surly gourmand

Terra Plata

2012-01-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

1501 Melrose Ave Seattle, WA 98122

206-325-1501

At what point does something stop being innovative and start being cliché? How many repetitions does it take? 200? 1000? I’m sure the first time some 1930’s Hollywood screenwriter, hunched over his Underwood, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, hacked out a scene in which some impetuous hero strides into the villian’s court and does something brash, and in retaliation the villain roars “SEIZE HIM” to his loyal guards, I’m sure that was a breathtaking scene when that was written, but by now it’s boring as fuck. The same goes for “alternative rock”: at first, Eddie Vedder’s hurka durka dang was a refreshing sonic palate cleanser against the creaking falsettos of butt rock, but by the time Nickelback came around, no one gave a shit.

Ingredients, too, can become cliché. Think back to the days of artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes and tapenade and truffle oil and beet salads and, sadly on the horizon, foie gras and, probably at some point, bacon. The first time you ate salty caramel I bet it blew your mind the way your mom blows NBA teams, but now I, and hopefully you, have tired of it.

Which brings me to Terra Plata. Located directly adjacent to Capitol Hill’s ultra-awesome Melrose Building, Terra Plata is inside a sleek and modern room, wedge-shaped, with lots of wooden stuff everywhere, which makes it look like the inside of a canoe. Is the food as stylish as the décor? If you want to find out, read on!

We started with an order of blistered shisito peppers ($7). This was a good price for a big plate of these small green peppers: blistered like a suspicious set of genitals, but much tastier than the unfortunate simile I just made. The shisitos were smoky and sweet, with a weak thin burn of mild heat in the finish.

Stuffed dates ($12) were pretty 1990, filled with a soft core of some variety of tangy, biting cheese, wrapped in a thin crisp film of lardo. I wanted to be all sarcastic about these, but sometimes you really can’t fuck with the classics. Let’s call these stuffed dates the Nirvana’s "Nevermind" of appetizers and move on.

Marrow bones were pricey at $14, The bones themselves were perfectly roasted, sliced lengthwise so you could conveniently sluice out the smoky globs of the melted marrow with your butter knife, but the accoutrements were too fancy and distracting: they only included 4 thin slices of toast, greasy with some kind of sweet marmalade and topped with a supreme of orange and a parabola of sliced red onion. Some awesome but unadorned bread would’ve sufficed. But an order of crispy bronze frites ($6) were super fantastic dipped into the marrow. I heard a muffled “…noooooo…” coming from my chest when I did this. “Fuck you, coronary arteries,” I told my heart, and that rapidly clogging motherfucker promptly shut up so I could continue to fill it with cholesterol.

Roasted Brussels sprouts ($11) were masterful: salty, with crunchy outer leaves but tender centers, with shreds of Serrano ham and some sweet citrusy flavor in the background. If grade-school cafeterias served brussels sprouts like these, kids would not only eat them, they would punch each others’ faces in an orgy of kid-on-kid violence in order to get a second helping.

The beet salad ($11) returned us to 1990 with chunks of roasted beets, a few leaves of watercress here and there, and thin rectangles of some variety of sharp dry white cheese. This salad narrowly avoided cliché, because while the cheese might, in fact, have been some variety of goat cheese (though probably sheep’s milk), at least it wasn’t chevre, and the cress was a nice touch.

Duck breast ($25) was presented simply, sliced on the bias into thin pink medallions, shingled atop a rich pan reduction, dotted here and there with sultanas. The breast was dark and tasty, but the true cod ($24) wasn’t as good. In fact, it was quite bland, the flavor washed out, with a pallid cod filet perched atop a pile of steamed potatoes, which sat in a limpid pool of broth. Only a few olives here and there darkened this lily-white platescape (the olives must be the help).

A big slab of braised short rib ($21) was similarly bland, though very tender and served with a small mound of mashed root vegetables and a pile of puy lentils. While I was disappointed by the short rib itself, please allow me to wax rhapsodic about the lentils: they were fucking awesome. Glimmering dark green like a pile of emeralds found in the hold of an ancient shipwreck, they were perfectly cooked, with just a little bite, but still yielding. Puy lentils are so much better than the drab green slack-jawed horse vagina lentils you usually get.

Unfortunately, we almost didn’t get the lentils at all, because at first they brought us the roast pig ($20) instead of the short rib. This is why you don’t put items that slant-rhyme on the same menu in a noisy restaurant. Luckily, the roast pig was actually way better than the short rib: a big succulent softball of pork shoulder, swimming in a pool of savory broth, with some chunks of potato and a big fluffy sheaf of crackling floating on top. Surrounding were a couple clams, briny and flavorful and not at all chewy, and a few rings of the same pickled red onion from the marrow bone toast.

Finally, the churros ($7) were tasty. This price got us three loopy donut turds, arced all over the plate and leaning on each other, as though Frank Gehry designed this dessert. With the churros was a shot glass of chocolate dipping sauce with a surprising amount of heat. A thick slice of chocolate terrine ($12) managed to be rich yet simultaneously NOT the heavy leaden chocolate shit that Twilight fans always seem to want to eat in lieu of getting a good hard fucking. Accompanying the terrine were a few scattered hazelnuts (sadly impossible to eat, as everyone knows, with a fork, so you end up resorting to just picking them up with your fingers) and a small puddle of crème anglaise.

Despite my complaints about dated cuisine, Terra Plata is tasty. That’s because nostalgia’s currency is inflation-proof. You might think, for instance, that fancy mac & cheese is played out by now, but you still return to it because in the end, like bacon-wrapped cheese-stuffed dates, it’s actually quite awesome. As in Portlandia, so too is the dream of the ‘90’s alive in Terra Plata. Put a bird on it.

Rating: 6.5 left-wing bookstores out of 10

Dinette

2012-01-10T18:31:00.000-08:00

1514 E Olive Way

206-328-2282

Here are a few possible ways to make toast fancier than regular toast:

1. Use bread made from heirloom wheat which is harvested by orphans, milled by lesbians, baked by Italian monks, sliced by ninjas, and slathered in butter made from the milk of cows fed only foie gras.

2. Hire a robot submarine to grab some leftover bread from the wreckage of the Titanic. Then have this priceless bread toasted by your butler over the flames coming from the exhaust pipe of your platinum rocket car. Have your butler drench it in butter made from Christina Hendricks’ breast milk. Then the butler has to commit suicide so he can never reveal this awesome recipe.

3. Create some molecular gastronomy bread made from molecules, then sous vide it for several months, then caramelize the crust with a satellite- mounted laser. The “butter” is actually yellow wax into which you have somehow infused artificial butter flavor through a very complex process.

4. Two words: Faberge Bread.

5. Or you could go to Dinette and eat some of the fancy toast they sell there.

Everybody knows that Dinette is awesome. It’s been in the same Capitol Hill location for years. The interior, turquoise and yellow and dimly lit, with tiny antique tables and mismatched plates, is simultaneously precious and wizened: just like Bjork! I hadn’t been to Dinette in years, but we were prompted by a deal from Groupon or Rue La La or one of those places.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw a whole section on Dinette’s menu, dedicated to toast of all things: I was definitely more surprised than the time I saw a monkey in a tree outside my dad’s friend’s house (true, but boring, story), yet much less surprised than when I discovered that your mom can read (at a 3rd grade level).

We started with the pork belly and arugula toast ($6). Crusty slices of toasted baguette, sliced on the bias into ovals, were topped with aioli, a bright green bale of arugula, and a neat rectangle of pork belly confit. This was delicious: the pork belly had been seared outside, but so tender inside that when you bit it, it melted like a housewife’s panties during a George Clooney interview. The pork belly was topped with a sharp orange marmalade which, along with the arugula’s peppery crunch, kept the toast from veering off into a fatty abyss. “Fatty abyss” is my pet name for your mom.

Next up, also at $6, was a rapini pesto toast. Personally I’m getting fed up with pestos made of whatever the fuck plant you feel like using that day. Why not make Brussels sprout pesto? Or bay leaf pesto? Why stop there? Why not just refer to polenta as “corn pesto?” Or make a “pesto” out of green Chiclets? That swooshing sound you just heard was law and order flying out of the window! That having been said, the rapini pesto, dark green and a little bitter, worked well on this toast, paired as it was with a layer of melted gruyere, nutty like a Teabagger’s election platform. On top were some superfluous chunks of pickled red pepper which kept falling off.

The chicken liver mousse toast ($7) was better than the rapini pesto toast: this one was spackled with a thick smear of velvety chicken liver mousse. Embedded into this savory mortar were tiny fractal florets of romanseco, that bastard child of broccoli and cauliflower which, if it didn’t exist, millions of disgusted 3rd graders would have had to invent. There were also some more of the same pickled peppers from the rapini pesto toast. They worked better this time, since they stuck to the mousse instead of falling off, and the tangy spice kept the mousse in check.

I was getting toast fatigue by this point, so we got a beet salad with escarole and radicchio ($11). The price tag seemed steep but it was a pretty bigass salad. The bitterness of the chicories was barely cantilevered by the sanguine cubes of beet and the creaminess of the bleu cheese in this, the Alexander Calder of salads.

A big bowl of gnocchi ($18) was tasty: fluffy vaginas of pasta floated in a delicate cheese sauce. Twined through here and there were rich shreds of braised pork shoulder and dotted with toasted pine nuts. A dark green patchwork of braised greens completed this picture.

Dinette has elevated toast to an art form. I would be in no way saddened if they eliminated all of the other menu items and concentrated solely on toast. They could serve panzanella! They could eliminate dessert and just serve cinnamon toast! Instead of wine, they just served carafes of blended up toast! That, my friends, would be a true uTOASTpia! What an awesome pun I just made!

Rating: 7.5 puns out of 10

Coterie Room

2011-12-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

2137 2nd Ave

206-956-8000

I was astonished to hear that Restaurant Zoe, once one of my favorite dining rooms in Seattle, was moving to Capitol Hill. What, I frequently wondered, would take its place? Answer: Coterie Room!

I was saddened by Restaurant Zoe’s departure from its vaunted 2nd Ave location, but time waits for no one, and besides: the Coterie Room employees did a great job with the old Zoe space. Gone were the heavy late 1990’s furniture and fixtures and drapery: these were replaced by a pressed tin ceiling, a chandelier, and an unusual science-wall of live plants. This décor could only be more Edwardian if there was a Shooter's Sandwich on the menu which, I am sad to report, there isn’t.

Still, despite the menu’s lack of the Shooter’s Sandwich, the food at the Coterie Room is still fairly badass. The marinated beet salad ($8) was interesting: we got a pretty big bowl of arugula mixed with tangy sanguine cubes of pickled beets, lots of pistachios, and soft pockets of cottage cheese. This was perhaps the most homogenous beet salad I have ever eaten: usually the beets are way too big to fit onto your fork with other ingredients, but this time it worked perfectly, and all the components eaten together was absolutely masterful. The sour and dense texture of the beet was tamed by the creamy cottage cheese. Eventually the arugula elbowed its way in, augmented by a salty battering ram as the pistachios crunched in your mouth.

Usually I abhor cottage cheese: it’s pasty and curdled like a dowager’s upper thigh, and why would anyone but a circa 1980’s dieter want to eat it? But THIS cottage cheese, courtesy of the Cowgirl Creamery, was so mellow and smooth, I was amazed. If my 14-year-old self knew I was eating a COTTAGE CHEESE AND BEET SALAD he would mutiny. Times change, past chump.

A foie gras torchon ($12) was sadly and inexplicably less awesome than the beet salad. Three toasted oval cross-sections of bauguette were each topped with a perfectly round beige areola of foie gras torchon. I liked the torchon itself: almost geometrically circular, mercilessly executed, creamy, rich, and full of that endlessly savory flavor that’s unique to duck liver. But then they fucked it up by dousing the plate in some kind of sweet vinegar reduction. Cloyingly sweet, this reduction emitted its astringent acid vapors into your mouth with every bite: the Samuel L. Jackson of condiments yelled at my tastebuds in his hoarsest voice, “I’M VINEGAR, BITCH!” This dominated the proceedings.

Similarly less than badass was a special: the duck prosciutto salad. This special salad wasn’t that special. A tiny pile of frisee was all tangled up, on top of a couple slices of duck prosciutto, red and white like meaty candy canes, with thin slices of bosc pear. It was fine, and hardly what I would call a misstep, but it wasn’t good enough compared to the utterly awesome dishes that were to come.

Like the poutine ($12). These motherfuckers make a version of Canada’s national dish so good, that the entire nation of Canada should swear allegiance to the Coterie Room and become the Coterie Room’s janitor. Seriously, every single component of this dish was better than the last: the fried Beecher’s cheese curds were like little nuggety nuggets of deep-fried deliciousness. The fries were possibly among the best French fries I have ever eaten. The gravy was silken and salty. And the braised pork shoulder was magical: these molecular gastronomy assholes must have performed some molecular gastronomy on the pork shoulder because it was way too pink (cured with nitrites, maybe?), and so tender it fell apart when you looked at it. I was so surprised by how this dish tasted, my face looked like a botox job gone awry for hours afterward.

The Parisian gnocchi special ($25), was similarly delicious: soft cylinders of dough swam lazily through a cheese sauce, with little cubes of guanciale and chanterelles. It was creamy and comforting and ALMOST perfect: the waiter promised us fried Brussels sprouts, but I called bullshit because there were maybe 4 fried Brussels sprouts leaves in the entire dish. I wanted more.

At this point an electrical disturbance on the sidewalk outside distracted me. A weird kid, clad in a Morbid Angel shirt and glowering from beneath his bangs, strode up to my table. “What the fuck are you doing, old man?” he demanded.

“Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew, because I’d been here before: my 14-year-old self was time traveling again.

“You know who I am, fuckface. You’re old. And fat. And you’re eating BEETS AND COTTAGE CHEESE AND LIVER AND ASKING FOR MORE BRUSSELS SPROUTS. YOU MUST BE GAY YOU ELDERLY LOSER.”

But I knew how to handle this punk. “Yes, that’s right. I MUST be gay. That’s because, unlike YOU, I no longer masturbate to the Sear’s catalog.”

14-year-old me didn’t see this one coming. “How did you know?”

“I LIVED IT, asshole. But don’t worry, next year Mom will start getting the Victoria’s Secret Catalog. And the year after that, you’ll have the audio from the scrambled Spice Channel to work with. Sometimes you can clearly see a boob!”

I wasn’t done humiliating the little prick. I gestured to my lovely and talented companion. “You see this tall, blonde, big tittied woman I’m dining with? YOU HAVE DECLINED SEX WITH HER! REPEATEDLY!”

14-year-old me was thoroughly chastised. “Don’t be such an asshole.”

But I wasn't done. “You need to understand that times change, little man. What you think is cool now will suck in a couple years. That’s just the way of the world, dude!”

“No way!” he huffed. “Metallica will always kick your ass!”

“Guess what? They just recorded a shitty album with LOU REED on vocals instead of James Hetfield. Do you remember who Lou Reed is? That geezer Dad always sings along to on the radio? ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side?’ Remember that shit? THAT IS LOU REED AND METALLICA SOLD OUT AND TIMES CHANGE BITCH.”

“No!” Completely flabbergasted, he sat heavily down at the table next to us, with an old lady vainly trying to finish the Wagyu Sirloin. Unfortunately, that old lady would never finish it. At $50, it was the most expensive thing on the menu, but that’s okay because this was a huge family style plate. That price got the old lady 7 or 8 big slices of steak, which must have been cooked sous vide for days because it was so fucking soft, and beefy like a bunch of firemen, coated in a miles-deep demiglace. This magnificent steak sat atop a fluffy layer of ricotta mashed potatoes, attractively piped, old-school, into foamy bunting around the steak. In the middle was a hidden undersea treasure of some glazed carrots and a little diced squares of braised endive.

Just as delicious was the family-style seared trout ($28). This was an astonishingly cheap since this is the price for a meal for two. We got two unnervingly perfect rectangles of trout filet, the skin still on, gleaming like hammered steel, tarnished brown on the edges. The flesh was nutty and delicate like Crispin Gliver, and sat atop a pile of fregula, twined through with sautéed spinach leaves. On the bottom was a mellow green smear of pistou. By this point my 14-year-old self had recovered from the shock of visiting this futuristic dystopia, where Metallica sucks, and he would eventually love liver and beets and Brussels sprouts and sometimes be too tired for sex.

“What’s fregula?” he asked?

“Pasta shaped like tiny leprechaun balls.” I replied

“What’s pistou?”

“A fancy French name for pureed herbs and shit.”

He seemed disoriented.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ll obviously be fine. Let me give you this tip from the future: buy as much stock in Apple Computers as you possibly can.”

“Apple?” he seemed nonplussed. “That shitty computer in English class? All that’s good for is ‘Oregon Trail.’”

“Trust me. Buy Apple Computers and this company called Amazon. And Microsoft. And also, stop Bin Laden.”

“Stop who?”

“Never mind, here’s dessert.” My 14-year-old self needed a break from all of these astonishing revelations, so we split the pineapple sorbet with white chocolate soil and candied pineapple ($8). This dessert veered into molecular gastronomy territory: on the bottom was a sandy and bland dusting of powdery chocolate “soil.” On top, shingles of candied pineapple stabbed into the quenelle of sorbet. They could’ve just given me a modest scoop of the sorbet, graced old-school with a mint sprig, and I would’ve been happy. My 14-year-old self, on the other hand, was bowled over:

“Holy shit this is delicious!” he raved.

But we’d also ordered the Cinnamon fritters, also $8, which should more accurately be called “awesome flavor balls.” They weren’t overpowered by cinnamon flavor, light and airy, dusted in cinnamon sugar, and accompanied by a luscious caramel sauce which would be totally appropriate if licked off of tits.

“These desserts of the future kick ass!” my 14-year-old self gushed.

It was time for a life lesson: “Listen,” I told him. “Everything changes eventually. Restaurant Zoe used to be in this very building, and it was awesome. And I was sad to see it go, and that's okay. But then this place opened, and it's even better! Someday you will paradoxically think that Buddhists are lame, while simultaneously agreeing with their axiom: ‘life doesn’t change; life IS change.’ When you realize that a static, unchanging existence is not only futile, it’s also uninteresting, then, my young friend, will you be truly wise.”

My 14-year-old self pondered this a moment. Finally he stood up. “You know, you’re right. I learned a valuable lesson today!”

If any other 14-year-old had said this I would’ve experienced a heartwarming moment of bonding with him, but I was, of course, intimately acquainted with this particular asshole. “I learned,” he sneered, “that in 21 years I’ll turn into a total PUSSY!”

Then, before I could issue a cutting retort about the time he almost shit his pants in trigonometry class, the time machine called him back to 1990 and he blinked out of sight. That little bitch had gotten the last word. If I hadn’t known that this was going to happen, I would’ve been totally pissed. But at least I had eaten a delicious meal.

Rating: 9 chrononauts out of 10

John Howie Steakhouse

2011-11-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

11111 NE 8th St in Bellevue, inside the Bravern Bulding.

425-440-0880

A rare trip to downtown Bellevue prompted me to eat at John Howie Steakhouse. Conveniently located inside Bellevue’s funhouse of conspicuous consumption, the Bravern Building, I decided that John Howie’s old- school menu was just what I needed to make me forget the cheesiness of the surrounding neighborhood.

Perusing the menu, I noticed a dish that was completely out of place. Artichoke and mascarpone ravioli? At a steak house? For $23? You’d have to be a crazed lunatic whose taste buds were mutilated in a tragic fireworks explosion to order such a dish. Naturally, the woman at the table next to ours heard my ranting about the artichoke and mascarpone ravioli and glared at me, as she ate her order of artichoke and mascarpone ravioli.

Just then, some dude appeared. He strode purposefully over to that woman’s table.

“Excuse me,” he told the woman and her husband, “I’m John Howie.”

They seemed suitably impressed that the owner himself would take the time to come over. “Is everything all right with your order?”

“Oh yes,” the woman said, “This ravioli is fabulous. It’s to die for. I’m sure it’s going straight to my hips!”

John Howie smiled. “Well, good! But the reason I just wanted to make sure everything was okay with your order was because if you order ravioli at a steak house YOU MUST BE RETARDED. And I just wanted to make sure your special needs were being met. But now I know that you’re not retarded, but instead that you simply have bad taste. AND MOTHERFUCKERS WITH BAD TASTE DO NOT EAT AT JOHN HOWIE STEAKHOUSE, BITCH!”

The woman, appropriately flabbergasted by Howie’s enraged rant, remained sheepishly silent as he roared on. “You fuckers don’t deserve my hospitality!” he angrily swept the complimentary bread basket off the table, which they had barely touched. Five different varieties of awesome baked goods spilled out onto the floor: a thin breadstick, gnarled and woody like a wizard’s wand; a crisp salty sheet of cracker, almost big enough for them to have printed the menu on it; a small yeasty pretzel, studded with spikes of black lava salt like a punk-rock arm band; a sweet mini rye loaf; and what was possibly the BEST gougere I have ever tasted—peppery, cheesy, almost creamy inside, with a flaky buttery crust. I almost wept at this senseless destruction.

Howie wasn’t done. He picked up the three- layered salt caddy, each rung of which contained a different boutique salt: Portugese fleur de sel on top, pink sea salt in the middle, and black Hawaiian volcano salt on the bottom. “YOU DON’T DESERVE AMBIANCE EITHER!” He dumped the salts unceremoniously into the table’s candle, so that it looked like one of those layered sand jars, perhaps bought at a New Mexico rest stop, only with salt instead of colorful sand.

“This isn’t Outback Steakhouse. None of this ‘No rules, just right’ shit. Here there ARE rules: MY motherfucking rules, and I govern with an iron fist. No, wait, fuck that, it’s a PLATINUM FIST with lightning bolts shooting out of it and diamonds and spikes and other badass adornments. And rule number one at JOHN. MOTHERFUCKING. HOWIE. MOTHERFUCKING. STEAKHOUSE is that you order a goddamned steak!”

This chick was being buffeted by Howie’s vitriolic bellow, her hair and clothes blown back like that dude in the old Maxell ad. Then John Howie reached under and flipped up their table. “GET THE FUCKING FUCK OUT OF MY RESTAURANT!” The woman and her husband scrambled to get away, ducking under John Howie’s outstretched foot as he tried to kick the husband in his ass.

Howie, red faced, breathing heavily, turned around to glare at everyone in the restaurant. “Anyone else have anything to say?”

In retrospect I know I shouldn’t have piped up, but I’m addicted to poking bears, and bee hives, and hornet’s nests, and your mom, and everything else that causes a disaster when poked. But I really wanted to complain because my steak was too expensive: at John Howie Steakhouse you can order combinations: diners can choose two four-ounce portions of different kinds of steak. $55 got us one each of an American wagyu filet and an Australian A5 wagyu sirloin. The steaks were tasty, to be sure, but too tiny in my eyes. So I foolishly decided to call John Howie out on it.

“Hey John Howie,” I asked, “How come these steaks are so small? Is it because you get a lot of anorexic Bellevue chicks in here?”

John Howie turned and fixed his awful Eye of Sauron upon me. I immediately regretted my decision to fuck with him. He came over to my table.

“Are these steaks small, tough guy?” He stared me down.

“Yeah,” I told him, but that was a stupid mistake.

He leaned heavily on the table. “Let me tell you something, little bitch. Those steaks are superb. That American wagyu filet, that beef is so tender, it CRIES when you cut it. It’s the closest thing to pussy you can ACTUALLY EAT and DIGEST without them making a documentary about you from your prison cell. And the Australian sirloin is so motherfucking beefy it’s like failing to outrun the Bulls of Pamplona, but the only difference is that you end up with far less hoof marks on your dick!”

“But—“ I was going to make a joke about why John Howie’s mom has hoof marks on HER dick, but he cut me off.

“SHUT UP. I’m talking. All of the beef we serve here is GOOD BEEF. We don’t sell that Holocaust beef, like Costco or Outback, beef that comes from cows that are happy to die, from cows that want you to eat their flabby, drug-addled flesh so that you, too, can taste a sliver of their suffering. No, we serve REAL BEEF here, son: beef that drank WHISKEY and played FOOTBALL and climbed MOUNT EVEREST and LIVED LIFE THE WAY A GODDAMNED COW IS SUPPOSED TO LIVE. And if you think that’s not worth $55, then I don’t know why your parents didn’t abort you, son.”

I should’ve just taken my rebuke and ended the argument, but of course I didn’t. “They’re like the size of skateboard wheels.”

“Yeah, they’re skateboard wheels,” John Howie hissed. ‘Skateboard wheels that let you nose grind and Ollie on the half-pipe of PURE UTTER DELICIOUSNESS!” He leaned in closer to examine our plates. “Besides, you little fuck, you’re complaining about the portion sizes but you didn’t even FINISH YOUR FUCKING SIDES!”

It was true. The sizes of the steaks might have been small, but everything else was very reasonably priced for the sheer volume. A “cup” of seafood chowder was a mere $8 for a huge cauldron. It was creamy without being too heavy, and contained enough seafood to stock an aquarium: huge lumps of sweet crabmeat and delicately poached shrimp swam in this savory pelagic zone, coexisting peacefully alongside lots of corn, bell peppers, asparagus tips, and a few sliced scallions. You can get a bowl for $12, but I would sincerely hate to see how big that would be.

Potato pancakes, too, were a steal: for $6 we got two large discuses of shredded Yukon Golds, lacy like a doily in a great- aunt’s house. They were lightly fried to a soft taupe on the outside, while remaining sunny yellow and fluffy within. These were topped with a melty drift of crème fraiche and copious tiny green bracelets of diced chive.

Sauteed spinach ($8) came in a giant steel chalice. This spinach had been cooked down into a comforting bale, looking like a bigass pile of crushed green velvet, with lots of garlic, and speckled with little cubes of preserved lemon rind. I found this dish a bit too salty, possibly due to the lemon rind, but it was otherwise tasty.

And $6 got us a twice baked potato as big as a circus big top, covered in a billowy tent of really fluffy and silky mashed potatoes. Inside, the potato was studded with bacon bits and scallions; outside it was dusted on top with diced chives and microplaned cheese. This thing was the size of my cock, and there was no way I could’ve finished it.

“But I bet you left room for dessert,” John Howie growled, interrupting me reverie. “Didn’t you, you little hypocrite? Any questions about my dessert menu, prick?”

“Actually, yeah,” I said. “New York Cheesecake? Crème Brulee? Bananas Foster? Cherries Jubilee? All pretty lame ” I knew I was taunting that motherfucker but couldn’t help it, “Did you forget Crepes Suzette? I’ll have the strawberry shortcake.”

John Howie fumed for a bit before stalking off to the kitchen. He returned with a stylish concoction of molecular gastronomy: a couple delicate pucks of pastry were cantilevered with a frozen disc of whipped cream, still smoking cold from its time on the anti- griddle, and dotted here and there, red and green, with reverse- spherified strawberry jam and mint gel “caviar.” “Is this modern enough for you?”

He set the plate down onto the table. It looked so tasty, but just as I was about to dig in, John Howie swept the plate onto the floor. “SIKE!” he yelled, then body slammed the broken plate and began break dancing on top of it: first he did the centipede, then a couple back spins. He finished by leaping to his feet, making halting, jerky movements, arms akimbo, biceps held rigidly in parallel to the floor, hands pivoting freely: doing the Robot. “I AM A ROBOT.” he roared in his best Stephen Hawking voice, “SENT FROM THE FUTURE. TO DESTROY SHITTY FOOD.”

Right on his heels was one of his minions, carrying the real strawberry shortcake. For $8 we got a classic template of this famous dessert: a big tawny cube of airy shortcake was layered with a cloud of whipped cream and topped with a pile of macerated strawberries. Garnished with mint. You simply can’t get any more classical.

By this point John Howie’s rage had subsided. “You see,” he told me, his chef’s whites stained with red, white, and green smears of shortcake, “we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. I offer polished and understated service, and very high- quality ingredients, at a reasonable price. We here at John Howie Steakhouse put the customer first, which is why we do ‘old fashioned’ things like taking reservations. I know we can be staid at times. But not every restaurant can be Alinea. And that’s okay.”

John Howie’s humble admissions shamed me far more effectively than his brutal tirades ever could. “You’re right, John Howie!” I told him. “I’m sorry I made fun of your steaks.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “And I’m sorry for all that stuff I just did.”

Then we became friends.

And true friendship is better than any steak.

Rating 8.5 fabrications out of 10

Inn at Langley

2011-09-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

400 1st St, Langley

360-221-3033

Thanks to a gracious invitation from my friend Stephen McClure, sommelier at the Inn at Langley, we were able to score a table in the Inn’s dining room for a tasting menu by Chef Matt Costello. This was a TEN COURSE MEAL and there’s a lot of ground to cover here, so I’m just going to dispense with my usual bullshit introductory paragraph and just jump into it.

Things started off well enough with a seemingly arbitrary combination of amuse-bouches. There was a tall and cylindrical shot glass containing a translucent lime- green liquid which we were told was a “BLT consommé,” a little stand with a glossy maroon bing cherry on top, and a peculiar thing of some sort that looked like a big pink Hershey’s Kiss. These were brought to the table on a cluttered little platter and looked like a chess board that a losing player, caught in the grip of his opponent’s endgame, frustratedly tried to sweep clean.

The BLT consommé was quite good, though served unfortunately cold, with a shimmery tomato flavor and a draft of smoke in the finish. The cherry was stuffed with something, and was somehow supposed to represent a deconstructed Manhattan cocktail: it didn’t taste like bourbon, but you could get a hint of bitters in the finish. And the pink Hershey’s Kiss was a beet meringue, filled with camembert. In general, this combination of flavors seemed pointless. Each thing taken separately worked, though there was no rhyme or reason to the combination of BLT, cherry, and camembert. But it was crazy, and ambitious, so I figured I'd give it a chance.

First up was a salmon mousse. The mousse had been frozen in a big bowl of liquid nitrogen which, as the chef stirred the freezing mousse, spilled white vapor all over the countertop. Little pink crumbles of frozen mousse were served strewn across the plate, along with magenta semicircles of pickled onion and a garnish of coriander flowers. I’d feared that the mousse would still be frozen into crystalline chunks or, even worse, that the chunks would melt, and then ominously recombine themselves into a fully formed salmon mousse a la the T1000 from Terminator 2 but, luckily, no: it was soft and pillowy, with a very mild salmon flavor. Accompanying this was a small clear disc of rosewater gel which was an effective palate cleanser.

Next came a pretzel roll. This was served with a tiny cylinder of goat’s milk butter and razor-thin discs of sliced radish. The pretzel was so fucking good: crusty and burnished bronze on the outside, like your mom’s face, yet steamy inside, like your mom’s panties. Even better was the goat milk butter: so creamy and tangy, I really don’t understand why goat butter isn’t more popular, though it probably has something to do with people not wanting to say “Do you have goat butter?” to the guy at Whole Foods. The pretzel and butter together were almost too rich. In fact, the watery and piquant and dirty-tasting radish, which I ate last because I couldn’t keep from wolfing down the pretzel, was an effective change of pace.

The third course was a “baked potato.” No, I’m not one of those people who use quotation marks inappropriately, like when they’re trying to emphasize something. Once when I was a kid I patronized a snow-cone stand with a sign that read “Please ring the ‘door bell’ for service.” The door bell wasn’t in reality a midget’s ball sack with an LED attached to it; they just thought they’d call attention to the fact that you should use the “door bell” instead of yelling “hey bitch come out here and get me a snow-cone.” What I mean by this pleasant walk down memory lane is that my cloistering of the phrase “baked potato” in quotes means that it wasn’t actually a baked potato. What we got was a small chunk of pork belly, slow-cooked sous vide for 15 hours then seared. This was served in the bottom of the bowl adjacent to an ivory cloud of potato foam, dotted with miniscule bracelets of diced chive. But we weren’t supposed to eat it like this: eventually the waitress emerged with a small kettle of potato consommé, which she poured into the bowl, halfway submerging the belly and lifting the foam afloat. The consommé, sadly, was not served boiling hot, as consommé is classically served. Nonetheless, this “baked potato” was “awesome.” So awesome, in fact, that it made me temporarily forget how to use quotation marks.

Jesus Christ it was good. The pork was so tender you could cut it with a spoon, which was lucky for us because they didn’t give us a knife. When you took a step back from this dish and tasted it altogether it really tasted like a baked potato. If you got too close, though, and ate each ingredient separately you couldn’t get the effect. This was culinary pointillism. Accompanying was a lacy cheese cracker, white cheddar or gruyere or something sharp, topped with crumbled bacon bits. Like most crackers, myself included, this cracker was largely superfluous.

The fish course was a neat triangle of seared halibut, served atop a puffy nimbus of mint foam. With this came a scattering of vivid green peas and a couple buttery baby carrots scarcely thicker than those tiny pencils you score golf with. Splashed across the plate was a stripe of bruleed anise foam. This was generally good, though the halibut trended to dryness and the anise foam was so overpowering, it kicked your mouth’s nuts repeatedly. But the peas and carrots were the most among the most Platonically perfect examples of vegetables I’ve ever eaten. Who needs halibut? They could’ve served me a bowl of peas and carrots and I would have said “Thanks, dude.”
Then we had an intermezzo: a small scoop of melon sorbet, served atop a smear of feta cheese, crowned with a miniature bouquet of fennel flowers. This was simultaneously salty, sweet, and accomplished its mission of refreshing the fuck out of me.

The gustatory marathon continued with risotto: a glossy pile of risotto was served with a foie gras emulsion (which was modestly referred to on the menu as mere “duck liver”) and sautéed wild mushrooms, topped with an impressively large slice of black truffle, easily bigger than a pog. And if you remember what a pog was, then you’re old enough to properly appreciate the taste of a slice of black truffle. The risotto was flanked on either side with twin piles of macerated huckleberries, slices of roasted onion, and a weird awkward disc of something which we were told was some sort of mushroom- based product. The risotto was delicious: creamy and rich, with millions of miles of flavor. The truffle was, as per the Inn at Langley’s locavore mission, a local truffle and not a Perigord, but I sure as fuck won’t hold it against them. The only misstep here was that weird mushroom circle thingy: I felt like flinging it but decorum demanded I didn’t.

We rounded the bend with the meat course: a medallion of a grassy- tasting lamb tenderloin, seared outside, cooked to a confident medium rare and then sliced, so that its red eye stared up at you like a drunk on a bus. This was perched atop a smear of artichoke puree. Tiny balls of green and yellow squash were served alongside and, curiously, camouflaged among these was a floppy green sac of spherified béarnaise sauce. We were supposed to break the sphere and release the sauce amidst the balls of squash. When I broke the sphere, it belched out a gout of completely smooth green sauce all over those spheres. Creamy sauce spurting all over spheres? What does this remind me of? Saturday night with your mom, of course! The problem was that the sauce, heady with tarragon, was too much for the squash.

Personally I wish it had been served, jiggling precariously, atop the medallion of lamb. After all, béarnaise is traditionally a sauce for meat. Still, I have to give them props because the sauce itself was expertly prepared. After all, just making a Hollandaise that won’t separate is tricky enough in itself, then these motherfuckers SPHERIFIED it. Later I ate the deflated sphere: it was salty and slimy. Eating it seemed wrong, kinda like those insane hippies who eat human placentas.

The cheese course consisted of a quenelle of ice cream which, according to the menu, was flavored with toasted grass, but it’s my opinion that whoever wrote that was toasting a different kind of grass because it mostly just tasted sweet. Either the flavor was VERY subtle, or my taste buds were fatigued by all of the imperial gluttony that preceded. My memory becomes hazy at this point: there was a smear of triple cream somewhere, and yet another jelly disc: this one with a bracing green tartness, made of sorrel.

Finally, dessert. The menu called it “blackberries from the side of a country road.” A big dark purple quenelle of blackberry sorbet was surrounded by clouds of sweet herbal foam. Flowers dotted this serene sugary landscape. I was too tired to concentrate so just blindly gulped it, the way a kid eats ice cream, or the way I go down on your mom. This dish, like the baked potato, was a pleasing pastiche of flavor.

We thought we were done, finally but no: they made us eat cotton candy. Actually “made” is a strong word, because I would’ve eaten that cotton candy out of a rotten armadillo shell: it was CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE COTTON CANDY! They somehow obscenely combined two awesome treats into one. The cotton candy had been formed into a snow- white disc, with a spiral of coca dust in the center. It was served on a stick, as cotton candy usually is, which was in turn anchored into a shot glass of coca nibs. You weren’t supposed to eat the cocoa nibs but I did anyway. This was some crazy Willy Wonka shit.

