Cornichon.org

Nice to be noticed

Always satisfying to get recognition, isn't it? National recognition at that, for two Seattle companies.

For Belltown's Flying Fish, it's the "Restaurant of the Year Grand Award" from a respected trade mag, Santé. And for Seattle-based InTouch Travel, it's having one of only six "World's Great Wine Tours" in the October issue of Food & Wine.

Kitchen crew and grilled scallops appetizer at Flying Fish.

Santé (which reaches a quarter-million hospitality professionals) cites Flying Fish for its commitment to sustainable food and its professional achievement. It's the only peer-judged restaurant-and-hospitality awards program in North America; Flying Fish was the only northwest restaurant even mentioned. (The Fish, we just want to point out, was our choice for Belltown restaurant of the year (see our 2005 Belltown Bravo! Awa@rds). Last year, Canlis and its sommelier Shayne Bjornholm won the Santé Grand Award for Wine Hospitality.

Speaking of wine: the tour cited by Food & Wine, designed and marketed by InTouch, is led by an English Master of Wine who lives in Bordeaux, James Lawther. (InTouch was also mentioned in the New York Times recently for its innovative cultural programs.) Before she started InTouch, founder Andrea Nims was VP/GM at my previous company, the now-moribund France In Your Glass.

The only other French wine tour on the list, in Burgundy, is run by Lauriann Greene, another erstwhile Seattle resident who had her own classical music show on KUOW for several years before she moved to France. Yes, she also worked for me, all-too-briefly. Sent her off to get some real-world experience. Did she ever.

Don't lettuce poison you

Gulp! As if the world weren't dangerous enough, the latest news from California is particularly disturbing. Seems that lettuce and spinach from the Salinas Valley might be contaminated with the dreaded E. coli O157:H7 bacteria.

Picking lettuce south of Monterey. Los Angeles Times photo

The last time we saw this, it was undercooked Jack-Inda-Box burgers and improperly pasteurized Odwalla juice. This time the excuse is convoluted: infected cow manure gets into streams that overflow into nearby feedlots and pastures; birds drink the water and drop polluted poop as they fly over the lettuce fields. One blighted head of lettuce, the processors argue, could taint the whole operation. Might. Ya can't prove nothin'.

Only solution, short of steaming or sautéing your salad: buy from local farmers, wash the leaves.

Fishy questions, fishy answers

In the wild, salmon are carnivores; unlike, say, vegetarian cattle, they eat smaller fish on the road to our dinner plate. So here's the conundrum: should we buy a fish that's literally eating up the ocean's resources? What's the alternative? Farmed fish raised on an inexhaustible supply of soy pellets, a burger from a feedlot steer, an industrial chicken?

These musings prompted by an op-ed in today's NYTimes by novelist Paul Greenberg. Yeah, fish is fish, but eat smaller fish, he says, to avoid mercury and PCB contamination, and don't buy the cheap stuff; spend what it takes to support the more expensive (but better-for-the-ocean) line-caught fisheries. Lots of save-the-salmon groups out there, too. Long Live the Kings, sponsors of a recent salmon dinner at Flying Fish, focuses on hatchery reform, as good a place as any to start.

Meanwhile, at Fisherman's Terminal, the annual Fall Festival. Highlight: the Wild Salmon Fillet Challenge. So help me, the winner of the heat we videotaped was one "Speedy" Gonzales. YouTube link here. We bailed before they got to the Lutefisk Eating Contest.

Chicken breast for the soul

News from Tampa that a culinary team from Swedish Hospital has won the national championship at the HFM cook-off . (That's the National Society for Healthcare Foodservice Management, dontcha know.) Swedish had already won the annual Ivy Award from the trade mag Restaurants & Institutions two years ago for serving the best, er, institutional food in the country.

Now before you start snickering, ask yourself where it's written that sick people have to eat cold, disgusting crap off a tray thrust at them in their time of misery by some dismal orderly. A tray that 90 percent of the time, by the way, gets dumped into the garbage untouched. Wouldn't it be nice, the thinking goes, to be able to order a tuna melt on rye when you wake up ravenous at 2 AM? Or a midmorning snack of cookies and ice cream? Why not, indeed.

Swedish, to its credit, hired a nutritionist named Robert Caudle to change the staff's approach to food service, which is now in the hands of his successor, Kris Schroeder, and a Paris-trained executive chef,
Eric Eisenberg. Their team of cooks feed 2,000 patients a day; because patients order what they want, when they want it, they actually eat the food, and the hospital actually saves money. The winning dish whipped up by the Swedish crew for the Florida judges: Mojito Chicken Cubanos al Espeton, no less, served with manchego fondue and savory mango-pinto bean purée. (Want the recipe? Click here.)

Footnote: why chicken breast? Ah, because Tyson, that stalwart of corporate and institutional foodservice, was a sponsor. A reasonable tradeoff? Or yet another example of the pervasive influence of agribiz on our industrial food chain?

Keep on forking?

You guys know Charles Ramseyer, the executive chef at Ray's Boathouse, right. Off duty, on the patio at the Elliott Bay Marina, he's having a beer and giving Cornichon a suggested "tag line" for the new videos we'll be posting.

Yes? No? Comments appreciated. Thanks!

No Hour Left Unhappy

Used to be, Happy Hour was, oh, 3 to 5, the idea being to let your neighborhood alcoholics start early so they wouldn't interfere with your after-work crowd. That got to be 4 to 6, precisely to attract the after-work crowd, then 5 to 7, which is now pretty much Seattle's standard. About half the places with early-evening drinks specials have added late-night happy hours as well, 10 to midnight, 10 to closing, that sort of thing. One would think we're a nation of drunks, using those in between hours to sleep it off.

Nope, no longer. Now See Sound Lounge (115 Blanchard; SSL to its friends) is weighing in with a mid-evening Happy Hour, 8 to 10 PM. Recognizing that most of its patrons have already had a bite and a drink by the time they arrive for the late-night music scene, SSL's Kristi Anderson decided to entice them in a bit earlier than usual. Rotating lineup of beers and cocktails for $3. Not just drinks, either: everything on the menu is $5, including SSL's signature crab cakes with lemon aioli. And the movie (last night it was Stanley Kubrick's classic "A Clockwork Orange") thrown in, with the house DJ's techno soundtrack.

So now, with Happy Hour at Umi Sake House running until 8, the whole evening's covered. What a town!

Footnote: have just spent a week in California, where Happy Hours are few and far between. Guess they're happy enough already.

PODCAST

Now look what you've done

So ya tighten border controls and make it tougher for farmworkers to sneak into the country, and what happens? Duh: not enough Meskins to pick the lettuce.

Not just any lettuce, mind you. Organic lettuce. High-margin, climate-sensitive, no-pesticide organic lettuce sold by Wal-Mart. Lettuce some of you asked for because it's healthier. Lettuce some of us want because it's better for the environment. The industrial food complex listened, and the corporate food giants like General Mills begat natural food giants like Cascadian Farm to plant organic vegetables...that are now rotting in California because they can't pick them (not enough Meskins anymore) so now the big boys'll buy their supply of organic lettuce in Mexico (still plenty of Meskins) or Asia (lots & lots of peasants in China) and ship it to the produce section in Laurelhurst and Bellevue where you'll be thrilled to pay the "organic" premium because it's so much healthier and ecologically sound. Right?

Pesky issue. Salon.com has an article today that tars Whole Foods, a leading supporter of local agriculture, with the same "industrial organic" brush. Unfairly, I'd say.

And no, this doesn't mean I'm siding with the enemy. "Supply and demand" requires both supply ("organic" lettuce that happens to be picked by ill-paid, often illegal migrant workers) and demand (ditsy shoppers convinced by the rhetoric that "organic" is worth twice the price). There's really only one kind of lettuce worth buying: locally grown, period. If meat or produce has to travel more than 200 miles, the environmental costs of transportation alone negate any "organic" benefit; if it's boxed, canned or frozen, forget it. Class dismissed.

Listen to this post (1:48)

Pet Neutrality

If Sen. Ted Stevens is right and the Interpet is a series of tubes, then I don't see what the fuss is about. The biggest, fattest cat is always going to win, period.

But wait, there's more.

Neutralized or not, Persians and Siamese shouldn't be eligible for Friskies. And alley cats should be required to work, dammit, before they can apply for welfare...or Fancy Feast. Riding around in Cadillacs, who do they think they are? I say let 'em eat Purina Cat Chow. And they're still a lot better off than dogs in China.

Listen to the podcast :48

Land of plenty

Consider two of the "ten most emailed" articles from yesterday's NY Times (registration required):

* A eight-year-old Scarsdale tot who obsesses over outrageously expensive fashionable jeans
* A nine-year-old African boy who spends his days breaking up rocks that his mother sells for pennies to a cement contractor

New York Times photos: boy in Zambia, girl in Westchester County.

How can we, as Americans, put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation I can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in the food and drink that keeps us from shrieking with moral outrage.

Roman emperors kept the plebes happy with bread & circuses. Marie-Antoinette told the peasants to eat cake. America's industrial food complex feeds us amalgamated, irradiated bar-coded fecal spam.

Well, Rome fell to the barbarians and the French aristocracy went to the guillotine, but we've become so sedated by all that high-fructose corn syrup that we're too fat and happy to rise up in anger.

Wake up, guys! Somebody has to tell Merkins to stop drinking the sweet, deadly Koolaid!

But who? Should it be up us, to the floggers? (New word, short for food bloggers.) Are we the only ones paying attention, or does our vision stop at the edge of the plate? Are we too numbed by nebbiolo and sated by soufflés?

My manifesto: Floggers of the world, unite! We've got nothing to lose but our food chains. Let's stop playing "Rhapsody in Blue Cheese" and switch to something fierce: "Food, Glorious Food!" perhaps. More suggestions, please!

You gonna eat that?

Friday morning update from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here concerns red tide, not vibrio.

Out-of-town friend writes that he loved slurping half-shell oysters at The Brooklyn on a visit last week. But wait, aren't the oyster beds closed because of the dreaded vibrio parahaemoliticus outbreak?

The answer is yes and no. Says Kim Zabel-Lincoln of the state Dep't of Health, it's the worst outbreak they've seen, but it hasn't closed all the beds. Hood Canal, Dabob and Quilcene bays, Totten and Skookum inlets, yup, they're shut down. But plenty of others remain open. Best to check the official website because the rules are different for recreational and commercial oyster-harvesting.

At the Pike Place Market today, some vendors were selling only Oregon and BC oysters; others posted warning signs. Health Dep't thinks things will get better as the water temperature cools; vibrio bacteria don't like cold water...or, as we reported last month, white wine.

An alternative to oysters: mussels. The NY Times was extolling mussels grown off the west coast of France and phoned the chef at Maximilien in the Market--a native of La Rochelle, where they eat mussels like Seattle eats salmon--for a quote. We've enjoyed mussels at almost every café in or around the Market, as recently as lunch today at the Bell Street Diner: a reasonably French mouclade of steamed mussels in a light curry sauce over garlicky mashed potatoes. (Could have used a bit more saffron and a bit more salt, but, hey, $8.95; at Maximilien, the real mouclade is $15.)

Meantime, it's D-for-Duck-Liver-Day in Chicago, the day the ordnance against foie gras was supposed to go into effect. Did it? Hah! In the best tradition of Windy City speakeasies, restaurants served it anyway. Can imagine tomorrow's headline: "Duck Liver on the D-L."

What's for dinner?

Literally at the last minute, Chicago chefs are looking up from their sauté pans and asking, "Hey, why you guys picking on me?"

Foie gras on the hoof at a farm in the Dordogne.

The Windy City's fatwah against foie gras is slated to go into effect next week, but it's taken months for restaurant owners to take matters into their own hands. The Artisan Farmers Association and a new group called Chicago Chefs for Choice announce they'll challenge the ban. The local restaurant association weighs in as well, saying, "We believe the City Council does not have a right to tell people what to have for dinner."

If we believe in keeping the government out of our bedrooms, we shouldn't let them inspect our dinner plates, either.

Cocktail cred

What a workload, what a record! For close to ten years, 3,500 nights in a row, the barkeeps at Tini Bigs have been shaking, stirring & pouring. Not to mention researching, developing & testing, testing, testing. (Who can say as much? 13 Coins and Denny's, those always-open stalwarts, don't have the same reputation for innovative drinks, to say the least.) To celebrate, owner Keith Robbins dropped the price of libations to $3.50...for a couple of hours.

Burning-Man Tini; birthday cake; $3.50 tinis

Meantime, lead bartender Aaron Marshall was named Seattle's Best in a poll of Seattle Weekly readers, and the drink given its name by Cornichon, the Burning-Man Tini, was voted Best Specialty Cocktail. Recipe: Mazama chili-pepper vodka mixed with chocolate liqueur, topped with sweetened cream; glass rimmed with cocoa powder and cayenne; garnished with dried Thai chili.

Footnote: The Burning Man's original moniker was Vulcan. Concern was that Paul Allen, developer of nearby South Lake Union, would not have been amused. Good call.

Tini Bigs, 100 Denny Way, 206-284-0931

Chipping away at freedom

Brits call them chips, we 'Merkins call them fries, those potato sticks cooked in oil. Cooked twice, in fact. They used to be called French fries, until three years ago, when the perfidious, cheese-eating French surrender monkeys refused to line up for our scrimmage against Saddam, the much-derided "Coalition of the Willing." The French honorific was purged, Stalin-style, from the cafeteria menu at the House of Representatives and the potatoes rechristened Freedom Fries. Orwell himself could not have imagined a better outcome.

Alas. That was then, this is now. Without fanfare, Freedom Fries have been replaced. The latest menu, according to an item in today's Washington Times, once again allows our hungry congressional delegations to speak the word "French" if they want a side of America's favorite vegetable with their hamburger or frankfurter. (We don't have anything against the Germans, do we?) No comment from Rep. Bob Ney, the Ohio Republican in charge of the cafeteria, who no longer supports the war in Iraq. That, as we said, was then, and times have changed.

Or have they? Associated Press reports that obese people claim to exercise vigorously and to have healthy eating habits. Denial, it seems, is turning into a national pastime.

Shoot the oyster

Uh-oh, the Feds are getting into the act. First it was the state-level Health Dep't telling folks not to eat bivalves because a bacterium, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, had infested oyster beds in along Hood Canal. Wrote letter to Seattle Times, I did, pointing out that the vibrio bacterium is effectively neutralized in a solution of 12 percent alcohol: in other words, a glass of white wine. Slurp.

But of course the gummint won't tell folks to imbibe. Instead they closed the beds, recalled the oysters, and opened--we kid you not--a marine biotoxin hotline (800-562-5632) and an online biotoxin bulletin.

Slurp. That was last week. Now the heavy hitters from DC have arrived. Food & Drug Admin cites 70 cases of food poisoning, here and on east coast, blamed on bivalves.

Where's Dr. Yi-Cheng Su when you need him? He's the one doing research, at the OSU's Seafood Lab in Newport, that shows wine neutralizes 99% of the vibrio pathogen in 60 seconds. Reported here.

So play it safe: don't slurp that oyster after all. Chew it well and slurp the wine instead.

Listen to this post (1:41):

Lutefisk & Watermelon

Seafood Fest in Ballard this weekend, and it's a tough way to earn $50: win the lutefisk eating contest. Gadhus morua, Atlantic cod, the fish that was to the Vikings and the Basques (yes, the Basques!) what the buffalo was to the Plainsman: sustenance on the road to conquest. Salted, soaked in lye, boiled and baked, it turns into a smelly fish jello, scarfed down by desperate men. Desperate for fifty bucks, at any rate.

The kiddies have an easier time of it: watermelon. The winning strategy: put your face into it! The prize: a brand new bike. Ah, to be a kid again.

How green was my kitchen

Back in Seattle after three weeks in France and straight to the market. Live basil plant, gorgeous red sunflowers, and the good things of summer in the Pacific Northwest: berries, tomatoes, zucchini, sweet onions, peas.

Exciting, dealing with all this bounty! Don't want to waste even a minute clearing the countertop. Slice the tomatoes, top with chopped onions, fresh basil, olive oil, Russell's 532 seasoning (salt, pepper, mystery spice), olive oil, balsamic. Hmm, seems to be room in the center of the tray for another salad. Quick! Mushrooms, yellow pepper, avocado, rice-wine vinegar. Heaven.

