.

Born on the shores of Lago Maggiore, in the northern Italian Alps, Luciano had already managed exclusive restaurants and private clubs in Las Vegas and the Hollywood Hills. One fine autumn day in 1981 he happened to pay a call on a friend in Seattle, and found that the landscape of red and yellow leaves reminded him of home. Within months, he had left the desert and driven to Seattle, the radio of his U-Haul tuned to the Kentucky Derby. ("The winner was a long shot named Gato del Sol," he recalls.)

Luciano became the Godfather to Seattle's Italian restaurant renaissance. He was not a chef by training or temperament; his strong suit was Armani (topped these days by a full head of white hair), served with an urbane elegance. French was the cuisine of prestige back then, but Settebello, his first Seattle restaurant, on Capitol Hill was decidedly Italian. Not low-brow, Spaghetti House meatballs-in-red-sauce but classy, suave northern Italian: osso buco, agnolotti stuffed with veal, tiramisu. In the course of its ten-year run, it changed the way Seattle thought about food--not just Italian food, but restaurant food in general.

One of his cooks was Scott Carsberg, who'd fallen in love with Italian food, and went on to start Lampreia and Bisato; he's the exception: a chef who really knows and understands Italian cooking. A mutual friend says, "Luciano has a point when he says that these Americans go to Italy for three months and think they know how to make pasta and cook Italian food. The soba masters in Japan study the art of making noodles for 15 years, and then spend the next 30 perfecting it. You can't just order it frozen from California." In an interview for the Seattle Times five years ago, Carsberg returned the compliment: "Luciano was the best front man in the Italian genre. He brought modern Italian cuisine to Seattle."

Vancouver, BC, had a similarly gregarious Italian promoter named Umberto Menghi, who'd started building a restaurant empire ten years earlier. Word got around, and pretty soon Umberto sent down his associate, Carmine Smeraldo, to open an outpost in Pioneer Square. Umberto withdrew within a couple of years but Carmine remained; he and Luciano became best friends.

"Carmine and I were the same age. We were like brothers," Luciano told me this week. "After he died in January, I thought, it's time to scale down and do something else."

What he'd been doing for three decades, of course, was opening and running restaurants. A string of them after Settebello: Stresa, Sans Souci, Italianissimo, among others. Sometimes he'd become a minority partner and help out a friend; sometimes he'd make bad bets on a location or a concept; sometimes he'd become distracted by marital problems. His last place, Ristorante Luciano, had a great location, Bellevue Square; a landlord, Kemper Freeman, with a reputation for being hard-nosed; and a clientele of Yelpers quick to complain about high prices and a mis-fired dish.

"I owed a lot of money, but Mr. Freeman released me. And he gave me a going-away party. He paid for 60-70 people." In attendance: Eastsiders who'd been coming to the restaurant regularly, along with a few Seattle diners who'd remained loyal.

At Bellevue Square, a new tenant is already lined up: Spice Route Cuisine, a mid-market Indian restaurant, currently at Crossroads. As for Luciano, after taking some time off for a trip back to Italy, he'll resettle in Morro Bay, Calif., where he has his eye on a little house overlooking the Pacific. "Twenty seats, retired people who come in two-three times a week. I'll go to the market for produce and fish and fix a fresh menu every day." He hopes to be open by mid-summer.

Even before modern agriculture, the Yakima Valley was a bountiful land. In one of the many Native American dialects of central Washington, the word E-ya-ki-ma means "well-fed people."

Apple orchards and hop vines came soon after the rivers and mountain runoffs were channeled for irrigation. The first grapes were the hardy, prolific Concords, whose sweet, fleshy fruit was prized by the Welch's cooperative to make juice and jelly. But Concords sell for $200 a ton, while vinifera like Cabernet and Merlot sell for ten times as much. In 1983, with a couple thousand vineyard acres planted and Washington's wine industry well underway, the Yakima Valley became the state's first AVA. It's easy to see the geography: the valley is bordered on the north by Ahtanum Ridge and the Rattlesnake Hills, to the south by Toppenish Ridge and the Horse Heaven Hills; Red Mountain rises at the eastern end, Mount Adams presides in the western distance.