So that’s it. Dinner at the Inn at Langley is an interesting experience, to say the least. This gluttonous marathon punishes you, but the courses are so creatively fucked up, curiosity about what’s coming next trumps the fact that your stomach feels as stuffed with food as your mom feels stuffed with cock. The wine pairings, too, are a thing of beauty. I don’t usually talk about wine, but we got a LOT of wine; enough, in fact, to get me shitfaced: no small feat. And finally, in the spirit of full disclosure and blogging law and the federal government and all of that pussy shit I don’t really care about, I must make a revelation: the Inn at Langley cut me quite a deal. Normally the tasting menu is $95 per person, and the wine pairing will set you back $85. I, however, paid far less than that. Yes, they knew who I was. No, I almost never reveal myself to a kitchen. In this case it was unavoidable since they knew we were coming because Stephen set up my reservation. I feel justified in writing about this because it was a tasting menu, and so everyone ate exactly the same food which was prepared all at once, and there were like 6 tables, including the communal table where we were seated, and everyone got the exact same service too. So fuck your ethics.

Rating 8.5 ethical standards out of 10

Book Bindery

2011-08-22T21:09:00.001-07:00

198 Nickerson Street

206-283-2665

One unexpected quirk of sociology is that nerds are really successful people. Think about it: how many famous and powerful people are nerds? Their ranks include luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Sister Wendy, Woody Allen, and Mila Kunis. No, that last one isn’t a typo: the very same Mila Kunis that everyone loves to jack off to is, in fact, a massive nerd who openly admits that she constantly plays World of Warcraft. Conversely, how many highly successful people seem like they’re really cool motherfuckers? This list is miniscule: Jack Nicholson, Latrelle Sprewell, Dr. Kary Mullis, Samuel L. Jackson. Very few US Presidents, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, have been cool as hell. And that, my friends, is a true American tragedy.

But what makes a nerd so successful in life is an intense scrutiny to detail, which makes nerds both high achievers AND lots of fun in the sack because, after all, if you can remember the name of the giant vagina dentata that Boba Fett fell into in Return of the Jedi, you can damn well figure out how to work a fucking g- spot. Lady nerds obsessively twitch their kegels until their pussies could siphon gasoline from a car; man- nerds optimize their diets for the best possible tasting jizz (PRO TIP: avoid asparagus!).

Which brings me to Book Bindery.

Book Bindery looks like an aristocrat’s parlor. It’s a timeless wainscoted tribute to shit old ladies care about; effortlessly elegant and unapologetically old- school, like a Prime Minister’s wife. We sat at the bar.

We started with the foie gras terrine ($18). This was a rich candy bar of foie, the terrine a foamy taupe, like meaty nougat, topped with a high- gloss tortoiseshell of aspic embedded with truffle. Accompanying the terrine was a beet salad. Yes, I know beet salads are cliché, but this one straight up fucked with my mind: miniscule quartered baby beets—purple, golden, pink—were littered like crashed race cars atop a maroon highway of beet puree. Interspersed here and there were crispy Chioggia beet chips, and the landscape was dotted with tiny edible flowers.

Truffle fries ($8) avoided the usual truffle fry crutch of being doused in synthetic truffle flavor, which was a relief because, as everyone knows, there was a recent scientific discovery that truffle oil is actually robot come. The fries were garnished instead with copious black flecks of shaved Oregon truffles. True, the delicate flavor of Oregon truffles seems almost feminine in comparison to the brutal petroleum musk of real Perigords, but then again no one is arguing that Oregon can beat France in ANYTHING. The fries themselves were great: fried to a glittering bronze, these crisp shoestrings would have been flawless if they hadn’t been over salted.

Poached hen egg ($12) featured a jiggly blister of poached egg, cloudy white and glistening wetly, like an old man’s dead eye, which stared up at us from a nest of supple pasta. The egg was half submerged in a parmesan broth, umami as fuck but sadly, also very salty.

Compressed summer melons ($14) was an unfortunate, matter-of-fact name for an audacious interpretation of prosciutto e melone. Rectangles of honeydew and cantaloupe, compressed with a vacuum sealer into sweet glassine prisms, were served with ribbons of prosciutto and a little drizzle of a sweet sherry sauce. The prosciutto was shaved razor thin and was astonishingly marbled: the reds were so red, the whites so white, it was like this prosciutto was either designed by Roy Lichtenstein, or else someone used a mandoline to slice a peppermint stick.

Sea scallops ($25) were perfectly cooked, nestled down into a drift of creamy sunchoke foam. Reinforcing the flavor profile were chunks of roasted sunchoke, which dotted the plate here and there like the scattered stones of a ruined abbey. A few wispy microgreens completed the picture.

A duo of pork cost $26, which works out to an average of $13 per type of pork: a bargain I must admit. Braised pork belly was fatty and rich like Oprah; a pork loin chop was seared a pleasant golden outside, while still managing to be moist and steamy inside like a saxophone solo in a 1980’s suspense thriller, the bone protruding obscenely from the flesh. With this came a neat pile of petits pois a la francais: shocking green peas peeked shyly from within the folds of braised red leaf lettuce, and the whole things swam in a graceful creamy sauce.

Finally, we closed out with a buttermilk tart, which, I smugly noted, was the last one they had that day at the restaurant. The crust was flaky like your mom, filled with a custard that was tangy and dense, also like your mom. With the tart was rhubarb, prepared seemingly every way possible: there was a rhubarb foam, a rhubarb compote, rhubarb sauce. By the end of it I was tired of rhubarb, but I never did get tired of taunting nearby diners over the fact that we got the last one.

Book Bindery, with all of its book binding and attention to detail, is a true nerd’s paradise. The plating is mind- bendingly quixotic without seeming intimidating, and everything is prepared with a nebbishy exactitude. I really love the Book Bindery. In fact, I love it SO MOTHERFUCKING MUCH, I’m going to get married there. The portions tend towards the smallish side and as a result the Book Bindery, with its exotic presentation and posh decor and high(ish) prices, becomes the kind of restaurant which Tea Baggers stereotypically assume is de rigeur dining for libtards. Luckily, discerning libtards can tell that the Book Bindery is sexy and intellectual, just like Mila Kunis.

Rating: 8.5 dirty nerds out of 10

General Tso's Death March

2011-07-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

General Tso’s Chicken is the best food in the world. This is what it tastes like: mad scientists combined the DNA of an eagle, a lion, a dinosaur, and Aron Ralston AKA the guy from the James Franco movie who cut his own arm off with a Leatherman tool in order to escape a ravine. Then they took the resulting badass mutant bird and assassinated it using the only means possible to kill such a resilient beast: they had to throw it into the sun. Then, using a space craft and several million miles of special towing cables, they removed the carcass, rolled it in uncut cocaine, and deep fried it. Then they coated it in Christina Hendrick’s vaginal juices. The resulting delicious gleaming abomination is General Tso’s Chicken.

I’m a HUGE fan of the General’s. I once wrote nostalgic paean to the General since it is unquestionably my favorite food. But my absolute favorite purveyor of the General closed in 2006, and I hadn’t been able to find a suitable replacement in Seattle. So in the true martial tradition of the A-Team and other buddy movies with an ensemble cast, I recruited a crack team of fellow gourmands to help me track down Seattle’s most delicious iteration of General Tso’s Chicken.

Joining me in my quest were men whose palates I trust without question, men with august personages and huge penises who are leaders in their respective fields: Matthew Amster- Burton is a well-known local food writer and a fellow General Tso’s aficionado. Langdon Cook is an author and professional forager, whose poetic turns of phrase are surpassed only by his ability to discover a bunch of killer shrooms. Marc Schermerhorn is a food blogger and an experienced chef who’s staged at Alinea and Allium on Orcas. Henry Lo is an architect and experienced home cook. Henry is also a true General Tso’s authority: a family friend of his is a chef who studied under Peng Chang-kuei, the Chinese chef who INVENTED THE GENERAL TSO’S RECIPE. And so with my expert cabal assembled, we ventured afield.

Louie’s Cuisine of China was our first stop. Nuggets of breast meat were doused in a light sauce. The meat itself was a little dry, though not offensively so. The batter was very airy; indeed, it manifested itself as a bare dusty coating on the surface of each nugget. The sauce managed to be sweet without being syrupy. A good plate of the General usually comes with a couple florets of steamed broccoli, but Louie’s version didn’t include any. While I assigned demerits for the lack of the General’s native flora, some of my colleagues disagreed. Langdon was quite smitten with Louie’s, ranking it as his favorite, and Matthew scoffed at my proposed rating for Louie’s. “I’d give it a 10 for no broccoli.” But I’m writing this review, Matthew, and not you.

Rating: 7 Louie’s out of 10.

Judy Fu’s Snappy Dragon was next up, and I must say, with absolute clarity and a complete lack of obsfucation, that they failed to not disappoint. Judy Fu’s failure was surprising given that the hand-shaved noodles they serve there are the second best shaved thing in the world. However, this usually reliable Maple Leaf institution was a stalwart in the worst sense of the world: it was stale and tasted like warts. These limp- wristed slabs of pity were shrouded in a puffy winding sheet of soggy batter and condemned to an ignoble burial at sea in a bland ocean of slimy sauce. Visually, Judy Fu’s General was quite striking, shellacked an impetuous and glossy maroon, like a lacquered box found at an estate sale. But unlike in nature, where the vivid colors of toxic South American frogs and treacherous butterflies serve as a visual growl to predators, Judy Fu’s General had no bite: spice was nonexistent and the tang was muted. It tasted like watered- down Aunt Jemima’s. Sad. It wasn’t the worst version of the General we tasted on our campaign, but given Snappy Dragon’s reputation, it was the biggest letdown. This General deserves a court martial.

Rating: 2 defanged predators out of 10

Black Pearl is just down the street from Judy Fu’s and we managed to infiltrate the premises just before closing. Black Pearl’s version of the General was okay: massive hunks of chicken breast were crusted in a lackadaisical batter, which was serviceable, if spongy, much like your mom. The chicken was glossed over with an unlikely sauce which somehow managed to be both spicy and bland at the same time. While it wasn’t too bad, Black Pearl’s General Tso’s is hardly the stuff of legend.

Rating: 5 serviceable, spongy batters out of 10

Chiang’s Gourmet proved to be quite the conundrum. On paper, at least, Chiang’s General should have been superlative: juicy nuggets of thigh meat were jacketed in a really crunchy crust. These nuggets cavorted playfully amid a tangy citrusy sauce with a rumbling heat. Everyone besides me seemed to enjoy Chiang’s General, but I kept getting overcooked pieces: while the sauce was good, the batter seemed to be scorched and the meat was stringy and dry. “You must’ve gotten a rogue piece,” Henry offered, but if I did then it must’ve been a rogue dynasty, because the second piece I ate was easily the Kim Jong- Il of General Tso’s Chicken. Still, Chiang’s gets a boost in the ratings from me because the sweet and spicy sauce was quite tasty, and I was clearly the victim of a statistical outlier.

Rating: 4 outliers out of 10

China Harbor did a pretty good job: hearty slabs of poultry stare up at you from beneath a glistening bronze pool of sticky and vinegary sauce. The crust is deceptively crisp; it looks like it would be flabby yet somehow, blessedly, it isn’t. Yet China Harbor is such a wacky fucking place, the décor almost detracts from the food: it’s not only a restaurant, it’s also a fucking marina. And there’s an indoor swimming pool. The dated interior décor sports the classic red-on-black color scheme and musty Victorian chinoiserie of the old Chinese restaurants of yesteryear. It’s the kind of place where it seems like people should legally still be allowed to smoke inside. It’s the kind of place where Jews eat on Christmas Day. The panoramic view of Lake Union can’t be beat, but unfortunately the General cares not for such things. After all, what is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women: these things are best in life.

Rating: 6 pieces of chinoiserie out of 10

As far as asian restaurants go, Monsoon rivals perhaps only Wild Ginger as the most popular among crackers. Seriously, Monsoon’s Drunken Chicken is the white-breadiest dish on the menu of one of the whitest restaurants in Honkey Town, also known as the back side of Capitol Hill. True, it technically isn’t called “General Tso’s,” but here we just assumed that the General was going undercover, because while Monsoon’s Drunken Chicken might violate the letter of General Tso’s iron-fisted law, it joyfully embraces its spirit. Tender cuts of chicken breast, juicy like an issue of Us Weekly, were breaded in a crisp batter that practically fragmented when bitten into, and painted with a complex and subtle sauce that managed to negotiate the fine line between sweet and sour. The Drunken Chicken was dusted in sesame seeds and served on a sprightly bed of sautéed yu choy. Masterful.

Rating: 8.5 delicious examples of deliciousness out of 10

At this point we suffered our first casualty: Matthew had to go home, but he urged the rest of his comrades to soldier on. So we did. The last battle of the campaign took place at Honey Court. Honey Court’s General Tso’s was universally panned by my compatriots, but I found it intriguing. True, the desiccated shreds of chicken breast were sheathed in a limp parka of foamy batter, and the sauce had too much cornstarch, which gave it the consistency of the swill found on the floor of a peep show. Despite all of that, I rather enjoyed it, in a perverse way, mostly because I liked the flavor of the sauce: it was tangy and bright orange, with a vinegary heat, as if they mixed a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot with corn starch slurry. Honey Court’s General Tso’s Chicken fails on almost every level, but the sauce was different, at least. Accompanying the General were a couple stiff green broccoli florets, glossy and dense like the plastic food inside a floor model refrigerator at Sear’s.

Rating: 1 slurry out of 10

The General is a formidable foe, and his chicken is not to be fucked with. Many places try in vain to capture the General’s flag, but end up, like your mom, looking like a homeless asshole with a dick in her mouth. Yet a few masters do in fact turn out a respectable homage to General Tso’s greatness. Now you know.

Lecosho

2011-06-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

Lecosho is so goddamned awesome, Jesus Christ obviously came back from the dead to eat there. Unfortunately, Jesus's timing sucks because he came back from the dead a couple thousand years too early to eat at Lecosho, which sucks for him and all the zillions of people who died without eating there. Almost as motherfucking awesome as Lecosho is the fact that Word’s spell check software recognizes “motherfucking” but not “Lecosho.” That’s progress.

The handmade spaetzle ($6) was tasty. This price got you a big bowl filled with shitloads of chewy pasta squiggles, the golden- brown ringlets mounded up, like a careless toss of a pretty girl’s head on a summer day. This cascade was topped with a gossamer pile of microplaned romano, like cheesy dandruff on Goldilocks’ scalp.

$6 also got us a bowl of balsamic lentils with potatoes. The French puy lentils, heaped up like gleaming emeralds in a long- lost undersea treasure chest, were perfectly cooked. The eponymous balsamic vinegar kept a respectful distance; with each bite the vinegar made itself known without yelling “IT’S ME, MOTHERFUCKING BALSAMIC VINEGAR BITCHES” at the top of its vinegary lungs. Atop this savory pile were three medallions of grilled potato, seared a pleasing burnt sienna outside, soft and pillowy inside.

Grilled polenta was, at $6, similarly priced and also similarly as awesome. Three scalene triangles of polenta, sides perfectly straight as though cut by industrial machinery, were crusty outside yet as fluffy and silken as a cloud of pussies within. They were lightly salted and graced, like the spaetzle, with another microplaned drift of romano.

Housemade sausage with roasted cabbage and apple slaw ($10) was okay. The sausage itself was so fucking good, I’m totally gay for this sausage: when cut into, this juicy glans of pork sausage ejaculated a lurid gout of juice all over the plate. The meat was delicately seasoned, and very finely ground into a perfect sausage. Sadly, there was only one of these awesome homoerotic sausages for the huge- ass bowl of cabbage. The roasted cabbage and apple slaw was great: crisp, sweet, maybe a bit too tart, and did not at all smell even the slightest bit flatulent, as cabbage sometimes can. A dressing of housemade mustard came close to overwhelming the slaw, but those canny Lecosho assholes stepped right back from the brink, and so it tasted (mostly) balanced.

Spicy coppa salad ($9) was the only thing I’d consider a misstep. Arugla, pickled beets, and a couple blobs of goat cheese were piled atop a couple thin slices of coppa. Like a bitchy Republican from a Podunk congressional district, these beets screamed red- faced at full volume, dominating the proceedings. The goat cheese, obviously designed to buffer the beet’s tirade, proved ineffective at quelling the uproar. Unlike the balsamic vinegar in the aforementioned lentils and potatoes, the pickled beets didn’t have the good sense to back the fuck off. The spiciness of the coppa only added fuel to the fire, intensifying the bitchy flavor. Each bite of this salad was like licking a brass doorknob with lightning bolts shooting out of it. The arugula was fresh, at least.

Cavatelli ($15), on the other hand, managed to be spicy without losing its cool (just like me). This price got us a big bowl of cavatelli, which was supple and folded into little packets, like a magnificent pile of pasta vaginas. These labial folds were evenly painted with a rich orange tomato sauce. The sauce, like the coppa salad, had a sultry, unapologetic heat, but the creaminess of this sauce kept it from flying off the handle. Bitter skeins of braised kale twisted throughout the bowl, and the whole thing was topped with the recurring pile of finely grated cheese.

But probably the BEST FUCKING THING we ate was the porchetta. Affordably priced at $17, we got a huge meaty slab of porchetta. If you don’t know what porchetta is, allow me to explain with this fanciful meaty analogy: imagine a world made entirely of meat. The crown prince of this fleshy land is a fat kid, whose torso is made of meatloaf, his cock is a salami, and each of his legs is a whole prosciutto. His fiery, proud eyes are spicy meatballs, and instead of freckles, his nose is dotted with bacon bits. All hail King Meatyass! In his hand he holds the sacred symbol of his office, Porchetta: a pinwheel made of meat, this holy relic spins lazily in the carnivorous wind which blows across King Meatyass’s kingdom.

Maybe I went too far with that dumb fantasy. After all, how unrealistic is that? Kings don’t carry pinwheels! Duh. But that’s what porchetta is: a pinwheel made of pork. Lecosho’s porchetta was superb. A whole pork tenderloin was rolled up in pork belly like a jelly roll, then the whole thing was roasted. Sliced into cross- sections and finished in a pan, the belly was as yielding and juicy as when your girlfriend comes home drunk, and the central core of tenderloin was, after having been constantly basted by the fat of the belly, tender like a skinned knee The porchetta was perfectly seasoned, with a rind of crisp skin, and served on top of a mound of white beans and thinly sliced baby turnip. The beans were creamy, and the baby turnips, cute little while minarets, each topped with a precious green crewcut, were piquant and sweet. It doesn’t, my friends, get better than this.

We didn’t get dessert because that's for people who mourn an unrequited love and read the Twilight books. If you’re still hungry, get more porchetta.

Lecosho is badass. Unfortunately for Jesus and George Washington and Rick James and all of the other sad motherfuckers who died, they will never be able to eat at Lecosho, but I lived long enough, so fuck you, dead people.

Rating: 9.5 dead out of 10

Lecosho is located at 89 University St at the Harbor Steps

For reservations call 206-623-2101

Requiescat in pace, Mrs. Ricketts

2011-05-02T21:22:00.000-07:00

Kim Ricketts died last week. A lot of people have already discussed her untimely demise, but I wanted to talk about it too: she was one of the most awesomely outrageous women I have ever known, and I respected her a lot. She was the only mom on earth exempt from my jokes about your mom.

I’ll never forget the day we met. It was day two of Foodista’s very first International Food Blogger’s Conference. It was just after lunch. I had eaten enough food to make a hippo become bulimic, all of it masterfully prepared by expert delishtards like Mark Fuller and Brian Cartenuto and Keith Luce. Elise Bauer or Molly Wizenberg or somebody was instructing everyone in the audience on how to become beloved by billions of housewives. The mid afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows, hammering me in the face, and suddenly all the tequila shots I had drunk caught up to me, and I nodded off. When I opened my eyes, this lady at the next table was staring directly at me, laughing. Weird laugh, crooked smile: Kim Ricketts.

During the break I introduced myself to Mrs. Ricketts. We talked about reading and writing and Sour Patch Kids and Conan the Barbarian. She had a distinctive voice. It was weathered and lilting, cracking on the high notes: this was the sound of a $1000 a day Ricola habit. And that motherfucking laugh: wheezing, squealing, like a cigar-smoking chihuahua. It was like her vocal cords were made out of an old baseball glove.

She was charming, savvy, literate, and fucking generous. The same night I met her, she introduced me to Ruth Reichl and, I proudly recall, referred to me as “one of the best food writers in Seattle.” I instantly knew that Mrs. Ricketts was my kind of people, and not just because of her effusive praise (although that really helped). Someone more concerned about politics would never have risked her own reputation by exposing the Archduchess of culinary journalism to an unknown douche with a penchant for jokes about your mom.

That was one of the great things about Mrs. Ricketts: sometimes she really just didn’t give a fuck. She was fearless. A couple years ago she invited me to dine with her at the Ruins. The dinner conversation, of course, was stellar, but the food was less than awesome: there was turtle soup, and roasted duck breast, and a bigass steak, but nothing to write home about. After dinner she asked me what I thought about the menu. I lied politely about how good it was, but Mrs. Ricketts was having none of it. “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she hissed, “because I thought it sucked.” And one time she told me the lurid story about how, when she was pregnant, her water broke in the bathroom at Vito’s. It was probably the third time I met her when she revealed this.

She could also be a total harpy if you crossed her. Last October she hosted a reception for Renee Redzepi at Mistral Kitchen. Redzepi, chef at NOMA restaurant in Copenhagen, was in town promoting his new cookbook, but Mrs. Ricketts was SUPER PISSED for some reason. Later on I found out what was going on: to make a long story short, Mistral Kitchen proprietor William Belickis had somehow tried to double cross her. After Redzepi left, Mrs. Ricketts and I retired to the Palace Kitchen for a drink. She was adamant that I write about Belickis’s attempt to steal her thunder. “PLEASE,” she told me, “make sure to tell everyone that I will never work with William Belickis again!” Now you know.

Anyway, I was as shocked as everyone to hear that this woman, once so full of piss vinaigrette, had been stricken with cancer. She was stuck in the hospital for what seemed like a long time. I got a few emails from her, and followed her Twitter stream, and she seemed upbeat. I thought for sure she was going to defy the odds and survive. After all, this woman was fearless. If she could handle Marco Pierre White (“That man is a vampire!”) then cancer would be a fucking cakewalk.

But she didn’t survive. She was gone, so suddenly. Which really fucking sucks. Here in Seattle we’ve managed to build a food writing community that’s probably the most interesting, engaged, and cohesive scene in the entire country, and yes, I’m including New York City when I say that, and Kim Ricketts was instrumental in bringing us all together. Now the keystone has fallen out of our arch. Fuck.

Still, the show must go on, and for me at least, Mrs. Ricketts’ death has served as a wakeup call. Besides, she’s in a better place now anyway. After all, being dead means you no longer have to hear anything about Branjelina, and she’s probably already organizing book tours for John Milton and David Foster Wallace by now. It’s bittersweet, in a way, like being kicked in the nuts by a leprechaun: yes, it hurts a lot, but YOU GOT TO SEE A LEPRECHAUN. So thank you, Mrs. Ricketts, wherever you are, for being such an awesome leprechaun.

Rating: 12 personal inspirations out of 10

I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to the Ricketts family.

I would also like to respectfully dedicate my entire oeuvre on this blog, from 2005 up to today, to the memory of Kim Ricketts.

Toulouse Petit

2011-02-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

Toulouse Petit

601 Queen Anne Ave N

206- 432-9069

Hey everybody! I'm going rogue once again, because the Seattle Weekly didn't want this review of Toulouse Petit. So enjoy! The Weekly never lets me say "retard" but I control all the variables here, so... retardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretardretard.

Anyway.

When I heard about Toulouse Petit I was immediately intrigued, but skeptical. Normally I try to keep my nose out of the politics but I heard a rumor that the dude who owns Peso’s had something to do with Toulouse Petit. That was strike one because Peso’s sucks ass. Actually, I’m sorry: I can only CONJECTURE that Peso’s sucks ass because you aren’t allowed in there if you don’t drive either an Escalade or a
Hummer, and everyone knows that my ride is your mom so of course I’ve been denied entry to Peso’s.

I was also extra skeptical because I don’t like the name. Toulouse Petit. It’s like they tried to come up with the most “New Orleans-y” name possible. I could have come up with some better ideas: how about “Bayou Billy’s Bourbon Street Bordello?” or “A Streetcar Named the Superdome?” or “Show me Your Tits: the Restaurant?”

Still, I’m a glutton for punishment so I went to Toulouse Petit. Much has been made of the interior, but I don’t think words can describe how over the top this fucking place is: the multicolored rough plaster walls look stupid. Or maybe they hired blind hookers to paint it. The menu brags about how many gazillions of pieces of glass are in the windows. And yes, I’ll agree that the windows look cool, but that’s
only from the INSIDE. From the outside, Toulouse Petit’s extra- awesome windows just look like a lot of expensive handcraft embedded into a green stucco box. And the tables, with their intricate wood inlays, are just fucking ostentatious.

I’d call the showy interior a fail. It looks like a crayon factory exploded inside. They DID, however, get one very important thing right: the menu. Toulouse Petit’s menu, like Galatoire’s or Antoine’s or any one of the old school New Orleans pleasure palaces that it’s trying to emulate, is a vast decadent Bible of
gustatory excess. We started with the boudin blanc ($7.50). This boudin blanc is similar to the watery, pallid, rice- filled sausage you find in Louisiana convenience stores in name only. Toulose Petit’s boudin was fantastic: plump, juicy sausages, sautéed to a glossy bronze, strained in their cases and practically begged you to cut into them. And when you did, it was awesome: rivulets of juice ejaculated from a deceptively light and airy pork stuffing.

The duck confit salad ($10) had lots of radicchio, crescents of sliced celery, and lurid glistening purple chunks of duck confit, topped with a poached egg and a mustard vinaigrette. The vinaigrette combined with the grumbling bitterness of the radicchio was ALMOST too much until you cut into the egg and mixed the yolk into the salad, which mellowed the fuck out to the point where it was JUST painless enough to wolf the fuck down.

Fried alligator seemed a bit pricey at $9.95. For this price you got a small pile of alligator: pink slabs of fleshy tail meat sliced thinly and fried in a really shaggy but crisp breading. This was served with twin pools of remoulade: one chili flavored, smoky and burgundy; the other bone- colored and speckled with herbs. Both remoulades were finely textured. Sometimes when eating alligator, you get the
shittiest, most rank taste you’ve ever had in your mouth, similar only to the shitty rank taste I get when eating your mom. The gator was in no way contaminated by the rancid flavor of reptile fat.

Fried Chicken Gumbo was, for $7.50, a rather small bowl. They wisely didn’t try to stretch the gumbo with too much rice; all of the shitty bowls of gumbo I’ve seen at tourist traps always feature an enormous ice cream scoop of white rice, or even TWO scoops sometimes, mounded into twin bosomy heaps, with only a meager splash of thin grey dishwater gumbo on top. Toulouse Petit’s gumbo was nothing like this: the roux itself was thick and chocolatey, with a satin finish, and there was just enough
rice to mix into the soup without blunting the flavor. Perched on top were crisp chunks of chicken breast fried in that same crunchy shaggy batter as the fried alligator. Well done.

Beignets cost $7. This is pretty fucking pricey for 6 triangular beignets. That’s highway robbery in Louisiana. In Louisiana, beignets are CHEAP. But that’s BECAUSE THEY FUCKING SUCK. Beignets are for old people and drunks: drunks can’t taste how shitty and leathery these fucking things are, and old people remember the time they ate a rat at the height of the Great Depression, so to them a stale,crumbly fake donuts tastes delicious. The beignets at Toulouse Petit are not much better: they’re fried to a dark brown varnish, folded into crumbly triangles like middle school paper footballs. They were okay but a creamy chicory crème anglaise that accompanied was brilliant: when you dipped the beignets into the chicory cream the overall effect was like a million 5 am breakfasts with your grandparents.

I reluctantly found myself genuinely enjoying Toulouse Petit. The food is actually quite tasty. The only way it could be more reminiscent of the actual Louisiana experience would be if the food caused you to drop out of high school and drive a Firebird and wear white rubber boots.

Rating: 8.5 Louisiana experiences out of 10

Ga Ga Loc

2010-05-25T20:36:00.000-07:00

424 Maynard Ave S

206-521-8933

Yes, this blog is still alive. Even though I write for the Seattle Weekly now, I'm going to keep this wainscoted salon of loose morals updated, at least intermittently. They won't let me write about some things, for a variety of reasons: either someone else beat me to it, or I'm breaking too many balls, or some old lady ratted me out, or something. So to answer your questions, yes I'm still alive.

Anyway. Ga Ga Loc.

There are many restaurants in Seattle’s International District. All of them serve similar dishes, so how do you choose? Answer: pick the place with the funniest fucking name. Like Ga Ga Loc. I’ve been laughing at this place’s name for over a decade now. Ga Ga Loc. Ga Ga Fucking Loc.

What does it mean? My Chinese- speaking sources claim it means “Happy Family” or “Lucky Family” or something, which makes perfect sense, since that’s the kind of name ALL Chinese restaurants seem to have. Really, it’s like every Chinese restaurateur has a pair of 8- sided dice, Dungeons & Dragons style, that they use to name the restaurant. The first die has adjectives: Happy, Lucky, Jade, Magic, Great, Seven, China, Sea. The other die has nouns: Dragon, Wall, Garden, Sea, Warrior, Tiger, Family, Wok. Every combination is allowed except “Sea Sea.” When that one pops up they must roll again. Although I don’t think I’d be too keen on eating at a place called “Sea Wall.” And “Magic Warrior” is probably already taken as the name of a (R.I.P.)Ronnie James Dio song, so that one’s out too. And “Happy Wall” just doesn’t make any fucking sense. But you get the picture. I suspect that people just like to say silly words, which is probably why Ga Ga Loc is still in business, because the food sure as fuck isn’t that great.

I WANTED to start with the salt and pepper duck tongue ($11.95) but they were OUT. Who fucking knew that duck tongue could be so popular? We settled for the braised squab ($11.95), which seemed a bit pricey. For that price you get a whole pigeon, which isn’t unfortunately saying much since squabs aren’t that big. That having been said, it was really a WHOLE squab: the head was still attached. The skin was a crackly salty golden brown. The flesh was all dark meat, and by that I mean it was REALLY fucking dark.

I’ve had squab before, but in restaurants owned by white people it’s usually cooked to a rosy and succulent medium rare. Ga Ga Loc’s squab was obviously well- done, since it had been braised, but that doesn’t mean it was bad: it had the rich sandy texture of cooked chicken liver, like chocolate made of meat.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I ordered the chilled jellyfish ($7.95). I was just being a flippant dildo, and the waitress even asked me if I was sure I wanted it. I was expecting tentacles, and stinging, but of course got neither of those things. What I DID get was a gigantic plate full of clear rubbery squiggles speckled with red pepper and a couple batons of pickled carrot and cucumber. The jellyfish was cold, largely flavorless, and had a weirdly unexpected granular bite to it. Biting into a jellyfish piece is a lot like eating a piece of gristle from a steak.

If you didn’t actually bite into it and just kinda slurped it down, the jellyfish, ice cold and slippery and fleshy, would be like what I imagine going down on a lady vampire would be like. It didn’t really taste bad, but it sure as fuck didn’t taste good.

When I ordered the soft egg with prawns ($9.95) I got a huge puffy cloud of scrambled eggs punctuated here and there with sautéed prawns. The prawns were actually quite good, not overcooked, with a hint of 5 spice powder. As for the eggs, please allow me at this point to digress into a dreamy paean to a good scrambled egg. A perfect scrambled egg is a thing of beauty: creamy, with a texture like custard, quivering on the plate like a vaginal cumulonimbus, and as bright yellow and glossy as Pac Man’s spherical carapace. A good scrambled egg is so pure and luscious it’s practically virginal, and it seems like an abomination to even eat it, yet you must violate the chaste sanctity of the egg because it’s SO FUCKING AWESOME. But guess what: Ga Ga Loc’s so- called “soft egg” was nothing like that. The eggs were overcooked, with the shitty dry and foamy texture that only overdone eggs have.

Five spices supreme duck ($9.95) had a pretty goddamned ambitious name, though I wonder what made them stop at that particular level of hyperbole. Living in the realm of obscene exaggeration, as I do, makes me question Ga Ga Loc’s commitment to their own cause. Because if you’re going to call it “supreme” duck you might as well throw in a couple “ultimates” and “holys” and possibly even an “optimal” just for good measure: “Ultimate five spices supreme holy mega- duck” has a much more commanding ring to it anyway.

The pitfall with this idea is that it then has to be the best motherfucking duck you ever tasted, which of course it wasn’t. The duck was good enough: it was the typical standard Chinese roasted duck, moist and fatty, and chopped up into bony chunks the way the Chinese like to do, swimming in a glossy greasy dark brown sauce, heavy on the 5- spice powder. Was it really “supreme” though? Nope. I wouldn’t even call it “penultimate.” I might, however, call it “magnanimous” duck since the poor bastard gave its life to star in such an uninspired dish.

The beef chow foon dry ($6.95) was the best thing I ate at Ga Ga Loc. I fucking LOVE chow foon, or chow ho fun, or however the chinamen want to spell it this week. For the price you get a mountainous pile of wide rice noodles, with supple slivers of beef, diced scallion, and plenty sautéed onion, all tossed in a slippery soy- based sauce. The noodles were soft and go down like liquid satin. The beef was tender, the onions still a bit crunchy for contrast, and the sauce was beefy and smoky and salty. I’ve had this dish many times at different restaurants, and Ga Ga Loc does a fine version.

Then again, it’s difficult to fuck up chow foon because the key is not in the seasoning, but in how wide the noodles are. Wider noodles are clearly better than thin noodles. In fact, the best noodle dish in the world, if it exists, would probably just have one whole gigantic noodle, all folded up on the plate. I wish I could wrap myself in a huge noodle Snuggie right now and eat my way out. Actually that doesn’t go far enough: I wish we could wrap the ENTIRE EARTH in a gargantuan noodle, thus abolishing world hunger because everyone could just chow down on the local noodle dough nearest to them. I’m sure the earth noodle would get dirty in some spots, like where it touched a pile of dog poo or got some dirt or pine needles on it, or where it got dipped into a sewer or something, but still: that would be rad.

Anyway, Ga Ga Loc is okay I guess. It’s open until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, which is pretty good, but so are lots of other places in the International District. Now that I’ve been inside this ridiculous fucking place there’s no need for me to return. If you’re drunk after last call, and a place like Jade Garden or Hing Loon is crowded, then I’d give Ga Ga Loc a shot. Maybe they’ll have some fucking duck tongues this time.

Rating 3 noodle Snuggies out of 10

PS This entry is respectfully dedicated to the friends and family of Ronnie James Dio. My thoughts are with you, even though Black Sabbath totally sucked ass after he took over from Ozzy.

Outback Steakhouse

2010-01-11T20:34:00.000-08:00

666 Everywhere St
Everywhere, USA, 66666
1-800-OUTBACK-SUXS

Let me start off by announcing to all the “food blogging ethics” Nazis that my brother owns this particular Outback Steakhouse, which is located somewhere in Louisiana but of course I won’t say exactly where. Rest assured I won’t go easy on him; I’m going to issue many literary noogies to Outback’s food just like I’ve given ACTUAL noogies to the brother who owns this fucking place. After all, I hold my friends and family to a higher standard than my enemies. My enemies can go fuck your mom for all I care. Oh wait: they already did!

Everyone knows about Outback Steakhouse, and don’t pretend that you don’t, you pretentious motherfucks. There’s a bunch of varnished blonde wood inside and lots of fake “Australian” crap, like boomerangs and “Kangaroo Crossing” signs, on the walls everywhere. They give you gigantic Crocodile Dundee- style steak knives and the waiters wear shirts with epaulets, as if that’s more “Australian” somehow than a regular shirt. Maybe they need the epaulets to hold the rope they use to lasso the kangaroos for the freshly butchered kangaroo meat that Outback sells. Or maybe those epaulets are the only thing holding the waiters’ dignity in place when they have to collect the $2.19 tip from a party of 12 that Outback’s hillbilly clientele typically leave them.

The worst thing about Outback (surprisingly it’s NOT the food) is the customers. All of the dudes seem to have goatees which follow a peculiar natural law: the bigger the overhang on the dude’s beer gut, the bushier his goatee, so that the very fattest of Outback’s gentleman patrons appear to have gigantic pubic thickets from a 1970’s Playboy issue sprouting from their chins. All of the women dining at Outback look like they will eventually appear in amateur bukakke videos. And according to my brother, they’re scam artists, one and all. He can’t count the number of times customers have “found” glass in their food. You’d think that shattered glass is a garnish at Outback. And a couple douchebags once found a ladybug in their salad and claimed they were so embarrassed by the experience that only $500 in Outback gift cards could salve their wounded egos. Honestly I don’t know what’s worse: Outback’s hokey Australian minstrel show or the classless fucks who patronize the place. Or maybe they deserve one another: garbage in, garbage out.