Resolution for the rest of the summer: no processed foods. Nothing frozen or shrink-wrapped. To the extent possible, won't buy stuff that comes in a box, bottle or can. Exceptions for milk and yogurt containers. And wine.

Footnote about the Mother & Child sculpture in the kitchen foliage: it's a study for Frederick Littman's popular bronze fountain in Portland's Council Crest Park. Hey, there's the Basilique de Notre Dame in Vézelay, why not a Notre Dame du Basilic at home?

Zizou, USA

Thoughts while watching TV in a leafy Paris suburb:

Almost universally admired, elected to the leadership of his championship team, the embodiment of his nation's commitment to tolerance and diversity ... and yet, while the world watches, he squanders that goodwill in response to a vile but essentially harmless insult. The French are baffled, transfixed by the endless replays of his hotheaded response, saddened by the consequences of his action.

I'm talking of course about the Gallic inability to understand a country that could elect George Bush. A country it admires, yet with leader whose actions it cannot fathom or condone.

My guess: the French will dismiss Zidane's head-butt as an "unfortunate blemish" on a brilliant career. Let's hope, post-Bush, that the 'Merkin invasion of Iraq will be viewed with similar forgiveness.

Meantime, we prepare and share a midsummer supper: Cavaillon melon with Parma ham. Leg of lamb. Provençale tomatoes, fresh green beans. Fruit cobbler. French wine, Italian wine. Food conquers all.

A sense of place

The village of Aloxe lies amidst sloping vineyards less than five miles from Beaune, below a forested hilltop known as the Bois de Corton. And just below the treeline, the famous vineyards of Corton-Charlemagne produce some of Burgundy's most stunning and powerful wines.

At Domaine Senard, in the center of the village, you can taste top wines from the surrounding vineyards--grand cru Corton and Corton Charlemagne--in the course of a hearty lunch. I call it "tasting with your feet." About $50 for the best of the best, an unmatched opportunity to absorb what makes Burgundy unique: that each tiny parcel produces a singular wine, with attributes that cannot be duplicated anywhere else. Here and here alone, Corton Charlemagne.

Domaine Comte Senard, Aloxe-Corton, +333.80.26.41.65

What tripe!

Does tripe make you squeamish? Then feel free to stop reading this now. Go noodle around on eBay or something. Foodies know that the internal organs of bovine and porcine animals--liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines--have long been a part of the human diet. Sadly, we 'Merkins would rather relegate all that good stuff to cat food.

Not here in Lyon. Take Tablier de Sapeur, a superb dish (literally "Fireman's Apron") made with what's known as fraise. Not sweet strawberries but chewy tripe, the lining of beef and veal stomach and intestines. Pounded flat, coarsely breaded and sautéed, garnished with lemon and accompanied by a a sauce gribiche of chopped capers and cornichons, it's the centerpiece of that unique Lyon institution, the bouchon.

In fact, there are always 8 or 9 main courses on the menu here at the Café des Fédérations, the city's most celebrated bouchon, and there are always a few "safe" choices for reluctant tourists (a fluffy quenelle of pike, chicken in a vinegar reduction, pork stew). It's a tiny, convivial spot, with red-check tablecloths, local Beaujolais served in heavy-bottomed pots, 46-centiliter decanters, and a seemingly endless array of appetizers: sausages, salad, duck-liver pâté, poached egg in a red wine sauce, and so on. Cheese follows, then dessert. Nothing like it.

Back to the Fireman's Apron for a second: Seattle readers will find that it resembles, in appearance, preparation and texture, the no-less-exotic Puget Sound geoduck. Surely you're not going to feed that to the cat, are you?

Café des Federations, 8 rue Major Martin, Lyon, +334 7828 2600

French Kiss

No, I'm not talking about the bachelorette party on the prowl in Lyon, nor about the cute waitresses at the Café des Federations.

Besides, the Fed is full on this warm summer evening; they can't possibly squeeze in even one more body, so they send me up the hill to another bouchon serving Lyon specialties, the Comptoir des Deux Places. First time here, and they had me at bonjour: an exquisite plate of lamb tongues covered with a sauce gribiche. Tender slices of tongue, crunchy cabbage as a garnish, and a piquant dressing of mustard, vinegar and...chopped cornichons! Lip-smacking good!

Ham & Cheese

Meet Beaune's Madame Jambon and Monsier Fromage.

She's Anne-Marie Penaud, who has a charcuterie that sells homemade sausages, pates and the town's best jambon persillé. [Had confessed, earlier that there should be an accent aigu on the final e of persille. Thanks to Robin Garr for telling me how to type it so it doesn't come out all screwy with ?? on your screen.] Homemade parslied ham.

The pigs come from local famers, delivered weekly, which are cut up and salted at the back of the shop. The knuckles are simmered overnight to make an aspic, then molded with chunks of ham and lots of fresh parsley. Sliced from a terrine or sold in half-kilo rounds, price is exactly 18.96 euros per kilo Works out to about $11.50 a pound.

He's maitre fromager Alain Hess, who matures and sells artisanal cheeses from the region's goat farmers from an elegant shop on the main square. In his workshop nearby he also makes a cheese of his own. Triple creme studded with mustard seeds. It's called Delice de Pommard, sold worldwide, and it's true to its name. About $5 per each. Breakfast tomorrow! Can't wait.

Poisson for lunch

Wine bar on a pedestrian street here that I've been coming to for 20 years, Bistrot Bourguignon, run by Jean-Jacques Hegner and his wife, Agnès, a hangout for local growers who like to get their bottles into one of the 16 slots. A hangout for jazz fans, too; Jean-Jacques runs the local jazz society.

Dropped by for a glass and a bite to find Pink Martini's "Hang On Little Tomato" playing. Pink Martini! A group from Portland, Oregon!

Hegners under awning; tuna at the bar

Glass of white St. Aubin 1er cru as an aperitif, glass of red St. Romain with the plat du jour, tuna provencale. Grilled fish sits atop flavorful sauteed Swiss chard, next to cylinder of couscous topped with herb-scented ratatouille. There's a fresh tomato sauce, a smokey sour cream sauce and a bit of balsamic on the plate as well. For a $10 luncheon dish, it's a bit over the top, sure. Tasty, though; mighty tasty.

Fromage for breakfast

Back in France, where they eat cheese whenever they can. And not the processed, packaged stuff, either.

This is the Renaissance patio of Le Cep, a delightful hotel in the Burgundian town of Beaune. The cheese--Langres, Epoisses, Chambertin, Aisy Cendre, Saint Andre--comes from Alain Hess, whose shop is just around the corner. A cafe au lait, a croissant, some freshly squeezed orange juice ... and wi-fi.

Does this painting make me look fat?

Pick up the paper, feel queasy. Billionaire buys a Klimt for $135 million. Nestle, meanwhile, pays $600 million for Jenny Craig.

Jenny Craig model; Museum Associates/Agence France-Presse - Getty Image

OK, OK, Jenny dumped Monica years ago. Sorry. (It's Kirstie Alley now, they tell me.) And the Klimt was purchased from legitimate heirs, not looters. (But they had to sue the looters to get it back.)

Will you sleep better at night knowing that a Swiss industrial food corp--the same outfit that airdrops formula to African villages and bottled tap water to Bellevue minimarts--now intends to profit even more from our collective gluttony? The official doublespeak is Orwellian, Nestle talking about its "commitment to nutrition, health and wellness."

Do you feel gratified that the surviving niece who inherited a painting commissioned by her uncle gets an obscenely huge bundle? Or still vaguely queasy?

A lapse of taste

Joint called 520 Bar & Grill, opened last week in Old Bellevue (nothing to do with the bridge) has already perfected the art of removing flavor from food. Used to be, only low-end places like Olive Garden had figured this out. Bistro Romain chain in France, too, where you stuff yourself silly because your brain doesn't get any signals of satisfaction.

520's chicken marsala: a decidedly mixed verdict.

520's menu talks about big-flavored "social plates" and fresh, hearty neighborhood favorites made for sharing. So we take over a fourtop and dig in. Yikes, what a disappointment! Tasteless coconut prawns in an uninspired mango-papaya salsa ($14); Caesar salad ($9) without character, but with a side of salty fries ($2); bland CHAOS salad ($9, supposed to be chicken, avocado and mandarin orange) doused with unsweet honey-poppy seed dressing; chicken marsala ($14) in a sauce that lacked any evidence of marsala; and filet gorgonzola ($16) of unseasoned beef, unseasoned spinach and mildly cheesy sauce. Chicken & beef both bear grill marks, yet remain virginally flavorless. Whoever's frying up those fries ought to do the right thing: at least share the saltshaker.

And this lack of zip doesn't come cheap. A couple of glasses of wine apiece, and the tab, by the time we tip the hapless waitress, is $200! Fifty bucks apiece for wine and apps! Do we feel stuffed? Hardly. Do we feel mellow? Uh, no.

The owners aren't foodies, as if you couldn't guess, but real estate people. On the other hand, Michael Degginger is the exec chef, formerly at Troiani, and ought to know better. Dude, put in an order for some spices, will ya, or else get a patent on that flavor-extracting process of yours.

Listen to this post (2:34):

520 Bar & Grill, 10146 Main St., Bellevue 425-450-0520

One glass at a time

Look who's in Food & Wine magazine's "Ten Best New Wine Lists"...Seattle's own Lindsey Norton of 94 Stewart !

Not bad for a 25-year-old without formal wine training. Then again, she did grow up in a restaurant family; her mother, Celinda, ran a string of cafes in Longview over the years, including the highly regarded Cibo Con Amici, Rusty Duck and Pig Feathers Market before moving to Seattle a year ago. Cindy's the chef and runs the kitchen, Lindsey handles beverages, brother Nic is the cheese steward, dad's the official handyman.

Lindsey's wine list names some 300 bottles, half from Washington, Oregon and California, the balance from Italy, France, and more distant shores. Over a dozen by-the-glass pours, including an $8 mystery wine dubbed "The Brown Bag Experience." Ya gotta guess the grape variety...or ya don't get dessert.

Matching wines to her mom's cooking is Lindsey's strong suit. Every dinner entree comes with a suggestion for an appropriate bottle, from a modest Inama Soave Classico ($38) to wash down the $18 Market Mac to an elegant Domaine Drouhin Oregon pinot noir ($75) to accompany a $30 plate of Copper River salmon. Bottle of bargain bubbly? Sure, a $20 cremant de Bourgogne or a $22 prosecco. Splurge? Sure, there's a Penfold's Grange Hermitage at $350, and a couple of Burgundies in the same range. You'd be better off bringing your own bottle; there's no corkage fee on Sunday nights.

We've been among the cheerleaders since 94 Stewart opened. Now, with a year's worth of downtown Seattle experience, the Nortons are ready to launch a series of monthly, 5-course wine dinners around a communal table starting with Alexandria Nicole Cellars on June 29th.

For her part, Lindsey says she's not interested in getting professionally certified. "Too trendy," she feels. Besides, they're not going to teach inspired answers to questions like this: what to drink with scallops in coconut cream? Why, a gewurztraminer from the Alto-Adige, of course. You can't learn that kind of match by rote; it comes from an exceptional palate and exceptional confidence.

94 Stewart, guess the address, 206-441-5505

Sacred salmon, demon rum

Until the mid-17th century, the Royal Navy would give its sailors daily rations of brandy. Then they captured Jamaica and switched to the local hooch, rum, which they diluted with water & lemon juice. The citrus prevented scurvy, kept the Brits healthier than the French and Spanish, whose sailors were still knocking back brandy; Britannia soon ruled the world.

With such historical cred, you'd think rum would get more respect. Instead, the Temperance Movement named its bogeyman "Demon Rum" and blamed it for every imaginable evil. Until last night, when it was redeemed by its association with the Sacred Salmon.

Lineup of Cruzan (light, dark, Diamond) and Pyrat (XO, Bin 23) rums

The altar was Elliott's, an appropriately ecumenical fish house (oysters, crab, salmon), where chef Jeremy Anderson officiated at a series of ambitious marriage ceremonies, each uniting salmon with grog.

First there was a rum-kippered Copper River King Salmon, dry-cured and marinated in black strap rum, alder-smoked and paired with Cruzan Single Barrel rum. Superb match of sweet and mellow flavors. Grilled Stikine River White King was plated with a vanilla rum-butter sauce and Cruzan Estate Diamond, a savory (and safe) vanilla-on-vanilla combination.

Then came the most imaginative and successful creation by far: the chef's red curry and dark rum treatment of a Taku River wild salmon. But first, a question: what to drink with curry?

The default answer, beer, works only if you want to douse heat and wash away the spices. Yet curry is a blend of exciting flavors, to be savored, not drowned. The answer is spirits--in this case, Cruzan Estate Dark--whose volatile heat actually emphasizes the complexity of the spices. Also on the plate, providing a sweet and crunchy contrast to the curry, were a slaw of chayote squash, some tropical papaya and a lime-melon salsa.

It was one of those unexpected, wow! moments. This is a dish (like Tom Douglas's original kasu cod 20 years ago) that deserves to become a Seattle classic.

Chef Jeremy Anderson plates up Red Curry salmon.

Anderson (who's been getting a lot of mention in Cornichon lately) is a local lad, a grad of Shorecrest HS who attended WSU and the CIA in New York. As an executive chef in the corporate orbit of Consolidated Restaurants, he's got creative freedom in the kitchen without having to worry about filling seats; that's GM Greg Hinton's job. In this case, Hinton's palate for premium rum provided the challenge, and the kitchen's response merited tots of Pyrat Cask 23 ($240 a bottle) all round.

Elliott's Oyster House, Pier 56, 206-623-4340

Crispy, crunchy

They're called Crispy Prawns with lime and ginger, and an order of six costs $4 during happy hour at Belltown's spanking-new Umi Sake House. A generous happy hour it is, with snacks and drinks at reduced prices from 4 to 8 every day on the "front porch."

Wall of sake choices, crispy prawns at Umi

It's past 7 and no longer happy anywhere else on First Avenue, so I sit myself down in a clean, well-lighted, bamboo-paneled and skylit front room whose wooden benches remind me a bit of a high school cafeteria. No matter. Former Bada Lounge has been totally redone to resemble Japanese country house.

Bevy of charming hostesses and servers bring menus for dozens of sake choices, pages and pages of dinner entrees and some 20 bar snacks (sushi, sashimi, rolls, tempura) at about half the cost of the dinner options.

Now, like most Seattle folk, I'm a pushover for shellfish, so I order the aforesaid crispy prawns along with a $5 Hot Sake. Presto, they arrive, the prawns considerably warmer than the sake. Not curled up, either, but mysteriously straighted, each one the dimensions of a Magic Marker, wrapped in egg noodles and deep fried.

The first two or three go down like popcorn. Giant, shrimpy popcorn. Good thing there's a sweet chili dipping sauce for the fourth one. By the fifth, I'm out of sake. By the end, I'm prawned-out, shrimped-out.

Dinner? Hah! And don't even mention breakfast. Turns out there's a guy in England with the screen name Prawn Overdose. I know how he feels.

Umi Sake House, 2230 First Avenue, 206-374-8717

Salvation by salmon

We Merkins are a devout lot. We remember our nation's dead in May, venerate fireworks in July, celebrate the arrival of a boatload of Yerpeen settlers in November. What we don't honor, strangely, is the first demonstration of nature's annual generosity: the salmon run.

(Helpless mankind, sacrificial fish. They've taken care of us for centuries, now it's our turn to take care of them. More on this soon.)

But if there's no official thanksgiving, there are plenty of opportunities these days to eat one's fill of Copper River Kings. Two such just last night.

At Flying Fish, razor clams, black cod, Copper River salmon

You'd think a dinner benefiting Long Live the Kings would go heavy on salmon, no? No. Instead, the repast at Flying Fish celebrated a wide range of northwest seafood: oysters, sweet razor clams, crab, black cod with the creamiest risotto imaginable, and, yes, finally, salmon. All of it local, all of it fresh. Wines from Chinook: wow! cabernet franc with salmon, what a great combination!