The valley is defined geologically by a broad layer of fractured basalt topped with silt, loam, loess and cobble. The climate is desert-like during the growing season (only six to eight inches of rainfall, but access to the Valley's vaunted Roza and Kennewick irrigation districts for water), the familiar late-season drop in nighttime temperatures (to maintain a good balance of acidity in the grapes), and cold winters (to kill pests).

Thomas Henick-Kling, who runs the WSU viticulture and enology program sees quite a variety of wines coming from the valley. with more full-bodied reds coming from vineyards on the eastern end (Red Mountain) and more elegant, finely textured reds from the cooler
sites on the northern and southern slopes.

Even so, Yakima Valley hasn't always produced the state's best wines. Paul Gregutt, author of "Washington Wines & Wineries," remarked in 2007 that the AVA wasn't living up to its potential, but by 2010 he was applauding the influx of new talent and recognizing the best of the old-line growers. (The valley's two leading growers, Mike Sauer in Wapato and Dick Boushey in Grandview, don't have wineries of their own.) "It is heartening to see growers and winemakers working together to promote their many strengths," Gregutt wrote in his 2010 edition.

Fully a third of Washington's wine grapes are in the Yakima Valley AVA, and there's room for vineyard expansion. The AVA encompasses 12,000 acres currently planted (including its three sub-appellations, Red Mountain, Rattlesnake Hills and Snipes Mountain) with a total of 82 wineries. The challenge, says Boushey, is finding land that includes water rights.

Appeared originally in EdibleSeatte

The story is straightforward, as grand opera plots go: a naval officer deceives a poor young girl and pretend-marries her, gets her pregnant and leaves town. When she learns, three years later, that he has for-real married someone else, she turns the child over to his new wife and kills herself.

In Madama Butterfly, currently playing at Seattle Opera, this age-old tale of wayward love, of trust and betrayal, is set in Japan (a new and exotic land to early 20th century Europeans), but Puccini's music and the Giacosa-Illica libretto were written for Italian ears: over two hours of nonstop, romantic arias, duets and interludes swirling inexorably toward the Butterfly's inevitable, tragic ending.

The term "cad" may be old-fashioned, but Butterfly's lover, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, is nothing less. Though he woos her well, in a magnificent love duet that ends Act One, he never considers her more than a plaything. Much is made of his "America Forever" sense of entitlement to "pluck the flowers on every shore" he visits. The US Consul, Sharpless, warns him about not to break Butterfly's "trusting heart," but Pinkerton has convinced himself that in Japan, "everything is flexible," even a marriage contract.

Poor Butterfly. When she enters with her bridal party, luminous beneath a golden parasol, she is "the happiest girl in Japan." She gives herself completely to Pinkerton, even though she's promptly renounced by her family. At the beginning of Act Two, abandoned for three years, she still waits for Pinkerton's ship to return. And here, at Madama Butterfly's midpoint, comes "Un Bel Di," the opera's most famous aria, the heroine's gut-wrenching resolve to tough it out, come what may. Alas, as we know all to well, It's all downhill from there.

When Pinkerton does return, he can't even face Butterfly. Too late, he realizes what a shit he's been. Too late, Butterfly acknowledges she's been deceived. "I knew it would end like this," clucks the Consul. (Last year, an American professor wrote a book, "Butterfly's Child"--renamed Benji-- that imagines the youngster growing up \on a farm in the Midwest after Pinkerton retires.) Stefano Secco, the tenor from Milan who sings Pinkerton in this production, says he knows he's done a good job when he gets booed at the curtain call.

But in the end, it's all about the soprano who sings Butterfly. Patricia Racette owns the role, taking us from a giddy teenager thrilled to be marrying an American in a Navy uniform to the sadder but wiser single mom who chooses suicide over dishonor. Racette has lived in Japan and knows firsthand the gestures and movements of a geisha; she has sung Butterfly almost 100 times, most recently at the Met in New York. Vocally, the part demands everything, while physically the Japanese geisha gestures must be precise. If there's an emotion to be manipulated, Racette knows how to wring the heartstrings.

The story, in fact, was originally adapted for the Broadway stage by the American playwright David Belasco; Puccini saw a production in London in 1900 and--though he understood not one word of English--was moved to tears. And, sure, there's a certain irony that in Seattle the American naval officer is sung by an Italian, the American consul by a Canadian, the two Japanese women by Americans, all led by a Bulgarian conductor. If you stood around until the world produced a perfect Japanese Butterfly, you'd still be waiting for the downbeat.