But I digress. As much as I would love to further expound upon the plebians who jam- pack their lard asses into Outback’s varnished wooden booths, this is, after all, a food blog and not a symposium on regional varieties of rednecks. So I should get around, I suppose, to the food. It isn’t as bad as you might think: the sweet glazed roasted pork loin ($10.95) was a half a tenderloin, sliced into medallions and presented with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables. ”Prepare to be impressed!” proclaims the menu. They obviously mistook me for one of the ubiquitous infomercial ladies who can’t believe how EASY or CONVENIENT or SPACE SAVING the product in the infomercial is because I’m not that easily impressed. I will admit that I was surprised by how perfectly cooked the loin was: succulent and juicy, cooked to a rosy medium, with a flavorful seasoned exterior crust. Alas, Outback couldn’t leave well enough alone, because the pork loin was dribbled in an obnoxious pink sauce that seemed like it came from one of those packets of sweet- and- sour sauce you get when you buy shitty egg rolls from Panda Express. Embedded in the sticky sauce were tiny crispy shards of something I couldn’t identify but which, according to my brother, were corn flakes sautéed in butter. What. The. Fuck. The garlic mashed potatoes were very garlicky but had the consistency of stucco. The vegetables, a boilerplate mix of broccoli and carrots, were crisp and tasty and fresh- tasting and perhaps best of all, they didn’t feel the need to drench these in 20 gallons of melted butter or whatever the fuck.

The crab stuffed shrimp ($4.95) was okay. For that price you got four large shrimp tails, butterflied and piled with a gloopy mixture of crab meat, some variety of melted cheese, and breadcrumbs. The shrimp weren’t overcooked at least and still had a pleasant little snap to them. This dish would have been better if the shrimp weren’t floating in a ½” deep moat of melted butter: salty, salty, salted butter. This butter sauce is okay if you dip a piece of Outback’s vaunted bread (vaunted by hillbillies anyway), which comes in smooth, chocolatey brown oblong loaves and is delivered to your table by the waitress with one of their Crocodile Dundee steak knives protruding murderously from it.

I was disappointed by the fresh tilapia with pure lump crabmeat ($14.95), but only because the oddly straightforward name of this dish has none of the descriptive flair of the rest of Outback’s menu. I think it would have tasted better if they called this dish “Mel Gibson’s Holocaust- Denyingly Delicious Fish.” That’s because you’d need an asshole- puckering name like that to make Tilapia interesting. Yes, the fish was tender and flaky, and you got a gargantuan portion of it, topped with a gigantic avalanche of shredded blue crabmeat in an otherwise inoffensive white wine and butter sauce, but Tilapia is so fucking lame. Still, it was otherwise tasty. This was probably the best thing I ate at Outback. It came with a side of steamed green beans which were still a little crisp inside and shockingly green.

A cup of potato soup was served in what I would call more of a “cauldron” than a cup, and at $2.95 cost next to nothing. Chunks of tender potato floated in a creamy broth, laced through with strings of melted cheddar, chunks of bacon, and diced scallion. This was pretty good, but it was more like a baked potato that had been eaten by a pelican then regurgitated to feed its young than a soup.

The Victoria’s filet with lobster ($26.95) was served in the classic surf- n- turf configuration. The only weird thing about this dish was the fact that my spell checking software, in a weird postmodern quirk, is not offended by “surf- n- turf.” This culinary menagerie featured a really large filet mignon and three lobster tail halves. Honestly, if you’re into filet mignon, the Bryant Gumbel of beef, you can’t go wrong, not even at Outback. The filet was gigantic and tender and had a nicely seasoned caramelized crust. The lobster tails, on the other hand, weren’t quite as tasty: too salty and a bit leathery and accompanied by a ramekin of Outback’s extra salty salted butter for dipping. You can choose your potato configuration: baked potato, fries, or garlic mashed. I chose a baked potato which was basically the potato soup, before it was partially digested by the aforementioned pelican. The flesh of the potato was fluffy, the skin was salted, and it came with a twin scoop of whipped butter (which stared up at you from the perforated potato skin like a pair of buttery breasts), green onions, bacon bits, and cheddar cheese and was otherwise a fully realized example of a potato which has been baked then slathered with shitloads of stuff.

Outback Steakhouse is definitely okay. It’s the kind of place that’s usually pretty reliable if you’re stuck in some shithole in the hinterlands on business, or if your car broke down, or if you’re hoarding guns nearby and you need a break from hoarding guns because you’re getting hungry then by all means go to Outback. But only if your brother owns it and you don't have to pay a goddamned dime. And for the love of christ tip your waiter you redneck shitheads.

Rating: 5 angry phone calls from my mom out of 10

PS Outback puts so much butter in and on every dish, that if you could somehow scavenge all of the butter out of a typical three course meal, you’d have enough to sculpt a life- size sex doll entirely out of butter. And that would be pretty awesome.

Marination

2010-01-08T20:53:00.000-08:00

http://marinationmobile.com/

Marination is a taco truck with a twist: when I heard that Marination sold “Korean tacos” I became enraged. That’s because I hate fusion. If you like Mexican pizza, or Thai pizza, or pizza with corn on it, or pizza with broccoli on it, or Southwestern egg rolls, or Japanese French food, or French Japanese food, or anything that Wolfgang Puck cooks, you’ll LOVE Korean tacos! That’s what I thought, anyway, because I’m a total dick and I hate anything new. It’s totally true. I love Saint Chapelle because it’s old; I hate the Weezer Snuggie because it’s new. I love the ancient Norse gods because they’re old; I hate Scientology because it’s new (and because who do you think would win in an arm wrestling match: Thor or Tom Cruise?). Yet in the true scientific spirit I vowed to empirically test Marination’s wares. So one Saturday, when I knew that they’d be slumming along 35th Ave SW, I decided to check these motherfuckers out for myself.

The Kalua Kimchee Quesedilla ($5) had pulled roasted pork shoulder and kim chee, glued together with cheese on a grilled flour tortilla. The pork was finely shredded and the kim chee, despite the fact that I generally despise its spicy farty smell, did a good job of countering the quesedilla’s cheesy dripiness with its tangy crunch. The tortilla was pleasantly charred and crunchy and was topped with those drab army- green pickled jalapeno slices and a pink spicy sauce which I’m guessing was a mixture of Sriracha and sour cream. The “Kalua” in the name refers to the pork and not the coffee liqeur favored by sorority girls from 20 years ago and protagonists of The Big Lebowski.

At $6.50, the Ala Moana Melt was the single most expensive menu item. It’s a perfectly serviceable grilled cheese sandwich with the same pulled pork used in the quesadilla,plus melted gouda cheese and more of the spicy pink sauce, sandwiched between thick slices of coarse chewy bread. It’s basically the same as the quesadilla except with different cheese, no kim chee, and bread instead of the tortilla, so if you want for whatever reason to save $1.50 go for the quesadilla instead. After all, that extra $1.50 you saved can go a long way with your mom.

Kimchee fried rice ($5) came in one of those iconic red and white paper Chinese food containers that no Chinese restaurants actually use anymore. When you first open the box a fried egg stares up at you from atop a big pile of rice, garnished with scallion curlicues. The rice was rather bland, although it was stained a fiery reddish- orange and it LOOKED like it would be really spicy. There was lots of kim chee, which gave a crunchy texture contrast. The egg yolk was still soft so it ran down into the rice and you could mix it in and that was pretty nice, but it wasn’t nice enough to save this dish from being my least favorite thing on Marination’s menu.

But what about Marination’s vaunted Korean tacos? My verdict: mixed results at best. Each taco was $2, and you can choose between four different kinds: kalbi beef, spicy pork, ginger miso chicken, and tofu. The tofu taco doesn’t get any flavorful adjectives, probably because it’s so difficult to attach any flavor to tofu that flavorful WORDS won’t even stick to it.

For how high motherfucking falautin’ these tacos were supposed to be, I would call $2 a reasonable taco truck price. Kalbi beef was clearly the best : sweet and spicy and garlicky chunks of tender beef were topped with a tiny bale of crisp, tangy, sweet slaw of shredded cabbage and carrots with cilantro and wrapped in two (sometimes three) corn tortillas.

The so- called “spicy” pork was no spicier than the kalbi beef despite the fact that they actually took the time to describe the pork as being spicy. Like the kim chee fried rice, just because the ground pork in this taco was dyed orangey- red doesn’t make it spicy. Sure, it was spicier than a glass of water, but it definitely wasn’t as spicy as your mom’s love life.

The ginger miso chicken was what I would call a misfire: I guess they didn’t put enough ginger in it. I kept expecting to feel that rumbling, slow, sweet burn that only LOTS of ginger brings to a dish, but it never materialized. And the miso was too cloying and chalky.

As for the tofu taco: don’t bother unless you’re a freak. The tofu was grilled and marinated in some tangy salty marinade, but the marinade didn’t penetrate very far into the tofu. Every vegetarian I have ever met swears it can be flavored yet I personally have never tasted a piece of tofu that was truly seasoned. Tofu must be pretty dense; why are we making bulletproof vests of Kevlar, when a squishy, milky- white tofu vest is so much more impenetrable? At the very least we should consider making CONDOMS of tofu because obviously flavorful liquids can’t seep past it.

The aloha slider ($2) is the first and only sandwich that’s actively trying to provoke me. That’s because it has SPAM on it. Spam sucks. The great Jonathan Kauffman, formerly of the Seattle Weekly and an extraordinary yet understated dude (who has sadly left our faggy city for the even MORE fudge- packer friendly San Francisco) has predicted a Spam craze of the same magnitude as our current bacon mania (note: I don’t know if he actually wrote this or if I just made it up. Fuck journalism). While I personally believe that Kauffman is a prophet and is in fact the Salman Rushdie of food writing (I’d call him the J.D. Salinger but Kauffman is too prolific), I must disagree: Spam will never grip the popular imagination the way bacon has. That’s because Spam sucks. You may argue that Spam is really just a terrine of sorts, but if you make that argument I will punch you in the neck. Spam is an abomination; a slice of the festering pustulent nutsack of a gibbering insane Lovecraftian god. Spam is not food. Spam is your mom.

My friend and I tried to fry Spam once. At first it seemed somewhat appealing, though not necessarily edible: bubblegum pink and finely textured like a rubber pencil eraser. Then as it cooked the slices shrank down into brown leathery hockey pucks floating in a pool of their own rendered fat. Even though we were totally drunk we both refused to eat it, and THAT my friends has got to be some kind of anomaly because when I get drunk enough I’ll eat an Almond Joy without irony.

Still, the aloha slider surprised me: A slab of grilled spam cozied down in a nest of pulled pork, with more of the same sweet and tangy taco slaw on one of those weird sweet Hawaiian rolls. With a smoky, charred crust and surprisingly edible interior, the Spam was actually quite tasty. Besides, two kinds of meat are always better than one, even if one of the meats in question is Spam.

I really wanted to sneer at Marination because the only fusion I endorse is the fusion of your mom’s genitals with mine. And even THAT isn’t really very good. But Marination won me over because it is CHEAP: I ordered EVERY SINGLE MENU ITEM (except the drinks; I can buy my own can of Mr. Pibb, thanks) and the total was $28. And yes they did reuse a lot of the same ingredients over and over again, like the pulled pork and the slaw and the spicy pink saucy stuff, but it’s on a TRUCK for fuck’s sake. SO yeah: Marination is good, but it isn’t as good as getting a blowjob from a leprechaun on the deck of the solid platinum yacht you just won in the lottery. Still, it’s a solid value. Stick to the kalbi beef tacos and the aloha sliders and you can’t miss.

Rating: 6 Leprechauns out of 10

Bastille

2009-12-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

5307 Ballard Ave NW

206-453-5014 (GET A RESERVATION FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST)

As many of you know I love the French. I want to go to France and have sex with every last French citizen (provided they took a shower that day, which of course is iffy at best). The French are so fucking awesome, especially since we don’t have to call French Fries “Freedom Fries” anymore, and your mom can stop “Freedom Kissing” my asshole, and I don’t have to wear a “Freedom Tickler” when I fuck her. So I was excited when Bastille opened, even though I question the choice of name. The Bastille is a loaded term in France; that ancient and now- destroyed prison was the symbol of a decadent monarchy famous for cruel torture and unlawful imprisonment and which deserved to be overthrown. Naming a French restaurant here in the USA “Bastille” would be akin to opening a Southern food restaurant in France and calling it “Jim Crow.”

Usually when people talk about restaurants in the context of French food they discuss bistros. Well I’m going to discuss them too. Here’s a hint about Bistros: if the word “Bistro” ISN’T the first word in the name of the restaurant, don’t go there. If you ignore my warning, I can guarantee two things: 1. the food will suck, but not as much as you might think (just enough to aggravate you) and 2. the menu will have at least a paragraph about how the word “bistro” came into use.

The word “bistro” came into use during the French Revolution, but I don’t give a fuck about that. What I DO give a fuck about is the French Revolution itself. The French Revolution was totally fucking retarded. They claimed to have been inspired by our very own American Revolution, but I think those motherfuckers missed the point: after all, WE managed to overthrow the reigns of aristocracy without resorting to indiscriminate head chopping and ridiculous purple prose. The French had the right idea but ultimately fucked it up when the Revolution turned on itself; among the many innocent people who didn’t deserve to lose their heads were: winemaker Francis Bertrand, accused of producing “sour wine injurious to the health of citizens;” Mary Angelica Plaisant, a seamstress who was guillotined for exclaiming “A fig for the nation!” (I can sympathize with ingredient hatred but COME THE FUCK ON; I don’t like cilantro but I’d never want someone decapitated over it); and of course Antoine Lavoisier, France’s most famous chemist, who devised the metric system and discovered the principles of combustion, who was sentenced to his own ride on the “National Razor” after being accused of selling adulterated tobacco.

Just as arbitrary as the odds of having one’s head removed during the actual French Revolution are the odds of getting a reservation at Bastille. Your best bet is to use Open Table; if you’re computer illiterate you could give Bastille a call, but you’d have better luck trying to fuck a leprechaun (does wanting to fuck a leprechaun make you gay? Jesus I hope not). I called Bastille and repeatedly got their voice mail, which clearly states that if you leave your name, phone number, number of people in your party, and day and time of your reservation, they’ll call you back to confirm. Well guess what: like the Jacobin pledge to enact price controls on food during the famine following Louis XVI’s execution, my confirmation call from Bastille never materialized. I called and called Bastille and kept getting the aforementioned voice mail. When I FINALLY connected with a person I was told that I didn’t, in fact, need a 9:30 pm reservation on a Friday night, because “it usually drops off after 9 anyway.” So Friday I dutifully made my way over to Ballard, where I was greeted by a shrug and news of a two hour wait. Silly me, believing what I had been told by an employee of the business I wish to patronize!

Like I said, I’d rather take my chances with the National Razor. But what about the food? I daresay it was better than what was available when the Bastille still stood, at least. The Lyonnaise Salad ($12), with frisee and lardons topped with a poached egg, was fucking killer: the bitter fronds of the frissee was balanced out by a creamy dressing and the poached egg, which when cut into wept its golden tears of tasty yolk all over the salad. The lardons were chewy, salty, and smoky, and dropped into the fray like perfectly thrown Molotov cocktails of porky deliciousness.

The Soupe a l’oingnon ($11) seemed a bit expensive for a rather small bowl of soup, but Bastille’s rendition of this classic dish could have been the original template, for better or worse: a rich beefy broth swimming with caramelized onion threads, maybe a bit cloying but brightened up with the unexpected woodsy hue of rosemary, and topped with an unfortunate giant glob of congealed Gruyere or Comte or some other such stretchy white tangy cheese.

The steak frites ($18) was maddening: the steak had a good, seasoned crust, but the motherfuckers overcooked my medium rare into well done. This has NEVER happened to me before in a restaurant. The accompanying frites (in a cup) were all too short. I
only had 1 frite which was what I consider an acceptable French fry length of 3 inches. The frites were crisp outside but a bit mealy. If dudes could lose their heads for selling bad wine, SURELY someone deserves to be guillotined for these crappy frites.

The lamb burger, on the other hand, was a fucking thing of beauty. For $12 you get a luscious ball of ground lamb, topped with a bird’s nest of arugula and caramelized onions with some kind of spicy sauce on a sesame seed bun. And it wasn’t some pussy sesame seed bun like you’d get at McDonald’s, either: this bun was soft, yet somehow still as firm as the hand of Revolutionary justice meted out by the Committee for Public Safety. The bun had to have some substance to it to restrain the lamb patty, which was so juicy and sweet it was almost like a piece of fruit made out of flesh. And it comes with fries! Unfortunately, as previously mentioned the fries suck, which is ironic considering that they’re FRENCH fries (or not, for you “correct use of the term ‘irony’” Nazis).

Caille Grilee aux Lardons ($14) was a grilled quail, which arrived splayed open like a porn star, reclining on a bed of quartered Brussels sprouts and lardons in a creamy mustard sauce with lots of thyme. The pornographic quail was attractively cross- hatched in grill marks and had a wonderful charred smoke flavor while still remaining a rosy pink inside. The Brussels sprouts were tender yet not mushy. Frankly, the lardons struck me as overkill, even given the now- famous dictum that Bacon Makes Everything Better. This dish was ridiculous; it was so good I wish I could fuck it and make it have my babies, which I would then eat the way obsolete gods in ancient myths always seemed to eat their children.

Crispy Pork Belly ($10) was, as the name suggests, crispy. On top. So I guess that description is only 50% accurate. On the bottom it was soft and succulent, with gentle artesian springs of melted fat bubbling out from between the tender striated layers of meat with every forkful. Accompanying this perfect cube of pork-- at this point I’d like to formally define a “perfect cube of pork” as the act of fucking your mom 9 times—were a couple pink rings of pickled shallot and a pool of a mildly sweet plum confiture.

We finished things off with a perfectly serviceable lavender crème brulee ($6), with a crackly sugar crust that, like a broken light bulb, surprises you with how strong yet brittle it is. The crème beneath was as creamy as the breast of Lady Liberty herself, bare chested, arms raised, gun in hand, leading the French people to VICTOIRE over the Revolution’s enemies, like in the famous Delacroix painting.

I have mixed feeling about Bastille, just like I have mixed feeling about the actual French Revolution. The food is generally good, but the service sucks. And forget about setting foot inside that place on the weekends: Monday through Wednesday is your best bet if you want to go. And for God’s sake, man, make a fucking reservation.

In the best tradition of obnoxious food bloggers everywhere I went to Bastille twice. After the first disastrous time in which they overcooked my fucking steak, and I was too afraid to send it back because we were waiting FORTY- FIVE FUCKING MINUTES BETWEEN COURSES, I was prepared to suggest that THIS Bastille should suffer the same fate as its namesake. Luckily (for them) I returned to try it again, and my opinion of them, like history’s opinion of the French Revolution, has softened with time. So VIVE LA FRANCE, you fuckers, and, uh, Bastille is okay.

Rating: 5.5 sans- cullotes out of 10

The Rickshaw

2009-11-27T21:36:00.001-08:00

322 N 105th St
206-789-0120

Sit down, and listen to this, dear readers: on Thanksgiving Eve two old friends and I decided to have a few cocktails and raise a glass to not getting killed by a truck. After several tipsy rounds of darts we found ourselves suffering from the unnecessary hunger to which drunks typically succumb. We were in Greenwood and my friends kept talking about the awesome Chinese place down the street. As anyone who’s stumbled into the International District at 3:00 am knows, Chinese food always sounds good when you’re shitfaced so of course after several rounds of self- congratulatory high- fives we headed off to this awesome Chinese restaurant. It turns out the awesome Chinese place my friends were talking about was the Rickshaw.

The Rickshaw was largely deserted so we chose to sit in the bar. Apparently, counter intuitively, the Rickshaw actually takes reservations, which we found out the hard way, by trying to sit at a table that had been reserved. Our gracious bartender directed us to an adjacent table, in the process inadvertently starting what will go down in history as the Great Rickshaw Table Skirmish. The Rickshaw’s lauded karaoke hadn’t started yet, which is good because karaoke annoys the piss out of me. The bar inside the Rickshaw is a classic old- school Chinese cocktail lounge: dimly lit, with formica tabletops and vinyl chairs and plaster dragons and paper lanterns and the red/ black/ gold color scheme that used to indicate musty Victorian Chinoiserie but which has lately been replaced by the mod cutesy neon shit that somehow indicates “Asia” a’ la Boom Noodle or Kushibar.

Several scruffy bearded blue- collar dudes were at the bar, clustered like moths around the obligatory metaphorical flame: the bartender. For good reason, of course, because the bartender was smoking hot. She was a busty brunette, and the very personification of the Platonic ideal of T and/ or A. This woman looked like Nigella Lawson, if Nigella became a supernova. Her rack alone was capable of distorting the space/ time continuum: close inspection of her tits with a radio telescope revealed gravitational lensing around the slope of her breast. Her hips were bountiful enough to write a patriotic song about, and she had a glossy gushing brunette fountain of hair which could inspire a million years’ worth of Loreal commercials.

Allow me at this point to engage in an editorial aside (as if my breathless puppy- dog prose wasn’t enough of an aside) and thank the ghosts of all the Caesars that T&A is finally back in vogue. I think I speak for every straight guy in the world when I thank motherfucking Jesus that this fucking emaciated Kate Moss shit is finally out of style. Helen of Troy may have had the face that launched 1000 ships but women like Nigella Lawson and Christina Hendricks and the bartender at The Rickshaw have the racks that dropped 1000 megatons of thermonuclear warheads.

Setting aside my gushy starry- eyed prose for the bartender, the food itself is actually pretty solid. Egg rolls were $5.50 for 2, which seems a bit expensive. Sure, they’re a bit bigger than the ones you typically get around town, but those egg rolls weren’t really anything special: standard issue egg rolls, wrapped in rice sheets, fried to a crackly bronze, and filled with the usual stuff like shredded cabbage, little bits of sautéed ground pork, glass noodles, and julienned carrots.

The observant among us will by now have noted that there are TWO kinds of egg rolls: the rice paper kind and the kind of egg rolls I call “Cracker Egg Rolls.” I like Cracker Egg Rolls better. Cracker Egg Rolls are the kind you can buy in packs of 50 from Costco. Also available at malls, in airports, and at Shitty Chinese Buffets throughout the south, Cracker Egg Rolls have bubbly fried wheat wrappers and are usually filled with more meat. What’s the basis for the slight variation in egg rolls? I don’t know but I’ll hazard a guess and say that the different types of egg rolls come from different regions in China. After all, as everyone knows, China is full of regions.

While the egg rolls were okay, the pot stickers were actually quite tasty, AND a better deal. For $7.95 you got 6 of them: huge pillowy pot stickers the size (and shape) of croissants. The dough was sautéed a crunchy brown on the outside, though the interior layer of dough might have been a bit undercooked. There was a shitload of ground pork inside, juicy and seasoned with the usual diced scallion, ginger, and 5- spice powder, and the pot stickers were accompanied by a rather large bowl of the boilerplate sweet and salty dipping sauce.

The Mongolian Beef ($10.50) was also pretty typical: tender slivers of beef stir- fried with plenty of onion in a spicy and sweet reddish brown sauce. There were lots of Thai bird chilis here and there, and of course the saucy beef was ladled over a bed of those ivory- colored fried noodles that only ever seem to come with Mongolian Beef. I generally like Mongolian Beef, and the Rickshaw serves up a fine if unoriginal example of it, but something tells me that if Genghis Khan happened upon the Rickshaw he wouldn’t order Mongolian Beef. I don’t see real Mongols enjoying a plateful of delicately crisped pasta squiggles. Instead he’d probably pincushion everyone in the bar with arrows, then raid the place’s freezer and just hack off a frozen piece of beef and eat it raw. So if the Rickshaw REALLY wanted to be “authentic,” maybe an order of Mongolian Beef should just come with a jagged hunk of raw meat and a complimentary beheading.

The Szechwan Beef Noodles ($9.50) came in a vast bowl and it was also tasty and it was a very good deal. Chewy sliced beef, perfect rectangles of bamboo shoot, and zig- zaggy parallelograms of carrot that looked as though they’d been cut by an elf with pinking shears all floated in a murky tangy broth. This was the perfect dish, spicy and steamy, for a rainy chilly November evening. It was actually really spicy: orangey red droplets of chili oil floated visibly on the surface, and my nose was running after only a couple gulps of broth. My only problem with this dish is that the eponymous noodles were shitty grocery- store dried vermicelli. You can’t have everything I suppose.

The General Tso’s Chicken ($10.95) was one of those unexpected delights that make life interesting. Many of you have read my melancholic reminiscing about the best General Tso’s Chicken in Seattle. The Rickshaw’s Gen Tso’s Chicken wasn’t quite as legendary as the Broadway Wok & Grill’s but it was still very good. In fact it was way better than I thought it would be. Succulent chunks of fried thigh meat were doused in a sauce that, as befits the Rickshaw’s obviously spicy bent, featured LOTS of chilis. A couple florets of broccoli, lightly steamed to a vivid and commanding green, accompanied. With a very crispy batter and a spicy sauce with a splashy vinegary top note, the Rickshaw’s General Tso’s was almost like a plate of Buffalo Wings. Very intriguing.

Unfortunately our delightful evening was cut short by the opening shots of the aforementioned Great Rickshaw Table Skirmish. Remember when I said that our lovely and talented bartender escorted us to an adjacent table? At this point the party of 12 that had reserved the two tables nearest to us started to trickle in, and this is when the trouble started. They began to sit down. Eventually some old lady with a head of hair that looked like a lhasa apso’s ass appeared and told us to move. Apparently she was the karaoke lady. Well guess what: fuck you, karaoke lady, and fuck your furry shitty hairdo. We weren’t done eating. This fucking crystal- meth addict looking whore actually STARTED TO GRAB OUR FUCKING PLATES. I stopped her and politely stated the obvious, i.e. that we weren’t done eating.

Karaoke lady, with her pinched and puckered smoker’s mouth and her bushy mound of curly frizzy furry tricolor hair, shall forever hereafter be known as “Dog Ass Face.” Dog Ass Face said “Well you have to move right now because this table is reserved.” I just looked at her. There was NO PLACE for us to move. The Rickshaw had suddenly become crowded because Karaoke was starting: some Rick Moranis looking motherfucker was singing “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones in a pleasant mahogany baritone that seemed incongruous coming from his nebbishy mouth. My friend laughed at me and mentioned that I love the French too much. I don’t know if that was his way of insinuating that I was pussing out, but Dog Ass Face made a grave mistake when she agreed with my friend and said that I WAS in fact like the French. Time froze: who the fuck are you, Dog Ass Face? You don’t know me. And apparently you also don’t know a competent hairdresser. And your face looks just like my dog’s ass. Fuck you, woman. Die.

Before things could escalate our lovely and talented bartender intervened. She explained to Dog Ass Face that she, the lawfully ordained bartender, gave us the table. Dog Ass Face sputtered some vile verbal canine diarrhea from her anus/ mouth and made an obscene barking noise about how we should leave soon. Within clear earshot of Dog Ass Face I asked the bartender if Dog Ass Face was the manager. The bartender laughed. “She works here,” replied the bartender, “but she’s no one’s boss.” Dog Ass Face heard the rebuke and slunk away with her ass face tail between her ass face legs.

And just like that the bartender deftly intercepted all of the ratings points that Dog Ass Face had just caused the Rickshaw to shed onto the floor the way her shitty hairdo sheds. THAT is what I call customer service. Still, I don’t think Dog Ass Face’s brusque manner and shitty hairdo should go unpunished so I’m going to give the Rickshaw a rare 3- part rating.

Anyway, I hope you’ll forgive my bitchy screeching literary vomit which is worthy of the most arbitrary one- star yelp rating. I shouldn’t have let Dog Ass Face push my buttons, and I generally don’t hold service against any place I review, but Dog Ass Face is a total loon with ZERO skill. Still, I wasn’t going to let my run- in with a rude styleless douche ruin my day.

My trip to the Rickshaw and subsequently pleasant evening with friends reminded me, in the true spirit of Thanksgiving, about what’s good in life:

Friends.

Buffalo Trace Bourbon.

Surprisingly non- disappointing General Tso’s Chicken.

Not getting killed by an oncoming truck.

T.

A.

My dog, whose furry ass was the inspiration for Dog Ass Face’s Dog Ass Face.

Happy Thanksgiving, fuckers, and if you go the Rickshaw, for fuck’s sake sit on the restaurant side.

Rating:
Our super hot bartender with MAD PEACEKEEPING SKILLZ: 9.5 brunette quasars out of 10

Dog Ass Face: 0 stupid old ladies who mistake Karaoke management for any other sort of authority out of 10

The Rickshaw: 6.5 eventful evenings out of 10

Zippy's Giant Burgers

2009-11-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

1513 SW Holden St

206-763-1347 (but don’t bother calling)

I fucking LOVE hamburgers. Hamburgers are the quintessential American food, and they fucking rock the ever living FUCK out of your FACE. They taste so goddamned good. Actually that’s a generalization. Not every hamburger tastes that great: for instance, the McDonald’s Corporation exists solely to fend off hangovers. Their beef tastes stale and dusty yet humid, like what I imagine a mannequin’s vagina would taste like.

I’m also less than enamored by the Costco- style mega- packs of frozen burgers, ESPECIALLY the ones that have an irregularly shaped perimeter, as though that wavy edge would fool anyone into thinking that their burger was a handmade patty. One big tipoff would be the fact that while the edges of the burger might not be perfectly circular, the top face of the patty is perfectly flat. Flat enough, in fact, for you to use the patty as though it were a writing desk. To paraphrase Lewis Carrol, how is a burger like a writing desk? Answer: when it sucks so bad that you write all over it instead of eating it. Because you see, my friends, the essence of humor is finding an unlikely link between two vastly different things. For example: the esoteric combination of tax- dodging aristocrats and huffy ignorant gasbags with an infinite wellspring of indignation is the reason the Republican party will always be more hilarious than the Democrats.

Like the Republican party, the long line to buy a fucking hamburger at Zippy’s would also be hilarious if it didn’t directly impact my life. Obviously Zippy’s, tucked into a corner of West Seattle and just a whore’s hair north of White Center, is popular, although the line wouldn’t be so long if the place wasn’t the size of a cubicle inside. You can allegedly call in an order in advance, but don’t bother: the one time I tried that, they put me “on hold,” and by that I mean they put me on “ghetto hold,” which means they just put the phone down with me still on the line, so I could hear them taking EVERYONE ELSE’S orders, while ignoring my own humble hamburger request.

Anyway, despite the cluster fuck inside Zippy’s, the hamburgers are so fucking killer it’s totally worth the wait. Despite its awkward name, the Zip Burger with Bacon and Cheese ($5.50) is a fucking classic: a huge sloppy monster on a bun. The patty, juicy and grilled to a lurid and unrepentantly pink medium, barely holds itself together with each bite. Bacon reinforces the smoky charred flavor. The usual vegetable suspects loiter about: iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and red onions all jockey for position. A couple slices of melted cheese mortar the whole thing together.

The enigmatically named “No. 11” ($5.25) features the same obscenely juicy beef patty, along with lettuce, cheese, chipotle sauce, and pickled peppers. Although it doesn’t seem very spicy at first, with each bite the heat mounts progressively, until a sheen of sweat breaks out on your forehead and your nose begins to run. Instead of cryptically labeling it “No. 11” they should have called this burger “Sauna on a Bun.”

All of you hypocritical vegans in the audience should know that the (vegetarian) Zip Bean Burger ($4.75) is VERY GOOD: a black bean and mushroom patty nestles snugly into a bun amongst a big pile of lettuce, tomatoes, red onion, and lots of pickles. The patty itself has a nice crusty caramelized char on the outside, while the interior is surprisingly chewy and moist with pleasant woody notes. The Bean Burger would actually be orders of magnitude better with bacon, which as everyone knows is a flavor multiplier. As everyone ALSO knows, beans and bacon go so well together. And I’m pretty sure the “Secret sauce,” a glossy orange concoction, has mayonnaise in it, so the Bean Burger ISN’T vegan. If you’re a vegetarian and you’ve made the tricky logistical commitment of setting foot inside Zippy’s overcrowded 3rd world cubicle, you may as well just go ahead and get bacon on the Bean Burger. Just do it. No one will know.

Fries and onion rings are each $1.50. For this price you get a good amount of rather bland but otherwise good fries. The onion rings are SPECTACULAR: the batter is nicely seasoned, not too thick, and so crisp it crunches almost like a Dorito in your mouth when you bite it. The onions themselves are sliced neither too thick nor too thin. And you get a lot of them. My only complaint here is that Zippy’s gives you a tiny cup of ketchup and “Secret sauce” to dip you rings into, and there’s no possible way it could fit: it’s like trying to shove a hula hoop into a shot glass.

If you’re thirsty there’s a variety of weird local sodas in the cooler (I counted 34 different kinds). Zippy’s is also renowned for its floats, malts, and milkshakes ($3.25, $3.75, and $3.50 respectively), which of course are made from real ice cream. Honestly, though, I don’t see the appeal of milkshakes. People who love to point out obvious things frequently say that the first dude to eat escargot must have been starving, but I posit that the dude who invented the milkshake must have been STONED. Why else would someone want to drink a cup of melted ice cream? Sure, it’s sweet, but a 10 pound bag of sugar is sweet too, and I don’t see people waxing nostalgic and craving handfuls of granulated Dixie Crystals.

I would say that Zippy’s rules your stomach with an iron fist, but it’s so chaotic and goofy that I don’t think an iron fist is an appropriate metaphor for Zippy’s administrative control of your digestive system. After all, an iron fist implies order, authority, and ruthless efficiency, and Zippy’s of course, has none of that. So let’s just say Zippy’s rules your stomach with some kind of floppy, brightly colored clown glove.

Rating: 8 clown gloves out of 10

Poco Wine Room

2009-10-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

1408 E Pine St

206-322-9463

There’s nothing quite like being an old- school, unrepentant lush. I wish I had the balls to pull this off, and become a modern day W.C. Fields, but I’m too much of a pussy. In the modern day, daily alcohol intake is frowned upon, with all of our “zero tolerance” bullshit and “three strikes” and other “law & order” type nonsense (except for the actual show Law & Order, which rules your face, especially the episode where Zack Morris played a gay porn star). But back in the days of W.C. Fields, sobriety was a mere suggestion, much like those so- called “Stop” signs I keep seeing everywhere.

Naturally, being an aspiring drunk, I thought I’d hit the Poco Wine Room. After all, nothing says “slow descent into alcoholism” like passing out in a restaurant, slumped onto the table, empty wine bottles rolling around and clunking against your head while you snore the heavy gurgling snores of the REALLY FUCKING WASTED.

Before I reached that level of intoxication, however, I thought I’d have something to eat. We started with the sausage, apple, and crimini flatbread ($7). “Flat” bread is a bit of a misnomer here since it was clearly three- dimensional bread. After all, if it was truly “flat” bread it would disappear from view if you looked at it along its edge. But this bread had far too much thickness for that. You got four squares of puffy, chewy bread. Each square was topped with a couple slices of grilled sausage, sautéed crimini mushrooms, and crowned with a razor thin halo of Granny Smith. The flatbread rested in a shallow pool of very good, very green olive oil, with a dusting of finely minced parsley for contrast. What this really looked to me was a “deconstructed” sandwich. And if you thought I’d mention a phrase like “deconstructed” without bitching about it, then you obviously haven’t been paying attention.

As you can probably guess, I’m tired of “deconstructed” shit. Who decided that this was a good idea? Let’s take a recipe with lots of components, cook them all separately, and throw them all over the plate. What a brilliant fucking idea! Why not serve someone a pile of sugar, a mound of flour, and a couple eggs and call it “deconstructed cookies?” “Deconstructed French fries” could just be a raw potato. Or better yet, you could sell a glass of milk and some salt, which you make the customer wait around for, for several weeks, before you serve them “deconstructed cheese.”

Or even better, the ne plus ultra of deconstructed bullshit: “deconstructed entropy.” Cosmologists predict that at some point in the very distant future, all matter in the universe will eventually unwind and, through one process or another, be converted into energy, which will then all dissolve into heat. This process is called entropy. So the truly “cutting edge” chef with a real vision of the future would just serve patrons a warm, empty plate. Deconstructed entropy. The end of the universe on a plate. Eat THAT, “foodies.”