Two-thirds of a mile downstream, as the crow flies, eagle soars, or the salmon itself might migrate, at the water's edge on Pier 56, another celebration to give thanks for the salmon's return. Dominic reports from Elliott's Oyster House on Pier 56.

"Dinner here (four courses of salmon) is the cornerstone of Elliott's annual Salmon Gone Wild promotion, complete with "salmon-friendly" wines. The wineries are certified for using sustainable methods – organic farming, proper irrigation, avoiding silt runoff, etc. With different wines paired for all six courses it's clear what made the salmon go wild; by course and glass number five, so were we.

"Seafood's answer to a springtime Thanksgiving was discovered in a Mixed Salmon Brochette. Tender pieces of Copper River King nestled next to white salmon on a couple skewers. Chef Jeremy Anderson fortunately missed the memo that kabobs must be incinerated. These morsels were perfectly cooked, cradled by a bed of browned potato and hazelnut hash and circled by drizzles of Bing cherry and pomegranate reduction. It's too bad for the Pilgrims they didn't land in Seattle."

Too bad for the rest of us, too. Instead of a stupid, flightless buzzard, we'd have the wisest, noblest fish of all.

Something fishy this way swims

No, this isn't another review of Seattle Opera's Macbeth. And no, it's not about evil. Quite the contrary, in fact: it's Seattle's iconic wild salmon, swimming onto our plates just in time to rescue us from the long, dark winter.

Indeed, the concept of Redemption by Salmon is central to our civic religion, our Northwest Faith. We celebrate the Salmon: it dies for us, we eat it and are saved. In gratitude, we expend a fair measure of our riches to assure its immortality.

Okay, maybe that's layering a bit too much theology onto what is, after all, just dinner. Yet here's the irony: two of the city's leading seafood houses have scheduled celebratory salmon dinners on the same night: Thursday, May 25th.

They're not trying to outdo each other with claims of moral superiority, but one cannot help but wonder. Elliott's calls its $75 dinner Salmon Gone Wild, offering four courses of salmon (as carpaccio, fish cakes, gazpacho and mixed brochette). A few blocks away, the $100 event at Flying Fish benefits Long Live the Kings and saves its Copper River bullet for the finale (starting instead with clams, crab-stuffed crepe,and black cod). The two chefs agree on one thing: strawberries for dessert. Peace be with you.

Cornichon will attend both dinners. How? Ronald in Belltown, trusted associate Dominic on the waterfront. We'll let you know ...

Celebration of Seafood, Flying Fish, 2234 1st Ave., 206-728-8595
Salmon Gone Wild, Elliott's Oyster House, Pier 56, 206-623-4340

Getting fresh on the farm

Farmers and fishers turned out: Willie Green's Organic Farm, Taylor Shellfish, Lopez Island Farm, Skagit River Ranch, Full Circle Farm, Whistling Train Farm,, Fall City Farms

Restaurant and catering chefs turned out: Herban Feast Catering, Kaspar's, 35th Street Bistro, Bon Appetit Management Co., Flying Fish.

Serious foodies turned out, too, most notably author and farmer Michael Ableman, who read from his new book, Fields of Plenty.

This was dinner at Fall City Farms in the shadow of Mount Si, a fundraiser for the Cascade Harvest Coalition. Reassuringly familiar phrases were spoken: sustainable agriculture, family farms, bridging the gap between urban and rural, connecting eater and farmer, one fork at a time.

And Ableman, who tended a 12-acre near Santa Barbara for 17 years ("I just wanted to grow the best tomatoes") now describes farming as "one big orgy." Applause from the well-fed crowd. Where do you stand? Oh, sure, agriculture is all about reproduction, but does that mean food is sex? Is the act of eating intimate? Or is it, rather, political?

The man who would be Editor

Little did Jerry Baldwin, Ziv Siegl and Gordon Bowker expect, when they sold their modestly successful coffee company to the determined guy they'd once hired to do their marketing, that he'd turn Starbucks into the world's most frequented brand.

And yet, and yet. Not satisfied with the company's phenomenal growth, Howard Schultz wants to be even more than America's top caffeine pusher, he wants to be our cultural pimp, too. His grand ambition is all over a story on the front page of USA Today: he literally sees Starbucks as the "editor" of American popular culture.

A culture czar? Heaven forfend! We've already got Oprah, Martha, Paris, Ellen and Hilary, not to mention Jon, Rush, the George-Dick-Don-Karl Quartet, and the whole Fox gang. Get in line with the rest of the wannabes, Howard.

"One of the great strengths of Starbucks is our humility," he tells USAT with a straight face, but it's still a naked power grab.

Sure, Starbucks has taught us to drink better coffee, but it's also conditioned us to pay $5 for what used to cost a buck.

Sure, Starbucks supports Fair Trade coffee growers in third-world countries, but it's also selling obscene amounts of calorie-laden drinks and snacks to its own customers.

Sure, Starbucks is turning its stores into comfortable neighborhood magnets, but it's a slippery slope. Once Howard decides he knows what's best for us (uplifting movies like Akeelah and the Bee, CDs by Tony Bennett), who knows what's next? Edsels? New Coke? Koolaid?

Making good

More attention should have been paid to the James Beard awards this year. After three nominations, Scott Carsberg of Lampreia finally won as "Best Chef, Northwest." Backhanded compliment for this modest craftsman: they misspelled the restaurant's name on the website. Sheesh! Then again, most winners have, at some point, cooked a benefit dinner at James Beard House; not Scott. Nor did he attend the awards banquet; it's not his thing. What is his thing? Ah, that would be his meticulously composed tasting menu, the pride of Belltown.

Lampreia's Carsberg, Macrina's cupcake, oyster-guru Rowley, cocktail-guru Hess.

Scott's next-door neighbor, Leslie Mackie of Macrina Bakery, was nominated as "Best Pastry Chef." The Stranger's Sara Dickerman won a food-writing award for her work on Slate.com. Altogether, good haul for Seattle.

And while we're at it, the New York Times has a fine article (free registration required) by Johnny Apple today on Salumi, calling Armandino Batali's culatello the best ham America. Cornichon wrote about Salumi a couple of years ago; here's a look at:the archived photo album.

Couple of weeks back, Apple wrote a wonderful piece about Olympia oysters and the fellow who single-handedly brought them back from the brink of extinction: Jon Rowley. Slurp!

Finally, the current issue of Esquire, featuring "The Best Bars in America." Whew! They didn't ignore Seattle's best, the ZigZag Cafe. Recommends the Deshler: Dubonnet, rye, Cointreau, bitters. Turns out their Northwest correspondent was local cocktail guru Robert Hess. Cheers!

Lampreia, 2400 First Ave., 206-443-3301

Center of the cocktail universe

It's all about the gin, the vermouth, the garnish, the size of the glass, even the temperature of the ice. The folks who know are here in Seattle. Four cocktail luminaries on the dais at the Mayflower Park Hotel: from New York, authors Anistatia Miller and Jared Brown (Shaken, Not Stirred), local guru Robert Hess (drinkboy.com), and celebrity bartender Ryan Magarian. Two dozen people in the audience for a seminar on martinis.

Anistatia Miller and Robert Hess prepare martinis at Mayflower

Surprise number one: the first martini was half gin, half sweet vermouth, with a dash of orange bitters. Botanical elements of vermouth deemed crucial. (In fact, Julia Child drank "reverse martinis," 5 parts white vermouth to 1 part gin. "The perfect drink for swordfish," says Jared.) Order a martini today and all you're likely to get is a giant glass of cold gin (or vodka).

Those sexy, oversize martini glasses? Bah. A cocktail should be of modest size. "It's a 5-minute thing. Drink it while it's still laughing at you," says Anistatia.

There's no consensus among the experts on the "shaken or stirred" question, except that melting ice adds water--a good thing. They also agree that the martini is first and foremost a cocktail, a culinary creation worthy of prime ingredients. "Use fresh vermouth!" says Anistatia. "Measure your ingredients, use fresh ice, pay attention to garnishes," says Robert. "Drink one glass of water per cocktail," says Ryan.

Inevitably, the question turns to "best" spirits. "Do blind tastings," recommends Ryan. For gin martinis, they agree on Plymouth (for its floral edge), though Tanqueray (very dry with notes of lime) is ideal for gin & tonic. Vodka: Ketel One, but Anistatia and Jared have their own award-winning brand, Heavy Water, that's about to go into expanded production. .

"Seattle is a great cocktail town," says Jared. "We say so in our book," says Anistatia. "So's Portland," says Robert.

Related calendar items:

* On May 13th the Museum of the American Cocktail celebrates the 200th anniversary of the first mention of a "cocktail." Kirkland bartender Brandon Williams is among the contestants for best new concoction. Commander's Palace, Las Vegas.

* On June 29th Oliver's, the Mayflower Park's bar and 7-time winner of "Seattle's Best Classic Martini," celebrates its 30th anniversary. Cheers!

Now, what's for lunch?

Roast suckling pig under heat lamp in Seattle; dressing fattened goose on a farm in France.

Pity the parsnip. Artificially germinated, forced to sprout in a furrow, nurtured (if you can call it that) in a bed of manure, raised with indifference, virtually ignored until it reaches market weight. Then it's thoughtlessly deracinated, mechanically decapitated, mercilessly skinned, and, in a final act of stultifying callousness, boiled alive.

Fruit and veg of other species fare no better. Corn is stripped from its parental cob. Parsley is hacked to death. Spinach is chopped and creamed, potatoes routinely whipped, pumpkins eviscerated, grain thrashed and flailed. Who's there to coddle and console a carrot? Provide foster-care for an orphaned banana? Instead, there's jubilation when cherries are doused in alcohol and set afire.

Think about this: by "harvesting" a string bean, we're kidnapping the plant's children. What does it do to our humanity, when, three times a day, we kill vegetables just to feed our voracious animal appetites?

Cruelty to vegetables is a serious concern, hidden from view because farming and gardening appear to be so natural, and questioning "nature's way" isn't politically correct. But lower taxes on farmland means higher taxes for the rest of our property. Plants require a lot of water, and water's not cheap.

Look it up: I'll bet farmers use more than their share of sunlight, too.

Bond: Liver let die?

Psst! Bond, James Bond, over here! Do what you like with the girls, shake or stir your vodka martinis however you wish, but keep your mitts off my geese!

This is patently absurd: based on a blatantly terrorist video produced by PETA and narrated by Bond2's Roger Moore, the Chicago city council votes to ban the goose liver delicacy known as foie gras

Couple of updates to recent posts: The Stranger discovers Cascadia's miniburgers, fails to mention ill-mannered bar patron ... Seattle Weekly's Roger Downey spews venom at the Washington Wine Commission's botched "Taste Washington" event ... As expected, Tini Bigs renames the Vulcan, its spicy chocolate concoction. Press release credits Cornichon with the new name, Burning Man Tini. Forgive me, Larry Harvey.

First-Person Food

What's that, you ask? First person: if you grew it, found it, caught it or shot it yourself, there's no intermediary. If you know the person who did, no more than one degree of separation, that qualifies. In an urban environment, you really can't do better.

Michael Pollan's reading at Elliott Bay Books last week.

Nature writer Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, sets up the challenge: at the end of the industrial food-chain (corn fields, feed lots, chicken factories) is nothing more than an industrial eater with a diet of "amalgamated, irradiated, barcoded fecal spam." The solution: eat local.

Belltown's concrete doesn't present a problem. There's water at our feet, agricultural Bainbridge and Vashon islands a ferry ride away, and a few surviving family farms to the north, south and east. Not always easy for most of us to go that far to pick up dinner, true. So who better to introduce us about first-person food than restaurant chefs?

Shall we get to work on a cookbook concept? "First Person Food: How urban Seattle chefs are teaching us to think globally, eat locally and vote with our forks."

Who'd you like to see in that group? Have a few Belltown candidates, would welcome your suggestions.

Pig Tails

Tamara Murphy of Brasa is the most courageous chef in town. Like many restaurateurs, she wants to feel more connected to the sources of her raw materials. Like her Belltown colleague Chris Keff of Flying Fish, she's particularly impressed by the humane and sustainable practices at Whistling Train Farm, the family farm in Auburn that supplies the suckling pigs for Brasa's signature dish, roast pig with chorizo and clams.

Murphy's passion goes well beyond the fashionable quest for heirloom vegetables. Back in January, she starts a blog, "The Life of a Pig," that follows a litter of piglets from birth to ... well, we know where this is going: to slaughter to kitchen to table. Weekly entries chronicle their lives as they romp, feed and grow.

Murphy down on the farm with piglets ten days ago; loins on the grill tonight.

She writes: "As a chef I am so thrilled to have this opportunity to actually feed them product that will change their flavour. Not only do our pigs get to root in the dirt for bugs, and plants, but items such as sweet potatoes, apples, nuts and berries will be a part of their diet, This is a good life for a pig."

As the piglets approach 100 lbs, it's time for their trip to an approved slaughterhouse in Puyallup. Murphy follows, watches, snaps photos (which she doesn't publish), pokes their livers. An hour later, the piglets are in her walk-in cooler at Brasa. And tonight, 130 guests sit down to a banquet celebrating the piglets' lives.

Nothing is wasted. Trimmings, fat, hearts, livers, kidneys and tongues go into an "everything pig pate." Shoulders, heads, trotters and hocks become a traditional posole. Loins are grilled, riblets smoked. Cracklings from the fatty skin accompany the salad course. Pork belly becomes bacon brittle, served with dessert.

There's even a perfect wine, a pinot noir from Oregon's EIEIO & Co. called, would you believe it, Life of a Pig. $35 a bottle, autographed, simply, "Tamara."

Brasa, 2107 3rd Ave., 206-728-4220

Hu's on first

Prez Hu of China is guest of honor at state dinner chez Gates tonight. Typical chicken-shit: Gov. Gregoire is official host but event is privately financed. Saving grace: decent wines! Would be hard-pressed to find two more worthy representatives of Washington viticulture than this pair:

* Chateau Ste. Michelle, the 2003 Canoe Ridge Estate Chardonnay
* Leonetti Cellar in Walla Walla, the 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon

Both wines come from mature vineyards with well-identified characteristics; both exhibit the subtle signatures of their terroir rather than the flashy hands of a splashy winemaker. Elegant apple and citrus for the chard; ripe berries and cedar for the cab.

How civilized that our business and political elite can sit down with a visiting potentate without false modesty or phony displays of temperance, even if they did have to drum up corporate underwriting. Ya think the earnest voices protesting Hu's visit could raise a glass to the notion of cooperation, consensus & comity?

Fish food

Did I read this right? History prof in Georgia named Stephen Mihm writes, in the New York Times, that prisoners fed healthy food are less violent. Check it for yourself here.

If Prof. Mihm's theory is correct, it would explain why people in Seattle--occasional exceptions aside--are so damn nice: it's the omega-3 in all the salmon we eat.

Squawk and Awe

Me, when I want eggs, I buy them at Trader Joe's for 99 cents a dozen. When landscape designer Jennifer Carlson wants eggs, she reaches into her chicken coop. Not on some farm out in Snohomish County, either, but her backyard in Magnolia. City of Seattle lets you keep three hens on a typical, 5,000-square-foot residential lot.

Under the auspices of Seattle Tilth, Carlson was teaching an Easter weekend class in chicken-coop building at the Good Shepherd Center, explaining everything from construction techniques to sourcing chicks to a dozen or so intrepid urbanites. Why raise poultry in the city? Aside from the obvious (fresh eggs) and the politically correct (recycling), there's this: chickens are funny. They bring a sense of humor to daily life.

No, you don't need a rooster. No, bird flu isn't a danger. Yes, chickens recycle kitchen waste. Can't see doing this on my balcony in Belltown, even though Carlson makes it sound inviting, if not necessarily cheaper; a dozen store-bought eggs a week is only 50 bucks a year, after all. But fresh eggs are sooo much tastier. "It's a lifestyle," Carlson says.

