Baseball & hot dogs in 2013: Safeco Field from the new Edgar's Cantina
You got your "elite", then your middle class, then the teeming, beer-drinking masses who take you out to the ball game.
Oversimplification, sure. Unfair, without a doubt. Yet this is an all-too-easy (racist, sexist, classist, take your pick) perspective on popular culture. Here's why: let's say you make a car. Who's your market? The guy who's wealthy enough to have a chauffeur? The building contractor who needs a pickup? The guy who just wants to get to work? Now let's say you've got a restaurant. Who are your clients? People who live in the neighborhood? People who share your ethnic background (German, Italian, Mexican)? People with an interest in sophisticated gourmet food?
Ethan Stowell, wearing the baseball cap, owns six restaurants and admits he used to focus on the top two percent of Seattle diners. That's a very small slice of the folks who eat in restaurants, and it's also a hugely competitive sector of the market. Almost everything you read about restaurants in Seattle (and that includes this blog) is aimed that that top two percent. He wasn't doing badly, far from it. But a year ago, when he was offered the chance to consult for Centerplate (the concessionnaire that manages food service at 250 venues nationwide, including the Safe), he didn't pooh-pooh it as a chore beneath his abilities; he welcomed it.
Here we are a year later, Opening Day is next week, and Stowell has come up with an expanded menu for baseball fans. Tacos filled with chicken, beef, pork and tongue. A new chicken torta with an Italian "Milanese" dressing.
Belltown mixologist Anu Apte of Rob Roy has contributed a list of "Edgar's Cocktails" using Zacatecano, a brand of tequila favored by slugger Martinez. "There's nothing like this in baseball," says John Sergi, Centerplate's creative director.
If you get into the hospitality biz because you like the idea of feeding people, it's a lot better to feed hundreds of thousands than just the top two percent. Point being: Stowell has the wherewithall, technically, to recreate the experience of dining in Rome (Rione XIII), of making his own pasta (Lagana), of engaging his fans with special events and "Sunday Suppers." What he's doing at Safeco Field is breaking out of the self-imposed box that limits the appeal of celebrity chefs to the followers of celebrity chefs. He's not on the Guy Fieri low road (thank goodness), but he's making a connection, at the ballpark, with a heck of a lot more diners than could ever squeeze into Bar Cotto or How to Cook a Wolf.
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