On the HD simulcast at Key Arena on opening night, it was a bit of a surprise to see beer vendors in the aisles before the music started, although there was no intrusive "Getcher programs, getcher peanuts, getcher sooshee!" thank goodness.Instead, the jaw-dropping immediacy of the performace itself. I found that the closeups of the singers made the story seem even more tragic, but my own sense of awe and terror wasn't readily shared. (That essay is here.) Onstage at McCaw, there seemed to be much greater warmth in the audience toward the performers, a greater connection with the artists, and a growing sense of excitement and foreboding that exploded in well-deserved applause at the final curtain.

Seattle Opera presents Madama Butterfly, at McCaw Hall. Performances May 11, 12, 16 & 19 at 7:30 PM; May 13 & 20 at 2 PM. Tickets from ($25 to $244) online at www.SeattleOpera.org, or by calling the box office (206-389-7676) during business hours.

Above: Patricia Racette as Butterfly, Sefano Secco as Pinkerton. Seattle Opera photo © Elise Bakketun

It's not the fervid excitement that used to precede a Sonics game at Key Arena, with vendors in the aisles: "Getcher programs, getcher co' beer, getcher sooshee!" (Not really, but you get the idea). Instead, there's a tranquil anticipation leading up to the first-ever simulcast of a local opera production.

No matter that it's actually happening, live, at McCaw Hall, barely 300 yards away, the premiere of Seattle Opera's Madama Butterfly. The HD screen at one end of the Key is enormous, 50 by 80 feet, dwarfing the evening's live presenters. Previews play: interviews with designers and directors. And, just like the movies, there's a cartoon, the iconic "What's Opera, Doc?" parody of classical Wagner stagings. Then Speight Jenkins steps to the microphone at McCaw and onto the screen, ten times larger than life, to say a few words of welcome.

"Lights!!" someone shouts from the balcony, where spotlights are still glaring. As conductor Julian Kovatchev mounts the podium (in a view from the orchestra pit that non-musicians will never see), the shouting becomes a chant, "Turn down the lights! Turn down the lights!" Just in time, the house lights dim, and the maestro gives the downbeat.

Movie directors have known for decades that closeups do wonders for drawing people into a story. ("We didn't need dialogue; we had faces.") and Madama Butterfly's Patricia Racette spends the next three hours reconfirming her status as the queen of opera in HD opera: She doesn't need to say it: she is big. It's the pictures that got small.

With remarkably few glitches (a split-screen effect in Act III that failed due to a wayward camera), the simulcast was better than the best seat I've ever had at McCaw. No opera glasses needed.

Video director Frank Zamcona (known for the San Francisco Opera's successful "Opera at the Ballpark" series) uses his seven HD cameras to propel the story in ways that you can't see no matter where you sit, where you view the full stage no matter what. In Act I, for example, the camera catches Suzuki overhearing Pinkerton tell Sharpless that he's looking forward to the day he'll marry a "real American wife." No way that a Japanese servant girl like Suzuki could actually understand a word of English, but the cutaway (and Suzuki's arched eyebrow) tells the audience that she's already wary of Pinkerton.

The music continues without interruption. There are no recitatives, no spoken dialogue; everything is sung with dramatic immediacy. We see every twitch in Butterfly's composure. Patricia Racette isn't playing a part or singing a role, she's inhabiting her character with such conviction that we forget we're watching a performance. Even though the story is familiar, the outcome known to every opera-goer, we live Butterfly's anguish, and at the climax, when Butterfly surrenders her child and kills herself, thousands of sports fan gasped in horror.

At McCaw, as Racette took her bows, the audience was on its feet (you could hear them cheering wildly), yet the Key was muted, the crowd strangely silent. Applause, yes, but polite. Almost no one standing. Not because they weren't thrilled, in my view, but because they were numb. It's thrilling to see and hear opera live, and we've been conditioned to respond with applause and calls of bravo at live performances. The hybrid HD experience overwhelms our senses and seems to call for a new set of responses. When we were kids at the matinee, we'd cheer for the cavalry. HD is a different sort of adventure but we should allow ourselves to become kids again and cheer like crazy.

Frank Zamora photo by Jonathan Dean, Seattle Opera

(UPDATE of sorts: this isn't just a Seattle issue; according to the NY Times, it's an HD problem.