Haven Illustrated LLC, 206-283-9102
Seattle Tilth, 4649 Sunnyside Ave N., 206-632-1999

Deliverance: rethinking the box

Axiom of food blogging: don't just write about the ham sandwich you had for lunch. So before we get started, it was a blackened herb chicken sandwich with roasted red peppers, arugula, havarti and cilantro mayonnaise on focaccia. Moist, tender & delicious. Besides, this isn't about my lunch.

Sure, the pizza joint delivers. The corner deli might deliver, and you can sometimes persuade the neighborhood bistro to send over an idle waiter with a to-go order. Surprisingly, Seattle has only a couple of restaurant delivery companies, and they specialize in bringing dinner to your home.

But what about that staple of the American business day, the noontime meeting with a stack of box lunches delivered to the conference room? Familiar names like Gretchen's Shoe Box Express (part of Schwartz Brothers), Jackrabbit, Larry's. For local office workers, by-now familiar flavors. The barrier to entry in the catering biz is pretty low; anybody can slap together a sandwich.

Now there's a newcomer, serving commercial customers exclusively, B2B Delivery, whose original plan was simply to deliver Costco pastries and pizzas. Early customers wanted box lunches as well, but B2B didn't want to operate a kitchen or commisary. So owners Jeff Pollak and Martin Yamamoto set out to in search of the best deli sandwiches available. What they found was Big Mouth Catering in Bothell. Home run! Staff consensus at my condo: best box lunch sandwich evah!

B2B's business plan: high quality (Alki Bakery's coming aboard shortly), low prices (because they don't hold inventory) free delivery in downtown Seattle and Bellevue (in a couple of Hyundais), build repeat business. So get started and tell the boss to set it up, okay?

B2B Delivery Service, 206-464-4222

One lump or two?

Camel is Mona, dude is Barry, location is across from San Juan Winery on Lopez Island. Latte, if you look closely, is from Tully's. As for the matzoh balls, they appeared--unrelated to the camel--in the course of a very pleasant seder in Seattle. You want more information? Really? Read it here.

Celebrating Seattle's black chefs

New York Times, with annoying & typical provincialism, claims that black chefs are "struggling" [free registration required]. Not so in Seattle, where a culinary star like Daisley Gordon shines at Campagne. More to the point, a baker's dozen black chefs gathered last night to present "Food As Art," a celebration of African-American culinary expertise, annual fundraiser for the Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas.

Subject of a splendid profile in the Seattle Times last month, Gordon shakes his head at the implications of racism in the New York piece. "Coming from Jamaica, all I ever saw were possibilities," he says.

And how's this for possibilities: the most sophisticated chicken sandwich you're likely to munch. Fluffy gougeres stuffed with slices of chicken quenelle (forcemeat of breast, eggs and cream poached in chicken stock) and chopped confit of duck gizzards, dressed with a mustardy aioli. Long, long line at the buffet.

Event co-chair Dana Frank admits being puzzled by the NY Times article. Didn't hurt ticket sales though. Capacity crowd of 350.

Seattle Not-Nice

"So how'd you feel about comping me two of 'em?"

Two of the six mini-burgers the dude just scarfed down at Cascadia. Cuz all of a sudden he decides they're "inedible." This after his girlfiend clicked shut her cell and alerted the barkeep the guy was enroute and "starving." Now, before we go off the deep end, these are one dollar bar snacks, the mainstay of Cascadia's happy hour.


Barkeep demurs. "Let me know next time, I'll order them rare." Keeps his cool.

Me, on the next stool, I'm in the dude's face. Comp two bucks worth of bar snacks? "You're an embarrassment to the neighborhood," I say.

"Ten seconds, I'm going to lose my patience," sez the dude. Nine, eight, seven. Not nice, not nice.

Ejakart: Guns 'n Whores

The place: Shorty's (see below). The dog: Chicago-style, with everything (see below). The scene: Jenna Curtis, in a leather bikini, playing a video game called Target Terror. She's posing for Ethan Jack Harrington, the plein-air painter and chronicler of Seattle's street scene whose alternative, indoor work features alluring, partially-dressed women using firearms. No, not Guns 'n Roses; Guns 'n Whores. You might have seen some of the art on the wall at Whisky Bar, where Jenna works as a bartender. Or in the bar's ads in The Stranger. Or in the window of his V Gallery. "Single men and older women notice," he says. "But what sells are the cityscapes."

www.ejakart.com
V, 2222 Second Ave. 206-956-3900

Doggie style

And you wondered how Cornichon was going to segue from Chicago back to Seattle. Well, we've got our own dogs right here in Belltown at Shorty's. Chicago-style, its relishes & condiments in the requisite, frighteningly fluorescent hues, its jalapenos of mouth-searing intensity, its quality questioned only by die-hard immigrants who grew up with the Real Thing.

2222 Second Ave, 206-441-5449

Plastic fish eggs

Vegfest (see earlier post as well) drew a predictable crowd of Birkenstocks to the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall couple of weekends ago, but Dale Sherrow wasn't among them. The owner of Seattle Caviar Company, he had the foresight to lock in the domain name Caviar.com long before Russian mafia types started looting Caspian Sea sturgeon, causing the price of beluga, osetra and sevruga to triple. His solution: caviar from the stable, government-controlled markets of Iran, which keeps the price under $200 an ounce. And alternate sources, like caviar from Montana's Yellowstone River paddlefish, a sustainable fishery priced at an almost-affordable $25 an ounce.

The real thing v. processed seaweed: you get what you pay for.

So what's one to make of that clutch of foodies at Helge Klausen's table, where he's promoting veget>arian Cavi-Art, an imitation caviar extruded from seaweed? Invented in Denmark, Cavi-Art comes in tiny spheres of black, red and yellow, and has a mouthfeel not unlike the finest caviar. It sells for less than two bucks an ounce!

The catch is that it while it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it doesn't taste anything like a duck. At best, it's mildly salty; at worst, it's edible plastic.

But that's precisely Klausen’s point: use it where taste is secondary to looks. As VP of NorSea, Cavi-Art's American distributor, he's not really selling to individual vegetarians. (What the hell was he doing at Vegfest in the first place? One can only wonder.) His real market is the food service industry, where even the appearance of "fancy" can be converted into higher-priced menu items. A dollop of Cavi-Art in an omelet, alongside a piece of smoked salmon or atop a seafood salad, costing next to nothing, is easily worth a couple of bucks extra on the customer's ticket.

The downside is that even caviar, the ultimate luxury food, is no longer immune to being ripped off. Unlike a diamond, caviar, it turns out, is not forever.

Wine kudos

We're quick--too quick, perhaps--to honor luminaries from afar. Distant stars glow seductively, it's true, but home-grown talent shines bright as well. Two examples: Tim O'Brien and Brian Carter.

O'Brien runs the admirable wine program at Salty's On Alki, which I praised here not all that long ago. Oh, the howls of derision I faced from supposedly serious connoisseurs! But O'Brien understands that wine is the actually most egalitarian of beverages. Now the reward: the Washington Wine Commission this week named O'Brien "Washington Sommelier of the Year" and Salty's "Restaurant of the Year." Bravo!

Carter has been a fixture in this state's wine industry for 25 years now and has already garnered all the top awards. What's next? The British wine mag Decanter reports this week that Carter is launching the first American "Euro-blend" winery: blends in the style of Bordeaux, the Rhone and Tuscany. Welcome news, though not yet reported locally. We'll keep you posted.

Here a blog, there a blog

The New York Times is downright schizophrenic. On the one hand, they've put their most popular columnists behind a TimesSelect firewall, forcing online readers to pay up or forego daily doses of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and Bob Herbert.

On the other hand, they're linking to free, staff-written food & wine blogs. Their ponderous restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, has been chruning out for about a month now. There's a promise of livelier writing from wine critic Eric Asimov's whose blog, The Pour launched earlier today.

Asimov promises to avoid the ritualized shorthand of tasting notes and concentrate instead on the pleasures of wine. Can't wait. Meantime, check out his links: online editions of Spectator and Parker are there, to be sure, along with some really idiosyncratic blogs. It's like being turned loose in a friend's wine cellar and finding all sorts of great bottles.

Gift horse

Is Starbucks out to sabotage the American work ethic? So it would seem: they'll be giving away coffee from 10 to noon tomorrow at more than 7,500 of their stores. Half a million 12-ounce Talls.

It would be churlish to point out that a Starbucks Tall is what others call a regular, or even a small. And it's just the brewed coffee. Those lattes, cappuccinos, Tazos and their ilk aren't part of the freebie.

Which is just as well. In fact, maybe it's time to make a list of things you shouldn't drink at Starbucks.

* The whole line of Frappuccino drinks: way too many calories from sugar and fat
* Chantico Chocolate Drinking Chocolate: icky, too sweet
* Those dreadful holiday concoctions: eggnog is a drink of its own, not a flavor!
* Last month's Cinnamon Swirl latte: muddy spice flavor
* This month's Marble Mocha macchiato: ugh! Like drinking a sticky Oreo through a chain link fence.
* The new Canned Iced Coffee: thin, watery and overly sweet (23 grams of sugar).

Isn't it time we recognized that Starbucks is no longer a coffee house but a candy store? An urban dessert bar called, er, Brokebucks? Sweet, seductive, even addictive, but ultimately unhealthy? Trouble is, we don't know how to quit you.

Eat your vegetables!

Vegfest 2006 brought close to 15,000 people to Seattle Center this weekend, where earnest young volunteers handed out samples from over 100 vegetarian vendors. Good news: not everything tasted like cardboard.

Best example: an outfit called Field Roast. Hadn't heard of them before. Not a fake animal meat like Tofukey or even Gardenburger, Field Roast has its roots in ancient Chinese baking techniques and Japanese Seitan. Seattle chef David Lee, working in an artisanal bakery ten years ago, added the bold flavors of European charcuterie--mustard, garlic, wine--to the mix. The result is a dense, rich and savory "grain meat."

Sampled the new line of Field Roast sausages--Italian, Mexican and Smoked Apple--all unbelievably tasty.

Lee runs Field Roast from a production kitchen in Georgetown and sells in 30 states (including PCC stores locally). Some time back, he started another company, Common Meals, to train homeless people as cooks; it's now run by a non-profit entity as FareStart. Clearly, a guy with his heart...and his tastebuds...in the right place.

In like a lion

First three news items on the first day of March:

* Civics in America on the decline. Homer & Bart, one; freedom of speech, zero. That's depressing.

* Agriculture in America on the decline. Fruits & vegetables have less nutritional value than they used to. That's depressing.

* Psychiatry in America provides provides a discouraging response: a new skin patch called Emsam to treat depression. We're going to need a lot of those. As body armor, if nothing else.

Cornichons of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our vitamins! Assuming there's still some B12 left.

Gut feelings about junk food

UPDATE: Just when you're ready to throw in the towel, Alice Waters comes along with some sage advice to restore the soul. A Delicious Revolution indeed!

Harriet Brown, a poet in Wisconsin, gets it. The New York Times printed her Op-Ed essay titled "Go With Your Gut" this week.

Her point, like Mireille Guiliano's in French Women Don't Get Fat, is that we should simply enjoy the food we eat.

Ironically, the Times itself, doesn't get it. An editorial yesterday argues that "Government" should regulate the advertising of junk food to youngsters on TV.

That's the same refrain we hear regularly from the Food-Is-Bad cranks.

Marketing drives the demand for junk food, sure. But the problem's not whiney kids, it's lazy or stressed-out parents battered by the media and the Pleasure Police. The bad guys aren't so much Kraft or the makers of Twinkie's (think of them as co-conspirators), they're the scolds at the so-called Center for Science in the Public Interest. Shame on the Times for listening.

No place like foam

Mistral's ever-changing menu features hamachi, parsnip soup with scallop

The best chef in Belltown, hell, the best chef in Seattle, William Belickis, no longer has a menu. He and his kitchen crew at Mistral ring improvised changes on a classic framework. Last time I was here, there was a 5-course "market menu," a 7-course "chef's menu," and a 9-course "Mistral Experience." There were printed menus and a printed wine list; you could pick your bottles or let the servers pour a glass to match each course. That was then.

Now there's only a brief, uncertain conversation with the waiter, who explains that you've really got one choice: 7 courses or 8. Like a symphony, like an opera, you’re in for a predictable structure: an appetizer (amuse-bouche in French, incorrectly called "amoozay"), a soup, one or two fish courses (that's your choice, remember?), foie gras, a meat course, a cheese plate and dessert.

That's like announcing the team's starting lineup: enough to make you head to the ballpark. Ya gotta know the players; the excitement is the game itself. And what a game it turns out to be!

William Belickis serves a guest; guinea-hen with spinach

The amuse is a piece of sushi-grade hamachi atop shavings of hearts of palm, bits of grapefruit and a gram or two of microgreens; the subtle flavors and contrasting textures are brought together by a remarkable froth with the tangy bitterness of celery.

Celery bubbles? Indeed. More below.

Mistral, 113 Blanchard, 206-770-7799

Now, depending on your relationship to the waves of culinary fashion, bubbles are the next big thing, very in, or already so 20th century. Dude named Ferran Adria, restaurant called El Bulli, north of Barcelona, came up with the notion of foam…turning food into air, if you will. The point is to simultaneously challenge and satisfy your senses; haute cuisine, like fine art, is both intellectual and emotional. You just want dinner, go order a pork chop. Just don’t try it here.

You probably shouldn't try the foaming thing at home, either. You can get fine, stiff and stable bubbles by adding gelatin and shooting your liquid with nitrous oxide, or you can sprinkle in some soy lecithin and use your immersion blender. Using the latte attachment on your espresso machine or your whipped cream charger would just make a mess.

The foam reappears in several of the courses Belickis serves. The kitchen's classic brown butter and parsnip soup comes with an orange crescent of carrot foam next to a seared scallop. Silky snapper features rice beans. A breast of pintade (guinea hen) sits atop salsify surrounded by a saffron emulsion and a swatch of spinach. Wait, wasn't this supposed to be a second fish course? And what's that being served at the next table?

Duck liver with apple crisp, Oregon lamb with swiss chard, mango sorbet

Turns out the chef's menu can vary not just from one evening to the next, but from table to table, depending on the kitchen's rhythm. Nothing's cooking ahead of time, so it's literally "Let's do something with these chanterelles." No amateur hour, though. Chef de cuisine Charles Walpole at the stove, currently assisted by Stacy Fink and Juan Sanchez, has been with Belickis for over two years now.

Artisanal duck liver, seared on just one side so it doesn't dry out, is served atop a comice pear with a dried apple chip and just enough crumbled ginger snaps to evoke an aroma of winter. Oregon lamb is served on a bed of fingerling potato puree and swiss chard. A panoply of artisanal cheeses is followed by a palate-cleansing dessert of mango sorbet atop a slice of pound cake flavored with Meyer lemon.

William (does anybody actually call him Chef Belickis except for the maitre d'?) used to stay in the kitchen, one of the shyest chefs in town. How'd this guy ever get hired at David Bouley’s in New York, let alone start his own place? Now it's clear: it's the modesty of a master. The shave and haircut help, too: he looks ten years younger than he did two years ago; he has a new confidence in the dining room, he seems excited to be ferrying plates out from the kitchen, pouring wine
for his guests.

When I first moved to Belltown, I would peek behind Mistral's curtains and mourn there would be a mere handful of diners at one or two tables. Traffic picked up though. Mistral was doing 100 covers a week two summers ago; the last few weekends have been sold out. No question, William’s modesty, patience and confidence are paying off.

Oh yes, the damages: 7 courses go for $75, 8 courses for $90. Five matching wines are $70, or $100 for a "captain's flight." You'd easily pay three, four, five times as much in New York Paris or Tokyo, but you'd be no happier.

Twist Again

We warned you in late December and early January that this was coming: a confrontation between residents of the Pomeroy and its new tenant, Twist.

The mainstream guys are finally onto the story now: big piece in today's Post Intelligencer describes the concerns of condo owners, although they're made out to be bad guys who want to undercut the mayor's desire to bring more people downtown.

But the real doofus here is Twist's managing partner Ted Rodemeyer, who shows he's got no concern whatever for the neighbors. Dude! You thought you could waltz into Belltown, open a yuppie lounge in a residential building and not face restrictions from the liquor board? "I never would have signed our lease if I'd known these were the rules."