Luckily the spiced butternut squash salad ($7) wasn’t deconstructed at all. In fact, it was well constructed, though it seemed a bit pricey for what amounted to a small mound of mixed greens. Fortunately there was a ton of flavor packed into that salad. As the name suggests, there were many cubes of roasted butternut squash in this salad, but there were also dried cherries, thinly sliced pear, and goat cheese, all coated in a light vinaigrette. This was a classically constructed salad, with the tart yet chewy cherries and dry crisp pear balanced by the chevre’s creamy milky tang. Unlike your mom’s creamy milky tang, this salad was not only edible, it was quite good. The squash was surprisingly spicy: while it wasn’t “5- star Thai” fiery, the squash definitely made its presence known. With its delicate balance of flavors and secretive unruly spiciness, this salad reminded me of something I’ve eaten elsewhere. It was so cute and so precious it could be on the menu at the Tilikum Place Café.

The truffled mac & cheese was on sale so we got some. It’s normally $8 but on Sundays they drop the price to $5. It being Sunday, we decided to get it. I didn’t have very high expectations for the truffled mac & cheese. After all, I’ve been burned by so- called “truffled” items before. Many restaurants treat truffles the way hard- core drunks treat vermouth: drunks try to call a glass of straight gin a “martini” just because you held the bottle of vermouth near the cocktail shaker. Shitty restaurants try a similar self- serving ruse and use as little truffle as is legally possible without violating false advertising laws. Seriously, sometimes truffles are like homeopathic remedies: they may or may not actually contain the active ingredient. Remind me to complain about homeopathy and Bastyr University at a later date.

Luckily the truffled mac & cheese at the Poco Wine Room is exactly the opposite of the preceding paragraph. The Poco Wine Room is not fucking around with the truffles. They are so serious about truffling stuff that I should go back and write that last sentence so that every word is capitalized: The Poco Wine Room Is Not Fucking Around With The Truffles. The mac & cheese was so truffled the fuck out that I could smell it before it even got to the table: the heady garlicky aroma of white truffle oil preceded the ramekin of macaroni by at least 20 feet. This dish was topped with a crunchy breadcrumb crust. The penne pasta beneath the crust was tender without being flabby, and the cheese sauce clung on lightly without coagulating into rubbery bits. Best of all was the aforementioned truffle flavor: deep, earthy, and muscular, like a delicious roundhouse punch to your tastebuds’ nuts, delivered by some kind of monstrous earth giant summoned by a chaotic evil geomancer. Honestly I don’t know how they did it. Having sat through so many shitty potluck mac & cheeses, this was like taking a breath of fresh motherfucking air after going down on your mom.

The shallow butter poached shrimp ($14) was delicious, though I don’t know why they needed to tell you the depth at which the shrimp were poached. You got four huge prawns, succulent and supple, gently poached in butter with some kind of puree. The shrimp were very good, but the leftover butter, mingled with whatever was in that puree, was so fucking delicious I kept licking it off the plate until we finally got some bread to wipe it up with.

The Poco Wine Room is an unassuming and cozy little place to get quietly, seriously fucked up. For a place which refers to itself as a “wine room,” the wine list isn’t very extensive, especially not compared to some place like Crush, which has a Grand Grimoire of hundreds of vintages. Still, the Poco Wine Room is cute and chill and the wine is fairly priced: the most expensive bottle I saw was maybe $50, and on Sundays all bottles are $8 off. The food is good, cheap, and classy. Unlike your mom, who embodies only one of those three adjectives I just listed in the preceding sentence. Guess which?

Rating: 8 truffles out of 10

Smith

2009-10-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

332 15th Ave E
206-709-1900

Smith is tough to find. If you’re driving along 15th Ave E on Capitol Hill, you might miss it because the sign is so goddamned, motherfucking tiny. It’s a metal sign that’s maybe 6 by 12”. I always thought that a place of business would want to be visible, but I suppose I’m wrong. If it’s a tiny sign they want, I know an electron microscopist who can construct a sign made of rhodium atoms on a carbon background. This sign would be about 0.000000154 meters long, plenty big enough to be seen from the street.

But the outside of Smith isn’t the most puzzling part of the place: the inside is plenty weird, too. I’m a bit confused about what Smith is trying to do with its interior design. It’s dark, with varnished wood and tan floral print wallpaper everywhere. Taxidermied deer heads and ducks, and a bunch of naively painted portraits (including a crude painting of JFK!) stud the walls. It’s got a Wild West vibe, which is too bad because the Wild West was obviously a fucked up place. If movies are to be believed (and of course everything in the movies is accurate to within 1/ 100,000th of one percent), then the American West circa 1880 was a place filled with horses, saloons, gunfights, card games, and of course whores, all packaged in a couple Victorian storefronts on a dusty street in the middle of Assfuckville, Arizona. If Smith is trying to approximate some mythical Western stereotype, they don’t quite nail it. They need some card tables, some dude in a vest and arm garters plunking out Scott Joplin and Stephen Foster on a badly tuned upright piano, and whores. And syphilis.

What about the food? I might have been distracted by the tiny sign and strange décor, but the food is pretty solid. Duck rillettes, a smooth paste made from pureed duck meat, was $7 and was served in a glass jar, sealed with an ivory slab of creamy duck fat. The rillettes had a rich roasted duck flavor and came with a couple grilled bread slices, some cornichons, and a tiny ramekin of grainy mustard. Salt cod fritters ($6) weren’t that great. You got 6 of these fried balls of salty fish. They tasted like fish sticks, and were served with a zucchini and dill dipping sauce. The dipping sauce was very creamy and fresh tasting, and was much better than the thing that was supposed to be dipped into it, which was a goddamned shame.

The poutine was similarly disappointing, although not because of the price: $6 gets you a half order of cheesy gravy- coated French fries, piled into a gigantic mound the size of a man’s head on a full 12” dinner plate. I would sincerely hate to see a FULL order, although I suspect a full order of poutine is what killed John Candy. The fries themselves were okay, glistening richly with beef demiglace, but the coagulated rubbery cheese, which you could easily use to seal a bathtub, left something to be desired. Poutine is one of those things about Canada I just don’t understand. Just like the way I don’t understand how that socialist wonderland of the North, where health care is free and hookers, pot, and codeine are legal, can produce such shitty music (especially Nickelback, AKA the Auschwitz of Good Taste).
But enough about Nickelback and its boring artificial angst, since everyone knows Canadians have no angst; it’s one of many products they must import from the good ole’ USA.

On to the marrow bones: $9 gets you 3 huge chunks of beef bone the size of a brontosaurus femur, scathingly hot, the melted marrow bubbling up over the top of the bones like lava from a volcano. Spread onto the accompanying grilled bread, this luxurious beef marrow tasted like butter made of meat. The small side salad of mixed greens that comes with the bones has a light, tart dressing that cuts cleanly through the greasy beefiness of the marrow.

Just as delicious as the marrow bones was the chickpea, tuna, chorizo and arugula salad ($8). The aforementioned ingredients peeked out from a huge pile of baby arugula, dressed in a little olive oil. The chickpeas were obviously canned, and the batons of Spanish chorizo were a bit superfluous, but I won’t hold a grudge because the tender, oily, flaky tuna was the best canned tuna I’ve eaten in the USA. This is a solid fucking salad, and this dish could have only been more Iberian if they served it on a weirdly shaped, wavy plate, or put squid ink in it, or topped it with a cloud of some sort of flavored foam.

I was less impressed with the golden beet salad ($8). The name is deceptive because there weren’t that many golden beets in this salad: it was mostly chicory, with bleu cheese crumbles and hazelnuts. The chunks of the eponymous beets, when they made a rare guest appearance, were underdone, and the bitter chicory really knocked the flavor out of whack. When you could get a bite of the beets, cheese, chicory, and hazelnuts together, the flavors balanced nicely, but getting all of that shit together into one forkful was like herding cats.

The Cuban pork and ham sandwich ($8) featured a thin filling of black forest ham and pulled pork shoulder with caramelized onion and sliced pickles grilled and pressed on panini-style bread. The meat was good enough, and the pickle slices were an interesting twist, but the bread was a bit leathery. What really made this sandwich awesome were the chips that came with it: they were razor thin, lightly salted, and shatteringly crisp. These fucking chips were so thin they were TRANSLUCENT. The chef must have cut them with one of those infernally sharp microscopic glass knives that geneticists use to dissect cells. If I had such a blade I could vanquish my enemies with ease, slicing them into thin prosciutto slices and layering their flesh onto a sandwich of PURE REVENGE. But this isn’t about my enemies, or the delicious sandwich their deaths would make (the revenge sandwich also comes with chips, but they unfortunately aren’t as good as Smith’s chips); this is about Smith’s spectacular potato chips. Apparently you can get them by themselves for $3. Forget the Cuban sandwich; GET THESE FUCKING CHIPS.

We finished with the steak ($14). For this price you get a few grilled sirloin medallions atop discs of fried potato, with a side salad of mixed greens and chicory. The steak had a nicely seasoned grilled crust, and the salad was okay, if a bit aggravating with all the chicory in there, but what really got my attention were the potatoes: like the house made chips, they knocked it out of the park. The potatoes were sliced into ½” rounds and fried. The outside was super crispy, while the inside remained as steamily gauzy as the best baked potato you’ve ever eaten. Whoever’s cooking the potatoes at Smith knows exactly what the fuck they’re doing.

Smith is a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, with a side of awesome potato chips. I don’t quite get the western theme, especially since the food isn’t as “western” as you’d expect: I kept looking for venison, or rabbit, or some kind of stew on the menu but of course none of those things were available. Still, the food is delicious, and although it seems that Smith is primarily a bar, they obviously didn’t treat the food as an afterthought. With its weird décor, generous and competent bartenders, reasonable prices, and potato chips so delicious I wish I could puke them up right now and eat them again, Smith has earned the unlikely distinction of being my FAVORITE BAR (on 15th Ave E). Not since the Jack in the Box commercial about midget cattlemen has someone so perfectly captured the VERY ESSEENCE of the American frontier. Yippee ki- yay, motherfuckers.

Rating: 8 “Die Hard” quotes out of 10

Tortas locas

2009-09-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

14912 Ambaum Blvd SW, Burien

206-244-0717

Normally I dislike Mexican food. It’s not that I dislike the food itself as much as I dislike the people who REALLY LIKE Mexican food. This phenomenon is called “sucking by association,” and it’s the unfortunate reason I hate Pink Floyd.

A prime example of sucking by association is Rick Bayless: he’s so fucking smarmy. I detest the way he leers at those Mexi- paupers on TV. “I love Mexico’s vibrant culture,” Bayless always drools, “It’s so real,” which in his thinly veiled racist code means “These carefree Mexicans are lucky they don’t have the white man’s burden on their shoulders.” Bayless somehow manages to seem simultaneously simpering and superior: it's a perfect example of how Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage” has been misinterpreted today. It's like how suburban white tardoes love rap music: they don't ACTUALLY like it; they just want to feel superior to the impoverished fucks who have to live the life they wish they could. But they don't REALLY want to live in the ghetto, they just want to say that they do.

Rick Bayless infuriates me. Noblesse oblige hangs limply from him like a sweaty bathrobe. If Rudyard Kipling, Cecil Rhodes, and Sean Penn had an orgy, and the resulting ass baby got the worst genes from all 3 of them, it would be Rick Bayless: a condescending poser; a thin gouache of liberal guilt dripping from a total imperialist dick.

But for all my criticisms of Rick Bayless, I will say this: he introduced me to the glory that is the torta. Several years ago I caught an episode of his PBS show Mexico One Plate at a Time, in which Bayless ventured into a Mexico City torta shop. The cook constructed a gigantically sloppy Mexican sandwich: the torta. I was instantly hooked on tortas. So when I discovered that Tortas Locas, a real, vibrant Mexican torta shop opened in Burien, I had to go there.

Tortas Locas isn’t cool, and it isn’t hip. The menu, which is printed on big yellow plastic sheets tacked up on the wall, isn’t in English, although the people who work there are extremely helpful and will offer an English menu to those sputtering gringos like me who try to butcher the Spanish pronunciations. That’s because the only Spanish I know is “ME GUSTA LA MUSICA DE WHITNEY HOUSTON!” which, whenever the mood strikes me, I bellow with the joyous gravitas of a Univision futbol announcer declaring “GOOOOOAAAALLLLLLLL!” You go up to the counter, order, and pay in cash (sorry pindahos, they don’t take credit cards). Then you sit down at one of the rickety tables inside and wait. And wait. The service takes forever, and in the afternoon the sun slants in through the windows and heats the place up like a greenhouse. The end result, with all the waiting around, stifling heat, and lack of English, is like an actual trip to Mexico. The illusion could only be more complete if they filled the place with diesel exhaust and threw in some urchins selling Chiclets.

The best torta on the menu is clearly the Cubana ($9.49). This disheveled monster, which was served cut in half and is easily enough for two, had FOUR KINDS OF MEAT: ham, sautéed chorizo, and (incongruously enough) a HOT DOG, which was sliced in half lengthwise and grilled. The fourth and final meat was steak, although it wasn’t real steak: by “steak” they mean the kind of steak you can buy with food stamps, but was still tasty because it was sliced very thinly, breaded, and pan fried. This carnivorous orgy was topped with “Mexican cheese” (which seemed suspiciously like process Swiss), AND queso fresco, lettuce, tomato, and sautéed onions, on a really puffy oblong bun, and if all of that isn’t enough to turn your arteries into a world- class logjam, the bun was slathered in mayonnaise, avocado, and REFRIED BEANS.

The toluquena ($7.49) is like the cubana except without the hot dog and steak: the main ingredients here are ham and chorizo. The only reason I got it was because a misprint on the menu listed one of the ingredients as “leg,” and I was curious to see exactly how they executed that. Would they serve you a sandwich with some dame’s shapely gam protruding from the bun, stiletto heel still attached? Answer: no. It turns out “leg” is just a very literal translation of “ham.” Still, it was very good, even without the hot dog and steak.

The chorizo con huevos ($5.99) was a roll filled with a raft of scrambled egg, studded with chorizo, and slicked with sour cream. This will kill your hangover as brutally as General de Santa Anna killed Davy Crockett. Even better than that was the pambazo ($6.99). The pambazo is a strange sandwich: it’s filled with mashed potatoes and chorizo. The bread is orangey- red and appealingly charred in places because they douse the OUTSIDE with hot sauce, then grill it. The pambazo is spicy, salty, and really fucking satisfying due to the double carb attack.

If you are a total Commie who hates sandwiches, then there’s other, more “Mexican” crap you could order: the quesadilla de picadillo ($3.49) was a huge fluffy hand- made corn torilla (they make the tortillas in house), filled with ground beef, diced carrots and onions, and glued all together with stringy melted cheese. This quesadilla is awesome, and I’m sure is what Taco Bell was trying to emulate when they invented the fucking “Mexi- Melt.” I have to say that the handmade corn tortillas are far superior to store- bought. Grocery store corn tortillas smell like rats, and if you’ve ever smelled a rat, then you know what I’m talking about: they’ve got that stale, sickly, vaguely grainy odor to them. Tortas Locas’ handmade tortillas, on the other hand, smell like the sweet bountiful corny riches of the Great Plains, like a mouthful of Nebraska in every bite. There’s other stuff too: gorditas are $3.50. You can also get smaller, cheaper tortas (5.99- 6.99) with only one meat, but why?

Dessert, if you want it, is a slice of what the dude at the counter kept calling “cheesecake,” but which actually seemed more like a pound cake to me: it had a dense, moist crumb, but wasn’t super sweet. Sorry, I forgot how much the “cheesecake” costs, but does it matter? If you’re still hungry, get another torta, you fucker, and wash it down with one of the many weird Mexican sodas (even Mexican Coke!) available for purchase.

I love this goddamned place. There would be a line out the door if it were in a more obvious location: if Tortas Locas opened up in Wallingford, for instance, satellite images would reveal a gigantic white pool quickly spreading to flood all of Seattle as the so- called “foodies” simultaneously jizzed all over the landscape. And no, I’m not fetishizing Tortas Locas the way Rick Bayless fawns over everything Mexican. It’s good but it isn’t perfect: the tomatoes are frequently mealy, and the chorizo often still has huge chewy pieces of casing stuck in it, so you end up pulling a long sinewy condom of pork casing out of your sandwich when you’re trying to look cool. Some people might also be put off by the utter meatiness of the Cubana. You might ask yourself “do you really need four meats on a sandwich?” Answer: yes, because you don’t always get every ingredient in every bite. Sometimes there’s a hint of ham, other times a spicy Zephyr of chorizo wafts into your mouth, or occasionally a cool puddle of sour cream will well up to soothe your pork- addled tongue. It’s like taking a stroll through an idyllic countryside made of meat. Who wouldn’t want to travel to this delicious carnivorous land?

Rating: 7 noble savages out of 10

Jack's Tapas Cafe

2009-08-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

5211 University Way
206-523-6855

Despite this place’s name, it’s NOT a tapas bar. It’s a Chinese restaurant. This sets a dangerous precedent: if a Chinese restaurant can call itself a tapas bar, then the adjectives you might use to describe any restaurant lose all meaning. An accurate description of things is the basis of language. Jack’s Tapas Café is obviously some Orwellian attempt to destroy English by rendering the descriptive powers of the language completely corrupt. After all, if a Chinese restaurant can use the word “tapas,” then what’s stopping Burger King from changing its name to “Sushi King?” Wendy’s could become “Jenny’s.” Pizza Hut could easily become “Delicious Hut.” Your mom could describe herself as “sexy.” Arby’s might be able to call itself “Food.” Don’t we have false advertising laws to prevent shit like this?

Fortunately, it’s easily apparent when you walk into Jack’s that it isn’t a tapas bar because there’s lots of Chinese writing (and people) everywhere. If it actually were a tapas bar there would be wine bottles everywhere and lots of overpriced almonds. And probably some dude with a ponytail. So if you really wanted tapas, it would be pretty apparent to you that you were in the wrong place, and then you could turn around and leave, although I’d advise against leaving because Jack’s Tapas Café is tasty as fuck.

We started with one of the house specialties, the Stir Fried Noodles ($9.95). Hand shaved noodles were sautéed with cabbage, onions, scallions, slivered carrots, and your choice of meat. We chose beef. The meat was cut into tender strips, nestled in among julienned shards of cabbage and onions which still had a little bit of crunch left in them. The hand shaved noodles were thick and doughy, irregularly shaped, with an almost leathery texture, yet very soft to the bite. It was almost like eating some kind of raw, savory cookie dough. You can substitute the hand shaved noodles for regular noodles in every noodle dish for $1 more, and why WOULDN’T you? If you turn down the hand shaved noodle option you should get an MRI immediately because something is seriously fucked up in your brain, and you are a retard.

The tea smoked duck was all right. For $12.95 you get shitloads of duck meat, chopped up into succulent chunks the way the Chinese like to do and piled up on the plate with a tiny ramekin of hoisin sauce. The duck had a subtle smoky flavor, but it was a little dry. The vegetarian green beans ($8.95) were just a cheesy name for a classic Chinese standby: green beans in garlic sauce. This dish had umami pouring out of its ass. The green beans were soft and pleasingly charred on the skins. Large soft brown chunks of sautéed garlic peeked out from between the beans, and everything was glazed in a rich soy glaze that was just a whore’s hair away from being too salty.

Except it didn’t really matter that the green beans were almost too salty if you got the sesame scallion bread, AKA the Best Motherfucking Bread I Have Ever Tasted, and I’ve Been to France (BMBIHETIBF bread for short). This fucking bread was a goddamned revelation: $9.95 gets you a giant round loaf of flaky fluffy layered bread, sliced into wedges, flecked here and there with little slips of scallion, and topped with a scattering of toasted sesame seeds. This doughy, flaky sesame scallion bread fucking rules, although it’s more like a biscuit than bread, but perfect: the perfect Platonic biscuit, the kind of lofty ideal of pure biscuity biscuitness, that if it actually existed would appear on your plate amid fanfare and electrical noise, like Voltron made out of dough, to rule the bread world with a cruel but just hand. You remember how good your grandma’s biscuits tasted to you when you were a kid? Well fuck your grandma. Fuck her biscuits too. Jack’s sesame scallion bread does not tolerate any challenges to its domination of the pastry universe, and it punched your grandma’s pussy biscuits in the face with its gigantic Voltron fist which isn’t just a fist, it also has LION’S TEETH on it so it punches AND bites your stupid grandma biscuits at the same time. Like I said, the green beans may have been a little salty, but if you split open the magnificent layered sesame scallion bread and piled some green beans and a little tea smoked duck in there, you could make the kind of badass makeshift sandwich that people usually throw together on the day after Thanksgiving.

We closed with the General Tso’s Chicken. Let me tell you motherfuckers about General Tso’s Chicken. This tale is long and melancholy, so grab a snifter of brandy and settle down into a leather wing- backed chair, and get ready to weep as rain patters the window, and the fire dying in the hearth casts shadows upon the wainscoting, for this is the Story of Seattle’s Best General Tso’s Chicken.

The BEST General Tso’s Chicken in Seattle isn’t available anymore. It was the specialty of the Broadway Wok & Grill on Capitol Hill, and at the Asian Wok & Grill in Fremont. Both restaurants were owned by the same guy, Danny Wong. When Danny died in 2006, his family sold the restaurants, and the recipe died with him. THAT fucking General Tso’s Chicken was an exemplar of its breed: they served it to you in a gigantic pile on an oval plate, crispy chunks of tender boneless chicken thigh meat in a tangy sticky sauce, bronze and gleaming like a pirate’s booty. It could only have been better if they served the chicken to you in one of those mini treasure chests you can put inside an aquarium. The sauce was complex: at once spicy and sweet, sugary for sure, but with a tangy peppery bottom note and an orange blossom finish. The batter was very light, probably corn starch- based, and subtly crunchy. Thai bird chilis poked their spicy red beaks up from this delicious menagerie. The meat was succulent and tender. Lightly steamed broccoli florets were wedged between the chicken chunks to remind you to eat some fucking vegetables. The dish as a whole was somehow much lighter and easier to eat than a plate of fried chicken with sugar sauce has any right to be.

But then Danny Wong unexpectedly died, and his mind- bogglingly awesome recipe for General Tso’s Chicken died with him. They buried him with a piece of General Tso’s Chicken to give to Charon instead of a coin as payment across the River Styx. Danny’s family sold his restaurants. The Broadway Wok & Grill became some lame Mexican place. The Asian Wok & Grill became a gym, as if the universe was trying to work off all of the calories that had previously been sent out from that location. Sigh. And then I had to settle for inferior General Tso's Chicken, like the one you can get from China First, which tastes like McDonald's Chicken McNuggets doused in corn syrup. Sigh. Such is life.

But how does Jack’s General Tso’s Chicken measure up? Not too fucking bad, though the Story of Seattle’s Best General Tso’s Chicken is a tough act to follow. Jack’s General Tso’s is expensive: for $10.95 you only got maybe 8 pieces of chicken, round golf balls of breast meat lightly fried and doused in thin syrup. The meat was a little dry. The sauce was a one- note clunker, like an out of tune piano, cloyingly sweet and drippy and not very spicy, like they took some Aunt Jemima’s and mixed it with a little 5- spice powder. Two or three limp spinsterly broccoli florets looked on from the sidelines, wishing you would eat them but knowing that you probably wouldn’t and then writing bad poetry in their notebooks about rejection.

Jack’s Tapas Café might have a misleading name, but the cuisine is solid. The sesame scallion bread, which pummels your taste buds into submission with its weapons- grade deliciousness, is by itself reason enough to go there. I’m going to start using that shit as my regular sandwich bread. I was vaguely disappointed by the General Tso’s Chicken, but that’s only because I’ve been spoiled by my shimmering idealized memories of past iterations of that dish. Probably the ONLY thing about Jack’s that actually really sucks is the “artwork,” and I use that term as loosely as your mom’s vag: for $30 you can buy these cheesy scrolls, upon which is scrawled some sloppy folk music lyrics of the kind which is usually written by chicks with bad teeth and huge tits who love to make sure that everyone knows they once lived in their cars. But I’d call that a minor quibble: it’s not an art gallery, after all. I doubt the Whitney or the Saatchi sell very good Chinese food.

Now I’m feeling pensive. My mournful reverie of the Broadway Wok & Grill has put me into an introspective mood, so forgive me: I must retire to my drawing room for some absinthe and a chaser of laudanum. Your mom will be providing the sodomy, and Black Sabbath will be providing the background music. God save the Queen, you fuckers, God save the Queen.

Rating: 7 strolls down memory lane out of 10

Perche' no

2009-08-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

1319 N 49th St
206-547-0222

Perche’ no is located in a McMansion in Wallingford. The building is fucked up looking: gross salmon- colored stucco and pointless quoining indicate that they’re shooting for the “Six Flags Over Italian Food” conceit. It looks out of place in the neighborhood; it really looks like it should be located in a mall parking lot. The prerequisite replica of Michaelangelo’s David swings his disappointingly tiny marble pecker down at you from a corner of the roof. Why try to emulate the Olive Garden? That’s as fucked up as buying a Real Doll that resembles your own mom (note: I have a Real Doll that looks like your mom).

The first difficulty we encountered was the menu: it isn’t exactly written in the Queen’s English. It reads like the dialogue from a poorly translated Nintendo game circa 1988. In fact, with its awkward phrasing and vague subject- verb agreement, it’s more like a Chinese food menu than Italian. According to this menu the cappellini con sardine features “Chef flavor pasta.” As an upstanding citizen I object to being served pasta that tastes like a person; cannibalism is ILLEGAL, you motherfuckers! Another dish has the puzzling ingredient “spine shape pine nuts.” And I always thought they were oblong.

Once I stopped feeling superior to the menu we ordered stuff. The Salumi alla Perche’no was a trio of house- made prosciutto: for $12 you got 6 paper thin slices, 2 each of regular pork, wild boar, and lamb prosciutto, each slice smeared with a drop of olive oil and some diced garlic. This seemed expensive, but what offended me more than the price was the fact that all of the prosciutto was almost inedibly salty. The traditional pork prosciutto was salty but otherwise unremarkable. The wild boar prosciutto was interesting: it tasted like pork, but “porkier,” somehow, as if you genetically engineered a pig so that its legs were made of short ribs instead of ham. Man, would that be fucking delicious. I hope ConAgra gets cracking on creating some shambling, horrific mutant pigs made entirely of short ribs pretty soon. The lamb prosciutto wasn’t that great. Unfortunately for Perche’ no, all lamb prosciutto in this town must inevitably be compared to Salumi’s. Did it stand up? Nope: Perche’ no’s version isn’t even qualified to shake Armandino Batali’s dick after he pisses. It was salty, gummy, and tasted like an old pot roast covered in dust bunnies.

The spinacci della casa ($8) was a spinach salad with sautéed onions and crumbles of pancetta. The spinach was lightly wilted and shellacked with a warm vinaigrette made from the pancetta drippings. Staring up at you from the spinach was a pale areola of watery mozzarella, and the whole thing was garnished with a couple anemic slices of mealy unripe tomato. This salad was actually pretty good, if maybe a bit greasy. The vinaigrette was flavorful, the spinach was very fresh, and there were lots of pancetta bits for crunch. However, the almost flavorless mozzarella was totally unnecessary. And the tomatoes sucked. If you can’t find ripe tomatoes, then DON’T FUCKING INCLUDE THEM. A good tomato is a thing of beauty: sweet as a 1966 Chevelle SS and as enthusiastically juicy as a 30- year- old divorcee. An unripe tomato, on the other hand, is a bitter spinster driving a moped (your mom, in other words).

Next up was the cappellini con sardine ($13). As previously mentioned, this was a dish of “chef flavored pasta.” I guess this particular chef tastes like garlic, sardines, and powdered parmesan cheese, because that’s what the cappellini tasted like. Chunks of roasted garlic peeked out here and there from a bird’s nest of angel hair pasta, which was cooked to a confident al dente. The occasional caper popped its head up now and then, and there were many flakes of fresh- tasting sardine. This was actually pretty tasty except for all the cheese: the waiter unceremoniously dumped a giant snowdrift of powdered parmesan all over my plate which instantly dulled the other flavors. That sandy, dry, fake parmesan with its shitty bouquet of aluminum cans and puke belongs only on late- night pizza, and NOT in the hand of a waiter at any serious Italian restaurant.

The salsicce pizza ($13) had an ephemeral, chewy, and bubbly crust, but the sauce was weird: thin and oddly sweet, it tasted like some kind of Chef Boyardee bullshit. Slices of Italian sausage dotted this crust like meaty hay bales in an Ansel Adams pizzascape. The sausage was juicy and flavorful, when you could actually get a piece of it into your mouth: they tended to unbalance the frail crust, so that when you grabbed a pizza slice, the sausage rolled off, ricocheting off the wooden board upon which the pizza was served. And oh yeah, the pizza comes on a wooden chopping board, which is an apparently significant enough detail for them to mention it on the fucked- up menu.

For dessert we had the Ciocollatta Amaretto Mousse ($7). This was just a simple chocolate mousse, piped up old school in a glass sundae dish. This pretty much sucked. Little lumps of chocolate kept interrupting the consistency, and the amaretto flavor left a nagging aftertaste with each spoonful. The OTHER dessert, however, was really good: raspberries! The waiter kept saying we should get the “raspberries” for dessert. This was apparently a dessert special. The guy danced around with excitement, seeming like he was going to whiz in his pants if we didn’t order it, so I got the fucking raspberries. I thought he meant raspberry gelato, but no, it really was just raspberries: a whole mound of them, red, ripe, and sweet, piled into a cup made of dark chocolate. This sugary ship floated in a pool of crème anglais which had been decoratively spiderwebbed with chocolate sauce. The crème anglais was smooth and not overpoweringly sweet, but really, the raspberries hardly needed the sauce. They were so sweet by themselves that I found myself ignoring the sauce altogether and just scarfing down handfuls of berries.

Perche’ no is the very template of the kind of shitty generic Italian food that’s too big for its britches, a paper tiger, an empty suit. If restaurants were people, Perche’ no would be Sarah Palin. They should’ve called this place “Perche’ FUCK no,” because that’s what I’ll say if anyone ever asks me if I want to go back there. It’s not really THAT terrible, but if it’s Italian cuisine you’re after, Cantinetta is right down the street. I’m sure some people really like Perche’ No, but those people are probably retarded.

Rating: 4.5 raspberries out of 10

Top Pot Donuts

2009-07-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

2124 5th Ave
206-728-1966

An argument on Twitter about the best donut in Seattle resulted in a gauntlet being thrown down: I had to review Top Pot Donuts. I posited that Top Pot sucks; many people vehemently disagreed with me. These people are fanatic kooks. Top Pot is the Scientology of the breakfast pastry world.

My original plan was to try one of every kind they make. I didn’t realize, however, that Top Pot sells over 40 varieties of donut so I had to make do with a moderately gluttonous 16. I limited my choices to “regular” donuts. I didn’t want any of the ones with sparkles and sprinkles all over them; I was in no mood to eat the gastric equivalent of a My Little Pony doll. Having successfully obtained what I hoped was a representative cross- section of Top Pot's wares, I returned home, plopped down on the floor, and began working my way through them.

The glazed raised ring was only okay. The glaze was a little too sticky and humid; I prefer a drier glaze that crackles a little when you bite into it. The pastry itself had a good, classic donut texture, though it could have been lighter. The raspberry glazed raised ring was better, if only because the raspberry coating, with its slight tartness and occasional actual raspberry seed, was better than the regular sugar glaze. The raspberry glazed cake, by contrast, wasn’t as good: it was too heavy and greasy to be redeemed by the raspberry glaze. The raspberry old fashioned, on the other hand, was very tasty. The pastry was almost creamy, and the raspberry glaze seemed sweeter and thicker somehow than it tasted on the other donuts. Even better was the regular glazed old fashioned. Not overly sweet, the old fashioned was as creamy and cool as the raspberry version, with a tart hint of sour cream in the finish.

After the old fashioned I dragged my way through the cake donuts. These are like the fucking Battan Death March of breakfast. The plain cake was so fucking lame I couldn’t understand it: dry, crumbly, not sweet, and too dense to deserve the donut name. Only marginally better was the glazed cake, since at least it was (kinda) sweet because it was glazed. The cinnamon sugar blueberry cake donut was sugary for sure, but that doesn’t mean it was good. After all, Mountain Dew is sweet too, and I’d rather drink a pint of my own piss. The blueberry flavor easily overpowered the light dusting of cinnamon, and the pastry itself was stained an unappealing grayish- green by the berries. The cinnamon sugar cake donut (sans blueberries) was much better, lighter in texture, and sweeter, plus you could actually taste the cinnamon.

I tried to forget the misery of the cake donuts, but unfortunately the worst was not yet behind me: chocolate. The chocolate raised ring was pretty good: with a deep chocolate flavor and its heavy glaze, it tasted like somebody somehow enlarged a Cocoa Krispy. Better than the chocolate raised ring was the chocolate old fashioned; with its thick coating of glaze and a chocolate flavor so dark and rich it was like if you got in trouble with the mafia, and to punish you they threw you into a sinkhole on a deserted highway that they’d filled with chocolate syrup, and made you drink your way out. In other words it was okay.

What REALLY sucked were the chocolate glazed ring, the chocolate glazed old fashioned, and the double trouble. The chocolate glazed ring was a raised ring with a layer of chocolate glaze. The chocolate glazed old fashioned took the usually tasty old fashioned and draped it in the same chocolate glaze. The double trouble was a chocolate donut with chocolate glaze. In all three cases the chocolate glaze was waxy and tasted like they mixed Magic Shell with those weird clear crayons you get with Easter egg dying kits.

By this point eating these donuts had became a chore, baroque and fatiguing, a somnolent fugue in pastry, like a Philip Glass opera that someone had fried without using -trans fats. Still, I’m nothing if not dedicated (note: I’m not dedicated), so I soldiered on and ate the WORST of Top Pot’s wares: the plain cruller. The plain cruller was a weird and completely atrocious misstep. It sucked. It tasted like shit. Maybe I should clarify: it didn’t taste like shit per se, because it tasted more like a stale greasy piece of bread than actual shit (note: I don’t know what shit tastes like), but it didn’t taste very good. I’ve never referred to a piece of food as a “dumbass” before, but the plain cruller drove me to it.

The final stanza of this epic pastry poem concerned the filled donuts: a Bavarian crème- filled and a raspberry Bismarck. Honestly I have no idea what criteria distinguishes a Bismarck from a mere “jelly donut;” more puzzling is why you’d name a donut after a German leader, given the poor track record with German political figures in the popular imagination. I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that they wanted to call this donut “the Hitler,” but unfortunately that name had already been appropriated for a method of styling pubic hair. The Bismarck was luckily quite lovely, with a light dusting of powder sugar and LOTS of raspberry jelly inside. The Bavarian crème, on the hand, was lame as fuck: while the cream itself was smooth and not excessively sweet, the pastry itself tasted stiff and the whole thing was lacquered with a slab of the same shitty chocolate veneer that disgraced the other chocolate glazed donuts. Needless to say (yet mysteriously, I’m going to say it anyway), the cream filled churros at the Salvadorean Bakery make Top Pot look like as foolish as people who eat at McDonald’s in France (note: I ate at a McDonald’s in France).

In the final analysis, was Top Pot as bad as I’ve always claimed? I’m going to swallow my pride the way your mom swallows cock and say it’s not that bad. The old fashioned series, in particular, borders on masterful. Was it as rapturously delicious as Top Pot’s brainwashed masses of supporters claim? Nope. The true benchmark of donut superiority is the regular glazed donut, and Top Pot’s just isn’t good enough. If you somehow applied the Moh’s Scale of Relative Gemstone Hardness to snacks, the ideal donut would be ranked as only slightly more dense than cotton candy. A good donut should have a dry sweet glaze that crunches lightly when you bite it, but the pastry beneath should be just slightly more substantial than a shadow. Krispy Kreme’s regular glazed is a good shorthand for this style of donut, but the true grand master of donut density is the Donut Plant in NYC. In the donut universe, the Donut Plant’s crème brulee donut, with its crunchy burnt sugar glaze, gauzy pastry, and rich crème filled center, is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, a blue supergiant which shines in UV and burns brilliantly until it blows itself apart, like Jim Morrison, if you’re the kind of douche who really thinks Jim Morrison was a tragic genius (and a donut). Top Pot, by contrast, is a brown dwarf: a sullen and unremarkable misfit which also happens to suck big time. Like your mom.

Rating: 5 glazed rings (AKA your mom’s mouth) out of 10

PS This is probably the most boring review I have ever written, so fuck you, Top Pot fans, this is your comeuppance.

PPS Here’s a rare photo of the donut aftermath, soon to be a new movie from Sony Pictures. Donut Aftermath: The Movie will star Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Professor of Donutology no one listened to until it was too late, Megan Fox as Princess Tam- Tam, and Ryan Gosling as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Megan Fox’s Thumb will be reprising her role as Quato, the mysterious Martian rebel leader, and I’ll be played by Jimmy Smits!