How big a doofus? "If I don't sign [the conditions] I can't get my liquor license so it seems I have no choice but to forfeit my rights as a business owner..."

Forfeit my rights, indeed. Unmitigated chutzpah, that's what it is.

Feb. 16 UPDATE: Seattle Times weighs in; article by Sanjay Bhatt riddled with errors. And Rodemeyer still claims Twist isn't a night spot. I ask you, dear readers, is this the restroom of a fine dining establishment or a club?

"I left my heart in Frappuccino"

Notes from the annual Starbucks shareholders meeting, a razzle-dazzle, stomp-your-feet, clap-your-hands get-together on Wednesday.

Capacity crowd fills McCaw Hall; chairman Howard Schultz

Item: There are now 11,000 Starbucks stores in 37 countries.
Sounds like more than any coffee-addled person could possibly visit. Well, OK, 5 stores a day might be reasonable; would take 6 years. But you'd never catch up: they're opening 5 new stores a day. China, Brazil, Russia, India all huge untapped markets. For that matter, so are small towns across America where, to date, there's only one Starbucks.

Item: Starbucks has 125,000 employees.
If you brought them all to Seattle, they'd fill every seat in Howard's Key, Paul's Qwest Field and George's Safe with thousands more on the streets outside. If you sent them all to the Middle East, you'd have enough "partners" in green aprons to hand-deliver an iced Frappuccino to every American soldier in Iraq.

Item: stock price at all-time high, company's market cap $26 billion.
Almost as much as Weyerhaeuser and Amazon.com combined. If you'd bought $10,000 of SBUX in 1992, you'd have stock worth $650,000 today.

Item: Starbucks serves 40 million customers a week.
Average patron visits Starbucks 18 times a month. It's probably the most frequented retailer on the planet. Average revenue per store: a cool million.

Other news: upcoming products (a bottled Frappuccino, among others), feel-good reinforcement (social responsibility, "the most respected brand in the world"), winding up with a pitch for the first-ever Starbucks movie ("Akeelah and the Bee") and its ever-expanding music sideline.

With that, curtain up for a command performance by 80-year-old crooner Tony Bennett, smooth as a caramel macchiato. And yes, of course he sang "I left my heart." We'd expect nothing less.

"The best is yet to come," Bennett assures SBUX shareholders.

Salty of the earth

It's no wonder that banquet chefs at successful restaurants are easy-going types. They're rarely the owners, they've got a dedicated sales force, and their customers are getting a free meal: pressure's off! Still, banquet chefs don't get nearly enough respect. Who else is going to plate up 200 salmon fillets for your cousin's wedding or stand guard behind the baron of beef at the corporate reception?

Noah Maikisch has been at Salty's on Alki for 7 of his 33 years, running the kitchen for one of the Seattle's busiest banquets-and-catering operations. (The others: the Space Needle, Ray's Boathouse, and the major hotels.)

Sure, it's a great view, but it's the combination of skyline, food and welcome that make Salty's reputation. Get it right, keep it on track (800 brunches on weekends, respectable wine list, a string of "favorite" and "best of" awards from the media) and the wedding planners and corporate event mavens will follow.

Salty's, 1936 Harbor Ave. SW, Seattle, 206-937-1600

Four for the road

And they're off, the leading ladies of Seattle's culinary stage, to do a couple of cameo performances in Washington, DC.

Chefs Smith, Murphy, Keff, McCown

Here's their schedule: Monday, at a fund-raiser for Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton, a "dine-around" reception for 100 guests:

Holly Smith of Cafe Juanita: Wagyu Carne Cruda with Truffled Lardo Crostini
Tamara Murphy of Brasa: Smoked Salmon Tartar with Creme Fraiche, Paddlefish Caviar and Walnut Golden Raisin Crostini
Christine Keff of Flying Fish: Spicy Bigeye Tuna Cones
Sue McCown of Earth & Ocean: "Sweet Oysters on the Half-Shell" and Triple Chocolate Shortbread Cookies

Then on Tuesday, a fund-raiser for Sen. Maria Cantwell, a sit-down dinner for 25:

Smith: Squab Tortellini with Ginger Squab Brodo with Delicata Squash
Murphy: Rack of Suckling Pig with Chorizo, Clams and Pickled Shallots
Keff: Wild King Salmon with Fermented Black Bean Vinaigrette and Cucumber Salad
McCown: Lemon Soaked Cake with Preserved Huckleberries

Sen. Cantwell has a huge 12th Man poster in her office, natch. Don't know what's in store for the Hawks on Sunday in Detroit but the ladies can't lose, can they? Meantime, Sue, can I have an extra one of those sweet oysters, pretty please?

Desert Classic

Making fun of the French is a national sport. Even if you're French. But before we heap more abuse on the Land of the Brie (and risk getting whistled for piling on), let's reflect on something particularly French: culinary talent. The ability to create memorable meals from the ingredients at hand. Classical training is key; it teaches a chef to be rigorous yet flexible.

Before Vincent Gueritault opened his own place on Camelback Rd. in Phoenix 20 years ago, he'd worked at La Baumaniere in Provence, Maxim's in Paris and Le Francais in Chicago; he knew his stuff, and understood that stuffy French food would never fly in casual Phoenix. Instead, he looked to what's usually dismissed (in France and elsewhere) as "peasant food," in this case, the staples of Arizona's Hispanic community. Early-on, he adopted and adapted its ingredients and flavors, enhanced them with classic techniques and gained a reputation as the classiest restaurant in town.

Enroute to the airport we were, and stopped off for a light lunch. Heirloom tomato salad in green, yellow and orange, topped with home-made buffalo mozzarella and a cloud of tiny green and purple arugula, simply dressed with a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar: refreshingly unpretentious. Then one of Vincent's classic appetizers, tamales wrapped around a filling of duck spiced with Anaheim chiles and raisins. Not hard to see why the dish has lasted two decades! For dessert, a classic of the French repertoire, souffle Grand Marnier, delivered in twin ramekins because, the waiter explained, it just cooks better that way.

Not often that a place with a lofty reputation delivers so convincingly. If ya gotta get out of Phoenix, this sure makes a pleasant send-off.

Vincent on Camelback, 3930 E. Camelback Rd., Phoenix, AZ, 602-224-0225

Still thinkin' Reuben

Tacos and enchiladas I'd expect at Scottsdale's Mercado del Rancho Center. Not a genuine New Yawk deli, yet there it is: Chompie's, founded a quarter-century ago by the Borenstein family from Queens.

Now, as you loyal readers know, Cornichon loves a good pickle and a good Reuben, and Chompies offers several on its mile-long menu of mile-high sandwiches. Ordered the variation called Bob's Brisket and glad I did: moist & tender braised beef, grilled red onions, coleslaw, 1000-island dressing, jack cheese, held together by properly grilled [not just toasted] rye. Juicy, with unexpected sweet flavors from the caramelized onions, and crunch from the coleslaw. Pickles crisp and garlicky, too.

Didn't need the side of gravy, or even the fries; Reuben alone well worth the $10.99. No surprise that Chompie's was voted best deli in the Phoenix area.

Chompie's, 9301 E. Shea Blvd., Scottsdale, AZ 480-860-0475

Jolie Croque Madame

Pretty woman, that Jolie Madame. Parisian crooner Charles Trenet sang her praises 20 years before Roy Orbison. The great French designer Pierre Balmain named a perfume Jolie Madame in 1953 (gardenia, bergamot, jasmine, leather).

But hey, enough of this perfume & pop-music vamp. This is a food column, so let's get to the classic Croque Madame, a staple of French cafes for the past century.

3 PM and we're in an elegant development called Kierland Commons on the dividing line between Phoenix and Scottsdale. The place is the tres tres French Zinc Bistro, and the "Off Hour Menu" features an intensely flavored onion soup; mussels steamed with white wine, leeks and thyme; and as ideal a Croque Madame as you can hope for: brioche bread, a layer of bechamel sauce, thin slices of ham, melted Gruyere, and (this is what sets it apart from the Croque Monsieur) a perfectly poached egg.

Served with a (literal) tub of fries, it's all of $12. Add a small carafe of Macon blanc for $8 and you've got yourself a fine, fine meal. Merci, Madame!

Zinc Bistro, 15034 N. Scottsdale Rd., Scottsdale AZ, 480-603-0922

Return of the Pleasure Police

First an international caveat on caviar, now a fatwa against foie gras? That's what Rep. Brendan Williams of Olympia says: he's introduced legislation to ban the force-feeding of birds. Never mind that most American foie gras is produced out-of-state, by a French family (of course) in upstate New York, Williams is against it.

Williams admits he did eat foie gras once, but tells the Everett Herald he didn't know where it came from. (Right, and Clinton didn't inhale.)

Shocked, shocked he was to learn it involved gavage, overfeeding to enlarge the duck's liver, a centuries-old practice that engenders modern outrage when applied to animals but remains enshrined as freedom-of-choice when it comes to Twinkies, Big Macs and venti double-chocolate-chip Frappuccino. With extra whipped cream, please.

By the way, there are some ghastly alternatives to foie gras out there for the PC crowd, made with mushrooms and tofu. Be my guest.

Contended geese--foie gras on the hoof--along the Dordogne River in southwest France.

Gavage with softened grain has been practiced since Egyptian times as winter approaches to encourage the natural accumulation of fat in the goose's liver.

Queen of the Grill

What's all this fuss about "small plates," anyway? Three or four people ordering five or six items, the dishes arriving at your table at the kitchen's whim. Can be fun, sure; can be fatal, too.

At Belltown's venerable Queen City Grill, they've come up with an alternative to small plates, basically an update on family-style: call it the Platter Experience. Everyone's order is served at the same time, but on a single, elegant platter along with individual sets of serving implements. Share or hoard, it's your call.

Platter of appetizers: shrimp cocktail, tuna carpaccio, grilled quail, foie gras on brioche.

Midweek visit. Brick building, Miles Davis, dark wooden booth. Cocktails. Genial GM Robert Eickhof (Il Terrazzo, Rosellini's 410, Il Bistro) sends over bottle of Pommard 1er Cru. Fabulous wine list, moderate prices. We divvy up appetizer platter; favorite is generous nugget of seared foie gras with lush currant & star anise sauce.

Caesar salad follows, with freshly made garlicky dressing. Entrees next, including grilled lobster tail with saffron butter, New York strip loin, and uhu (fancy name for Hawaiian parrot fish).

Entrees & vegetables: lobster tail, Hawaiian uhu, sirloin strip, squash, sprouts, spuds.
Desserts: pear tarte, espresso-chocolate flan, Key Lime pie.

Desserts also arrive platter-style, along with after-dinner drinks. Kudos to chef Alan Davis, who's been part of the Queen's kitchen since it opened.

Queen City Grill, 2201 1st Ave. 206-443-0975

2005 Belltown Bravo! Aw@rds

My year-end Belltown Bravo! Aw@rds, barely worth the electrons they're printed on:

* Belltown restaurant of the year, 2005: Flying Fish. Celebrated its 10th anniversary, completed its transition to suppliers who practice fully sustainable and organic agriculture, continues to reward patrons with treats like oyster happy hour. No mean feat. Bravo, Chris Keff!
* Best newcomer, 2005: Black Bottle. (Cornichon had the first review back in July.) Knows what it wants to be, does it. Bravo, Chris Linker, Brian Durbin and Judy Boardman!
* Newcomer runner-up: 94 Stewart. Bravo Cindy and Lindsey Nelson!
* Best prospect for 2006: Boat Street Cafe
* Best new lounge: Suite 410.
* Best new happy hour menu: all those miniburgers at Cascadia. Bravo, Kerry Sear!
* Wish list for 2006: a pho parlor, please. Pretty please.

We pause to remember those who are no longer with us. The 2005 Belltown RIP roll call: Afrikando, U Wa Kitchen, Barocho, Torero's, Alexandria's, Axis.

That's it for this year, my friends. Oh-Five, you did a heck of a job!

Aux Armes, Cornichons!

The most ominous news of the year, received just today:

A new club called Twist has apparently leased the space vacated by Torero's: an outfit calling itself Good Karma, Ltd., run by a couple of guys from the former Club Medusa on Western (think shootings, think narcotics, think cops-on-the-take).

Medusa, for its part, has been sold to the fine folks who own Cowgirls in Pioneer Square and renamed Venom. Good to know, that.

The Pomeroy's condo owners are busily writing to the Liquor Control Board even as you read this. The 2300 block of First Avenue could become a battleground. To the barricades!

At Rick's gin joint in Casablanca, Viktor Laszlo leads a rousing Marseillaise.

Tomorrow: the 2005 Belltown Bravo! Awards.

Still scraping

We were talking about raclette, the cheese that came in from the cold.

In Switzerland, melted raclette is served rather simply, with boiled potatoes, pickled onions and cornichons; in the French Alps around Grenoble, the custom is to pile on cold cuts as well.

What's been missing, until now, is a way to enjoy raclette in Belltown. Small appliances to the rescue: a French kitchenware supplier, Tefal, makes a table-top raclette grill (sold in the US as T-Fal); it's perfect for the home or, better yet, an intimate evening at a cozy neighborhood cafe.

Laurent and Danielle Baldini, at Le P'tit Bistro, may be newcomers to Belltown but they're veteran ambassadors of Grenoble’s mountain hospitality. Their raclette is accompanied by potatoes baked with shallots and herbs and by a mound of air-dried ham, boiled ham, smoked meats, cured meats and sausages plus a mixed green salad, not to mention half a pound of cheese.

You put the cheese on a non-stick tray and slide it under the grill to melt; pour it over the potatoes one chunk of cheese at a time for a festive (and filling) meal.

Raclette dinners are priced at $23.50 per person, including all the charcuterie. Trick might be to order one with, one without (cheese only, $13) for a terrific night out that doesn't break the bank.

Ah, much has improved for those isolated Alpine farmers since the invention of the snowplow: now they can market raclette year-round!

Le P'tit Bistro, 2616 2nd Avenue, 206-728-4141

Scraping by

Back when cows were cows and men were men, Alpine farms spent snowbound winters in virtual isolation. No grazing on shared mountain pastures, no massive cheeses like Gruyere and Emmenthal made in cooperative dairies where the milk was "cooked" in enormous communal kettles. But cows give milk year-round (though not as much when they're stabled and fed silage) so the resourceful farmers of yesteryear developed secondary products: smaller, intensely flavorful "winter" cheeses like Morbier, Reblochon and Raclette.

Raclette, especially, is the cheese that came in from the cold; it makes a perfect winter dinner. In Alpine lodges, half a wheel of raclette is exposed to a blazing fire until it starts to melt; the innkeeper scrapes off the oozing cheese onto a hot plate. In fact, the French word racler means "to scrape."

In Paris last year I found a restaurant that served raclette grilled on a contraption resembling a medieval torture device. But it worked, melting a hunk of cheese to perfection.

And you can do this at home, too: raclette grills are easily found online for about $50, and raclette cheese is available at The Cheese Cellar in Fisher Plaza; it's $3.99 for a quarter-pound.

My personal preference, no matter what they say about discarding the "inedible" rind: believe not a word. Once the cheese itself is melted, the rind will be all crisp and crunchy.

TOMORROW: Raclette feast in Belltown!

The Cheese Cellar, 100 4th Ave. N., 206-404-2743

Staff of Life

The original name was Biofournil, which made me think the haz-mat squad might show up at any moment. In fact, it was the first US venture of the most successful organic bakery in France, based in Seattle's French sister city of Nantes. And with that combination of innocence, confidence and arrogance that characterizes entrepreneurs of all nationalities, Biofounil shipped its French bread ovens, French bakers, even a supply of its own sourdough starter to Belltown.

True, they'd picked a residential building with no parking for customers and no loading dock for deliveries. And the original configuration had room for barely ten seats: not really enough to make it a lunch spot. It took almost six years, but owner Jean-Yves Fouché finally agreed to remodel...and to rename the place.

It's now called Boulangerie Nantaise and it seats 24. New graphics, new colors, and new packaging, too. They'll do sandwiches, pastries, coffee, soups, just like every other lunch spot in town. All this might be comical except for one thing: the signature baguette, $3. It's a terrific loaf, with crunchy crust and a chewy, slightly sour taste. It's got my vote for Seattle's best-tasting bread.

So why not just call the place Belltown Baguette and be done with it?

Boulangerie Nantaise, 2507 4th Ave., 206-728-1874

Last call

Last day in November, last day of the "25 for 25" promotion that got you a three-course dinner for $25 at some of Seattle's snazzier eateries. Better still, about half of them also offered a three-course lunch for $12.50. At Flying Fish, starter choices included smoked salmon, beet salad or clam chowder; main courses offered albacore, salmon or seafood hotpot; dessert options were pumpkin cheesecake, apple upside-down cake or a grappa brownie.

What's that? You missed the whole thing again? Dude, you gotta get out more.

25 for 25

Belltown Buffet

Comings and goings this holiday week:

Too bad Barocho couldn’t hang on until the Seattle Art Museum’s new sculpture park opens next year (it's said). Their vantage point at Broad and Western was perfect. But they’re closed. And such a dog-friendly place, too. Bizarre orthography didn’t help; it looked like the name of the place was ibARoChO!—a disgruntled Japanese ballplayer, perhaps? Gesundheit!

There's a newcomer at the corner of Fourth and Wall, replacing SID’s. That stood for Seattle’s Italian Deli, except that it wasn’t a deli and wasn’t Italian either. Sid’s was deplorable, yet the apartment building across the street—looking for some local landmark—was named the Sidney. The new place is called Rockin’ Burrito. Maybe they’ll rename the apartments “The Rock.”

Just up the street, El Portal fills the space vacated by 522 Madrid. Owner is Joe Valencia, formerly of El Gaucho; chef is Pedro Aguilar of Veracruz, signature dish is guacamole prepared tableside ($6.75), motto is “Food our mothers would be proud of.”

And yes, it’s no relation to Porta, formerly on Eastlake, now calling itself Porta By the Market.

Down on Westlake, check out Slo Joe’s Bigtime Backyard Barbecue. You may recognize owner Joe Jeannot, a former bartender at Tini Bigs who also used to run several of the most popular hot dog carts in town (including the one at First and Bell, the closest thing Belltown has to an all-night diner).

Sad to see that my favorite liquid-lunch spot, Spice, no longer serves lunch. At least not during the winter. Guess that means no more nooners!

Finally, for this installment of the buffet, there’s a new takeout place at Third and Lenora. At least that’s what the sign says: “Grand Opening – Takeout” But is there a takeout menu? No. Will there be one? Blank stare.

Good deed, good taste

New Orleans chef Susan Spicer (Bayona, Herbsaint, Cobalt) is teaming up with my friends Staci Strauss and Craig McCord from FoodGoods on a worthwhile fund-raiser. Buy this black & green t-shirt ($35); the proceeds go directly to the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund set up through the hospitality industry's Share our Strength organization.

11/14/05 UPDATE: Bayona is Spicer's own restaurant. See reader comments for her association with the other spots.

As for the "Where's Emeril?" flap alluded to by reader Frolic in the comments, it's about this article in the Times-Picayune.

Great idea, guys. Read the completepress release or continue below for additional information.

New York (PRWEB) FoodGoods, a company that creates goods for food lovers, today announced that it will donate all proceeds from the sale of its “may the spice be with you” shirt to the Share our Strength Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. Designed specially by FoodGoods and New Orleans chef Susan Spicer of Bayona Restaurant, the tee celebrates Chef Spicer's eclectic global cuisine to bring hunger relief to those are in need after Hurricane Katrina.

"With so many friends and family in Louisiana and Texas, our hearts
were breaking for the communities hit by the hurricane" said FoodGoods
designer Staci Strauss. "We were thrilled to work with Susan to help
provide for those who are in need. Share our Strength's dedication to
ending hunger was a natural fit; we hope our efforts offer some comfort
to the Katrina victims,"she added.

The black American Apparel shirt is printed with green lettering and
comes in unisex S,M, L,XL, 2XL and 3 XL. The shirt retails for $35.00,
and is available online at www.foodgoods.com or by calling (917) 327-9394.

About Share Our Strength
Share Our Strength is a national nonprofit that inspires and organizes
individuals and businesses to share their strengths in innovative ways
to help end hunger. Their Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund is directed to
local organizations assisting victims in the affected areas. For more
information, check out www.strength.org/act/katrina.

About FoodGoods
FoodGoodsTM is a line of culinarily-inspired soft goods that strives
to promote healthy eating and living while heralding the delectable
words associated with food and wine. The company was founded by Staci
Strauss and Craig McCord in 2004, and is based in Lower Manhattan. The
line of t-shirts, aprons and tote bags, as well as information on
FoodGoods' philanthropic partnerships, can be found online at www.foodgoods.com.

Iron Chef Tom

Celebrity chef Tom Douglas runs Seattle's best-known culinary empire (Dahlia Lounge, Etta's, Palace Kitchen, Lola's), but can he handle the national spotlight? Indeed he can; Douglas bested Masahara Marimoto in this week's episode of Iron Chef America. His secret weapon: smoked salmon with a poached egg.

It came down to taste. One judge complained that her salmon was "too firm" and Tom looked devastated. But a second judge loved it and awarded him enough points for a convincing win. Bravo!

Just in time, too! Look what's on the cover of Sunday's Pacific Northwest:

Jazz at BaiPai

Seattle needs more piano bars, more lounges where a talented musician plays jazz standards. Oh, sure, there's the venerable Mirabeau Room, with a distinguished older gent, the iconic Howard Bulson, at the keyboard on Mondays. But what about something besides Happy Hour sing-along, a place with terrific food, a pianist with real style?

Try BaiPai, a new Thai restaurant in Ravenna, where our good friend Ludmilla is now playing on Friday and Saturday nights.

Owners are veteran chef Jack Kanand and Alex Silagin, a Russian seafood broker. Jack's menu offers traditional Thai dishes (BaiPai means "bamboo leaf" in Thai) with a wide selection of curries. Among the appetizers, the garlic string beans ($6) and banana shrimp cake ($8) have been a big hit. Also enjoyed the pork larb, served in crunchy lettuce cups.

BaiPai, 2316 NE 65th, Seattle, 206-527-4800

Original Original

Suburban Portland, white house just off the freeway: it started here over 50 years ago, now in 25 states: the original Original Pancake House.

Unchanged since last visit, at least two decades ago, though have stuffed myself at offshoots in Scottsdale and Chicago. Signature dish, as ever, is the Dutch Baby, which arrives quivering from the oven, dusted with powdered sugar, begging for lemon juice, melted butter and maple syrup. Only a detour, yet definitely worth the journey.

Original Pancake House: 8601 SW 24th, Portland, Ore. 503-246-9007

Mauro's Passion

Published today, Assaggio Ristorante Cookbook: Mauro's Passion presents dozens of recipes by Belltown's favorite Italian chef, Mauro Golmarvi, for signature dishes like insalata Francesca, sautéed gamberoni, osso buco ala milanese.

Mauro with Assaggio's general manager Kristen Johnson; sautéed gamberoni

Mouthwatering photos (by Angie Norwood Browne) and plenty of good advice, like "Keep it fresh, simple and honest." And "The point is not to make your home kitchen like a restaurant kitchen. It should be the other way around."

You can pick up autographed copies at the restaurant for $24.95 (or go online to read endorsements from Mauro fans Howard Schultz, Greg Atkinson and John Sarich).

Mauro says he wrote the book for his daughter, "future chef Francesca," so she can show it to her friends and say, "This is from my father." Lucky girl.

Assaggio Ristorante, 2010 4th Ave., 206-441-1339

Cocktail Hour

Behold the cocktail, embodiment of Western Civilization. Evolved from ancient technology (distillation was known to Babylonian alchemists 25 centuries ago; medieval pharmacists concocted flavored alcohols) and enhanced by contemporary imagination, designer drinks have graduated from patent medicine to emblems of sophistication.

Unobtrusive doorway; barman Amon Mende adds fresh egg; Pisco Sour

The latest spot to cater to our fascination with retro nostrums is Suite 410, around the corner from Toi on the slippery slope between the Mariners Store and Rochester Big & Tall. Toi’s owners, Damon Maletta and Max Borthwick, had already demonstrated a knack for exotic beverages; their move to Suite 410 has left culinary pretensions behind to concentrate on beverages, period.

They hired drinks guru Ryan Magarian (remember when he was the barman at Zoe?) to develop a list of “resurrected” and “original” cocktails, and brought in Robert Hess (whose website, drinkboy.com, is the authoritative record for cocktail recipes) to train the staff in mixological history.

The result is a lounge that’s gratifyingly serious about its drinks, not in a snobby “battle of the premium vodkas” way, but serious like great restaurants. Serving a vodka-soda would be like the chef sending out an unadorned head of lettuce.

The “chef” at Suite 410 is Amon Mende, lately at Via Tribunale and remembered by downtown imbibers as Murray Stenson’s talented understudy at Café ZigZag. No free-pours here; everything is measured into a mixing glass, some aromatic ingredients literally by the drop. Ice is added only when the blend is perfect. And worth the wait.

Suite 410 isn’t a loss-leader for a dance club with $1 well drinks, not the waiting room for a restaurant. In fact, everything’s the same price, $8.75. Steep but fair. I just hope the throngs of pretty young things packing the joint every night understand what they’re in for: a lounge with real drinks that are hand-mixed, not squirted. A round of shots? Not likely.

Classic and fanciful names alternate on the drinks list. Have you tried a Blackthorn? Gin, Dubonnet and kirschwasser: it tastes like a Manhattan. The Corpse Reviver is lemony, with gin, freshly squeezed lemon juice, Cointreau, Lillet and a drop of Pastis. The Pisco Sour uses an organic egg white; a dash of Angostura bitters floats across the top, providing a fragrant accent of … chocolate!

Amon and his coterie worship at the altar of Audrey Saunders, who opened her own bar, Pegu Club, in New York only weeks ago; worshipful review in Friday's New York Times. She’s the deity, they’re the disciples. We’re fortunate to have an outpost.

Suite 410: 410 Stewart St., 206-624-9911

The Emperor naked, the Perfectionist flawed

Two recent books about megalomaniacs: genial, larger-than-life luminaries of the food and wine world, Robert Parker, the American wine critic, and Bernard Loiseau, the French chef. They both tell of youthful talent that became increasingly ambitious as it ripened. Parker, the most powerful individual in the wine industry, ultimately claimed virtual infallibility; Loiseau, anointed with three Michelin stars but beset with doubts, ultimately committed suicide.

Exceptional books written by sympathetic journalists with inside knowledge. A unique perspective on the private lives of two men with very public working lives.

The Emperor of Wine:the Rise of Robert M. Parker Jr. and the Reign of American Taste by Elin McCoy
The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine by Rudolph Chelminksi

The Emperor of Wine, by Elin McCoy (herself a respected wine writer), describes Parker's steady ascendancy to the pulpit of supreme enological arbiter thanks to his gifted palate and demonic resolve. But those two qualities alone wouldn't have made him Emperor; it took Parker's easy-to-understand 100-point ratings and America's "discovery" that wine wasn't just for effete snobs.

McCoy's conclusion comes down hard on Parker: the tyranny of a single palate, a scoring system that's "a joke in scientific terms" and a misleading indicator of quality or pleasure. Parker, says McCoy, turns wine into a contest rather than an experience. Worse, he brooks no challenge to his authority, to his moral and gustatory infallability.

Cornichon is no particular fan of Parker's, either. Time and again, growers in France have admitted or complained that Parker's popularity is forcing them to make a certain style of wine. Which is why I that wish McCoy--who had full access to Parker over a period of several months--had given us a sense of how a Parker tasting note comes about: Parker in the vineyard or the cellar with the winemaker, Parker in his tasting lab with a sample bottle, at his computer writing out his notes, so we'd what went into the actual publication and could compare Parker's words with McCoy's observations.

One final thing I miss: a clear explanation of how (relatively) small the American market is, even for the very top French estates. I wish McCoy's book explained that the USA accounts for only one-sixth of all French wine exports (Belgium and Denmark buy more French wine than we do). So why did so many French winemakers quickly become such pushovers for an American critic?

The Perfectionist is the saga of Bernard Loiseau, big, outwardly gregarious and confident, inwardly shy and insecure, whose traveling salesman father apprentices him, as a teenager, to the chef at his favorite restaurant. As it happens, while young Bernard is flailing away at his first kitchen tasks, the Michelin guide awards the restaurant three stars. Bernard, who's a competent though not exceptional cook, is awestruck: winning those three stars for himself become his life's obsession.

Bernard is fortunate to find a patron who sets him up at a country inn, the famous Côte d'Or in Saulieu, a once-thriving market town in northern Burgundy now bypassed by the autoroute. No matter: Bernard settles in for the long haul. He assembles a talented team for his kitchen and dining room, he courts the Parisian press, he develops a network of local suppliers. He's unlucky in love (his first wife cheats on him with the maitre d'hôtel) but has a knack for the restaurant business (food journalists adore him); he wins back one Michelin star for venerable auberge, then two.

Now, as Bernard puts it, the trouble with success in the restaurant world is, "C'est jamais gagné." The battle's never over. First you strive for ten or twenty years to reach the top. It's not like training for the Olympics, where a single perfect routine wins you the gold medal; you've got to score a ten every day, twice a day. But then, after you've won, you panic even more: now that you've been given those stars, what if they take them away?

And poor Bernard, though happily married to his second wife, was bipolar. Mostly manic: that was the perfectionist his staff knew, the outgoing giant adored by the media and the public.

(He was ebulliant, too, when I met him in Saulieu in the fall of 1998, eager to discuss his plans for a new bistro in Paris--eventually three--and an unprecendented plan to raise money by being listed on the Paris stock exchange.)

Then third Michelin star did come along, and it seemed Bernard could do no wrong. But the tentacles of darkness were stronger than anyone knew.

A slight slip in one of the guidebooks, a rumor that his third Michelin star was in jeopardy, a change in the culinary fashion dictated by Paris critics: it all took its toll on Bernard.

His manic-depressive disorder--easy to diagnose in retrospect--was never treated. The right medications, it's assumed, could have saved him from his private demons. Instead he succumbed.

Rudolph Chelminski, a keenly observant foreign correspondent, had already written one of the liveliest books about gastronomy, The French At Table, some 20 years ago. This longevity--critical to professional acceptance in France--and his deep understanding of French culinary history gave him unprecedented access to all the actors in this drama, including Bernard himself over a period of many years.

You taste Bernard's recipes, savor his enthusiasm for hospitality on every page. Even as you cringe at his effusiveness, you savor his generosity.

In the end, you mourn his death, but when the latest Michelin guide again awards his restaurant three stars, you recognize that Bernard Loiseau's spirit lives on.

Reuben, Reuben, I've Been Thinking ...

Hunt for Seattle's best Reuben leads to Sport, part of Fisher Plaza at the foot of the Space Needle, beneath mural-size image of the hapless Ichiro. Inside, athletic waitstaff sport STAFF t-shirts, dispense menus and adjust TV screens.

Full sandwich ($11.95) listed as Rueben, not a promising sign. Half sandwich, spelled correctly, comes with a flavorless Fiestaware cup of chicken-tortilla soup ($8.95). Await nursery-rhyme's transport far across the northern sea, but, alas, Sport's Reuben is just a toasted sandwich.

Not bad-bad, mind you: tangy coleslaw, gooey mustard-mayo, sticky Swiss, crunchy rye, but oh-so-bland, unnaturally lean corned beef. No character! I munch in silence as Wolf Blitzer narrates latest Katrina video. Maybe northern sea not such a good idea after all. At least it's a decent pickle.

Sport, 140 4th Ave. N., Seattle, 206-404-7767

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Dude named Bobby Henderson claims on his website, venganza, that an entity called Flying Spaghetti Monster--the intelligent god of pastafarianism--created the universe, that SPAM is Spaghetti & Pulsar Activating Meatballs, and that the proper conclusion to prayers is "Ramen."

Touched by his noodly appendage ... yes, yes, it's a hilarious slam at the hogwash oozing from Seattle's own Discovery Institute. So what's this doing on Cornichon? C'mon, guys, this site is about noodles. Spaghetti is food!

www.venganza.org

Feeling peachy?