Tilikum Place Cafe

2009-07-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

407 Cedar St
(206) 282-4830

I don’t understand the name of the Tilikum Place Cafe. I always thought that the local Indian crap was spelled “Tillicum.” Bill Gates agrees with me because my spell checking software allows “Tillicum” but not “Tilikum.” So why don’t you assholes properly spell the restaurant’s name so I quit getting this squiggly red line underneath it?

Unfortunately for me, Urban Eats was going on, and the Tilikum Place Café was participating. In case you aren’t aware, Urban Eats is a local program here in Seattle where participating restaurants design a menu where you can choose 3 items, usually an appetizer, entrée, and dessert, for $30. It sounds like a great idea, but too bad it sucks. I’m calling BULLSHIT on Urban Eats. Urban Eats is a TERRIBLE program. The Emperor not only has no clothes, he’s walking down Main Street with a strapon hanging out of his ass. And the strapon is attached at the other end to Barbara Bush. Let me tell you about Urban Eats: the kitchens don’t like to do it. The chef at Crush comped us some appetizers once just because we DIDN’T choose from the Urban Eats menu. And even when the kitchen DOES like to do the Urban Eats menu, they don’t try very hard. The only people who really like Urban Eats are the fuckers who tip 10% and then have the stones to DEDUCT POINTS because the waiter didn’t refill their water glass in what their penny- pinching asses consider a timely manner. If you can’t afford it, save up until you can get the REAL DEAL from the REAL MENU. Fine dining doesn’t offer discounts. It’s gauche.

And so, liberated thusly from the tyranny of Urban Eats, we got stuff to eat. A cup of lentil soup ($3.50) was a delicious bounty: tiny green lentils were creamy, yet still firm to the bite, with chunks of carrot and celery. Minced parsley lightened up the flavor, and a drizzle of some kind of pepper oil sprung a subversive heat upon your tongue.

The sardine sandwich was so cute it could only have been more adorable if it were served by a leprechaun riding a Chihuahua. Large chunks of fresh sardine filets were served on a tiny baguette that somehow managed to be crusty WITHOUT at the same time shredding your gums the way a haughty Parisian will shred your French pronunciation when you ask the motherfucker a simple “Ou est le bibliotheque?” This sandwich was dressed with arugula, roasted tomatoes, and tapenade. It came with a side of pickled beets, cornichons, olives, lemon zest, and razor- thin onion rings. This was too much tanginess for me, even between bites of sandwich, because as you know the only ‘tang I like is your mom’s. And, at $9, the sardine sandwich cost about twice as much as your mom.

The butternut squash tart (also $9), had a moist, flaky crust and had in the center of it a giant mons venus of butternut squash so soft, sweet, and succulent it could’ve been apricot. The very center of this erotic pastry was veined with caramelized onion. A side salad of mixed greens played second fiddle with an evenly coated citrus vinaigrette.

The mint pea soup ($7 for a bowl) was as finely textured as suede. It tasted springtime fresh, with a mild minty top note. Scattered throughout the bowl were tiny cubes of apple or pear or something crisp and sweet, cut into such a miniscule dice that they had to have hired a fairy with a scalpel to be the prep cook. Like the lentil soup, the mint pea also had an unexpected heat. The soups at Tilikum Place Café remind me of a friend of mine from high school. He was a small, frail, quiet guy. I knew him for years and thought he was cool, but a total nerd. Then one day we were sitting at a bar, drinking. Apropos of nothing he just blurts out “Did you know that jizz burns when you get it in your eye?” He then went on to relate how he accidentally came in a woman’s eye while receiving a BJ, then suddenly began to ape the aftermath, jumping from his seat and running around in circles in the barroom rubbing his eyes and squealing in falsetto, “Somebody get me a towel!” That was the first and only time that I’ve laughed so hard I actually fell off of a piece of furniture. That story is about as fun to recount as the mint pea soup was to eat. And like the soup, that guy was secretly spicy. Moral of the story: when going down on a guy always swallow.

Speaking of things that I recommend you swallow, the grilled asparagus salad ($8) was a bit pricey but still good. Spears of really fresh asparagus were soft outside but still crisp within, dressed with a lemon oil vinaigrette that was as bright as a new penny, and garnished with a liberal snowdrift of REAL REGGIANO! This was simple yet very classy.

The grilled tri-tip steak ($19) was grilled an even medium, with a salty, crusty exterior. Usually ordering what I call the “loser steaks”-- tri-tip, flank steak, skirt steak-- is a gamble, since they sometimes have lines of gristly crap running through them. This tri- tip avoided the usual loser steak curse, and in fact was quite tasty and juicy and beefy. Accompanying the steak was a fluffy pile of silky mashed potatoes topped with batons of roasted carrots and parsnips. The whole plate swam in a comforting amniotic pool of rich red wine gravy. If you were some kind of 1950’s writer who smokes packs of cigarettes per day and only drinks two different liquids—coffee and whisky, often mixed together—this is the kind of shit you’d eat.

The grilled chicken breast ($16) wasn’t as good as the tri- tip, though I don’t know why I’m even bothering to mention that fact. After all, EVERYONE knows chicken isn’t as good as steak. Even vegans know that. While the chicken itself was juicy, it came with some weird spongy pastry things that looked sort of like hockey pucks and a rhubarb sauce that was so sour I couldn’t handle it. Whenever I got a taste of rhubarb sauce it really aggravated me. Finishing this dish was like trying to run the marathon with a piece of glass in your shoe. The pea vines that came with it were very tender and fresh at least.

Finally, a plate of 5 profiteroles cost $7. These pastry balls were so soft and flaky they were almost like croissants. They were filled with vanilla ice cream and topped with a caramel rum sauce that could actually get you drunk if you chugged a quart of it, although if you’re going to go to those lengths to get a buzz, Ny-Quil and rotten fruit will also do the job, with far less cholesterol.

Speaking of being desperate to get drunk, I think I’ll stop writing now and do that very thing. But before I go, remember this: The mint pea soup, tri- tip, and profiteroles together were together only $33, and you get to choose EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT, and YOU GET A LOT OF IT. So for all you fans of Urban Eats, I hope you enjoyed saving $3.

Verdict: Urban Eats is for CHEAP FUCKERZ. The end.

Rating: 7.5 profiteroles out of 10

Kushibar

2009-06-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

2319 2nd Ave
206-448-2488

The first thing I noticed about Kushibar was the smell: hanging in the air was a mixture of greasy smoke and old fish that smelled like what I imagine a Viking’s funeral pyre would smell like. If you’d like a less theatrical example I’ll give you this: it smelled the way the alleys in the International District smell on a hot day. This wasn’t offensive to me; there are a million awesome seafood markets all over the fucking Cajun country that smell exactly like Kushibar: places that sell lots of seafood all day and then don’t mop the floors. Besides, with the rickety wooden porch seating they’ve got, plus all the blue neon, I’m thinking they’re trying to go for some sort of late- night back- alley Tokyo vibe. Plenty of tables were available, but we chose seats at the bar anyway to observe the action. We quickly placed our order, and the plates started trickling in.

Almost as soon as we ordered it, the Yakisoba Pan ($5) arrived. This was a sandwich of ramen noodles, stir fried cabbage, tempura zucchini, crispy bacon slices, and avocado, with mayo, on a toasted HOT DOG BUN, of all things. While this sandwich wasn’t bad, if I had one question to ask the guy who came up with it, it would be multiple choice. “Chef,” I’d say, “when you invented the Yakisoba Pan, were you: a) super stoned, b) totally wasted, c) bombed out of your motherfucking MIND, dawg, or d) all of the above?” I then wouldn’t wait for the chef to even answer, instead quickly filling in choice “d)” for him immediately (except I would never actually say the word “dawg”), because you’d have to be COMPLETELY FUCKED UP to put that much randomness on a bun.

In fact, the last foodstuff I have seen that even APPROACHED the ludicrous ingredients on the Yakisoba Pan really WAS created when someone was stoned: years ago my friends and I all sat around eating some pot brownies all night. When the munchies inevitably hit the best thing we could come up with to eat were burritos made of saltine cracker crumbs mixed with Thousand Island dressing, wrapped in flour tortillas. I personally didn’t eat one of the cracker crumb burritos, being too busy laughing at a Neosporin commercial, but I’m sure they were just as good as the Yakisoba Pan.

Next, the skewers we ordered arrived, lined up and resembling a picket fence of mediocrity on the plate. The negi ($1.50) was 3 or 4 short lengths of green onion, lightly charred on the outside and softly grilled all the way through. I wish they’d sliced these lengthwise before threading them onto the skewers; every time I bit into one, the slippery inner layers of onion skeeted out onto the floor. $2 got you the aspara, which if you haven’t already guessed, were a couple grilled slices of asparagus. Tasty, but I can grill asparagus at home, thanks, and $2 will get me HALF A POUND from the farmer’s market. The buta bara ($3) was a grilled slice of pork belly. I was hoping that they would have braised it first before grilling, so it would be all melty and yielding inside, like your mom’s crotch, but they didn’t. Instead, it tasted like a tough bland piece of thick bacon. The shiro maguro ($3) was a couple chunks of grilled albacore. This was unfortunately very fishy smelling (and tasting), like they went dumpster diving behind Shiro’s. Just as stinky was the reba ($1.50), grilled chicken livers dusted with toasted sesame seeds. The livers had a good creamy silken consistency, but they tasted the way a wet dog smells.

At this point a pause in the action allowed me, from my vantage point at the bar, to observe the kitchen action. And it was pretty goddamned, motherfucking action PACKED: the chefs skittered around, doing the soft- shoe routine that dudes who are accustomed to working quickly in a confined space with each other do. They slashed open plastic bags of ramen, scooping them up into sieves which they plunged into a roiling cauldron filled with either very rusty water or (hopefully) some kind of stock. Long skinny charcoal grills ran parallel to the bar, crowded with patiently roasting skewers. The grill directly in front of us seemed like it wasn’t in use; at least, I hope it wasn’t, since there was an ink pen stuck into it. Or maybe the ink pen was actually on the menu and I didn’t notice it: after all, everyone knows that ink is edible because it’s frequently served with pasta. Maybe the Yakisoba “PAN” was a typo on the menu, and it really read Yakisoba “PEN.” A Bic sandwich! What a great idea! You get your choice of size (fine point, medium point, or roller ball) AND your favorite flavor (red, blue, or black)!

A couple handfuls of the complimentary bowl of curried popcorn allowed me to cleanse my palette before the spicy ginger chicken ($7) arrived. This dish was awesome; a breath of fresh air after a shitstorm of disappointment. Tender chunks of chicken breast were sautéed in a flavorful ginger sauce with plenty of caramelized onions. It's subversively spicy; the heat sidles up to you like a chikan on the Tokyo subway and gropes you with its sweaty hand as if your taste buds were an innocent schoolgirl.

If I owned Kushibar I would have called it “The Great Northwestern Skewered Foods Company: Purveyors of the Finest Grilled Meats, Vegetables, and Seafoods,” but of course that doesn’t have the crisp mod “zazz” that everything in Belltown must have. I just don’t like the name of this place. “Kushibar” is a bad word, and it sucks to even have to SAY it. “Kushibar” is like “Zayda Buddy’s”: it’s one of those incomprehensible words that, if I hadn’t already seen it in print, if someone said it to me I would have to keep having them repeat it over and over again until they became frustrated and finally just spelled it for me. This is like the time a couple years ago when I got into an argument with some kids in a bookstore. I overheard them muttering something that sounded like “Sammasossa, sammasossa is so awesome.” “What’s ‘sammasossa?’” I asked. They looked at me, then turned to each other, incredulous that I didn’t know about Sammasossa’s awesome existence. Turns out they were discussing baseball legend SAMMY SOSA. I don’t follow baseball, so I didn’t know that Sammy Sosa had broken the single- season home run record. I told those little bastards to enunciate, next time. Needless to say, they heeded my request by clearly pronouncing the words “Fuck you.” Mission accomplished, at least.

Yet even though I hate the name, and most of the food stinks, I HAVE GOT to admit that Kushibar is a SPECTACULAR deal: two of us got out of there for $29 after tax and tip. That is fucking dirt CHEAP. They’re obviously aiming at the drunken last call crowd, and I have to give them credit for that because there isn’t enough late- night dining in Seattle because most restaurants are for pussies. The Yakisoba Pan is okay; it will obviously soak up lots of alcohol with its two- pronged, carb- on- carb assault. But if I were you I’d go with a couple orders of Spicy Ginger Chicken and be done with it. That’s because, if it’s 2 AM and you’re trying to head off a thermonuclear hangover, you’ve got to think strategically: which of Kushibar’s menu items will taste the best on the way back up?

Rating: 4 chikan out of 10

Fresh Bistro

2009-06-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

4725 42nd Ave SW
206-935-3733

When I heard that this place had just opened, I thought it was called FRENCH Bistro. All day long I was skipping around, kicking up my fucking heels, a smile on my face like a leprechaun was hiding in my pants, tickling my asshole with a feather boa, thinking that an honest- to- Charles de Gaulle FRENCH BISTRO was opening up in West Seattle! You can thus imagine my disappointment when I realized that it was, in fact, run by the chumps who sell cookies at the West Seattle Farmer’s Market. Still, it would have been rude to dismiss their efforts without even trying the place, so off we went to Fresh Bistro.

I was immediately struck by the dining room’s interior. I don’t usually comment on a restaurant’s ambiance, but Fresh Bistro is OVER THE TOP. There’s too much stuff inside; too many clashing patterns like glass panels printed with bamboo, copper menus, weird lampshades that dangle like my dad’s nutsack, AND napkin rings that look like a scrunchie a robot hooker would wear (it’s obviously not a high class robot hooker), AND tiny planters of LEMON GRASS on EVERY TABLE. It’s like they wanted to be all sleek and modern, but also wanted to be “busy.” Some of you, my dear readers, are familiar with our local scion Elemental, a veritable how- to manual on the starkest of stark minimalism. Elemental takes its philosophy VERY seriously. If Elemental were a black metal band I’d listen to it ALL FUCKING DAY, even in the shower. Seriously, there are no curves inside Elemental, and EVERY angle is 90 degrees, and there are only 2 colors in the entire place: brown and light brown. Well this is what Fresh Bistro is like: it’s like Elemental and an Applebee’s fucked, and the baby that came out of Appleby’s face/ asshole, like some mythical Greek monster, was Fresh Bistro. It’s a visual riot that would drive an Aspberger’s Syndrome sufferer to commit seppuku. Plus they’ve got a cold, shady east- facing patio that won’t be much fun unless they start serving brunch, because on those brilliant Seattle summer evenings that make people want to sit outside drinking Mojito after Mojito, or whatever girl drink Sex in the City’s philosophical replacement told you to drink this year, Fresh Bistro’s patio will be in the SHADE!

Am I being too harsh? Not really, since as I’ve made clear many times, I don’t really care about ambiance. Then why complain about it for 500 words? Dude, I’m just saying.

Anyway, the food: we started with the asparagus soup ($9), which was a little fibrous but rich and creamy, especially once you got to the ball of melted goat cheese, sweet and hidden like a schoolgirl’s crush, at the bottom of the bowl. The asparagus flavor itself was bright, though the army- green color was a bit off- putting. The soup was garnished with a single tempura asparagus spear. This by itself was phenomenal: the batter was light and perfectly salted, ensconcing an asparagus spear that was still just a little crisp inside. I’d like to see these motherfuckers put tempura asparagus on the menu as a dish of its own.

The Caesar baby salad ($10) had a confusing name. It wasn’t little; in fact, the salad was a good portion. Nor did it have baby lettuce. So why “baby?” Do they think that if they sneak a cute word into each menu item, we won’t get mad if we don’t like it? After all, who besides a total psychopath would send a baby back? Not even me, although I might be tempted to sell my salad into white slavery in the Ukraine. Would I REALLY sell a helpless baby into slavery? No, but I would totally do that to your mom. Maybe Barrio could take a page from this play book and put “Magical Smiley Elf Tacos” on THEIR menu, both to justify the $11 price tag of their tacos (since as everyone knows, overfishing has notoriously driven up the price of elf meat), and to keep you from getting mad about it. But I digress; the Caesar baby salad was good, with soft leaves of Bibb or butter lettuce, glazed with a light coating of a mild Caesar dressing. There was one giant crouton, which was actually a piece of baguette sliced on the bias and all crusty with broiled parmesan and garlic. In an interesting twist, the ubiquitous Caesar salad anchovies were deep fried WHITE anchovies, with a muted fishy flavor and a crispy fried batter coating. All in all this was a solid, if non- traditional, Caesar salad with a dumb name.

Berkshire pork bellies ($9) had a straightforward, albeit misleading name. I was expecting a large chunk of succulently braised pork belly, yielding to the bite and melting its cholesterol straight into my aorta with seductive ease. Instead what you got was two perfect cubes of polenta cake, crusty outside but with a satin finish within, topped with a superfluous (but pretty) pile of shredded yellow and orange carrots. Where were the pork bellies? EVERYWHERE! There was a lot of it, strewn all over the dish, but it was cut up into tender braised lardons of soft yet chewy pork. The whole thing swam in an amazingly rich, glossy, salty demiglace, and perched on the very top was a pile of tiny amber spheres that could’ve been either some kind of roe or some kind of grain, but I couldn’t tell because the flavor of that powerful demiglace punched those tiny dots in their tiny faces. Which was what they deserved, for trying to barge in on this orgy of salty pork and creamy polenta.

The green olive and pecorino crusted halibut ($22) was as un- understandable as the Republican party platform. A filet of halibut was served atop a bed of fava beans, white beans, peas, and cherry tomato halves. Lurking on the bottom was some green eggy custard- like thing, which tasted rather watery. The halibut filet itself was juicy and tender inside, but the crust tasted like neither pecorino cheese nor green olives, although it was kinda salty, which makes sense given the alleged ingredients in said crust. The beans were okay but I thought the cherry tomatoes were bland and tasted washed- out and dragged down the other flavors.

Beef Wellington ($28) had some cutesy name that I forget, but it doesn’t matter because it was fucking AWESOME! A tender filet of medium rare beef, slathered in pate de foie gras, was wrapped in a shroud of puff pastry. The beef was so tender I thought it would evaporate if I didn’t eat it fast enough, which was why I wolfed it the fuck down. The puff pastry was flaky, doughy, and perfect, and the pate raised its voice just enough to be heard over the angelic chorus of divine virtue coming from the beef and pastry. It seems that lately foie gras is being overused; when even ice cream is made with it I think it’s time we all stood back and took a deep collective breath. After all, foie gras is a sword that shouldn’t be unsheathed lightly. Still, I’ve had lesser Wellingtons that used duxelles paste instead of pate, and it just isn’t the same. The Wellington was served in a pool of rich pan reduction sauce. Accompanying were a couple grilled young red onions. There was also a grilled mushroom, which was tender and satisfyingly meaty. It was also really weird looking: I’ve never seen such a mushroom outside of Super Mario Bros. Unfortunately, unlike the fungi commonly found in the various Super Mario games, this mushroom neither doubled my height, nor gave me an “extra man,” as my brother likes to call a 1up. The concept of the 1up is fucking weird: a MUSHROOM which gives you EXTRA LIVES. What sort of Satanic bargain did Mario have to strike in order to be provided with ANOTHER LIFE? It chills the very soul to ponder the ramifications. I prefer to think of the “extra men” as a mercenary army, chosen to be the same height, weight, hair color, and mustache thickness as the original Mario, sort of like the Rockettes. And you know times have changed when “Rockettes” triggers your spell checking software but “1up” does not. After all, who needs a row of sexy dancing dames when you’ve got Mario? Answer: obviously not anyone who works at Microsoft.

Dessert slid in under the radar with the Coffee & Cream with Sugar ($6), a cutesy name for a mocha flavored bread pudding. It wasn’t very sweet, and in fact tasted like bread that had been dipped in coffee, and to add an even deeper layer of cuteness, was served in a COFFEE CUP! How precious! Protruding from the center of the pudding was a glassy amber shard of brittle which had actual hazelnuts and whole coffee beans embedded in it. This made it look sort of like fly paper. I didn’t like this very much. Yet somehow, I liked the crème brulee ($6) even less. Normally, you may have noticed that I love crème brulee. Well, not with basil and tomatoes in it, I don’t. The menu simply said “seasonal crème brulee,” these motherfuckers didn’t even WARN me that they’d gone all faggy with it. I consider myself an adventurous eater, but after that Wellington, which was so old school you’re legally required to spell it “Olde Skewl,” I was ready for a glass of brandy and a classic end to the meal. But of course we can’t always get what we want. The crème itself was smooth and luxurious, with a good crackly sugar crust, but it wasn’t sweet enough. Plus there were cherry tomatoes on top, which leaked their limpid watery juices down into the custard below, and even –gasp!- some balsamic vinegar. Puzzlingly, despite all their proclamations of it being a “seasonal” crème brulee, tomatoes aren’t even in season yet! The sad thing is that I would’ve totally enjoyed this as an appetizer, but please, PLEASE don’t fuck with me on dessert. As a dessert it was too tangy and herbal to be an effective deal closer.

Despite my complaining about the décor (and other things), I’m actually optimistic about Fresh Bistro. The tomato- basil crème brulee shows that they’re shooting for high concept, which is sorely needed in West Seattle since Spring Hill currently has the monopoly on it. Yet they manage to pull off the Beef Wellington with ease, so they’ve obviously studied their history books and can do the classics as well. There might have been a glitch or two here and there, but they haven’t been open too long. I’m sure they’ll smooth the menu out shortly. But the glimmering memory of that utterly perfect Beef Wellington, the VERY DEFINITION of pure BRITISH STEEL, will definitely keep me coming back.

Rating: 7 extra men out of 10

Spur Gastropub

2009-05-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

113 Blanchard St
206-728-6706

I swore I’d never go back to another gastropub after I ate at Quinn’s. Not because I didn’t like Quinn’s (actually I like it quite a lot), but because I felt like they were using the pub format to discriminate against the other systems of the human body. After all, you never hear of anyone opening a “circulopub” (which probably sells lots of blood sausage), or a “respiropub” (specializing in French calf’s lungs), or an ”excretopub.” Do I really need to get into what an excretopub would sell? Yeah, I do: excretopubs sell shit sandwiches, which as everyone knows are like life, since no matter which way you slice it, it’s still shitty.

Anyway, I was in the neighborhood so we went to Spur. We started with the baby lettuces ($9). This dish was a blatant case of false advertisement since all of those lettuce leaves seemed pretty mature to me, and not at all as youthful as the menu claimed. If they wanted to be really accurate they would have called this salad “cougar lettuces.” Still, the mix of red leaf, butter lettuce, and romaine hearts was tasty. It was dressed in a sweet vinaigrette, with toasted marcona almonds and thin slices of speck. I always hated the name “speck,” which seems a totally inappropriate description for what is actually smoked prosciutto. They should thus call speck “smokesciutto,” which is a much better name. A “speck” is what came out of the guy’s ass in Pink Flamingoes when he opened and closed his sphincter to the tune of “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen. And like that scene in Pink Flamingoes, this salad was so delicious it made my sphincter open and shut in delight!

The parmesan gnocchi ($9) was also very good. These gnocchi had a rich salty parmesan flavor. They were light and fluffy nuggets, like little altocumuli clouds made of reggiano, served with a mix of sautéed green beans and carrots in a bright green sauce. The menu claimed that the sauce was “chive pudding” but I don’t believe them. This sauce was no more a pudding than anything the English call “pudding,” like “figgy pudding,” which is actually a cake, or “black pudding,” which is actually coagulated blood. And while we’re discussing pudding, I have a hard time believing that Bill Cosby would ever endorse Spur’s chive pudding, not because it wasn’t good, but because Bill Cosby hasn’t endorsed anything for years and I’m just pulling dated humor out of my ass.

The hamachi tartare ($16) seemed a little pricey for what it was: a rectangular mold of tiny cubes of raw albacore and yellow beets, topped with a thin line of radish leaves. This was accompanied by a couple crispy thin croutons upon which you could spread the tartare. This was very light and fresh tasting and not fishy at all, exactly the opposite of your mom!

The Washington chicken confit was, for $10, basically a plate of wings. They were really tender, readily falling off the bones, with a crisp skin. They wings were piled up on top of a sauce of either crème fraiche, or yogurt that had been thinned with something, or sour cream, or some other white tangy substance. Drops of a sherry reduction sweetened things up here and there, and the wings were crowned with a small pile of citrusy sorrel and scattered with a few pine nuts.

The tagliatelle ($14) was really fucking good. The pasta was very light, almost transparent, and so soft that they could only have been made in- house. Lots of oyster mushrooms provided a meaty bite, with plenty of pine nuts for crunch. A poached duck egg hid in the center like an Easter surprise, and the whole thing was topped a frothy pile of what the waitress described as “oyster mushroom foam,” but which actually seemed more like salty bubbles. The salty bubbles, while mildly distracting and unnecessary, didn’t detract from the overall awesomeness of this dish. The only thing stupid about the tagliatelle was the plate it came on, which looked like an inverted U with a dent in the center of it. Ever heard of a little something called a “bowl,” Spur? Obviously not. A bowl will change your life, bitch.

I need to pause at this juncture to tell you about Jesus. And by “Jesus,” I don’t mean some ancient middle eastern troublemaker who caused repeated disruptions to the law in some backwater of the Roman Empire, I mean Spur’s pork belly sliders. Like the real Jesus, these sliders are so good you can only save your soul by devoting your life to them. Unlike the real Jesus, you don’t have to die to meet the sliders; you just have to fork over $12. I admit that $12 is very expensive for 2 sliders. At $6 apiece, these mini sandwiches cost more than many full- sized sandwiches. Still, they’re worth every penny. Fluffy brioche mini buns were split and toasted crispy on their cut surfaces. The pork belly was silken, juicy, and so tender they fully deserved the name “sliders” because they slid right into your stomach the way I slide into your mom nightly. The pork was topped with apple compote, and the sliders were accompanied by a drizzly line of some kind of sweet bourbon honey sauce. These were without any competition the best sliders I’ve ever eaten, and I have eaten plenty of goddamned sliders because I fucking LOVE tiny sandwiches. Then again, they’d better be pretty damned good for the price.

I didn’t want to get the profiteroles ($11), but I felt like Spur was throwing down some sort of gauntlet because the profiteroles had FOIE GRAS in them! Holy fuck! Foie gras! Like a kid in a candy store, I was quivering with excitement waiting for dessert. I had visions of huge slippery tongues of rich fatty duck liver peeking out from beneath flaky pastry shells, but maybe my expectations were too high. What you ACTUALLY got was the usual profiterole pastry ball, three of them, filled with ice cream flavored with a few flecks of caramelized liver. What they probably did was take the pan they were cooking foie gras in and deglaze it with cream for the ice cream. The foie gras itself was mute, lending instead a vague meaty richness to the ice cream. The pate a choux was kind of leathery, and each of the three profiteroles were topped with a wholly superfluous dot of pomegranate syrup. I was a bit let down by the profiteroles, but I guess even something totally badass, like a clown car filled with monkeys who are trained to throw shit at and then hump the legs of the nearest Mormons, was bound to be a disappointment after the magnificence of the sliders.

I didn’t want to like Spur. I’m generally suspicious of Belltown, ever since Shorty’s started sucking major ass a couple years ago. Yet Spur won me over. It is totally fucking awesome. At first glance it seems expensive, but it isn’t too bad, since our entire bill for two came to just under $100 including tax and tip, and I probably didn’t need to blow the last $11 on the profiteroles. Between two people you should probably just get 3 orders of sliders, and be out of there for only $40 or $50 or so. But what if your friends don’t like pork? Then get new friends!

Rating: 8 porky messiahs out of 10

KFC

2009-05-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

123 Everywhere Street
Everywhere, USA
1-800- KFC-SUXS

I have never understood Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s because I could never understand why ANYONE would go there, given the existence of POPEYE’S. Let me tell you something about fried chicken: KFC sucks. Popeye’s rules the world with a spicy crispy iron fist. In fact, Popeye’s doesn’t just rule; its dominance of fried chicken and everything else in the world goes far beyond that. No, fuck that. Fuck what I just said about Popeye’s ruling everything in the world: Popeye’s rules everything in the UNIVERSE. This universe and EVERY OTHER UNIVERSE.

A funny thing about the universe: cosmologists think the universe is donut shaped (some of them, anyway. They can’t agree on the shape of the universe because cosmologists love to argue about shit because they’re a bunch of persnickety autistic tardos). So if the universe is donut- shaped, then what’s in its hole? No, it’s not God’s cock. Even better than that: it’s POPEYE’S. Popeye’s is clearly the best chicken in the known universe. It’s not just a fast food restaurant; it’s the axis upon which all of existence rotates.

Popeye’s dominance is, of course, why KFC is giving away chicken. Popeye’s doesn’t give away chicken because they don’t have to. KFC, on the other hand, is giving away free dinners featuring its new GRILLED CHICKEN. On the surface it seems like a great deal: 2 pieces of chicken, a biscuit, and 2 sides for FREE. Yet as we all know, things aren’t always what they seem: the “free IQ test” the guy in Los Angeles offered me was really a Scientology indoctrination seminar, and the “midget” hooker I called was really just a crackhead who put a pair of shoes on her knees and crawled around a la Tim Conway.

Still, I’m a sucker for free stuff so I dutifully printed my free Oprah coupon (more on Oprah later- don’t you worry about her) and headed down to my local KFC. Like I said, the coupon entitled you to two sides. There were two of us, and I had two coupons, so we chose 4 sides: fries, baked beans, and 2 copies of mac & cheese. We wanted a mashed potato, but there was a mix up in the drive- thru and so we ended up with double mac & cheese. Would that substitution be good luck? Stay tuned and find out!

Ah, fuck it. I hate keeping people in suspense, so I’ll just tell you now that the mac & cheese sucked. It was a violent orange color, and the macaroni had the waxy plastic texture of one of those PVC kiddie pools you can buy from Rite- Aid in the summertime that come with their own patch kit. It smelled vaguely metallic, and those of us brave enough to actually EAT the shit were rewarded with a hollow aluminum aftertaste. Basically, the mac & cheese was an insult to ALL the senses. It even SOUNDED gross: chewing it made the disturbing slurpy smacking sounds that a foley artist could use to simulate the sounds of two obese people 69’ing.

The fries, by contrast, weren’t actually that bad. They were of the “jo-jo” variety, thick cut wedges big enough to paddle a canoe with. The batter coating the jo-jo’s was light and crisp, and the potato flesh beneath was quite fluffy. Of course, I would expect no less from a place that has “Fried” in its very title! If they can’t at least make an okay French fry, then God help them. God help them, my friends.

The baked beans weren’t that great, but they weren’t terrible: too syrupy and cloying for sure, with no vinegar or mustard or ANY sour note to counter the treacly morass. The beans were mealy but otherwise inoffensive, I guess. These were the kind of baked beans grade- school cafeterias buy in gigantic cans, beans that slop all over the place everywhere and have no panache. The juice was slimy enough to use as some kind of lube, but that’s about it.

The biscuit was similarly lame. The main problem with the biscuit was that it threw into harsh relief the relative shitiness of KFC compared to Popeye’s. Popeye’s biscuits are the very Platonic ideal of pure biscuity perfection: light, flaky pastries that drip butter (or at least artificial butter flavoring) from every crumb. Popeye’s biscuits are the biscuits of Heaven’s very angels! Popeye’s biscuits are the food of the gods (and my dogs, when I’m not watching the counter). The KFC biscuit, by contrast, was dry, flavorless, and basically seemed like the kind of thing Irish immigrants eat while they’re waiting in line at Ellis Island.

I’ve put off describing the chicken itself both because I’m building up to it and because I don’t want to have to uncover the repressed memories. In fact, I’d rather be gang- raped by Satanists than eat KFC’s grilled chicken again. Did I really type “gang- raped by Satanists?” Sure I did; that’s just a normal Tuesday night. But KFC is an abomination. We got 2 thighs and 2 drumsticks. I would normally consider this to be a good omen because I love the dark meat. But of course KFC proved me wrong once again. The chicken had a glistening orange- brown skin complete with three perfectly sculpted “grill marks” that looked like they’d been designed by Roy Lichtenstein or Jasper Johns. In fact, the grill marks were so eerily precise, they could’ve been scored by a laser. Because this is what we as a society have developed lasers for: removing hair and tattoos, trying unsuccessfully to burn the paint job on a car that’s been recently treated with wax you can buy from an infomercial, and carving industrially manicured grill marks into shitty chicken.

But trust me, the grill marks weren’t the worst aspect of this meal. The skin was too thin and fibrous and tore into gummy threads like Saran Wrap that’s been microwaved too long. The meat was bland (unlike the mighty Popeye’s, KFC has no “spicy” option), and so greasy that Haliburton has a no- bid contract to mine it. And in case you think it’s odd that I’d make such a boring attempt at dated humor, then you can blame the chicken on that too: all the cholesterol in that chicken just gave me a stroke and so now all I can do is make jokes like a Jay Leno staff writer. That, and the stroke let me smell sounds, too. Somehow the “healthy” grilled chicken had more grease in it than ANY fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. How the hell is it possible?

Anyway, as usual the marketplace will undoubtedly refute my assessment of KFC’s piss- poor chicken. That’s because KFC now has the backing of OPRAH, the Hierophant of Mediocrity. I understand Oprah’s appeal even less than KFC’s. Before you complain about how I must hate Oprah because I fear powerful women, you should know that I would let Martha Stewart do whatever the fuck she wanted to do to me, provided that afterwards she could tell me how to get wine stains out of a rug and make a quick pie crust. Martha Stewart at least has an aesthetic. My problem with Oprah is that she has NO aesthetic: she seems to arbitrarily pick random things to fixate her retarded schmaltzy vision upon. Like KFC. Or Ezell’s, her local fave. I’ve got news for you, Oprah Winfrey: in my ancient homeland of Louisiana you can walk into any convenience store (south of Interstate 10, of course: only Protestant douchetards with no Joie de vivre live up north) and get chicken that’s effortlessly just as good as Ezell’s. Her book club is also suspect, in my eyes: how can you group a masterpiece of black despair like Night with the boring barroom tall tales in A Million Little Pieces? The very POINT of choosing things for dumb people to enjoy is that you’ll choose GOOD stuff. If you’re polluting your own choices with crap like The Secret, then what good are you? You may as well flip a coin when deciding which aspect of pop culture you’ll choose to enjoy! I can’t stand the whims of pure chance!

If Oprah wants to buy everyone in the USA free food, might I suggest something that tastes AWESOME, instead of ANAL RAPE CHICKEN?

Rating: 1 arbitrarily selected recipient of largess out of 10

PS I don’t usually post photos of food but here’s one I took of my meal. Please note that the meal DIDN’T actually come with a salad of arugula and shaved Reggiano with a balsamic vinaigrette and finished with Fleur de Sel de Camargue; I prepared that myself because my aorta threatened to tear itself out of my heart and squeeze itself out of my asshole if I didn’t eat something green. Note the perfectly parallel artificial grill marks on the thigh.

UPDATE 5/12/09: Complaining about Oprah, continued.

I wasn't done complaining about Oprah when I finally got too tired to keep writing last night, so here's another thing that makes Oprah Winfrey super dumb: her use of the term "Va- Jay- Jay." We grownups call it a "cunt," Oprah. "Va- Jay- Jay" is the worst thing that's happened to female genitalia since those self- loathing homosexual African fucks became so terrified of pussy that they decided to start cutting off their daughters' clits. Do you want to keep the company of uncivilized hacks, Oprah Winfrey? I think not.

Barolo

2009-04-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

1940 Westlake Ave
206-770-9000

I heard a rumor that the happy hour at Barolo was the single most awesome item in the universe. Better than the Cotton Candy Blowjob Mobile. Better than the robot assassin that’s fueled by burning Thomas Kinkade paintings (the robot assassin’s targets are the people who OWN the Kinkade paintings, naturally). Better than love, life, and all of human history itself.

Wrong.

Obviously, the rumors were wild exaggerations since the only thing in the universe that even APPROACHES the awesomeness of the aforementioned awesome items is the time I appeared onstage with Iron Maiden. I didn’t want to go to Barolo. After all, I’m currently suffering from High End Italian Food Fatigue (HEIFF), and it seems that there’s no end in sight. Yet I had to prove to myself that there was at least some legitimate basis for the Barolo happy hour love fest so off I went.