End of summer approaches. Yakima beckons, especially given Seattle forecast for a damp Sunday. Perfect time to go, too: Yakima Valley peaches in peak ripeness. Once you're across the mountains, take I-82 as far as exit 44, then head for Donald Fruit & Mercantile and the state's best peach sundaes.

Charming story behind this place. Four years ago, two local farmers and businessmen, Bryan Eglet and Jim Russi, restored the historic building as a gift shop and tourist attraction. Grape grower Dave Minnick, who'd started his own winery, Willow Crest, in 1995, joined them a year later to launch Piety Flats. (The label features the hop kiln across the road from the visitor center.) Bring a picnic; there's a shady orchard out back. As for dessert, you can't get a better deal: one scoop of Tillamook vanilla with those heavenly peaches is $3.25, two scoops for $4.25. Paradise!

Donald Fruit & Mercantile, 2560 Donald-Wapato Rd., Wapato, 509-877-3115

Garden of Eden

Drink is called Adam & Eve. Barman is Alberto Meza, formerly of Alexandria's, now on duty just around the corner at Buenos Aires Grill. Bar has dark wood, dark lighting, nubile patrons, scent of wood smoke.

The way Alberto mixes it: roughly equal parts Belevedere vodka and sour-apple Pucker, splashes of pineapple and lime juice, served in glass rimmed with cinnamon. Tastes like a sour-apple martini to me, with a distracting spicy note; I prefer my vodka less puckered. But Alberto claims it has the same effect on women as Eden's original apple. (Gotta trust your bartender, friends.)

Seductive dancers Patricio and Eva return after Labor Day from a gig in Reno where they're headlining the smash musical review Forever Tango. Meantime, Buenos Aires kitchen continues to turn out sizzling steaks. And Alberto works Friday through Tuesday.

Buenos Aires Grill, 2028 Virginia St., Seattle 206-441-7076

Sipping Supper at Rover's

Wine-tasting dinner with visitors from Michigan and California. Warm summer night at Rover's begins with Gosset Grand Rosé in the garden.

Then Thierry Rautureau starts sending out delectable tastes, starting with a caviar-filled eggshell as sommelier Cyril Fréchier uncorks a stunning 1999 Puligny-Montrachet from Domaine Leflaive.

Next, Chapoutier's 2001 Chante-Alouette accompanies a crab-and-fennel dish.

Then we switch to a much older white, Kalin Cellars 1993 Semillon. A huge diver scallop and a slice of seared foie gras is served to the gents; the ladies get beets with a couscous truffle. We taste from each other's plates, of course.

Now come two magnificent Burgundies: from Jean Grivot, a 1997 Nuits-St-Georges "Les Boudots" and from Louis Jadot a 1999 Vosne-Romanée "Les Suchots." They're textbook illustrations of differing styles: Grivot's rustic and earthy, Jadot's subtle and ethereal.

With the contrasting wines, two great pieces of fish: Copper River salmon and Alaska halibut. Eight people at the table, eight views of which combination was "ideal." Wonderful thing, great wines with perfectly prepared food: one's senses are heightened, concentration deepened, descriptive powers enhanced.

After a pause for cucumber sorbet, a great Bordeaux, the 1985 Chateau Pichon-Lalande. First tried this vintage during a visit to the property in 1989; it's never tasted as good as this: rich, ripe, its youthful fruit giving way slowly to mature aromas of tobacco and leather.

Again, two dishes: lamb medallions for the ladies, venison "burgers" for the guys. Then a trio desserts, which I photographed but don't remember eating. Maybe I didn't?

Rover's, 2808 E. Madison St., Seattle 206-325-7442

Happy-Hunting

Belltown teeming with werewolves, preening for the full-moon prowl: dudes in dungarees and unbuttoned shirts, babes in stilettos and platforms. A new staircase from sidewalk to boisterous deck at Tia Lou's. A third cocktailer and extra barback at Cascadia.

On Western, three bartenders emulate the Stooges at Twilight Martini Lounge. Six bucks for by-the-book Absolut martini, five for goat cheese "fondue." [Memo to Twilight's ad agency: it's Belltown, not "Bell Town," bruschetta, not "bruchetta."]

Surprise, the goat cheese is terrific, steaming hot, heaped with roast garlic, bits of artichoke heart and black olive, accompanied by crunchy crostini.

Starting this weekend, Sunday nights at Twilight will be The Urban Lounge, a hip-hop & club classics music venue (with a dress code, no less).

Random thoughts, while watching sunset through west-facing windows: what's Twilight's relationship to Seattle Opera's twilight production of Götterdämmerung? Nah. Shake it off. The moon, boss, the moon ...

Twilight Martini Lounge, 2125 Western Ave., 206-443-1212

Pellegrini memorial

Angelo Pellegrini, Italian-born author of The Unprejudiced Palate and The Food-Lover's Garden, was devoted to the pleasures of a convivial table; his books--his life, in fact--inspired a generation of foodies in his adopted home of Seattle and throughout the country as well. He died in 1991 at the age of 88 and his books, sadly, are no longer in print.

Pellegrini photo (L) by Bob Peterson

Now, Seattle seafood guru Jon Rowley is heading a campaign to create a memorial: a statue, a bench, an herb garden. Details in the current issue of Northwest Palate. Roger Downey also offers a tribute to Pellegrini in the current issue of Seattle Weekly. Surely this is a project we can all support!

94 Stewart updates

Updating the updates: Friday, August 19th, the august Seattle Times weighs in. Nancy Leson loves 94 Stewart! (Good for Nancy! Take that, P-I!) But isn't the timing just a bit bizarre? Three reviews in ten days? On the field, wouldn't it be called "piling on"?

Thursday's post:

The P-I has finally managed to review 94 Stewart, sending Rebekah Denn. She didn't much like it, though she expresses admiration, as Cornichon did two months ago, for Lindsey Norton's wine expertise.

Context, people! Vivanda, right across the street, has been closed for the past month! Campagne is fancier! Le Pichet is a tad pricier! And please, spare us the "parking can be expensive" routine. This is downtown, we live in a big city. Walk.

On the other hand, Bethany Jean Clement gets it. Her review in The Stranger has the most charming lead: "Walking into 94 Stewart is like finding out your blind date is really, really cute—and has an accent." Love it!

Belltown's P'tit Bistro

They've come to this quiet stretch of sidewalk along Second Avenue from the bustle of Grenoble, in the French Alps--Laurent Baldini and his wife, Danielle Chheng--with the innocence of aliens from outer space; their sole ambition is to replicate on their new terrestrial colony the benevolent institutions of their home planet.

If they succeed where four previous tenants have failed, and we sure hope they do, it will be thanks to their experience as restaurateurs and their enthusiasm as new immigrants.

Le P'tit Bistro is squarely in the cultural tradition of a French neighborhood cafe: it's not a gastronomic restaurant, not a bar, not a lounge, not "casual dining," not fast food, not take-out, but a neighborhood place where you go to eat almost by default. Never mind, for the moment, that Belltown might not be that kind of neighborhood. Laurent and Danielle did virtually no market research before picking this spot; they're here basically because he didn't like Los Angeles, his sister lives in Issaquah, and this property--most recently called U Wa Kitchen--was on the market.

They're offering dinner six nights a week, weekday lunches and weekend brunches. The fare is straightforward: salads, quiches, sandwiches, crepes, desserts (even madeleines!), and a handful of generous dinner items like steak, salmon and lamb chops. Expensive by Belltown standards, although, let's face it, we've been spoiled by happy hours, promotional menus and daily specials.

But if Le P'tit Bistro's relatively high prices are the bad news, the good news is twofold. First, Laurent's a decent cook. He's used to turning out hundreds of plates a day by himself, without complaining. His food tastes good. "C'est simple," he allows modestly. Uncomplicated, unfussy. French home cooking.

The second is that Le P'tit Bistro is already turning into a neat spot, with folks from the adjacent highrise condos dropping in to try it out and running into their neighbors, or people they've seen on the elevator and in the parking garage, or recognize from walking the dog. (Dogs are welcome at the sidewalk tables, by the way.)

"This is the first time I've felt comfortable in this space since I moved here nearly ten years ago," a Seattle Heights resident said, finishing up her dessert crepe at the end of Le P'tit Bistro's first week. Indeed, by providing the community with a new focus, those unlikely French space aliens Laurent and Danielle may have given this stretch of Belltown a soul. Bienvenue! Welcome!

Le P'tit Bistro: 2616 2nd Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121 206-728-4141

Mini expansion

If big is bad and small is good, mini must be better, right?

From its earliest days, Cornichon has been peppered with dispatches from and about Cascadia, star of Belltown's First Avenue sidewalk and home to Seattle's best Happy Hour bar snack, the $1 miniburger.

Now Chef Kerry Sear has taken the mini to a whole new level. Where some restaurants might have bewailed the popularity of a time-consuming, how-can-we-possibly-make-money-on-this, we've-created-a-monster menu item, Cascadia's response is to turn lemonade into nectar: keep the basic burger, add options, and upsell like crazy.

To wit: the classic beef miniburger (still ground from hanger steak, still $1 during Happy Hour) is joined on Cascadia's new menu by wild king salmon and veggie versions ($2 during Happy Hour). All three basic burgers run $3 outside of Happy Hour, and there's a raft of new add-ons: grilled onions ($1), sauteed portobellos ($2), pancetta ($2), even a fried oyster ($3) and barbequed lobster ($4) Tomato, lettuce, pickles and ketchup remain part of the base price, but dijon mustard, homemade mayo, and other condiments cost will set you back four bits.

If you say Mini, a lot of people these days will think of the Mini Cooper. Fair enough. So Kerry found the one he wanted, had it shipped to Seattle, painted it bright yellow and parked it out front.

And he's making the Mini--not his award-winning, soul-gratifying, ego-satisfying gourmet cuisine, but his one dollar burgers--the focus of his catering business. Takes confidence, takes imagination.

Can you picture it? Yellow "Mini-van" shows up at your party with grill; kitchen crew in starched whites dispenses choice of burgers topped with Oregon blue cheese and bites of barbecued lobster drizzled with black truffle butter ...

There's even a new website for the project, www.miniburgers.com. Genius, I tell you. I'm in awe.

Double martinis

Those of you looking for signs of divine intervention can give up now; we're all going to die.

But while we await the inevitable, those three-dollar midday martinis at Spice--previewed on this page a couple of weeks ago--offer temporary solace. At least that was my friend's premise in extending an invitation to lunch. Watching the bartender's two-wristed pour, I had to agree: we're doomed. For the rest of the afternoon at least.

What goes with with martinis? Why not a big, juicy burger? And then another round ...

I'm sure there was some cosmic revelation that afternoon, but it must have evaporated. Maybe I'll try again next week.

Rub-a-dub

Safeway was selling bottom round steaks and roasts for $1.99 a pound ... so I bought several of the roasts [looked like tri tip to me] and made my own rub, just using stuff on hand, starting with ... finely ground French Roast coffee. Added other stuff like garlic powder, salt, crumbled up bay leaf, paprika, and rubbed and rubbed.

Then I seared the roasts one by one [each must have been about two lbs] in a cast-iron skillet, put on a roasting rack, and left them in a 200-degree oven until internal temp reached 140-150 degrees.

Had two parties back-to-back this weekend, first one at my place, second one at waterfront home on Lake Washington in Kirkland.

Carved the meat on the spot, thin-thin-thin, then cross-cut a couple of times for easy mounding on bread. Perfect medium-rare. Accompanied with easy-to-make sauces: a horseradish sour cream [1 oz prepared horseradish, 1/2 cup light sour cream], and a yogurt-mustard blend [half non-fat yogurt, half dijon mustard]. Fresh-baked baguettes from Biofournil that use organic flour and imported sourdough starter from Nantes. Yum, I tell you, yum.

And it was my brother's description of the rubs right here on Cornichon two weeks ago that gave the me the idea.

Adding more prep info: rub night before, refrigerate in plastic bag, roast next day.

More specifics re oven: preheat to 300, insert meat, reduce to 200. Check roast w quick-read thermometer after maybe 3 hours. (Best is if oven is calibrated below 200: you can turn to 150 & leave indefinitely, since interior will not warm past that point.)

Cooking sage Shirley Corriher says you should roast to 110 degrees, then bump temp to 500 for 20 mins to get great crust, but I didn't do that part, figuring that the pan-searing already gives me the flavorful crust I want.

On the Waterfront

Glorious evening. Rainier melting in the southern sky like a gorgonzola ice-cream cone. Across the water, the jagged outline of Olympic teeth. Sails luff, ferries glide.

We're on the patio at the foot of Pier 70, celebrating Cornichon's birthday with a feast at Waterfront Seafood Grill: mussels, calamari, crab salad, swordfish, crab-filled vol-au-vent, gumbo, lobster mashed potatoes. A couple of terrific French wines (Sancerre and Chambolle-Musigny). Couldn't be better.

Build it. They will come.

Black Bottle, at First & Vine in Belltown, opened at 4 PM yesterday without so much as the click of a press-agent's keyboard. Loveliest afternoon of the year, plenty of folks out strolling in shorts and sandals, leashed to dainty doggies. By 7 PM the place was packed.

Black Bottle replaces the unlamented and unfortunately named Two Dagos, Belltown's skankiest and most reviled watering hole. Its reincarnation was shepherded by well-traveled Denver native Chris Linker, who envisioned a convivial, neighborhood place based on Britain's gastro-pubs and Japan's izakayas: informal, full-flavored food to accompany great drinks.

The mandarin cosmopolitan ($7) is served with its own shaker, a welcome touch. The wine list offers two dozen selections under $25, six or seven of them by-the-glass.

In the kitchen, chef Brian Durbin, a veteran of Carribean resort kitchens and Denver's Carmine's on Penn, was training an international crew (Morocco, Sicily, Seattle). His menu is deceptively simple: a dozen or so dishes at $8 a pop, from cumin pork tenderloin on a bed of frisee to a braised artichoke with beet chips to seven-spice shrimp. At first, he was going to serve the shrimp with the heads attached; in the end, they're piled in the center of the plate, take-em-or-leave-em. (I took em; talk about full-flavored!)

Best for last: a chocolate cake filled with vanilla gelato ($7). Yummy beyond words.

Despite first-night jitters, Black Bottle managed to serve some 200 guests. "We were taken by surprise," says the restaurant's designer, Judy Boardman. Not to worry, not to worry. You've got a winner.

A decade of Flying Fish

When Chris Keff was ready to launch Flying Fish, ten years ago, Belltown was still a culinary wasteland. To be sure, Marco’s Supper Club and Macrina Bakery had just opened to keep her company, but her concept of a seafood restaurant with Asian overtones was considered, well, perhaps a bit too “San Francisco.”

Chris had paid her dues: the Four Seasons in New York, McCormick & Schmick and the Hunt Club in Seattle. The flavors were new and honest, with unusual fish (bronzini, opah) and exotic preparations (curries, stir-fries, lemongrass).

Within a couple of years, the Fish was ranked one of Seattle’s top restaurants and Chris herself was named Best Chef in the Northwest/Hawaii by the James Beard Foundation.

From the start, it’s been a hip spot, and as the line snaked out the door and her management responsibilities grew, Chris recruited a talented and unassuming chef Steve Smrstik to watch the stoves, and an experienced, New Zealand-born wine guy, Brian Huse, to build an award-winning wine list and run front-of-the-house.

Then a new building across First Avenue had room for a restaurant, so Chris launched Fandango, but the space was awkward and expensive. She closed it after four years and moved most of the staff back to Flying Fish so she’d have enough people on hand to open for lunch.

And she turned her interests to sustainable agriculture and organic farming. On the restaurant’s 10th anniversary, at the end of July, the Flying Fish menu for the first time carried these words: “All of our raw ingredients are organic or harvested from the wild.”

To celebrate, a gala picnic yesterday down in Kent, at Whistling Train Farm, with family-style platters of king salmon and plump local mussels.

Purple Wine Book

No more stuffy “The wine list, sir.” At Purple Wine Bar & Cafe, it's now “Hey, folks, here’s our new wine BOOK!”

Informal, chatty, cleverly organized, 30-page, lucite-covered volume is much more than a wine list. A separate sheet lists dozens of wines-by-the-glass plus 14 wine “flights.”

Diners at Purple--restaurants in Woodinville and in Kirkland--are accustomed to finding remarkable wines on their own or willing to follow the spot-on suggestions of the café’s knowledgeable staff: little-known grape varieties, obscure regions, unbelievable values, unexpectedly delicious pairings with food.

What they haven’t had, until now, is a book that explains how the staff thinks about wine ....

Purple’s new Wine Book is presented to diners in an industrial-chic, lucite-covered, 8-by-8-inch binder.

“We kind of wanted to debunk the concept of ‘The Wine List’ as an oversize leather binder,” said Purple’s wine director, Christene Larsen. “So we thought, why not design a wine book totally unexpected?”

The restaurant’s philosophy is expressed in a one-page introduction that reminds readers “be sure to enjoy, experiment, appreciate & relax!” Annotated listings follow, concluding with a 6-page glossary of wine terms. In between are descriptions of over 300 bottles, each described with a snappy, perceptive phrase.

Informal and cleverly organized, the book begins with an overview of what wine is all about: “Mysterious, complex, sexy…”

Red and white wines are then grouped by variety and growing region, with a descriptor for each bottle. Individual pages are also devoted to “amusing & interesting” bottles, bargain wines, oversize and hard-to-find bottles.

Three or four lines at the top of each page talk about the wines in each category. For the dozen or so reds from the southern hemisphere, “Ah, New Zealand, so expressive & elegant you can drink them all day long.”

Tucked inside the binder is the by-the-glass list, which features more than 75 reds and whites available for tasting, along with over a dozen of Purple’s signature “flights” of four tastes of related wines.

“The response has been fantastic,” Larsen said. “Instead of putting it aside, guests are reading it throughout their dinners.”

Return of the Liquid Lunch

Gorgeous weather in Seattle, hot sun, deep shadows. Along Fifth Avenue, a sign outside Spice: "The Martini Lunch is Back!" Can it be?

Indeed, indeed, martinis for three bucks until 3 PM. (Regular happy hour starts at 4, drinks are $4.) And here I thought the liquid lunch had gone the way of 78 rpm vinyl.

Are there lots of takers? Not yet, but when the word gets out ...

Wild & Crazy

Kyeong Han, the owner of Belltown's Wild Fish, is making good on his promise to deliver "creative, contemporary" Asian food.

Best example of Han's unorthodox approach is his Dim Sum lunch. Literally translated as "touch your heart," traditional Cantonese dim sum are steamed dumplings, served two or three to a plate from a cart pushed through the dining room. But at Wild Fish, it's something else entirely: an Asian version of the hot Seattle trend of "small plates."

There are $4.50 choices like yakisoba with seafood, salmon teriyaki and Japanese calamari tempura; $3.50 choices like Age Dashi Tofu, Japanese egg roll, and salmon sushi; $2.50 choices like rice, edamame and green tea ice cream. Order any two and you get a bowl of miso and a salad as well.

There's also an astonishingly good sushi bento box for $11 with six pieces of fish, half a tuna roll and half a California roll. Loved it! And I thought I knew all about dim sum. Gulp!

Takes Two

One to cook, one to eat, right?

At Tango, midway between downtown and Capitol Hill, the "cooker" is Michael Bruno. And the eaters are happy indeed. Take, for example, his smoked salmon ceviche: cured in salt, tequila and vanilla, served with onions, red peppers and wasabi beans. Normally $10, it's half-price during happy hour. Mojitos are also $5. My fave, though, is the driest of dry sherries, a Hidalgo "La Gitana" Manzanilla, served in a huge shot glass, $6.

It was supposed to be a ceviche tasting, so we sampled the crab & portobello mushroom [with basil and habanero aioli], the mixta [clams, mussels, calamari and baby octopus in a horseradish-cucumber vinaigrette], the Ecuadorian [shrimp and scallops with tomatoes, avocado, lime and chiles] and the surf-&-turf [sirloin carpaccio dressed with lobster oil].

Ceviche is a catch-all for a style of South American "cooking" with citrus and other acids rather than heat, although sometimes there's a bit of poaching involved as well. And Chef Bruno isn't a purist about his recipes; he's inspired by the ceviche tradition, not just copying recipes.

We're not done by a long shot. Gotta try the Cheap Date [madjool dates wrapped in bacon, drizzled with balsamic vinegar, plated on slices of roast eggplant] and the lush, lush duck confit with spinach, fried onions, walnuts and a pomegranate vinaigrette.

Bruno's ["everybody just calls me Bruno"] take on gazpacho was the happiest thing about our time at Tango: a tasty blend of yellow tomatoes, bright canteloupe and smoky roasted garlic, drizzled with a bit of ancho chile oil and sherried vinegar.

Tango and its sibling, Bandoleone, are owned by Danielle Philippa. She sure knows how to run a restaurant: Tango's been around for almost ten years.

94 Stewart

Today's hot tip is a bistro that resembles Le Pichet and shares its neighborhood: it's called 94 Stewart, which means you won't forget the address.

If the space looks familiar from the outside, you might be thinking of the Garlic Tree. Get over it, and hurry on in. Cindy Norton, a newcomer to Seattle, is the chef, and she’s a fireball. At lunch, the crab focaccia ($12) has what we all crave: plenty of Dungeness crab, moistened with a basil aioli and drenched in cheddar. At brunch, there’s more crab in the Crabby Morning scramble ($14). Come for dinner and start with crab cakes ($14).

Yes, there’s more than crab. A terrific Reuben ($8—and better than the $12 Reuben at Goldberg’s Deli over in Factoria). A burger made with ground lamb. Roast lamb at dinner, too.

Cindy’s daughter Lindsey is the wine steward, and she could teach most sommeliers a thing or two. Sunday is BYO night, no corkage. Tuesday is half-price wines. There’s a specific wine suggestion from the by-the-glass list for every dish on the menu, lunch and dinner. And if you need more libations, there’s a full bar as well.

I'm not crazy about the desserts, but I don't have much of a sweet tooth. And if 94 Stewart isn't yet quite as cozy and steamy as Le Pichet, who cares! In the beginning, Le Pichet didn’t know what it wanted to be, either.

Ah, Tradition!

Who says family traditions have to be sensible? Why not gather the clan on birthdays and eat your age in sushi? Why not, indeed. Michael did it again this year; Dominic is up next, in a month's time. Stay tuned.

Catfight!

Meow!

May 13, 2004: UPDATE in today's Post-Intelligencer. Reporter Mike Lewis has the inside scoop on the duelling covers and offers an insightful look at Seattle's alternative weeklies.

Seattle Weekly's annual guide to local restaurants hit the newsstands yesterday, followed less than 24 hours later by The Stranger's guide ... to Seattle restrooms. Notable because The Stranger's covers usually bear no relation to the paper's content. But look what we have here: a parody of The Weekly's cover. How'd they do that?

Even more pointed is The Stranger's other headline, that Seattle Weekly profits support George Bush's reelection. A bit far-fetched, given the complex web of Village Voice Media's ownership; still, a valid observation.

More fun: the weekly catfight between Seattle Weekly's slutty Date Girl columnist Judy McGuire and The Stranger's Savage Love columnist Dan Savage. Current installment: Judy confesses to a three-way with pictures; Dan reassures a reader that wearing diapers is kinda kinky but not perverted.
The restaurant reviews? No particular surprises. The bathroom reviews? The ladies room at Barca gets a top rating. Ho hum.

Overall, though, I'd have to say that Stranger has drawn first blood. Watch your back, Mossback: Savage claws are out! Rowrr!

Warm Up That Coffee!

Hey, it's the big Specialty Coffee Assoc of America trade show in Atlanta this weekend, so I rummaged through the archives and found an article I wrote 12 years ago about the then-nascent coffee culture. My editors titled it "Jitterbug Perfume," which makes only marginal sense, but it's worth rereading for the fascinating early history of Starbucks and giving credit to the crucial contribution of Seattle writer Gordon Bowker to our collective love of latte. To read the full story, please click here.

Dispatch from Michigan

Dave Morgenstern writes from Grand Rapids:

We hosted a great almost-all-French dinner last Saturday night. Wow!
Warm-ups: Stuffed mushroom caps, blue cheese cream cheese cake - bring a bottle of French (as you can see, that request wasn't followed!)
Amuse: sugar encrusted figs & blue cheese wrapped with bacon - d'Anjou Rosé
Starter: Seared scallops with risotto - La Moussier Sancerre
Entrée: Roast half duck with cherry jubilee, carrots in Grand Marnier, potato with garlic - Louis Jadot Nuits-Saint-Georges
Salad: Greens with fresh strawberries, diced onion, mayonnaise sauce - Laurent-Perrier Rosé Champagne
Cheese: See the attached jpeg - okay, we went with a Port...an old port!
Dessert: lots of chocolate with Banyuls. A late night for many!

Dave, thanks for the deeelicious dispatch! As it happens, I wrote about French cheese earlier today; see the next post.

54 pounds of cheese, please

This just in from Paris: per capita consumption of cheese in France is up 60 percent in the past 15 years ... now just over 54 pounds a year. Seems like a lot, but it's actually not much more than a couple of ounces a day, barely enough to cover a Big Mac. Still, there's no arguing that cheese plays a central role in French gastronomy and it's definitely better stuff than Kraft Singles.
Renée Richard's cheese stall in the Lyon market

Along with the cheese stats comes a survey that food safety & security has supplanted taste as the most important quality that Frenchmen look for in their food. This no doubt in reaction to health scares. Why is it, then, that more than one Merkin politico has slandered the French as cowardly cheese-eaters? Do you think they're just jealous?

Beignets & coffee

Cornichon's a sucker for French food words. And on a Monday morning, what better pick-me-up than coffee and beignets. Here's Kristin Espinasse's post for March 8th, 2004, on her terrific French-Word-A-Day site:

beignet (ben-yay) noun, masculine: 1. doughnut 2. fritter
Also: Beignet aux pommes = apple fritter
Beignets are enjoyed hot or at room temperature, and have various
fillings, such as fruit, chocolate, vegetable, meat or fish... My son
Max likes them tiede (warm) with apple or chocolate inside...

Today's Quote:
Certes, un rêve de beignet, c'est un rêve, pas un beignet. Mais un
rêve de voyage, c'est déjà un voyage.
Of course, a dream about a doughnut is a dream, not a doughnut. But a
dream about a voyage, that's already a voyage. --Marek Halter

Back to Cornichon now. In the US you can dream of a beignet and of travel ... if you lay your head in New Orleans and mosey down to the Café du Monde. Live jazz along with your breakfast, too.

Congratulations to Trama!

Félicitations to Michel and Maryse Trama, the inventive chef and talented designer whose celebrated restaurant, l'Aubergade, has just been promoted to three stars in the new Michelin guide. They're located in Puymirol, a tiny hilltop bastide, midway between Bordeaux and Toulouse.

Cornichon & guests have visited l'Aubergade several times over the past two or three years, and we can attest to this master's skill, vision, and sheer culinary brilliance. Our most recent trip was with the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, when we ate our way across southwestern France in a frenzy of champagne, foie gras, truffles.

In Search of a Better Glass and a Smaller Plate

Cornichon goes looking for wine bars and appetizers ... and can't find what he's looking for in Seattle. So it's off to Portland. Read the whole story as a PDF.

Batali in Seattle

You know Mario Batali, right ? Molto Mario ? Well, he got his love of food from his dad, Armandino, right here in Seattle. And now that Armandino has retired from Boeing and has all the time in the world [just kidding], what better task than a deli, Salumi, a real Italian salumeria. Right in Seattle's Pioneer Square.

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More pictures in this album.

Lunch at Bandol

The Mediterranean comes to Seattle's Pioneer Square. Lunch at the new Bandol restaurant includes a delicious croque monsieur. The frites are particularly yummy.

A Bad Meal In Paris

Why now ? After all, Cornichon is supposed to tell you what's good and why. But here we are ... a rant about a bad meal in Paris.
Scene: the Place des Vosges, one of the most harmonious squares in Paris, in the heart of the Marais, a newly fashionable place to live. And popular with tourists.

Time: lunch hour. Place: a restaurant called Guirlande de Julie, where I'd eaten twice before. Specialty is that hearty cold-weather dish, pot-au-feu. A simple boiled dinner. Beef brisket, broth, fresh winter vegetables [carrots, leeks, onions, potatoes]. With mustard & cornichons. Cornichons in a little crockpot, with wooden tongs to extract them. Ah yes, except that there were no cornichons.

Still, looked great when served. Looked OK on the plate, too. [The French say "in" the plate, perhaps because their plates are more concave than American dishes.]

But yikes, the meat ! Supposed to be meltingly tender. Barely need to approach with knife, it falls apart. Not this time. Tough as a straw mattress. Felt glued together. Almost inedible.

Complained to waitress, Nathalie, who'd already let me know she was a student in economics. Wants to work in tourism, could I help ? Not a chance, sweetheart.

After all, you didn't even remember to bring the cornichons !

Soif Quenches a Thirst in Santa Cruz

Thirsty again, I'm clomping awkwardly along the streets of downtown Santa Cruz on Saturday afternoon in a pair of mark-down sandals from Long?s Drugs, having trashed my tennies in the surf. Fortunately, beachwear was on clearance, so they let me walk off in these for 35 cents a toe. I round the corner at Pacific and Webster and find, in my path, a Sign. Heaven-sent, it seems, to slake my parched palate: Soif.

Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something to deserve this.

In I go and hop onto a stool facing the four-cell, sixteen-bottle WineKeeper. My toes feel better already.

My senses tell me this is a real wine bar for real people. They've just finished a tasting of half a dozen rieslings, any one of which I could still try for $2 a taste. Or a flight of four whites from north-central Italy for $11, or five Tuscan reds for $20.

Blackboard lists seven small plates available for $3.50 even when the kitchen?s closed ? as it is this afternoon, being well short of the 5 PM dinner hour. No matter. Five sparkling wines by the 2-ounce taste or 5-ounce glass. A dozen more whites, from Mount Eden's chard grown in the Santa Cruz mountains just out the door, or the Loire, or South Africa or Austria or New Zealand. Sherries from Spain. Another dozen reds, from nearby Zayante Vineyard to the distant Rhone to Australia. And another dozen dessert wines, from a 5 Puttonyos Tokaji Aszu to a 1964 Madeira. I?m in heaven. No, make that Heaven with Capital H. Spelled www.soifwine.com.

High, high ceilings, walls painted wine-red. Open just about a year now. Two-thirds of the floor space is given over to the wine bar & restaurant, the remainder to an impressive retail store. You can buy any bottle from the store and drink it, from Riedel glassware at your table for an extra $10. Is that a deal or what ?
Which of the 50 choices to try ?

Start with 2001 Greco di Tufo from Umbria, taste for $3.75, glass $6.50. Straw-colored & refreshing. Would be ideal with some seared tuna, but the chef?s on break so I order something already plated up: asparagus with aioli. Perfection ! Bright green spears on a dazzling white plate, offset by nugget of garlicky, lemon-yellow mayo. Paradise. Ready for another glass, shift to sherry: 3-oz. pour of Hidalgo La Gitana manzanilla, $4. Yum ! My kind of sherry, dry & smooth. Ideal for transition to stronger flavors of crostini topped with hummus. Again, nothing on plate to distract from the morsels or detract from focus on wine.

Move on to a red: Ninth Island pinot noir from Tasmania, $3.25. Juicy, reminds me of Oregon pinot more than Burgundy. Had thought about cheese, but it?s still in the fridge and owner Ted Pearson won?t serve it cold. So I go for a bit of the pâté de campagne, thin slices of intensely flavored meatloaf, and a taste of Jean-Louis Chave?s excellent Saint Joseph, $3.50. Polish off the bread. By now I?m ready to drink a toast to my quenched thirst, a flute of sparkling prosecco. Here?s to Soif ! May all our thirsts be slaked with as much elegance.

Kitchen opens as I exit. Fire marshal says he'll allow the next 76 lucky souls to occupy the premises, no more. Hurry in ! Hurry !!