Once again, the marketplace disagrees with my assessment of things because Barolo was PACKED: packed like a rat, or packed the way my bags will be if Sarah Palin becomes president in 2012. There wasn’t room at the bar so the maitre d’, an Ed Begley Jr. looking motherfucker, sat us at a couple of these nerdy mini couches. The couches, which looked like they’d be pretty comfortable for midgets to fuck on, were about 2 feet wide and faced one another with a low coffee table between. I felt like a second class dickwad here because we couldn’t just sit at a human- sized table, nor at the bar, but instead were relegated to the fucking kids’ table.

The other thing I’m going to bitch about re: Barolo is the extremely attractive staff. Everyone looked like a reject from a Days of Our Lives casting call, or one of those reality shows where sexy twentysomethings compete for the affections of some attention- starved douche. I start to get uncomfortable when even the MALE waiters give me a semi, but as long as the waiters stay on their side of the fence, things are usually cool. It’s only when they try shit like sitting down at the table with us, or writing their name upside down on the table, or asking me if I like their nipple rings, that the social contract breaks, resulting in me dining- and- dashing. Needless to say, I’m not welcome at Red Robin anymore.

Everything on Barolo’s bar menu is half price during their happy hour, which is from 3-6:30. The prices I’m listing here are the prices we paid DURING HAPPY HOUR. So the regular prices are twice what I’ve written. With that in mind, we started with the grilled Caesar salad ($4). A half of a romaine lettuce head was served with a ribbon of dressing, big fluffy crunchy croutons, large flakes of parmasean cheese, and a lemon wedge. The romaine head was appealingly charred in places and was obviously grilled, but had no smoke flavor so I doubt it was grilled over a fire. The croutons were light and crumbly and very good, and not at all like the angular gum- shredding nuggets that shitty croutons can sometimes be. The dressing was pretty bland pussy dressing, with very little garlic and no anchovy flavor. The parmasean was obviously NOT reggiano. All in all it was a serviceable Caesar salad.

We continued with a pair of carpaccios: veal ($6.50) and ahi tuna ($6). The veal featured a thin layer of veal on the plate, topped with a loose pile of arugula, dotted with capers, and anointed with white truffle oil and some kind of vinaigrette. This was pretty good. The ahi tuna carpaccio wasn’t as tasty. The ahi was smeared across the bottom of the plate, topped with finely diced celery, capers, and olive oil. It had a light, fresh taste, but I don’t get the appeal of carpaccio. Who decided that squishing something makes it taste better? It works okay for beef, but that’s only because beef holds together. Tuna doesn’t fare as well in carpaccio form. I don’t mind raw tuna, but I DO get aggravated when it’s presented as a limp paste. Does it have to be pounded flat? Couldn’t they just give us a couple whole chunks? I could make the remark the only kind of tuna that I like to pound flat is your mom’s, but I’m not doing “your mom” jokes anymore, so let’s just say instead that Arby’s really sucks.

The prosciutto plate ($6.50) had lots of prosciutto on it, but not enough to justify the price if it hadn’t been happy hour. It tasted like pretty standard prosciutto di parma, but the best thing about this dish was the plate itself: a rustic wooden paddle! You know how much I hate all things rustic, but that rule doesn’t apply to things that I could use to spank your mom, if in fact I was in the business of spanking your mom, which of course I no longer am. You could, however, use this paddle to bludgeon the CEO of Arby’s, until he is so brain damaged that he orders his restaurants to start making delicious food instead of the limp iridescent meat sheets, slick with rat- felching juice, they currently prepare.

Barolo is rather lame. It’s not bad, but certainly not breathtakingly original. That’s not always a bad thing, since sometimes you just want to taste something familiar. Besides, the happy hour prices are pretty cheap. But the NON happy hour prices are TOO EXPENSIVE. Is it because they have to pay Hollywood wages to all the soap opera actors who work there? Dude, I don’t fucking know.

Rating: 5 poorly written restaurant reviews out of 10

PS Congratulations to my peeps at Urban Spoon on their recent acquisition by Citysearch.

Knee High

2009-04-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

1356 Olive Way
206-979-7049

Knee High is a self- styled “speakeasy.” I thought those went out of style with the Fox- Trot, flagpole sitting, and telling people that they’ve got “moxie.” Yet Knee High is a throwback, an anachronism, just like the Ford Model T or Blockbuster Video (but cooler).

When you go inside there’s a curtain and a dude. The dude checks your ID, which of course gave it away to me that this wasn’t an actual speakeasy, unless of course he was checking to make sure I wasn’t Elliot Ness. The dude told us “Let me see if we have a table available.” He poked his head through the curtain for a second then immediately pulled back. “I think I can arrange something for you,” he said. “Right this way.”

At Knee High “Right this way” means “3 feet from here” because the place is so damn tiny. It’s in the old Il Forno Pizzaria, which was an appropriate business to occupy this space because the building itself is pizza slice- shaped (of course by that logic, car dealerships would only be housed in giant car- shaped buildings, and the Washington Monument would be a dildo shop). It’s a great place for a speakeasy too: dark and secret inside, like Al Capone’s vault, but cozier. I had to laugh at the guy when he said “I think I can arrange something for you,” as if he was pulling some strings and painstakingly setting us up, because half the tables were empty. He seated us next to the bizarre mural of a grown man making out with an infant. It’s totally gross, and this is coming from the guy who loves Damien Hirst. I know there’s a Michael Jackson joke in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to figure it out so until then let’s all agree that Michael Jackson is a terrible child molester who loves sex with children, just like the guy in Knee High’s weird mural.*

The menu is cute and makes all kinds of antiquated 1920’s references to “Dames”, “Revenuers,” and “Suffragettes.” There’s an extensive cocktail menu, but the list of food items is brief. That’s okay with me; after all, you go to a speakeasy to drink and associate with flappers, jazzmen, aviatrices, and negroes, not to eat. But I was hungry after sitting on a hard bleacher for 3 hours watching roller derby girls, so we got some victuals.

The Chicago “style” Dog ($5) was as inappropriate as the quotation marks in its name (Note: I’m reproducing the typography directly from the menu here, lower case “s” and quotation marked “style” and all). A kosher beef frank was topped with relish, cucumber slices, and pickled peppers on a poppy seed bun. The flavor combination seemed unlikely to me, yet it worked. The relish was sweet. The peppers were tangy and spicy. The cucumbers were cool and fresh. The bun was as soft as gauze. The Chicago “style” Dog was really tasty and should be renamed the Chicago “awesome” Dog. It’s also the perfect thing to slow down rapidly approaching drunkenness.

An order of fries was also $5, but they weren’t as good as the “style” Dog. They were thick- cut steak fries. The coating wasn’t very crisp, and the insides were a little mealy. Plus you didn’t get very many of them. I’ve definitely had better fries, but at least they did come with an interesting spiced ketchup.

Roasted cauliflower ($5) also wasn’t that great. I like my roasted veggies with a little char on them, and while the cauliflower florets were a nice deep brown on top, they were mostly just pale and soggy underneath. They were coated with an anchovy butter that had a confident anchovy flavor. Unfortunately the butter wasn’t melted completely in many places, so I kept biting into soft pockets of cool, fishy butter. It seemed like they didn’t cook it all the way through.

Luckily, Knee High made up for the cauliflower with the asparagus Caesar salad ($6). In a cool twist on the traditional Caesar salad, they replaced lettuce with asparagus. I fucking LOVED this. The asparagus was lightly steamed so that it was tender but still a little crisp, and was coated with Caesar dressing. I’ve been to restaurants that serve pussy Caesar dressings with little garlic and no anchovy. These kinds of restaurants are usually catering to people on dates, who don’t want to have to kiss each other smelling like garlic and anchovies (though I call bullshit on that because the smell of garlic on a chick’s breath is TOTALLY HOT). Knee High’s Caesar dressing was nothing like those weak Caesar dressings: it was creamy, subversively perfumed with garlic and heavily muscled with LOTS of anchovy paste. Intense. Very nice, and it just underscores the fact that speakeasies like Knee High aren’t fucking around.

Perhaps best of all, Knee High serves ABSINTHE. While I was disappointed that they didn’t offer bathtub gin and watered down Canadian whisky like speakeasies of old, absinthe was a great choice. I ordered a glass of Lucid. For $9 you get a pretty big shot of it in a highball glass, plus an absinthe spoon, a sugar cube, and a small pitcher of ice water. The waitress offered to ignite the sugar cube for me with a match, but I declined because only philistines and Czechs do that. Lucid is a fine absinthe, though maybe with a rounder, softer, less herbal flavor than some other vintages I’ve tried. Still, it was a delightful postprandial digestif, and the romance and forbidden authenticity of the drink was perfectly suited to the ambiance.

I must at this point apologize to Knee High for making fun of the fact that it was empty when we walked in. We must have beaten the rush because at some point while we were eating, the place completely filled up! Granted, it’s not that difficult to pack the place, but still. In the private room behind us was a group of Algonquin Round Table motherfuckers, dressed to the nines and shooting rapid- fire quips at one another with the precision of Kaiser Bill’s own hunnish snipers. I wish I could say our table was enjoying such witty repartee, but sadly our talk of overly enthusiastic nipple rubs and awkwardly thumped vulvas lacked the same sparkle.

Knee High is fucking awesome. What a great idea. While the food is hit or miss, the drinks are stiff and the ambiance can fucking NOT be beat. Besides, you’re there to drink. It’s a great facsimile of a Depression- Era speakeasy. They’ve got the economic downturn nailed, after all.

Rating: 6 WPA writers out of 10

*My lawyer sez: “Michael Jackson is an upstanding citizen and is not, in fact, a molester of children or anything else other than good taste.”

Cantinetta

2009-04-12T10:35:00.001-07:00

3650 Wallingford Ave N
206-632-1000

For awhile I was getting High- End Italian Food Fatigue (HEIFF). HEIFF is characterized by a marked reluctance to pay $28 for a bowl of oxtail, aversion to the cloying taste of shitty balsamic vinegar, and an irrational hatred of Tuscany. Though if truth be told, I hated Tuscany BEFORE I got tired of Italian food. I once saw something on PBS where Lidia Bastianich described some part of Italy as being “Italy's other Tuscany.” Really, Lidia? And do you think the people of that other region agree with that assessment? Because I doubt I'd be very popular with the people of South Dakota if I called it “America's other North Dakota.”

So why do we continue to glorify Tuscany? Tuscany sucks. The people who really like Tuscany also really like The Bridges of Madison County and anything made by Glade. Have I ever been there? No, but I've never been inside an elephant's vagina either, and I suspect that that location also sucks, though Tuscany probably has more wheat fields and less smelly mucus. Yeah, sure, the Renaissance started in Florence, but that was 600 years ago. What has Tuscany done for me lately, besides becoming a keyword for the kind of pretentious fucks who care how old their vinegar is?

Needless to say, I approached Cantinetta with caution, since their website claims that they emphasize “Tuscan culinary traditions.” Well fuck it, once more into the breach, I suppose. When we arrived, the place was fucking packed, and they DON'T TAKE RESERVATIONS. Actually they do, but only for parties of 6 or more. Since there aren't 5 other people in the world who can stand my presence, a reservation wasn't an option. Luckily we were able to be seated at the bar.

We started with the grilled dates ($9). Three dates were wrapped in prosciutto and grilled. The prosciutto was crisp and smoky, and crackled when you bit into it, yielding to the chewy and sweet date flesh beneath. The menu claimed that the dates came with “red oak leaves,” which turned out to be oak leaf lettuce and not actual oak leaves. I must admit that this was a relief, since I hadn't eaten REAL oak leaves since the time a 3rd grade bully tackled me on the playground and shoved some in my mouth. Yeah, that was a tough time last week. Luckily the red oak leaf lettuce was supple and buttery, and the whole thing was drizzled in a rich balsamic reduction.

If the grilled date salad was Cantinetta's dark and smoky yin, then the arugula and muscat salad ($7.50) was its light tangy yang, only THIS tangy yang was much tastier than your mom's. We got a big pile of baby arugula, punctuated with green muscat grapes and salty dots of crumbled pecorino cheese. The muscats were pleasantly astringent flavor bombs which countered the sweetness of the vinaigrette that coated everything.

Ozette potatoes ($7.50) were roasted in rosemary butter. The potato skins were crunchy and crusted in kosher salt, but the flesh of these fingerling potatoes was a little mealy. Still, the herbed butter was really intense, and coating something in butter usually solves all problems. Although that having been said, Arby's could coat EVERY ONE OF THEIR MENU ITEMS in 10 gallons of herbed butter and it would still just taste like buttery ass with herbs.

Pappardelle Bolognese ($16) featured soft, wide pasta in a creamy bolognese sauce. The sauce has lots of meat, rich tomato flavor, and was spiked here and there with plenty of black pepper. Lots of parsley lightened up the whole thing. The risotto ($15), with hedgehog mushrooms and slivered onions, was perfectly composed, and as satin smooth as a Brazilian wax. Every grain of rice remained separate without clumping, and the risotto was creamy without being too gloppy. We had leftovers of the risotto, and I discovered that, again like a Brazilian wax, it was better the next day.

Dessert was the chocolate ganache tart ($8.50) which had a crisp chocolate crumb crust, dark chocolate filling, and was topped with a dollop of chocolate mousse. This dessert was pretty faggy. Fortunately, $7 got you three bombolini, which are Italian doughnuts. The pastry was soft, dusted in sugar, obviously fried in scrupulously clean oil, and filled with a mascarpone cream. The mascarpone cream wasn't super sweet, and after Alfredo sauce and my own jizz, is one of the best tasting white liquids in the world.

Cantinetta is an interesting place. While I'm clearly getting tired of Italian food, this place pulls it off with grace and style. It's not too stuck up, and not too expensive. It somehow threads the needle between the pricey but barely restrained Quixotic creative fury of Spinasse and the laid back vibe of a comfortable but unoriginal place like Machiavelli. AND it does all this while not falling into the trap of putting corny Italian crap on the walls, like a bust of the pope or one of Mussolini's eyeballs. If I was some douchebag of Italian heritage, which I am, I'd definitely go back. If ever there was an antidote to HEIFF, Cantinetta is it.

Rating 8 figli di puttana out of 10

PS Arby's jokes are the new “your mom.”

Homegrown Sandwiches

2009-03-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

3416 Fremont Ave N
206-453-5232

Man, this place has been getting some irrational hate! And that’s coming from me, America’s Premier Purveyor of Irrational Hate ™. After reading the bizarrely aggro comments about Homegrown in the Voracious comments section, I felt compelled to make a trip out to Fremont. Everyone loves to stare at a train wreck, especially if there are lots of severed heads rolling about on the ground like billiard balls, and tons of blood and guts everywhere, and piles of gross crap all over, detached fingers, maybe a couple slimy coils of intestines, and also lots of heavily damaged rail cars. And I wanted to taste the train wreck for myself (note: an actual train wreck tastes like metallic, bloody diesel fuel mixed with Arby’s).

Well I’ve got news for you, especially for the guy in the Voracious comments section who kept talking about how crude the palates of Seattleites are: this place is actually pretty fucking tasty. The flank steak sandwich ($9.95) had slices of grilled steak AND Portobello mushrooms, which basically counts as 1.5 kinds of meat. The condiments included bleu cheese, caramelized onions, mixed greens, and chimichurri sauce (officially the second funniest South American word after “Titicaca”). The chimichurri sauce seemed more like pesto, but what the fuck: I don’t actually know what chimichurri sauce is anyway. The flavors worked well together. The steak had a great grilled flavor, and the Portobello, with its subtle undercurrent of umami, was an interesting component. The greens remained crisp, and the sweet onions balanced out the bleu cheese tang. This was a hearty fucking sandwich, and if there’s anything that restores my faith in humanity, it’s a well constructed sandwich. Fuck the Pyramids. Fuck the Apollo Program. The sandwich is man’s greatest achievement.

The crab cake and bacon sandwich wasn’t as great. For $11.95 you get a crab cake, topped with bacon, avocado, and greens, on a brioche roll. The crab cake itself was quite tasty, with very little filler. The avocado was smooth and creamy, and the roll was fresh, soft, and as eggy as good brioche should be. But there was one problem. When I saw the sandwich’s description on the menu board I did a quick mathematical proof and sure enough, I verified the following differential sandwich equation:

as crab cake approaches bacon, flavor approaches shitty

For those of you with no background in calculus, that equation is available in an already differentiated form, where I’ve solved for “flavor:”

Bacon + Crab Cake= Shitty

I was hoping my equation would turn out to be false, because if true it would be the most terrifying mathematical proof ever encountered by man, even more horrific than the non- Euclidean geometry of Cthulu’s undersea palace. The following sentence is the hardest I have ever had to type, and I’m crying right now writing this. And it isn’t a dignified restrained Yankee WASP-y kind of cry where the tears silently roll down my cheeks and I dab at them with a silk handkerchief, but a full- on bawl, with snot bubbles popping out of my nose and lots of punching pillows and kicking at the air. As much as this seems like heresy (sob), the bacon seemed like the problem to me. It was good bacon but the smoky sweet flavor seemed out of place. I never thought I’d say it but they didn’t need to put bacon on this sandwich. There, it’s out in the open now. I can start to heal.

Each sandwich comes with your choice of South Carolina slaw (which is like regular slaw but more racist), apple- fennel slaw, something suspiciously called “Moroccan Carrot Slaw,” or a pickle. Since pickles are for fags we got the apple- fennel slaw and the Moroccan carrot slaw. The apple fennel was really good: crisp, sharp, floral, and sweet. The Moroccan slaw wasn’t very good. It wasn’t sweet enough, and in fact was bitter, just as bitter as all those Moroccans who can’t find a job in France. So I guess the name was pretty descriptive after all.

Finally, the rutabaga and parsnip fries ($4.95) had an interesting batter which I think had a touch of cinnamon in it. The fries themselves were okay, maybe a bit soggy. I probably would’ve liked it better if they were thinner and crispier. But I like the idea of seasonal fries made of different vegetables. When can we get some Brussels sprouts fries?

Homegrown is a great addition to the Fremont Sandwich Renaissance. I used to work in that neighborhood and until recently your lunch options were basically all Thai, all the time. It isn’t fine dining, but it’s not trying to be. Sure, their goal of only using local, seasonal ingredients is pretty ambitious, but at least they’re fucking trying something. Homegrown is a sandwich shop with a master’s thesis.

If the troll- filled comments on Voracious’s message board are to be believed, it sounds like Homegrown might be having a problem with one of their suppliers. BIG FUCKING DEAL. Every new business encounters a few snags when it first opens. Get over it. Or don’t, but don’t complain about it to me. Take your complaints to Lou Ferigno instead, because he’s deaf and can’t hear you anyway. And if he DOES somehow hear your complaints about Homegrown, he’ll just kick your ass because he’s super tough and he can’t stand to hear a perfectly good sandwich get disparaged by a douchebag.

Having been on both sides of the irrational hate fence, as both a supplier and receiver of hate, I can sympathize with these guys. So I’m awarding their rating ONE BONUS POINT for enduring senseless complaining. That’s right, bitches.

Rating 6.5 trolls out of 10

One Pot

2009-03-28T23:20:00.000-07:00

w/ Steven Rinella

At Via Tribunali
6005 12th Ave S

I first encountered Auguste Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire in a Barnes & Noble a couple years ago. I was instantly entranced by this, the greatest of cookbooks. Le Guide Culinaire is like if you took The Necronomicon, Hammer of the Gods, and the Bible, combined them, and soaked the entire thing in butter. The instructions are so vague! The writing style is so eldritch! The recipes are so unlikely! If H.P. Lovecraft had become a chef instead of a legendary horror writer, Le Guide Culinaire would have been the unholy result.

Later I heard an interview on NPR with a guy who’d followed Le Guide Culinaire and prepared a 40 course Thanksgiving feast entirely from ingredients he either hunted himself or found. The book was called The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. The author was named Steven Rinella.

If you read The Scavenger’s Guide one thing will become immediately apparent to you: Steven Rinella is TOUGH. He is so motherfucking tough. You know that internet list of reasons why Chuck Norris is tough? Steven Rinella makes Chuck Norris look like a quivering orphan with a Hawaiian Punch mustache and a snot bubble. Fuck Chuck Norris: he’s old news and besides, he burned all his bridges with me for the rest of eternity by campaigning for Mike Huckabee. Steven Rinella is the real deal. Steven Rinella is so tough it’s like they genetically engineered him from DNA of the world’s toughest dudes, just like Serpentor from the GI Joe cartoon. No, fuck that: Rinella is so tough Serpentor cleans Rinella’s toilet for him. Then when Serpentor is done cleaning Steven Rinella’s toilet, Lou Ferigno comes in to give Rinella a blow job. Directly in line behind Lou Ferigno is Sylvester Stallone, readying his massage oil to give Steven Rinella a foot massage. In fact, there’s a line of the most legendary tough guys stretching out the door of Steven Rinella’s apartment and around the block, all waiting to sexually service him and/ or clean his house. That’s how hyperbolically manly Steven Rinella is.

So when I heard that the universe’s toughest dude would be reading from his newest book American Buffalo: in Search of a Lost Icon I jumped at the chance to attend. This is how Rinella wrote his new book: after he was done researching he let Paul Prudhomme and Kathy Bates fuck on his back while he did 100 push ups on a pile of broken glass. When he finished his push ups he took a quill pen, dipped it in the blood oozing from the cuts on his hands, and wrote the first draft IN HIS OWN BLOOD. ON KATHY BATES’ NAKED SKIN, which only someone as tough as Steven Rinella could possibly stand the sight of.

But I digress. Rinella would be reading from his new book at One Pot, which as everyone knows is the brain child of another mystical figure, culinary ringmaster Michael Hebberoy. One of Hebberoy’s ventures, as you well know, was recently reviewed by me, and like all polarizing figures he fascinates me. Besides, it seemed like a killer deal: the meal at One Pot was $45, and included a copy of Rinella’s new book. AND he would be reading from it. AND he would be eating four pounds of potassium cyanide, washing it down with hydrofluoric acid, then flossing his teeth with barbed wire.

The meal took place at the Georgetown Via Tribunali. It was crowded and loud. Wine was flowing freely; unfortunately none of it was flowing into my mouth, because although the event was advertised as “Bring Your Own Wine,” I forgot. But at least drinks were available from Via Tribunali’s bar. There was a long table for about 40 in the room. On one wall was a projection of a National Geographic documentary about Alaska. Sarah Palin’s face was luckily nowhere to be seen, though there were a few ice worms, which I thought only existed in the Star Wars universe.

Eventually Hebberoy clinked his glass and all the idle chatter died down. Everyone sat down at the long table, which was probably about 30 feet long and easily the biggest table at which I’ve ever been seated. Seriously, it was like Mr. Burns’ table. Hebberoy said a few words, introduced Rinella, and we started eating.

The first course was a salad. Apple wedges were tossed with escarole, thinly sliced Spanish chorizo, Manchego cheese, and red onion in a bright vinaigrette. This was a very simple salad. All the flavors interplayed well. The sweet apple countered the bitterness of the escarole. The chorizo was spicy, and the cheese was salty. With the salad was flat bread. Hebberoy swore that, despite the fact that we were eating at Via Tribunali, no pizza would be served. However, the flat bread was basically pizza with no cheese. As far as flat breads go, it was pretty damn good, with a crusty, sooty, charred bottom and chewy interior, and a smear of sweet tomato sauce on top. They should’ve just put some fucking cheese on it and let us have pizza though. I don’t see why not. I ate a vegan pizza once. Do I really need to say that it sucked? Everything’s better with cheese. Dairy council, you can thank me later.

After the salad, Rinella read an excerpt from his book, where he described half- mile long piles of buffalo bones encountered by pioneers in the Midwest. Then he passed around a container of pemmicam which he’d made from the buffalo he shot. Said buffalo is of course the subject of the new book, which details Rinella’s adventures on a buffalo hunt, and also discusses the buffalo’s place in American history.

Pemmicam is made of ground buffalo meat, mixed with buffalo fat and ground nuts. The pemmicam had a weird taste: like powdered dog food that someone had farted through. It was also disturbingly crunchy. Rinella claimed he used pine nuts to make this pemmicam, but I don’t believe him. It was CRACKLY it was so crunchy. Also, it was sickly sweet. Plus it left that nasty shellacked layer of waxy grease on the roof of your mouth like shitty movie popcorn. I guess I’d eat pemmicam if I was starving in the woods.

Next up was the main course: beef stew, served over farro. The farro came out first. Though Hebberoy expressly forbid us from doing so, I tasted the farro by itself before the braised beef came out. It was good, chewy, and earthy, with asparagus, cauliflower, and leeks. Normally I disdain farro, spelt, and all those other “old- timey” grains because that’s the kind of shit lesbians eat, but I must admit it was tasty. Then the braised beef stew came out. Ladled over the farro, it was quite delicious. The stew was hearty and rich, with carrots and bay leaves. The chunks of beef were so tender I didn’t even need to cut it with the superfluous knife they’d provided me. With this dish came of bowl of what Hebberoy called “salsa verde.” I’ve got news for you, Mr. Hebberoy: ACTUAL PEOPLE know that chopped parsley in olive oil with lemon zest and garlic is called GREMOLATA. But no matter what you call it, the gremolata was bright and fresh, and really gave a high note when dolloped over the beef.

As dessert was being passed around, Rinella entertained questions. Most people asked about buffalo, but I really wanted to know if Rinella thought that the dude from Into the Wild was as much a misinformed, naïve pussy as I did. Unfortunately, he stopped answering questions before I could pose my earthshaking query. Dessert was coffee from some loser country (I don’t remember which one) and Theo chocolates. The chocolates were mostly like tiny Three Muskateers bars, but better, with a chocolate outer shell filled with chocolate mousse. Still, like all chocolate it was pretty girly, and not at all the kind of manly dessert I imagine Steven Rinella eats. Maybe they should’ve served chocolate covered eyeballs.

After dessert Rinella autographed copies of American Buffalo. I insisted he make the inscription in my copy out to “The Surly Gourmand, the only guy in the universe who’s manlier than me.” He refused, so I challenged him to a duel to the death in the Thunderdome, which will be on Pay- Per- View next year. I better start training, I suppose.

This meal was a fucking great deal. The cover price of the book is $24.95, which means that the meal cost about $20. And that’s an awesome price for a 3 course meal, especially since the menu was designed by the dude from Art of the Table. It’s too bad that this was a one- of- a- kind event. I was so impressed with One Pot, I’ll be back for sure. And if you ever get a chance to see Steven Rinella in person, be sure to do so, or he’ll hunt you down with unflinching resolve like the Terminator. And unlike the Terminator, Steven Rinella can’t be killed by crushing him in an industrial press or dropping him into a metal smelter. So you better do what he says.

Rating: 7.5 unstoppable action heroes out of 10

Pike Street Fish Fry

2009-03-11T23:08:00.000-07:00

925 E Pike St
no phone

If every English class I've ever taken is to be believed, one cannot truly understand a work of art without first understanding its creator.

WRONG, MOTHERFUCKERS!

No one cares about the artist's life (if by “no one” you mean “me,” and I do in fact mean “me,” so suck it if you don't like it). If you pay attention too closely to the artist's life you get shit like that movie about when Metallica went to therapy. I don't give a fuck about James Hetfield's grandma, Lars Ulrich's collection of Basquiats (which I'm sure he was forced to unload for the paltry sum of $2 million because Napster was ruining him), or which brand of activator Kirk Hammet uses in his jerry curl. And I SURE AS HELL don't care about the new douchebag bass player they hired who used to be in Suicidal Tendencies.

Likewise, I don't give a FUCK about any chef. I don't care about the chef's kids. I don't care about the chef's dog. I don't care about what the chef likes to eat at home. I don't care about how hot the chef's mom might be, although mostly because I'm fucking the chef's mom and my standards are dismally low, which is of course why I don't care how hot she is. The only thing I care about is how good the food is. I don't have time or energy to spend worrying about the personal details of a chef's life because we're in the middle of a WAR, an eternal battle going on between good taste and bad. We're all conscripts. You're either on the side of good taste, or you eat at Arby's. There's no grey area here.

Now I'm going to contradict all of that crap I just typed about my indifference to chefs. It's unavoidable, really. I blame the internets and all of the knowledge which Al Gore has personally fisted into its various tubes. All of that information on the interwebs has osmosed into my brain, and now I know something about the Pike Street Fish Fry. The man who owns it started out with an underground supper club in Portland. Lately he's personally gotten mixed reviews: a magnificent hero to some, a sperm guzzler to others. Yet isn't that true of us all? It is at this point sufficient to say that the dude started a restaurant, closed a restaurant, moved, then opened another restaurant. His rise and fall has been luridly documented by the chumps who care about that crap, but if you ask me you might as well just insert a Seinfeldian “yadda yadda” into the boring middle parts of the dude's story and skip straight to the menu. Which I will do. Right now.

While everything on the menu isn't fried, I for one don't order ANYTHING from a place called “Fish Fry” that hasn't been previously dipped in boiling oil. The halibut ($8) had a crisp panko coating, was VERY fresh tasting, and was so succulent and juicy, it was like the fish meat was weeping tears of pure deliciousness into your mouth with every bite. Unfortunately, you only got three small pieces.

Fried prawns were also $8. These were coated in a very light, thin beer batter. This was a nice change of pace from the usual huge puffy parka of fried dough which less- skilled frymasters usually try to pass off as beer batter. The prawns were tender, but I was disappointed again by the price, since for eight dollars you only got FOUR shrimp. One thing which I found interesting about the halibut and shrimp were that the traditional breadings were reversed: shrimp usually gets a panko crust and halibut usually gets beer batter, but here it was the other way around. Maybe it was a stylistic play on expectations. Or maybe they got the order wrong.

Calamari was (surprise) $8, which I'm guessing is the default price for seafood. At least you got a LOT for your money: the bowl was overflowing with a big pile of rings and tentacles. The squid had been dusted with cornmeal, and was expertly fried without a hint of the lame chewiness which plagues lesser calamaris.

I should point out that everything comes with fries. And not pussy fries, either, like the ones at Oddfellow's Cafe. Pike Street Fish Fry sells the kind of greasy, hand- cut, hangover- slaying fries that are similar to the ones at Dick's, but better, the kind of fries you can get two bums to fight each other over. Best of all, you get LOTS of them, so even if they skimp on the prawns and halibut, you can at least have a massive bowl of carbs to fall back on. In fact, Pike Street Fish Fry piles SO MANY fries into each bowl, the cooks carefully construct a newsprint retaining wall around the perimeter of the bowl to keep the mountain of fries from becoming a fry- slide. Or would it be called a “french slide?” Either way, it's the most delicious geological formation known to man. Besides the Big Rock Candy Mountain, of course.

Are there any REAL vegetables available at this place? Answer: yes, although they too are fried. Green beans were $5, and were dipped in a thin egg wash batter. The batter was pretty well seasoned, and the beans were cooked just until only a wire- thin tenuous vein of crispness remained in the center of each bean.

One major misstep these motherfuckers made were hushpuppies. For $4.50 you get about 6 shitty, dense hush puppies that settle down into your stomach like a black hole and pull your appetite into its event horizon. Bad hush puppies are worse than shitty gnocchi. Frying hush puppies is counterintuitive: if you cook them until the outside is an appealing golden brown, the inside remains raw. You've got to fry the exterior to a dark mahogany color, so that it seems like it's burned, in order to steam the interior into delightful fluffiness. A good hush puppy has a crisp crust but the inside is like flaky, crumbly, sweet cornbread.

I have one more thing to complain about. I didn't play the “I'm from the South” card when discussing the prawns, but I will now: I'm from the South, and NO ONE PUTS CHEDDAR CHEESE OR JALAPENOS INTO HUSH PUPPIES. The cheese only made the density problem worse. So when you bit into the hushpuppies, what you got was a soggy, solid core of cool cornbread batter strung through with shitty cheese. And spiciness. Lame.

In general, this place certainly knows how to fry the fuck out of ANYTHING. Except hushpuppies. But everything else that I tried came in a different type of batter, and nothing was overcooked at all. In fact, it was spooky how perfectly the fish, prawns, fries, and green beans were prepared. In fact, it was almost like the dude who owns Pike Street Fish Fry sold his soul to Satan in return for his success and mythological frying ability. I personally would've traded my soul for something better, like a cotton candy machine and some guns, but to each his own.

Rating: 7 demagogues out of 10

PS I didn't try it, but for $14 you can buy something called the “Old 96er,” which I imagine is an homage to the gigantic porterhouse consumed by John Candy in The Great Outdoors. It's a sandwich with any item on the menu as the main ingredient, and topped with cole slaw, fried green beans, and french fries. If you can finish the Old 96er in 5 minutes, it's free, plus you win a beer. One day when I'm feeling bulimic I'll be sure to try one of these behemoths.

Oddfellows Cafe

2009-02-18T21:52:00.000-08:00

1525 10th Ave
206-325-0807

Oddfellows Cafe isn't really very odd, which is frequently the case when someone describes himself as “odd.” In fact, when people refer to themselves as “crazy,” they're usually exactly the opposite, like the sorority girl I once overheard justifying her own “zaniness” by loudly proclaiming that Spongebob Squarepants was her favorite show. I've got news for you: adults who watch children's programming are not odd. Here are some examples of people who are ACTUALLY ODD: JACK KEVORKIAN is odd. JOHN WAYNE GACY was crazy. MICHAEL JACKSON is different. Wearing a Utilikilt does not make you “different.” Nor does actually using the flower vase in your new VW Bug. Unless you're willing to replace the daffodil in your Bug's flower vase with a severed finger, you're probably just an attention- starved douche.

Speaking of attention- starved douches, let's discuss my meal at Oddfellows. The day we went there, the soup of the day was cream of celeriac. For $5 you got a pretty motherfucking big bowl of earthy, sweet, creamy soup, dusted with a drift of finely minced parsley. The 3 Cheese Panini with Onion Jam ($6) seemed to be missing TWO of the aforementioned cheeses, because all I could taste was one kind of cheese: goat. To be fair, the sweet onion jam balanced the tangy chevre pretty well. Still, those odd motherfuckers at Oddfellows owe me TWO CHEESES. WHERE'S MY TWO CHEESES?

Luckily they made up for the missing cheese by including extra meat in the Oddfellows Sandwich ($8), which featured coppa, Black Forest ham, AND salami, plus gruyere and onions. That Oddfellows Sandwich was HEARTY as FUCK. To balance the otherworldly heartiness, the Oddfellows Sandwich comes with a very tasty side salad: mixed greens, sliced carrots, and a delicate vinaigrette. The greens were fresh and crisp. The vinaigrette was balanced and evenly coated every leaf. I've always said that the mark of a restaurant's quality is how carefully they prepare side salads, and Oddfellows fucking nailed it.

One thing that was lame about the sandwiches was that they didn't come with fries. Unfortunately, not being served with the sandwiches wasn't the only thing offensive about those fries. I've compiled a list of grievances against them:

1.The fries cost $6.
2.For that price, you only get a handful of them.
3.They are served in an old tin can. Yes, really.
4.The fries are too short in length. I expect a good french fry to be 3-4 inches in length. If my cock is longer than most of the fries on my plate, I cry.
5.The accompanying sauces aren't very good.

I'm going to print this list and nail it to the door of Oddfellows Cafe a la Martin Luther's 95 Theses. It's too bad they've has driven me to this drastic step because the fries themselves are actually quite tasty. They were crisply cooked, fluffy inside like a good baked potato, and flecked with crystals of kosher salt. But I couldn't get over how lame the sauces that came with the fries were: the so- called “house- made ketchup” tasted like watery marinara sauce, and don't even get me started on the aoli. Too late: I'm already getting started on the aoli. I HATE aoli. This is surprising in light of the fact that I love almost every other goddamned, motherfucking thing from France. But aoli sucks. It's too labor intensive. It's just trumped- up mayonnaise. It has too much cachet, and as you can probably guess, I hate cachet. If Pulp Fiction is to be believed, and why wouldn't you believe that ultra- realistic piece of cinema verite, then all Europeans love mayonnaise on fries. I vehemently disagree with this concept. In fact, if Europeans really do love mayonnaise on fries, then the European community leaves me no choice but to label every one of its citizens a bunch of fags. Every European citizen is a bunch of fags. Every one.

So maybe it's for the best that the sandwiches don't come with fries. I may have had an anuerysm if I had to keep thinking about aoli. Luckily the roast chicken ($15) was as tasty as the fries were irksome. This roasted chicken half was juicy and confidently roasted, well seasoned with crisp skin and tender flesh. It came with satiny mashed potatoes and garlicky braised greens. My one minor complaint is that maybe they could've braised the greens a little longer, because they were a little tough.

The steak was also $15. It came with a big pile of crisp arugula, which had been dressed in the same delightful vinaigrette as the side salads. Also present on this dish was a braised onion. Topped with blue cheese and broiled, it was smoky and sweet. The steak itself-- 2 medallions of grilled sirloin-- had a good, seasoned exterior crust and a perfect medium- rare interior.

Dessert was chocolate pudding. For $5 you got a pretty good portion of it. The pudding was rich and chocolatey and topped with a cloud of whipped cream. Unfortunately it was served in a retardedly shallow jar. It looked like the kind of jar that holds one of those creepy triple- wick candles. You know, those huge scented candles beloved by crazy cat ladies, people who collect pewter miniature dragons and wizards, and Renaissance fair attendees. Whatever happened to bowls? I fucking love bowls.

Oddfellows Cafe is really quite tasty. The cuisine is quietly competent and reasonably priced. PBR tall boys are only $2.50. And although the staff all dress like hipster fuckwads, the waiters are friendly, fast, and professional. They don't take reservations, but the place is so fucking huge I don't think finding a table could be such a huge challenge. Hopefully they'll someday ditch the bizarre cans and jars that they use to serve the food. Until then, I declare Oddfellows Cafe to be a bunch of bastards. But in the best possible way.

Rating: 8 Odd Motherfuckers out of 10

Fare Start

2009-01-26T22:53:00.000-08:00

700 Virginia St
206-267-6210

Fare Start is a cooking school for the homeless. I suppose that description is misleading, because although they teach the homeless to cook, they don't teach them to prepare traditional hobo fare such as an open can of baked beans, or half- eaten Chinese takeout found in a dumpster. Which is good because I don't think they'd make much money that way, since the only customers they'd get would be other winos. Instead, they school the homeless in fine dining.

To draw the crowds, Fare Start features a weekly “guest chef” night, where the three course prix fixe is prepared by a locally famous chef. This week was Chef Gabriel Claycamp, proprietor of the Culinary Communion cooking school.

The first course was “Handmade Stuffed Caramellos: Duck Confit, Roasted Pumpkin, Parmigiano Brodo, Sage Emulsion.” The description is in quotes because I'm pulling it from the menu verbatim. And don't feel bad if you can't understand exactly what this menu item is supposed to be, because I sure as fuck couldn't. I know some of those words, but they don't make sense together. The title of this dish reads like a stroke victim wrote it.

Luckily the handmade stuffed caramello was as tasty as its name was confusing. A mound of roast pumpkin, tender and sweet, floated in a pool of pumpkin puree, which was heavily muscled with pumpkin pie spice. Delicate sage foam crowned the whole affair. The menu promised duck confit; unfortunately, it failed to make an appearance. In fact, I didn't have ANY duck confit in my handmade stuffed caramello. Maybe there COULD HAVE BEEN confit in there, but if there was it was purely incidental. Statistically there was also probably at least one arsenic atom in the handmade stuffed caramello, but I didn't see arsenic listed as an ingredient. For all I care they could've listed cheeseburgers, pizza, and Leonardo Da Vinci as ingredients, and the result would have been exactly the same: me, pissed off, with NO duck confit working its way through my digestive tract. Plus I thought Caramellos were candy bars, and I sure as fuck could detect neither chocolate nor nougat.

The entree was a roasted lamb roulade with flageolet beans, shallots, trotters, crumbs, prunes. Again a random assortment of items. And in fact, those items might seem disgusting if mixed together, but this roulade was defyingly tasty. However, I question the inclusion of “crumbs” as a description. After all, crumbs are what you're left with AFTER you're done eating. By this logic, McDonald's should just rename the Quarter Pounder “Heart Surgery.” The Hyundai Accent would be called “Birth Control.” Internet service would be marketed as “Annoying Pop- Up Ads and a Handful of Jizz.”

Retarded hyperbole aside, the roulade really was delicious. Lamb shoulder was butterflied and rolled up with a prune stuffing. A telltale pearly webbing on the surface of the roulade indicated that it had been wrapped in caul fat before being slow cooked. The lamb was rich, flavorful, and very tender. The beans were creamy and perfectly cooked. The roulade was topped with a crispy breaded patty of shredded trotters. The breading on that crispy breaded trotter patty, I suppose, is how they justify listing “crumbs” as a key ingredient for this dish. Jesus, there weren't THAT many crumbs. If the roulade were served on top of a pile of crumbs the size of a sand dune THEN I would agree that they should list “crumbs” as an ingredient. Every sand dune- sized pile of bread crumbs should come garnished with a dune buggy, so you can drive up to the top and eat your way down. If I ran Fare Start that's what I'd do for sure.

Dessert was a cinnamon roll with mascarpone, espresso cream, and bacon frosting. Yes, you read that right. I've extolled the saintly virtue of bacon enough times that I won't go into its praises again right now, though I WILL say this: I overheard someone at a nearby table who ordered the vegetarian meal specifically request the cinnamon roll JUST SO THEY COULD HAVE THE BACON CREAM. Such is the power and the glory of bacon, cleanser of all wounds, soother (and clogger) of all hearts. VEGETARIANS can't even resist it. That's because bacon isn't really meat, after all. It's more like a really hearty condiment that can stand alone as a meal, the way a jar of sweet pickle relish seems when you're stoned. The cinnamon roll was flaky and cloyingly sweet. The espresso flavor was rich without being overpowering. The bacon frosting was a golden color flecked with black dots. It tasted as though they'd fried up some bacon and then deglazed the pan with cream to capture the bacon essence. When you got a spoonful of cinnamon roll, espresso, and bacon frosting together the effect was like mainlining breakfast.

Fare Start is a very good deal. It's $25 for a three course meal. The portions are big enough, although a triathlete might complain about it. It's so goddamned, motherfucking cheap because the waiters are volunteers. The kitchen staff are homeless. The ingredients, recipes, and techniques used for the meal are all donated by the guest chef. Fare Start isn't perfect, but the whole fucking place is so virtuous it's completely review- proof. After all, what kind of a raging asshole would write a bad review of a fucking CHARITY? Only a total ruthless dick would do something like that. And if you think I'M that ruthless dick, think again: I'm turning over a new leaf, you fuckfaces. Fuck you.

Rating: 7 hobos out of 10

Hunt Club

2009-01-14T22:18:00.000-08:00

inside the Sorrento Hotel
900 Madison St
206-343-6156

I wanted one thing, AND ONE THING ONLY, from the Hunt Club: a fucking cheeseburger. You see, cheeseburgers are like currency to me. If I was somehow elected Emperor of Earth tomorrow the first thing I would do would be to abolish money and replace it with cheeseburgers. Different denominations would be determined by how good the burger was: one of those shitty little McDonald's bitchburgers would be a penny. Dick's cheeseburgers would be nickels. A Whopper, Jr. would be a dime. A Whopper would be a quarter. The Jumbo Jack would be a fifty cent piece. Red Robin would be a dollar. Are you tired of this yet? I am.

Anyway, you'd think that if I were elected Emperor of Earth I'd have bigger fish to fry (other than destroying the global economy by replacing money with burgers, of course), but no: like some chief executives I'm too lazy to tackle any REAL problems, and besides, this whole paragraph is a simple thought exercise anyway. After all, everyone knows I could never be elected Earth Emperor! I'm not eligible because I smoked pot once. And also because I never think of the children. People always want politicians to think about children: “Please, won't someone think of the CHILDREN?” No.

So we ended up at the Hunt Club in the Sorrento Hotel, mostly because it was the only place open. I wanted to go to Quinn's for their Wagyu bacon cheeseburger, which is damn tasty, but those pussies were closed. “Boo, hoo,” I imagined those whiners at Quinn's sniveling, “it's New Year's Day! We want to be with our families!” Fuck your family, Quinn's. I was up until 5 am partying the night before (if you consider an all night Yahtzee marathon “partying,” that is). I was hungover and wanted a goddamned burger!

As a result, I settled for the Huntsburger, which according to the menu features “Huntsman Cheese,” which sounds more like some putrid genital rash than a really delicious dairy product. Also, you should be warned that the Huntsburger is $16. Yes, that's right: all of the money I made selling your mom into white slavery in Moscow went right into that burger.

The meat was still pink inside, and juicy, but the burger meat itself was rather bland. The bun was just a regular grocery store sesame seed bun. It came with a pile of romaine lettuce, sliced red onion rings, and tomatoes. The lettuce was crisp, and the tomatoes were pretty good for this time of year. Two ramekins, one of ketchup and one of a mixture of coarse mustard and mayonnaise, graced the side of the plate in case you wanted condiments.

The fries were the biggest disappointment. They were of the shoestring variety, and tasted like frozen french fries, which seems reprehensible considering the price tag. For $16 I'd expect hand- cut pommes frites with truffle oil, or at the very least some iridescent magical flying beetle fries conjured by Harry Potter himself. Or maybe it could be the same frozen fries, only delivered to you by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Those fries better smell like sunshine and taste like rainbows, for that kind of scratch. But of course we don't always get what we want. Besides, everyone knows hotel restaurants always treat your wallet the way Mike Tyson treats his cell mate: they anally rape you using your own blood as lube (and then they don't call you after), in case you didn't understand that clever topical comparison.

Was the Huntsburger worth it? In and of itself, fuck no. But the swanky fucking décor inside the Sorrento Hotel has got to be worth something. Actually, I know what the décor is worth: it's worth exactly $16. So I guess I broke even. If the Huntsburger were a piece of Imperial currency in my new monetary scheme, it would be a counterfeit $2 bill. So there.

Merry New Year, dickfaces.

UPDATE 1/19/09:

In my haste to disparage these fucknoses ( at least partially because this review was written in a rare moment of complete sobriety), I forgot to mention that the Huntsburger is a BACON cheeseburger. And I also forgot to mention the very important fact that the bacon on the Huntsburger is fucking awesome. It's thick, juicy, smoky, salty bacon, and as flat as a board. They must've cooked it with one of those bacon presses because it was perfectly flat. Perfectly 2- dimensional. And there was plenty of it too. I would make that bacon my wife if it was legal to marry meat products. Hopefully Canada legalizes baconsexual weddings soon.

Unfortunately the rest of the Huntsburger was as mediocre as the bacon was delicious. How delicious was that bacon? Tasty enough, in fact, to single- handedly pull the Huntsburger's rating up from 3 to 4. You might not think one point is very much, but I do, and it's MY rating system so fuck off.

Rating: 4 dollar bills out of 10

Olivar

2008-12-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

806 E Roy
206-322-0409

Everybody knows that Spain is super funky! From their whimsical buildings like the Guggenheim Bilbao, to Cervante's bizarre satire, to Picasso's quirky bullshit, Spain is the funkiest place in the goddamned, motherfucking universe! If you were to rate a nation's funkiness by comparing it to a band, Spain would be George Clinton. France would be Cradle of Filth. Britain, of course, would be Coldplay. Burn! You suck, Britain!

Another funky Spanish innovation is the “small plates” trend, about which I've previously complained. You can ultimately thank chef Jose Andres, Spain's unofficial Minister of Funk and Patron Saint of combovers, for bringing small plates to the USA. Olivar is yet another Spanish restaurant that serves small plates, but with a twist: their plates are not only small, they're all really fucked up shapes.

We started with the apple salad ($7), which was a neat pile of julienned apple tossed with shredded manchego cheese and finely diced chives. The apple was very crisp and snow white, and the sweetness was contrapuntally balanced by the tang of the manchego. The serving dish was just a plain white rectangle, but the curvy saucers provided to each place setting really BROUGHT THE FUNK!

The pumpkin soup ($7) was very smooth, pleasant and mild mannered. Floating like an island in the center of the bowl was a tiny garlic flan. While the flan itself was creamy and proficiently prepared, the garlic flavor was mute. I found this to be a lame gimmick. Added as an afterthought was one of those very long, skinny, gnarled, crispy breadsticks that I'm constantly comparing to a wizard's wand. What the fuck are you supposed to do with these things? They're too hard to sop up any remaining soup, and while they could be possibly used as a swizzle stick, the soup was pretty homogeneous and didn't need stirring. And they're clearly not useful as spellcasting equipment, so why bother? Really, this forgettable dish was created solely as a vehicle to showcase Olivar's FUNKIEST BOWL. The bowl the pumpkin soup came in was RIDICULOUS: it was about 12 inches in diameter, but the well in the center that actually held the soup couldn't have been more than 4 inches across. Which means the rim was TWICE AS WIDE as the bowl itself! This of course instantly begs the question: why stop there? How about a bowl whose rim covers the entire table? You could provide the customer with an extra long spoon to scoop the soup out of the center, and you could serve all the other diners directly onto the rim, thus dirtying less dishes. Or a gargantuan bowl with a rim the size of an Olympic race track. Racers line up on the huge rim, run the race and the the winner, instead of being awarded the gold medal, gets to eat the soup in the center of the track.

But enough about the pumpkin soup and its handicapped bowl. The Serrano salad ($9), while tasty, should probably be renamed on the menu as “Big Ass Pile of Serrano Ham.” Don't get me wrong; I love Serrano ham and in fact I think it's the best air cured ham, even better than the legendary Prosciutto di Parma. But I wouldn't consider a plate entirely full of luscious coils of thinly sliced ham to be a salad. It did come with a small mound of pomegranate seeds and chopped parsley, but if that tiny amount of plant tissue qualifies this dish as a salad, then a 42 ounce porterhouse steak topped with sauteed onions is also a fucking salad. Still, 9 bucks is a great price for that much Jamon Serrano. The only thing funky here was Olivar's idea of what constitutes a salad.

The patatas a lo pobre ($10) were sauteed with onions and bell peppers into a brown, fluffy, and crisp heap. Sunburn pink slices of chorizo spiralled up this hill, and the whole thing was topped with a perfectly fried egg, sunny side up. The yolk was still runny, so when you cut the egg it ran down into the potatoes. A bit of egg and potato, when eaten with a slice of tangy chorizo, was a match made in the funkiest corner of Funk Heaven, which is where James Brown, Rick James, and Curtis Mayfield all went when they died. But not Issac Hayes: when he died his Thetan flew away to Jupiter to live with 95 virgins, or whatever the fuck it is that Scientologists believe.

The Grilled pork Belly Grenobloise ($7) wasn't very funky. The pork belly itself was salty, peppery, chewy, crispy, and all of those other great qualities a properly cooked belly should have. However, the crumbled boiled egg, diced onion, and capers which came with it were all lined up in neat rows, as if the chef who prepared it suffered from OCD, or else had recently done lots of coke, and everyone knows that straight lines are never funky.

For dessert we got the Albondingas de Crodero ($9). Yeah, I know that lamb meatballs are not a dessert, but fuck it. Three large meatballs, crusted with savory brown fond on the exterior but still juicy and pink inside, were served atop a pool of green tomato puree. Roasted hazelnuts scattered across the plate gave a crunchy contrast. These meatballs were FUCKING TASTY, but unfortunately we had to wait for gratification because the plate was too hot. The funkiest thing about this dish, and by “funky” here I mean “dumb,” was the temperature of that plate: the waiter warned us that it was a hot plate but DAMN! We couldn't even touch it for 15 minutes. They had somehow heated that plate to the temperature of the sun. It must have been made from some space age ceramic compound, like the kind of porcelain that they use to make metal- detector proof guns. That plate was so hot it gave my face a tan just sitting there on the table. I understand that you don't want the food to get cold but hot food is overrated. Why can't it just be WARM, so that it doesn't puddle the roof of my mouth in blisters the moment I take a bite? Is not getting seriously injured while dining too much to ask?

I don't like funk, especially the funk that wafts from your mom's crotch. Yes, everyone tells me that funk is “fun,” and that you can't spell “funk” without “fun,” but as you've probably surmised by now, I hate fun. That having been said, I really enjoyed my meal at Olivar. While the presentation sometimes annoyed me, every dish was perfectly prepared, and the prices are reasonable. But don't take my word for it, you funky assholes: put on your pimp suit and gangsta- lean over to Olivar, post haste. Did I just type the word “gangsta?” Oh Heavens!

Rating: 8 aspects of black culture that white people have unsuccessfully tried to co- opt out of 10

Crush

2008-12-02T21:45:00.000-08:00

2319 E Madison St
206-302-7874

It's appropriate to compare dining to a military campaign. Many dishes are named after military or political figures: Beef Wellington, the Napoleon pastry, and Oysters Bienville are only a few. The food service industry is, after all, a fierce battle, since competition is stiff, profit margins are razor thin, and success or failure is often left up to the fickle whim of a restaurant- going public filled with dickheads.

So which restaurant would win if all of the restaurants in Seattle got into a fight? Crush is a contender for sure. Crush is so goddamned awesome, it's like they created some kind of evil dictator restaurant the way they created the genetically- engineered warlord Serpentor on the GI Joe cartoon: evil culinary scientists mixed up the DNA of great leaders like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible, Ghengis Khan, and General Tso. The resulting uber restaurant was then named Crush by a secret committee of elders, because it can CRUSH your hunger with an iron fist.

I met Crush on the field of battle fully prepared, my stomach completely emptied by all the puking from the previous night's drinking. I dared my adversary to conquer my appetite. Who would win this battle of wills? Read more, and find out!

Crush's first salvo was a diversionary tactic: too many choices. There were maybe only 15 things on the menu, but I wanted each and every one of them. The wine list is like 50 pages long (the most expensive bottle is $3200! HOLY FUCK). There's a 9 course tasting menu ($135), which tempts with the delights of the chef's unleashed creativity, but which from a practical standpoint is more difficult to review because you can't crib the descriptions of the dishes from a convenient online menu. Then to add another layer of choices, November was the “Dine Around Seattle” bullshit where you get 3 courses for $30.

We decided to eschew the allures of both the chef's tasting menu AND the Dine Around Seattle, and just picked a bunch of stuff off the regular menu. To reward us for NOT choosing the Dine Around Seattle stuff, the kitchen sent us a FREE AMUSE BOUCHE. Unfortunately, it wasn't that great, which I guess is why they gave it away: a cauliflower- flavored flan was topped with tiny cubes of raw scallop, crème fraiche, and diced chives. If what I just described to you had been on the menu I would have laughed those motherfuckers out of town, but unfortunately it wasn't listed. The flan was warm, which in turn warmed the scallop until it was humid and balmy, the two adjectives you do NOT want to use to describe raw seafood. The cauliflower flavor was muted, and the flan by itself would have been pretty good, but hot raw scallops just don't do it for me.

Next up was octopus ($12), which was slowly braised in pork stock until it was soft and creamy, then flashed in a pan to crisp the skin. What we got was a delightful pile of tentacles on top of white beans that had been cooked with the octopus in the stock. The beans were just as tender as the octopus. This dish was really good. I haven't been so impressed by tentacles since I read “The Call of Cthulu” in 8th grade.

Hamachi Crudo ($24) was so motherfucking delicious I can't believe that it isn't banned by the Olympics as a performance enhancing drug. Creamy celeriac sauce was pooled beneath slices of rare seared albacore which were so goddamned tasty I've run out of adjectives to describe it. And as if it wasn't good enough already, they put BLACK TRUFFLES on it. And not just a few microscopic black flecks, like some places do when they brag about having black truffles as an ingredient: no, a ruthless gastronomic police state like Crush can only properly intimidate your stomach with GIANT TRUFFLE SLICES. We had at least four whole truffle cross sections on top of the albacore. I've had this flavor combination before, and it impressed me no less this time. The earthiness of the celeriac is always a great complement to the visceral diesel perfume of the black truffle. They could have given me just a pool of that sauce with truffle chips floating in it, and I would have been happy enough. The albacore was ultimately so decadently unnecessary, it was as if you could somehow combine pussy, race cars, cotton candy, the PS3, and guns into some fast sexy tasty killing machine that lets you play Castlevania. The previous sentence is an illustration both of how awesome that albacore was, and of how juvenile I am.

The gastronomic assault continued unabated with the foie gras ($24). Again, it was so tasty that words fail me. A hunk of foie gras the size of a baseball was seared to a rich mahogany. An appealing criss- cross was scored into the skin. Accompanying the liver were sweet cubes of quince, toasted cinnamon brioche slices, and some julienned white crispy things that were maybe apples, or celery, or something. Forgive me for not paying full attention, because I was distracted by the foie. It was so good, it's unfair that my taste buds had to go back to tasting the Lucky Charms I had for breakfast the next morning.

By this point I was beginning to feel weary, but we soldiered on. A rabbit loin ($24) was shrouded in rabbit forcemeat and wrapped in a chard leaf. The meat was so juicy and delicate, it had to have been poached in a stock, the way you'd cook a galantine. The rabbit galantine was served with sauteed chard and chanterelles in some kind of rich syrupy demi- glace or reduction, and was accompanied by a tiny chip of smoky, salty, crispy meat the menu described as “rabbit belly bacon.” This was so fucking crazy, and so fucking classically French, it was like something Auguste Escoffier might have dreamt up while on an acid trip.

At $42, the lobster and coral sauce is one of the most expensive menu items I've ever ordered, but it was well worth the price. Clearly Crush was pulling out the heavy artillery for a last desperate push. Succulent chunks of lobster tail peeked out from a nest of thick cut pasta in a white truffle and coral sauce. The pasta upon closer inspection revealed whole chervil leaves PRESSED INTO THE DOUGH, giving it a mottled green floral design like Rococo wallpaper.

When it became clear that my stomach wouldn't be conquered, they resorted to chemical warfare: a $12 Valrhona hot chocolate was complex: bitter, spicy, and creamy all at once. A scoop of chocolate ice cream on the side rode a cushion of house made marshmallow, and a stream of salty caramel meandered through this sugary landscape.

Finally, the demoralized partisans of Crush fired a few parting shots in the form of CANDY that arrived with the bill: cocoa dusted marcona almonds, a strawberry peppercorn marshmallow, and a lemon poppy Madeleine.

Because I managed to eat it all, I emerged the winner in this gastric Battle of Verdun. Yet like that famous engagement, it was a pyrrhic victory. After all, we couldn't ignore the fact that we still had to pay for all this shit, much like the Iraq War. Other than the shitty scallops and flan amuse, which was obviously Crush's Abu Ghraib, everything was well worth it. And like the mercenary group Blackwater USA, Crush is extremely good at what they do, but they're really fucking expensive. Unfortunately, I couldn't make the taxpayers foot this bill. War, dear readers, really IS Hell.

Rating: 9.5 legendary warriors out of 10

Saffron

2008-11-13T01:06:00.000-08:00

5100 S Dawson St Suite 100
725-0388

Writing restaurant reviews is hard fucking work. “Cry me a river, asshole,” you might be thinking, and in a way you might be right, but in another, more accurate, way you'd be a dumbass. Common frustrations include not getting into the place (or having to wait in line with thousands of colostomy bag wearers and Rascal riders), the prices being too fucking expensive, getting too drunk to finish on deadline (this actually happened when I wrote the review of the Steelhead Diner) and spell checking software that thinks that when I'm trying to type the word “prix fixe” I actually mean “prig five.” Actually “Prig 5” sounds like a great name for one of those genetically engineered, wholesome, sexually nonthreatening teen pop bands Disney continues to manufacture. Bands like Prig 5 make Keith Richards roll over in his leathery, debauched, cocaine- dusted grave. Keith Richards isn't dead, you say? Oh yes he is: where I come from, disheveled, dessicated, shambling, mumbling cadavers are called zombies and they eat your brains. And then they wash down a hearty serving of your brains with the perennially popular Chinese restaurant drink which bears their name. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the hurdles one must jump when writing reviews.

I encountered many of these hurdles when we went to Saffron. They don't have a website. Why not? EVERYONE has a website, even people who think that cameras steal their souls. Even shemales have websites, and I should know because 95% of those are bookmarked on this very laptop upon which I'm typing this review. “What about the other 5% of the shemale websites?” you may ask. Those are actually Jesus-y websites that try to lure you in with hot pictures of sweet Thai ladyboys that eventually blink away to be replaced by an image of a scowling Jerry Fallwell. Even your mom has a website, if you count her profile page on www.dateretardedspermguzzlers.com. Yet Saffron hasn't joined the rest of us in the year 1995, for some reason.

Saffron's location is also rather difficult. I didn't drive there, so I have no FUCKING CLUE where it is. It's at a weird 5- way intersection, across the street from an abandoned laundromat, in one of those rich neighborhoods where a lady can jog, standard poodle at her side, with no fear of being gunned by paint- ball happy hooligans or pelted with McDonald's bags filled with used tampons. In fact, US Census statistics indicate that Saffron's ritzy neighborhood has a much lower bandit population than my own 'hood. We also have a high percentage of outlaws, footpads, confidence men, brigands, highwaymen, and the occasional scofflaw. That's why, despite the economic downturn, local sales of black masks, black and white striped shirts, and bags marked with dollar signs continue to be robust.

Also, they don't take reservations. I don't think I need to expound here because my disdain of this is well documented. In this case, however, it didn't matter because even at 7:30 on a Saturday, we were able to walk right in and sit down.

So we sat right down and started with the Saffron Prawns. For $12 you get 6 prawns in an orange butter sauce, garnished with basil leaves and orange slices. The prawns were juicy and yielding to the bite, but the sauce was rather bland, without very much of the distinctive saffron flavor. You could definitely taste a bright hint of orange juice in the sauce, but it could have been spicier, or saltier, or something.

The lentil salad ($8) was much better. A compact pile of green lentils was topped with razor thin shreds of red bell pepper and crispy fried lardons. A small pool of bright green olive oil seeped out from beneath the lentils. This was really fucking tasty. The lentils weren't dusty tasting, like they sometimes are. The lardons gave up a salty crunch which was a great contrast to the mild creaminess of the lentils, and the pepper shards provided a sweet top note.

A cup of the soup of the day was $8. It was a potato and carrot cream soup. It was rich and hearty without being too heavy, and the carrots made it subtly sweet. A little swirl of pesto on top was pretty, but basil is such an ephemeral flavor that I really wasn't able to taste it against the rest of the soup's earthy creaminess. Still, as far as potato cream soup goes, it was fucking awesome.

The Cassoulet de Poulet ($19) was damn tasty. Saffron's version of this classic Basque casserole included succulent shredded chicken breast and creamy white beans in a red bell pepper and tomato sauce. The secret weapon was slices of grilled chorizo, which was just smoky and spicy enough to make the cassoulet interesting without dominating the flavor. I can easily say it was the second best cassoulet I've eaten: the best, of course, was at a wedding I attended in St. Jean de Luz which featured duck confit, sausage, and ground beef in addition to white beans, peppers, and zucchini. That Basque wedding cassoulet, about which I have wet dreams to this day, basically gives a culinary nut- check to the one I had at Saffron, though Saffron's cassoulet is very good.

Beef tenderloin medallions ($22) were amazingly tender and so soft you really didn't need a knife to cut it. I know, I know, numerous jackasses love to brag about steaks they've had that were tender enough to cut with a spoon, but those jerks are usually lying. THIS steak actually WAS tender enough to cut, maybe not with a spoon, but with a spork for sure. I'm just not ready to commit yet to being one of those douchebags who like to say that you could cut something with a spoon. As an aside, how come sportscasters never make spork analogies? When two teams are playing, and it's a clear blowout, they'll typically say something about the losing team like “Stick a fork in them; they're done.” But what if the score is pretty close? They should say “Gently prod them with a SPORK because they MIGHT be done.” So when I finally ascend to the director of NBC Sports, I'll probably order all of the commentators to say that. The tenderloin medallions were well seasoned all the way through and glossed with an extremely tasty demi- glace. Accompanying the steak were a few slivers of steamed carrot and green beans which were still crispy and fresh tasting.

The crème brulee ($6) was very unusual: it was devastatingly creamy. I've never had a more unctuous crème brulee, and I've eaten a lot of them. It was more like ice cream that they'd somehow managed to keep solid at room temperature than custard. The crème brulee was mild, not too sweet, and utterly delicious. I really have never had one quite like it. The raspberry sorbet, on the other hand, wasn't quite as awesome. For $5 you got 2 HUGE scoops of the sorbet, which was smooth, sweet, and without a trace of iciness. The problem I had with it was that it hadn't been strained, and while I appreciate the chunks of real raspberry, all the fucking seeds in it were way too distracting. If I had dentures I would've been one pissed off geezer for sure.

Saffron is a difficult restaurant to review. The food seems to be too good for how deserted it was, but maybe it's because they don't have a website, so no one knows about it, and plus there's no way to find it without a GPS, or at least a sextant (Note: if you don't know what a sextant is, I'll have to break the news to you that it isn't actually as sexy as you would think a word that contains the word “sex” should be. You might think it's a masturbation device for sailors on lonely nights at sea, but it's not, though if I wrote the dictionary it would be). Maybe Saffron wasn't crowded because of the economic downturn, since all of the pensioners who would usually pack a place like this to the rafters just got to experience the unique despair of seeing their 401K plans decline 40% in value last month. I heard that it's owned by the same owners as Dulce's, but it's definitely not as swank as that place. It's really more of a neighborhood joint. The prices are maybe a little steep, but the food is solidly prepared. The flavor combinations they use at Saffron are mature, and by that I mean confident and bold without being flashy or trendy. It's cool, the wine list is extensive and pretty cheap, the service is prompt and knowledgeable, and as soon as I figure out how to extract my cock from this sextant, I'll go back.

Rating: 7 sporks out of 10

Spinasse

2008-10-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

1531 14th Ave
206-251-7673

What's the most rustic thing in the world? Is it a rocking chair made of rough- hewn pine logs? A leather wine flagon? A scarecrow? A cabin in a Bob Ross painting? An overturned, antique wheelbarrow in a front yard with flowers growing in it? Bread made by orphans? Anything that comes from Tuscany? Sarah Palin?

Answer: Spinasse is, in fact, the single most rustic item in the world. It's somehow even more rustic than the screenplay I wrote about the quest for the world's most rustic sandwich. It's so fucking rustic.

Spinasse takes reservations, but when I called they were booked, so I dutifully waited in line outside for a seat at the bar. I'd actually recommend NOT getting reservations so you CAN sit at the bar. A bearded, vested gentleman (who I presume is the owner) was methodically making the restaurant's fresh pasta for the night, right there on the bar in front of us. He was kind enough to answer questions while he shaped the pasta with different decorative rollers and cutters. I had tons of questions about his pasta tools. There are tons of rustic pasta tools on the walls inside Spinasse, and unlike at Bucca di Beppo, they aren't just for “kitsch”: those crazy pasta savants use every one. Even the one that looks like a homonculus. Even the one that looks like a speculum.

While we chatted with the owner, the waitress brought out 2 kinds of crostini. One was spread with ricotta and topped with a cherry pepper which had been stuffed with anchovy paste and a caper. The ricotta was light and fluffy, and the stuffed pepper was tangy and spicy. The other crostini was spread with a rabbit liver and porcini pate with a drip of thick balsamic vinegar. The pate was rich and smooth. The balsamic tasted like grape jelly. A fucking fine amuse bouche, and it was FREE.

Spinasse has a fantastic prix fixe menu with lots of options: we chose the “Menu Principale,” which allows you to choose 2 appetizers, 1 pasta, and 1 entree for $47 (per person). The first appetizer (known as “antipasti” in the rustic Italian tongue) was anchovy fillets in Piemontese sauce. The sauce was green and tasted like pesto, and was dotted with bits of crumbled boiled egg yolk. The anchovies were the Platonic ideal of anchovies: salty, fishy, and everything else an anchovy is supposed to be.

The second appetizer was a fennel and beet salad. This was a pretty standard beet salad, with chunks of roasted chioggia beets, slivers of fennel, and chopped fennel frond. The beets were creamy but the whole thing was cloyingly sweet. It could have used a vinaigrette or something to balance the flavor.

The pasta dish was an enormous platter of maltagliatti, which is literally “badly cut.” These are basically random shapes. How very rustic! Everyone knows that rustic things are usually random, like a giant roadside ball of twine, or a Stonehenge made of tits. The random pasta had razor thin slivers of porcini mushrooms, olive oil, black pepper, and maybe a few shreds of romano or reggiano cheese. It was also without a doubt the BEST PASTA I HAVE EVER EATEN. I'd almost go so far as to say it's the best thing I've ever put in my mouth (at least until I figure out how to suck my own dick). It was a huge platter, and I didn't think we could eat it all, but no: that maltagliatti was astonishingly light. The pasta didn't even taste like it was made of flour: it was as if they somehow condensed sunlight into random edible shapes. It was so thin the individual pasta pieces were translucent. A huge plate of pasta went down like your mom, and if it was the goal of Spinasse's vested owner to create a pasta to make the ghosts of all the Caesars themselves weep with envy for the living, then mission accomplished.

In case you didn't understand the main idea of all the aforementioned hyperbole, the maltagliatti was a tough act to follow. But the crafty insane artisans at Spinasse obviously know this so they played it conservatively with the secondi: a simple, roasted rabbit. The rabbit was tender, juicy, and farm raised, and was smothered with a menagerie of roasted red and yellow sweet bell peppers. No, it wasn't as good as the maltagliatti. But does it have to be? Does anything?

Dessert was a roasted Bosc pear with whipped cream and honey. The pear was soft, sweet, and spiced. The cream was creamy (I suppose). The honey had a complex flavor, with all kinds of notes, but I was still too distracted thinking about the pasta to concentrate on the flavor of the honey, so I suppose I'll have to go back. But if I go back, then I'll again be too flabbergasted by the maltagliatti to pay attention to the honey, again. What a terrible problem to have.

Usually when people say that something is “rustic,” they mean “crappy.” But Spinasse clearly bucks this trend. Those motherfuckers are mad, driven, and intense about pasta: they're the Colonel Kurtz of conchiglietti, the Beethoven of bucatini, or the something else of something else that begins with the same letter. So you can stick that up your rustic ass. And by calling your ass “rustic” this time I really DO mean “crappy.”

Rating: 9 rustic farmhouses inhabited by anti- government kooks out of 10

Zayda Buddy's Pizza

2008-10-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

5405 Leary Ave NW
206-783-7777

What. The. Fuck. That's not a question. It's a command. It's a command to the owner of Zayda Buddy's Pizza to explain that fucked up name. Zayda Buddy's. Zayda. Buddy's. Zayda Buddy's. That's really the name of the place. Zayda Buddy's Pizza. What does it mean? Is Zayda Buddy a guy's name? Or is the guy's name ONLY Zayda, and the place is owned by his buddy? Or would that actually be “Zayda'S Buddy's Pizza?” I hate it the way I hate Ruth's Chris Steak House, because it's grammatically imprecise, and it makes NO GODDAMN SENSE. Actually, it probably makes perfect sense to Sarah Palin. You should not have to do sentence diagrams on a restaurant's name. Just call it something like “Cafe Maximillian Robespierre,” or “Restaurant Iron Maiden” (I wish) and be done with it already. Comprehending the name “Zayda Buddy's Pizza” is like trying to honestly comprehend your own death: it just doesn't compute. We were programmed by evolution to not understand nonexistence; our brains are similarly hardwired not to understand dumb pizzeria names.

The only thing that's more nonsensical than Zayda Buddy's name is its menu: they claim to serve “Minnesota style pizza.” Allow me to reiterate: What. The. Fuck. Personally, I didn't know Minnesota style pizza even existed! That's pretty random. But not as random as the robot I invented which points out fall foliage: the robot rolls down the street, and whenever it detects the orange and red wavelengths of light emanating from tree leaves, klaxons sound, a warning light blinks, and the robot squawks “FALL FOLIAGE ALERT! FALL FOLIAGE ALERT!” in its retarded Stephen Hawking voice. And if you actually think that the FoliageBot 5000 is a good idea, too bad: patent pending, bitches.

The best part about mocking Minnesota style pizza? No one will complain. That's because the people of Minnesota are famously nice. This seems maladaptive to me from an evolutionary standpoint, considering that only the bastards survive, and retards are usually docile. If you ever meet someone with Down's Syndrome, you'll find them to be SUPER NICE. In fact, Down's Syndrome patients are just as nice as Minnesotans, only Down's Syndrome sufferers eat their boogers more. If I was Bill Gates, I would undertake a philanthropic venture to toughen up the citizens of Minnesota: take all of the people of the meanest state, which I would presume is New York, and take all the Minnesotans, and make them meet somewhere in the middle, like Indiana. Then make them fuck, and hopefully the meanness and niceness will cancel out and the resulting offspring would all be children of even temper. Then you could repopulate Minnesota with normal people. You may ask yourself “Why would Bill Gates spend money on such a bizarre, unfeasible, and unethical plan?” Answer: because he can. After all, if you've got the wealth and power of a Roman emperor, like Bill Gates has, shouldn't you act like one? At least Bill Gates would PAY those Minnesota assholes to do this. Caligula would have simply forced them at the point of a sword.

I guess I'm done making fun of Minnesota, so perhaps I should get to the point of this review, which is Zayda Buddy's. They don't take reservations, which is fine, because it isn't that kind of place. It's more of a bar than a restaurant anyway. Cans of shitty beer cost $3, which in my mind is too expensive. I haven't paid that much money for a CAN of beer since I bought one just so I could piss in a strip club in the French Quarter in 1996. Yeah, yeah, I know, inflation has raised prices, but still.

We started with Mipo's Sweet Potato Salad ($5.95). Like the name of the restaurant, the sweet potato salad could have used some well placed punctuation. I thought it would be a salad of sweet potatoes, which seemed like a great idea. However, they weren't the soft, earthy, bright orange tubers we all know as sweet potatoes. Rather, they were regular potatoes that had been SWEETENED somehow. The dressing was curried mayonnaise, with sweet pickle relish, and a generous dusting of paprika. The dressing tasted fine but the potatoes were undercooked enough to still be crunchy.

A cup of the beer cheese soup ($4.95) had nice sharp cheese flavor, and was flecked with thin slices of onion and carrot. It was creamy and hearty, but perhaps they could've thinned it with some more beer because it was like spooning up a cup of melted Velveeta. I would totally dip bread or a chip into the beer cheese soup, but spooning up a whole cup is a little much, even for me, and I revel in saturated fat so much that I would mainline foie gras if I could.

Speaking of reveling in saturated fat, the Tater Tot Hot Dish ($9.50) set the bar pretty high. It seemed to be a mixture of Stove Top stuffing, cream of mushroom soup, and ground beef, topped with a couple of Tater Tots and melted cheese. Those ingredients combined to give me a glimmer of what it was like to grow up in Minnesota 20 years ago. If they'd seasoned it with road salt and covered the whole thing with snow, it would probably be a slam dunk. If nostalgic comfort food is what they were shooting for, then mission accomplished. While the Tater Tot Hot Dish didn't taste that great, I would eat this with FUCKING GUSTO if I were hungover. Unfortunately, it came with a lame side salad of green leaf lettuce and spinach, which was topped with a glossy maroon pile of pickled beets, onions, and garbanzo beans, which I largely ignored.

Finally the vaunted Minnesota style pizza appeared and I was pleasantly surprised. And by “pleasantly surprised” I mean “completely fucking astonished by how good it tasted.” The 12” Eric the Red ($14.95) featured a crispy thin crust, a rich sweet tomato sauce, salami, pickled peppers, and crumbled Italian sausage. The pickled peppers were vinegary and gave a subtle heat. The flavors were pretty well balanced. The crust shatters when you bite it. Minnesota style pizza is so delicious that I would almost feel bad for ridiculing it earlier if I had a conscience. Luckily I don't, which saves me lots of time. It's so damn good I won't even complain about the retarded way they cut the pie up into squares, instead of wedges like normal pizza.

I'm out of put downs about Zayda Buddy's at this point, which I think is some sort of milestone, so I'll just close with this: while the mythic Minnesota style pizza is very good, I'd probably only go back to Zayda Buddy's if I happened to be in Ballard for some reason. If I lived in Ballard, I'd probably frequent this place, if only for the pizza, but since I don't live around there, they can all go fuck themselves. In the nicest Minnesota way possible.

Rating: 5 bitterly cold Minnesota winters out of 10

Poppy

2008-09-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

622 Broadway Ave E
206-324-1108

Despite the waitress's adamant insistence to the contrary, Poppy serves INDIAN FOOD. It looks like Indian food. It smells like Indian food. Which isn't a bad thing because Indian food rules. Part of the fun is in the retarded names like "saag paneer," "galub jamun," or "rogan josh" (the latter is the funniest because it could ALMOST be a dude's name if the order of the words were reversed, like the way a guy named Josh Rogan's name would be printed on driver's license).

In fact it's almost too bad that Indian food is so good because the rest of that subcontinent sucks, and I've seen some pretty shitty subcontinents: it's disease ridden, it's poor, they actually enjoy eating rats, they DON'T enjoy eating cows, and they suck extra because the British ruled their asses for 182 years. Plus Indian chicks don't know how to fuck. It's such a letdown, and all because of the fucking Kama Sutra. You go into it thinking “All right! I heard they make the school kids MEMORIZE the Kama Sutra over there! Kama Sutra! Kama Sutra! The Kama Sutra is India's Constitution!” Well I've got news for you: it's nothing but a scam. Please tell me what page of the Kama Sutra they tell women how to retch, gag, and complain loudly when going down on a guy. I bet that move is called “the Spitting Cobra.”

But anyway: Poppy. The format is unusual. All the appetizers are $5 each. You pick a couple, then from there you're stuck because there's only one main course, a large platter of smaller plates called a thali. There's a vegetarian thali option, and a thali with a smaller number of items on it (cleverly called a “smalli.”). And the price is fixed: a thali is $32. A smalli is $22. But other than that you can't choose the dishes that come with a thali, so if you're not an adventurous eater, and if your idea of an exotic spice is black pepper, then you should probably fuck off in advance.

We started with the shoestring eggplant with honey and salt, and the curry leaf vadas. The tender eggplant slices were coated in a crispy flaky batter. These were pretty good but there didn't seem to be ANY honey on it, which is as blatant a case of false advertising as is India's claim to be some sort of endless erotic paradise garden. The best way to describe the curry leaf vadas is to call them donuts made of falafel. They were spiced with curry and cilantro and came with a dill yogurt dipping sauce. Very tasty, even though the vadas didn't need cilantro, otherwise known as THE WORLD'S MOST PLAYED OUT HERB.

After the appetizers came the thalis: a large platter upon which is a constellation of small plates. And by “small plates,” I mean REALLY SMALL: the largest plate we got was an oblong one about 4” long; the smallest was a soup bowl the size of a shot glass. I think we're at the logical conclusion of the “small plates” trend, unless some scientist comes up with microscopic plates made up of carbon atoms only a few angstroms in diameter, upon which is served a single meat or vegetable cell. They'll call this style of service “nano plates.” You'll carve the chicken to be served on a nano plate with an electron microscope, and one drumstick will be capable of serving over 2 million customers. If the restaurant charges only $1 per nano plate, the profit margins could be immense! Unfortunately for you losers the nano plate idea is mine. Patent pending, bitches.

Yet despite my scorn of small plates, the food served on these tiny plates was generally pretty good. A romano bean (which I personally couldn't distinguish from a regular old green bean), hazlenut, and fennel pollen salad featured crisply blanched beans, crunchy toasted hazlenuts, and absolutely no fennel flavor whatsoever. It's possible they forgot to add the pollen to my salad, or maybe pollen doesn't actually contribute that much flavor. Either way I must call bullshit on the current vogue of name- checking the most exotic possible ingredients, especially if they don't taste like anything. Why not blanch the beans in tritium? Or salt them with some of the salt inside a mummy that the Egyptians used to preserve the dead pharaoh's organs? At least then you'd have a good story to tell, about how you braved a mummy's curse to flavor the customer's meal.

One thing that didn't need any extra mummy salt was the carrot salad. It was a bowl a carrots shaved into long ribbons, scented with clove, and heavily HEAVILY salted. It was a shame, really, because without so much salt this could have been a GREAT dish. Clove and carrot together really tastes like Thanksgiving to me, and it could have been a cute culinary tip of the hat to the coming holiday season, but they blew it because I couldn't finish it because it was TOO GODDAMNED SALTY.

Poppy's poor showing on the carrot salad was redeemed, however, by the meat dishes. The pork belly was magnificently succulent, and nestled opulently in a bed of sauteed cabbage. The belly was tender throughout, crisp on the outside, and perfectly seasoned. Seared albacore slices served with peppers and fennel were equally well- executed. Unlike the romano bean salad, this time you could actually taste the fennel, and in my book being able to taste ingredients is a plus, unless the ingredient in question is excessive salt, like in the fucking carrots.

The melon pickles were tart and sweet, but again were polluted with too much cilantro. However, the melon gaspacho (which came in the shot glass- sized bowl) was FUCKING DELICIOUS! It's a pity there wasn't more of it, because it was sweet and creamy, and as an added bonus had a couple ripe, bright red cherry tomatoes swimming in it. A small bowl of garbanzo beans in yogurt sauce was okay, but like an afterthought: smooth, creamy, and over all inoffensive.

Roast fingerling potatoes were fancifully dusted in an herb called ajwain, which I'd never heard of. When asked about this mystery spice, the waitress was nice enough to bring out a bowl of it for us to smell and taste in the raw. It's a little like thyme and a lot like black caraway seeds, but it has a fresh woody flavor. I can't quite put my finger on it but ajwain smells like what it would smell like if you put a sprig of mint through a pencil sharpener and then smelled the pencil sharpener. Needless to say, this strange herb made plain roast potatoes much more interesting.

A mound of steamed rice in the center of the platter rounded things out. The rice was light, fluffy, and just sticky enough. The rice bowl was topped with a perfect plank of naan which was crusty, sooty (in the good way), studded with caraway seeds, and chewy inside.

After all of these mini plates it was time for dessert. Like the appetizers, all of the desserts cost $5. I was surprisingly full by this point, so we went with the plum tart. It was fine. The pastry was flaky but maybe a little too crisp. And the plum flavor didn't really catch my attention, but by this point I hardly cared because I was really fucking stuffed.

One thing you'll notice when dining at Poppy is that the portions are deceptive: it doesn't seem like you're getting very much, but it really is a lot of food. Some of the dishes suck but the place did, after all, open YESTERDAY. Overall I'd call their unique idea a(qualified) success. The food is good. The prices are reasonable. The service is really friendly, and they do in fact take reservations. Still, I'd wait a while before going there for them to work out all the bugs. If there's a take home message to all this it's that Poppy, unlike all of those Indian women who allegedly know all there is to know about the Kama Sutra, never fails to satisfy.

Rating: 7 Dalits out of 10

The Corson Building

2008-08-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

5609 Corson Ave S
206-762-3330

It’s much harder to write good reviews than harsh reviews, at least to me. When I feel like trashing a place the venom flows forth from my pen like the eternal wellspring of blackest hate; when I’m trying to say something nice the prose dries up like your mom. Unfortunately, Astroglide doesn’t make a lube for writer’s block. So bear with me while I hack out this love letter to the Corson Building.

The first thing I noticed about the Corson Building is its name: no tricks, no subtle references to obscure texts, no clever plays on words, no overly sentimental schlock that’s named after someone’s kid with Down’s Syndrome or a deceased pet (about Down’s Syndrome: you’d think someone with an EXTRA CHROMOSOME would be a super genius, but sadly the opposite is true. Normal human cells have 46 chromosomes. Down’s Syndrome patients have 47. Mules have 63 chromosomes, and shrimp have 254, so obviously the more genes you have the lower down on the food chain you’ll be). The Corson Building is literally what the building itself is named. It’s on Corson Avenue South. It’s a building. Simple. I haven’t seen anything more self explanatory since that generic beer that used to be named “Beer.”

The other thing about the Corson Building is that it’s super fucking convenient. It’s the exact opposite of inconvenient, in fact: unlike many of today’s trendy restaurants that don’t take reservations, the Corson Building ONLY takes reservations. As we sat dining many fuckers drifted in, only to be DENIED because the Corson Building is only open from 7:00 through 11:00 pm, and there’s only one seating for dinner, and YOU HAVE TO HAVE RESERVATIONS. So unlike many of my other columns in which I lament having to wait in line with old people, this time I just walked right in like a real person. I don’t see why people hate making reservations. What could be easier than making a phone call? Laying your mom, I suppose, but she doesn’t cook one sixteenth as well as the Corson Building's proprietor Matt Dillon.

Dinner starts at 7:30, but the rusty gate in front swings open at 7:00, so you get a half hour to wander the grounds. When we walked in they handed us a glass of rose champagne and an amuse bouche: a crostini spackled with satiny smooth chicken liver pate and a razor thin slice of cucumber, topped with a pickled fava bean. Normally I find fava beans more trouble than they’re worth to make at home, but when someone else is taking the time to peel them- twice- I’m more than happy to eat them. So we had something to munch on while we wandered around. The train tracks are directly behind the building, and yes the train does pass back there, blasting its horn of course. Old geezers and gaywads who hate noise will find it tiresome, but the racket is intermittent and besides, it’s definitely no louder than a Pantera concert (RIP Dimebag! I miss you still, old man).

One thing I noticed was that these motherfuckers at the Corson Building are HARD CORE. They grow their own crops on the premises. Yes, the herbs and vegetables are THAT fresh. A chicken coop provides eggs and chicken meat, and they even have PIGEONS. And in case you think pigeon meat is gross, I’ve got news for you: I’d rather eat 1000 pounds of squab than ONE shitty fucking Hot Pocket. And that’s not only because I’m an elitist jerk (though that is pretty far up the list); it’s also because pigeon meat RULES YOUR FACE TO THE MAXX. It rules your face so much, in fact, you’re legally required to spell “max” with TWO X’s (don’t blame me; this was written into 40 CFR part 136 by the EPA in 1997).

After we’d gotten an eyeful of the Corson Building compound, they hustled us inside. It’s got a weird, old timey elegance, but the architectural period is difficult to pinpoint. There are plaster lion heads on the walls. There’s a fireplace in the direct center of the room. The windows and doors are arched. I have no fucking clue what this building was originally constructed for, but as a dining room it’s pretty goddamn fantastic.

The first course was a salad of yellow watermelon, pickled red currant berries, and salted tuna. The currant clusters were still on the stem and were the single biggest pain in the ass to eat of anything I’ve ever eaten. When you tried to scoop them up with your fork, they just rolled around on the plate, mocking you, and when you tried to stab them with the fork they ejaculated a squirt of tie- stainingly bright pink juice. When it was possible to get a bite of all three ingredients together, the tart berries and salty tuna meat contrasted well against the melon, but it’s easier said than done to get all of that shit on your fork at once. So my complaint against this dish is its structure rather than its composition.

Next up we had a caprese salad, of sorts: red and dark red heirloom tomato slices were tossed with buffalo mozzarella, some kind of bitter greens which could have been kale but were probably some other shit, purslane, and sautéed chanterelle mushrooms. Fucking tasty. I’d never tasted purslane before. It’s a thicker leaf, more like a jade plant than lettuce, and tart. This tasted pretty good with the mozzarella, which tasted home made and was as creamy as a princess’s thigh, and of course the chanterelles provided the meaty kick to the nuts for which they’re known. The only thing I don’t like about chanterelles is when people over enunciate the name and say “chan-ter-elles,” instead of “chan-trells.” Those motherfuckers sound like Katherine fucking Hepburn when they talk like that. It’s unbecoming.

Course number three was a melange of sautéed shrimp, yellow wax beans, green beans, and cauliflower. The whole thing was tossed in an anchovy, roasted garlic, and parsley paste. This was REALLY fucking good. The anchovies were “fruit forward,” as the forward fruits in the wine industry would say, but I didn’t care because I love anchovies. But I love shrimp even more than anchovies, and in this dish there were many. The beans were lightly sautéed and still crisp.

With the appearance of the next dish, we were halfway through this gluttonous marathon. Grilled eggplant was served with sautéed okra, artichoke hearts, and 2 kinds of beets. I began to see a pattern. Each of the last three dishes had TWO DIFFERENT COLORS OF THE SAME VEGETABLE: red tomatoes and dark read tomatoes; green beans and yellow beans; red beets and pink beets. Obviously this was some secret code planted by Leonardo daVinci to let me know that Jesus fucked someone, and all of Jesus’s other secrets can be revealed if you’re only willing to destroy Westminster Abbey. How’s that for a plot synopsis of a shitty book, assholes? And by “shitty book” I actually mean “shittiest book of all time.” And by “shittiest book of all time” I mean, of course, The DaVinci Code. Forgive my digression, and let’s segue to the one vegetable that’s as shitty as The DaVinci Code: okra. I don’t like okra, even though I’m from the south. Okra is, in fact, one of the reasons I left. But the presentation here was so masterful that I didn’t mind chowing down on those slimy slivers.

The fish course was a halibut cheek, braised in tomato sauce with chickpeas and topped with a brief squirt of béchamel sauce. This dish is the “your mom” joke that writes itself, because I once gave a brief squirt of béchamel sauce onto your mom’s halibut cheeks. But this halibut was much better than that. The halibut disintegrated beneath the fork and the chickpeas were soft and buttery. I ate this dish as quickly as I just described it. But the meat barrage was just beginning, because following the fish was an extremely tender chicken: it had been braised with apricots and anise hyssop, which as the name suggests is vaguely licorice flavored.

Before I could catch my breath after scarfing down a drumstick and some apricots, out comes LAMB. The shock and awe flavor bombardment continued with a leg of lamb, roasted rare, with a parsley and carrot slaw and stir fried zucchini tendrils. A word about the lamb: it was so fucking succulent you probably could have spread it across a piece of bread. The parsley and carrot slaw was dominated by too much parsley, though, and the zucchini tendrils were sometimes tough.

After packing in SEVEN COURSES they made us eat dessert, though I would expect no less. Dessert was a sticky glutinous rice pudding, very dense yet somehow simultaneously light, with blackberries and apricots. It wasn’t too sweet, and was accompanied with an herbal mint tea and, as if I wasn’t fucked up enough after 8 glasses of wine, a shot of OUZO. Shock and awe, indeed.

The total bill is a prix fixe of $110 per person, which might sound pricey, but it was for 8 COURSES, all of which came with at least one but usually TWO glasses of wine. Not all of the dishes hit the nail on the head (e.g. the parsley/ carrot slaw), but fuck it. If you don’t like a particular ingredient, I suggest you man up and just fucking TRY IT. You may be surprised to find that the same rule governing anal sex also improbably works for fine dining. The whole point of the Corson Building is elegant experimentation, and if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else for dinner. I hear the Cheesecake Factory serves the same 80 pages of dog shit 365 days a year. Fuck.

Rating: 9 precision gustatory assaults out of 10

Cremant

2008-08-18T21:39:00.001-07:00

Cremant
1423 34th Ave
206-322-4600

Like the French, I'm a pompous dick. Also like the French, I love French food, so I went to Cremant.

I started with the Oeuf en Gelee au Porto ($9). It sounds so lovely in French, but what is it? A soft boiled egg encased in ASPIC! Aspics are savory Jell-O molds, and they haven't been in style since the 50's. It takes me back to that bygone decade when you could smoke in a maternity ward. Not just in the waiting room, but inside the nursery that contained the babies! You could blow smoke into the newborn's face and even offer the infant a cigar of his own. “Congratulations,” a hypothetical man of the 1950's could tell the baby, “It's a... you!” Then he and the baby finished their cigars, knocked back some whiskey, and talked about the Brooklyn Bombers, whoever they are. Of course, not everything was so peachy in the 1950's. For instance, it was very difficult to get two chicks to make out and let you watch.

But I digress. The Oeuf en Gelee was tasty. Inside a round ball of wine- flavored gelatin, shrouded mummy- like in thinly sliced ham, was a soft boiled egg. It was served atop a small bed of greens, so when you cut into the egg the yolk ran down and became a dressing for the greens. The Gratinee des Halles ($12) is Cremant's take on the classic French onion soup. It's astonishingly rich, and the layers of flavor are built up by the onions being grilled first before caramelizing.

The Salade Verte Aux Fines Herbs ($9) sucked. This was an enormous mound of mixed greens, and in case you think quantity always beats quality, I remind you that while there are many sets of 36DD breasts in this world, very few of them are worth ogling. The “Fines Herbs” in the salad's name weren't very “fines,” and the champagne vinaigrette was too thin. I wasn't impressed, since the basic demonstration of a restaurant's style is in the green salad. It was all bland, and would have benefited immensely from the culinary equivalent of a reach around: plain old salt and pepper. My fortunes changed when I ordered the Gateaux de Foie de Volaille ($9). This was a satiny smooth chicken liver terrine, served in a small mason jar, and sealed beneath a layer of the same aforementioned aspic.

The Jarret d'Agneau au Vin Rouge ($22) was a lamb shank, braised in red wine until it fell off the bone. It came with a ramekin of aoli (mental note: complain about aoli in a future review) and was served atop a smashed Yukon Gold which was so lightly smashed that the smashing didn't look intentional. It was barely dented. In fact, that potato looked as though someone started to step on it, then realized they were stepping on a potato and jumped off before they could totally crush it. Still, it was good. The skin was crisp and the flesh was creamy. What more can you ask of a smashed potato? I guess you could ask it to grant you wishes, but something tells me that would work as well as my revisions to Keynesian Economic Theory.

The Steak Tartare ($17) was, like Lucky Charms, magically delicious. Raw beef chopped with capers, onions, and a beaten egg. If you've never eaten steak tartare because you're afraid of raw meat, get over it. If you'll put genitals into your mouth you'll eat steak tartare. You're guaranteed to feel like a caveman when you eat it. But you won't just feel like any old caveman, you'll feel like a FRENCH caveman: the kind of caveman who invents wine and confuses religious fundamentalists by existing 4000 years before they claim earth was created by Santa Claus. As for dessert, try the Cognac au Chocolat ($4). It comes in an aperitif glass and it's like an alcoholic chocolate mousse.

All in all, I'd say Cremant is good, but its rating is hampered by its prices. Plus they've got a big problem: Le Pichet. Any discourse about French food in this town has to include Le Pichet, the best restaurant in Seattle, which has set the gold-- no, fuck that, what's better than gold? --the BRAZILIAN WAX standard for French food. Le Pichet is delicious, cheap, and authentic. I suppose Cremant occupies a different market niche from Le Pichet, so perhaps they can't compare. After all, if Le Pichet is a country bistro, Cremant is a Parisian brasserie. Le Pichet is brightly lit and utilitarian, while Cremant is dim and sexy. Le Pichet is Jerry Lewis; Cremant is Barry White. In fact, Cremant is so sexy that the sexy radiation emanating from Cremant reanimated Barry White, who became a zombie, dug himself out of the grave, picked up Anne Bancroft's cadaver, and took her rotting corpse out to dinner at Cremant. Why would the management of Cremant tolerate the presence of two stinky zombies? Answer: they couldn't help themselves. That's how cool Barry White is. Even as a decaying corpse he still WOWS you.

Rating:

7 dead R&B superstars (but not Isaac Hayes because he's a Scientologist) out of 10.

Burning Beast

2008-07-28T21:55:00.001-07:00

Burning Beast
at the Smoke Farm
7/13/08

Burning Beast isn't a restaurant; it's an event. The idea was to get Seattle's best chefs, stick them in the countryside, and make them cook sundry varieties of meat. Sounds like a great idea to me. What I didn't like was the name. They were trying to pattern it after the Burning Man Festival, which was dumb because there were very few similarities between the two events: Burning Man is expensive; Burning Beast is, at $65, what I would consider a bargain. Burning Man takes place in the desert; Burning Beast took place at the Smoke Farm, a non profit farming and art facility in the woods near Marysville. Burning Man is for douchebags who stink; while Burning Beast featured no bad smells. In fact only delicious smells could be detected, by my nose at least. Plus there were surprisingly few douchebags in attendance.

It was a “Who's Who” of the local culinary scene (I'm cringing as I type that sentence because it sounds so gay, but it really was an A-list event. Besides, I'm on a deadline and I can't be bothered to come up with a turn of phrase with more “zazz” ). Various restaurants were set up in camps all around the farm. Each camp was roasting something. All the grills were improvised, mostly out of cinderblocks with rebar for the grill.

At the Tilth station a one armed man stoked the fire under a couple of roasting ducks. They were making duck tacos, cooking the duck over the open fire and baking flat breads in those conical Moroccan pots that resemble a wizard's hat and from which come such delicious delights that it's as if the Tasty Wizard of Magical Taste conjured them himself. Because those Moroccan pots resemble a wizard's hat, get it? Because wizards pull shit out of their hats, like rabbits, doves, that kind of shit. Right? Aw, fuck it. You know, it's not easy being this lazy. Anyway, the duck meat was tender, smoky, and pleasantly spicy, and the flat bread was soft and chewy. It was easily the best taco I've eaten since I ate your mom's tuna taco.

The Culinary Communion cooking school was making a lamb confit. A high school intern squatted in the dust near their grill, tearing roasted flesh from bones and tossing the meat into a hopper. He told me he wasn't getting paid, and the only thing he'd had to eat all day was the leftover cartilage from the lamb roast, which his boss described as being like “meat bubblegum.” Note to the high school intern: if you're looking for something to do that won't make you any money and won't get you laid, might I recommend writing restaurant reviews? But the lamb confit was tender and rich, and totally worth forcing an undernourished teenager to sit in the heat for 16 hours tending it. They even made their own crusty, chewy pita bread, triangles of which were served with a small chunk of confit on top and a drizzle of tzatziki over the whole thing.

Le Pichet was roasting mackerel. The fish skin glittered in the sun like brushed steel as they slowly swung from a metal teepee over low coals. Skewers of sardines and a melange of calamari and octopus waited their turn for the fire. I was sadly disappointed by their offering, especially since Le Pichet is without a doubt, hands down my favorite restaurant in Seattle. Everything was bland. But at least the calimari was tender.

The Serafina camp was grilling corn and these plump rabbit sausages, which strained at their casings and periodically leaked rivulets of juice onto the charcoal below. These sausages were by far my favorite dish at the Burning Beast. They were succulent and flavorful, and the casings gave the most delightful snap when bit you bit into them.

Brasa had a whole (or mostly whole) pig on a rotisserie. The pig's backbone, legs, and ribs had been removed, so it was really just like a giant pork loin roast with the head still attached. This ghastly apparition lolled lazily around and around on its axle, the rotisserie halting and jerking occasionally under the strain of its delicious passenger. They were also roasting mussels and oysters, which weren't quite as unsettling because the oysters couldn't fix you with their piercing dead eyes. The oysters were really fresh and tasted like brine and smoke. The pig meat was tender and juicy, and was served on sandwiches with onion jam, pepper relish, and arugula.

Sitka & Spruce had butterflied two goats and sewn them together, with a stuffing of herbs and meats between the two carcasses. This, I think, came the closest to capturing the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Burning Beast, especially when Sitka & Spruce proprietor Matt Dillon fisted the cavity between the goats to check the cooking progress. Yes, he really did stick his hand up to the wrist to check the temperature. It's that willingness to go the distance for quality that has made Dillon the darling of the chumps who care about things. Someday he'll be rich. Richer than Tom Douglas, even. Matt Dillon is so goddamned motherfucking awesome that one day he'll be so rich, he'll shit diamond studded turds. He'll shit diamond studded turds because he'll be so rich, he'll be able to afford diamond studded corn on the cob, which he'll eat, then shit turds studded with diamonds. And corn. But enough about Matt Dillon's turds. That goat was tender, juicy, and flavorful. Perfectly cooked.

Sitka & Spruce is a tough act to follow, so I felt extra sorry for the Jones Glassworks crew. Not only were they the only amateur chefs there, but they were cooking the same thing as the legendary Matt Dillon, whose awesomeness is aforementioned. Their roast goat looked good enough, but they gave me a really gristly piece which was as tough and crusty as an ancient mariner. In fact, a recently discovered manuscript by Samuel Taylor Coleridge references the Jones Glassworks goat meat. That's how crusty it was. But in defense of Jones Galssworks, the stuffing of rice, organ meats, and pine nuts they served with the goat meat was creamy and flavorful.

Last AND least, some guy who used to work for Stumbling Goat was grilling carrots, beets, and green onions. He admitted it was a thankless task, to be stuck with veggies when everyone else was serving up a decadent Roman orgy of meat, and I agree with his assessment. I don't know how this poor asshole got stuck with the vegetables. That job sucks as bad as the guy who has to mop the floors at a peep show, or the guy who has to artificially inseminate tigers. I didn't eat any of the vegetables, so I really can't comment, though I still feel as much pity for that guy as I do for the guy who has to translate episodes of “The Family Guy” into Spanish. Because I doubt it translates very well.

The Burning Beast was like a backyard barbecue, if the most famous chefs in a major city were the grill masters instead of your uncle with erectile dysfunction. At $65, it was a pricey buffet, but definitely worth it, if only because you could pick the brain of your favorite chef, who was usually standing right there tending the grill. Which got me to thinking that fine dining is like rock-n-roll in some ways: the chefs are like rock stars, except they don't get paid very much. Plus no one cares about cooking. And the people who DO care aren't smoldering hot young vixens, they're either old chumps with nothing better to do, or snarky writers looking to diminish their efforts. My, my, this issue of The Surly Gourmand has somehow turned as introspective as that episode of Magnum, PI where Magnum gets trapped under the airplane!

Rating: 7 Emmy- winning episodes of Magnum, PI out of 10

Spring Hill

2008-07-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

Spring Hill
4437 California Ave SW
206-935-1075

People who live in West Seattle are a sad, sorry bunch of shit fuckers (except those who live on “the good side” of 35th, who drive solid gold rocket cars and fuck their French maids). For years the downtrodden people of West Seattle have had to deal with culinary bullshit: Shadow Land sucks. Ama- Ama is good enough, but it would be better if the topless girl in their logo was totally nude. Talarico's is pretty good but turns into a giant frat party after 9 pm. Blackbird tries too hard. Mission, packed to the gills with yuppie scum, wants to be Fremont West; plus I only like Mexican food that comes out of a truck, so Mission sucks extra.

But now, finally, high concept has entered the scene: Spring Hill. I don't generally follow “restaurant politics” like some whores do, but apparently the owner of Spring Hill has in the past worked for Tom Douglas. Great. I have a bone to pick with Tom Douglas ever since I got a curdled bearnaise sauce at the Dahlia Lounge, so if one of his disgruntled former employees wants to make a few bucks I'm all for it.

After I got over the initial shock induced by the sight of our waitress's mullet, we ordered some food. The fried veal sweetbreads ($10) were everything that a cow's pancreas should be: crisp on the outside, tender inside, and very mild tasting. It came with three perfectly executed dipping sauces: an espresso barbecue sauce, a ranch dressing with lots of dill, and a hickory smoked honey mustard. All three sauces were good, though in my mind the barbecue sauce was the clear winner. The only problem was that they only gave us four sweetbreads, and there was too much dipping sauce left over, so it went to waste. You know how many starving African chumps, with bulging bellies and flies strolling across their sunken eyeballs, would love to eat that leftover sauce that we fat Americans just callously throw away? Uh, I forgot the question.

The roasted beet salad ($7) was delightful. Wedges of red beet were roasted until creamy, then tossed with cubes of pear and toasted hazelnuts. The pear was crisp and tart, and contrasted well with the crunchy smokiness of the hazelnuts and the earthy beets. The only problem with this dish was a spatter of half hearted green basil infused oil, the delicate flavor of which just couldn't be detected amidst the menagerie of other tastes and textures.

Next up was the duck egg raviolo, which is, of course, the singular form of the word “ravioli.” Which means you got ONE raviolo. For $9. And although the raviolo itself was really tasty, and the duck egg filling was smooth and creamy, and it came with three thin slices of salty duck breast prosciutto, $9 is still too damn expensive for ONE FUCKING PIECE OF PASTA.

Steamed manila clams ($11) were served in some kind of spicy, creamy broth with garlic and little chunks of pork belly. The clams were juicy and tender, and best of all there were a LOT OF THEM. Unlike the raviolo, it was a pretty large portion. The broth was so fucking good I ended up spooning the rest of it out of the bowl like soup after we'd eaten all the clams. They provided ONE flimsy piece of grilled bread to sop up at least a pint of broth, so that sucked.

The Rainbow Trout was the most expensive thing we ordered ($22). I wasn't offended at the price this time because it was a pretty big plate. A fried trout fillet was garnished with roasted artichoke hearts and served on a bed of fluffy herbed spaetzle. The trout was delightful, flaky and tender, and nicely seasoned. The artichokes were maybe a little too tart. The spaetzle was chewy but not tough, and this is the last time I'm going to mention it because I'm sick of trying to type the word “spaetzle.” Stupid Germans and their retarded words like “Spaetzle” and “Gotterdammerung” and “Kristallnacht” and all those other fucking words with too many double consonants and that weird loopy “S” thingy that looks mostly like a Greek “beta.” But enough about the Germans and their bizarre language. The trout was anointed in a nutty brown butter sauce. This dish was utterly tasty and easily the best thing we ordered.

After all of this we were still hungry. Our majestically mulletted waitress seemed astounded that we ate so much, but that still didn't keep her mullet ass from bringing us the menu again so we could order some more food. We went with the Steak Two Ways ($12). This was a comically tiny portion of steak tartare, which came with some weird but strangely fluffy chips. The tartare was okay, and seemed pretty traditional with chopped capers and onions, but the menu promised steak TWO ways. The steak the second way was a small chunk of some variety of grilled beef (the piece was too small for me to identify the cut). It was kind of tough, but at least tasted like it had been grilled over a real fire. Avoid this one unless you like tiny dollops of raw hamburger and chewy mystery meat.

We closed out the night with ice cream. For $8 you get three scoops. We had the vanilla bean, chocolate ovaltine, and a grape sorbet. The vanilla bean was creamy and obviously had lots of real vanilla bean in it. The ovaltine was good enough, but seemed like the kind of treat a pedophile would use to lure his victims into his white panel van for a good old fashion molesting.
The grape sorbet tasted like fresh grapes but was too icy.

I'd call Spring Hill a great first stab at introducing the back- country rubes of West Seattle to some high concept dining. Still, the proprietors of Spring Hill seem to be under the faded idea of nouvelle cuisine that fine dining should come in tiny portions. Many of the dishes are microscopically small, and I'd love to see the riot that would ensue if a company of lumberjacks happened upon Spring Hill. Eventually I hope that they'll EITHER reduce the prices OR increase the portion size. Or at the very least, ban all the wait staff from growing mullets.

Rating: 7 mullets out of 10.

Jasmine Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant

2008-05-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

This is my entry into The GastroGnome's Restaurant Review 360. Enjoy, fuckers.

Jasmine Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant
2822 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way S
206-722-3225

This place is fucked. When you walk in the door the first thing you see is a humidifier which spits a thin ribbon of steam into the room. I foolishly thought it was a rice cooker until I realized that a high volume restaurant could never get by with a rice cooker the size of a toaster oven. Plus, why would the rice cooker be on the bar, and not inside the kitchen? Why do they even need a humidifier? Is it not humid enough inside Jasmine? Is Seattle’s famously soggy air not muggy enough to remind those Vietnamese fuckers of home? And if it’s home they’re longing for, shouldn’t they strew about some 40 year old landmines? Another authentic touch would be a bamboo tiger cage containing a life size mannequin of John McCain.

The walls and furniture in this place are a lurid shade of “fuck-me” red, the shade of crimson you used to see inside every Chinese restaurant but don’t anymore. A wavy papier- mache thingamafucky hangs from the ceiling. A plasma screen TV on the wall scrolls through images of impressionist paintings. There’s a baby grand piano in the corner, on which a dude occasionally plunks out Mozart. The spiral- bound menu is 20 pages long, and has some crepe flowers pasted to the cover so that it looks like a wedding invitation. The décor is so goddamned random I felt as though I’d walked into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. I half- expected an Oompa Loompa to appear. Don’t you hate when someone says they “half- expected” something? I do. That’s because I don’t do ANYTHING halfway, not even expecting things. So you can imagine my disappointment when a normal man, and not an Oompa Loompa, appeared to take our order.

We started with the Grilled Prawns on Sugarcane ($6.75). Three lengths of sugarcane are served wrapped in shrimp paste. I still haven’t figured out how you’re supposed to eat this dish. Do you pull the shrimp paste off of the sugarcane and eat it with chopsticks? Or do you nibble the shrimp directly off of the sugarcane like a popsicle? Do you eat the sugarcane? Actually I know the answer to that one: you can’t eat sugarcane. Cows can; people can’t. It’s too fibrous. It’s mildly sweet, but tough and stringy, and sucking on a piece of sugarcane is like sucking on a wet rag. Fresh sugarcane is supposed to be a treat. I guess it WAS a treat of sorts, in the 1930’s, in Louisiana, before Gummy Bears were invented, and then only if you were too poor to afford REAL candy. Anyway, the shrimp was good: the paste was finely textured and seasoned lightly, so you could really taste the shrimp. The sugarcane in the center lent a subtle hint of sweetness. Some kind of sweet and salty dipping sauce came with the shrimp, but it was totally unnecessary.

Next we got the Vietnamese Egg Roll ($5.75). This was just an order of three crispy spring rolls. They were pretty typical and seemed to be filled with the usual stuff that egg rolls are filled with: pork, vegetables, noodles. The egg rolls were tasty enough, but not nearly as tasty as the Green Papaya Salad ($7.50). Slippery chunks of papaya were tossed with julienned carrot and daikon, topped with ground peanuts and slivers of crispy fried onion. The charm of this dish is in the contrast of textures: bites of smooth creamy papaya give way to crunchy carrot and daikon, punctuated by the crisp crackle of fried onion. The flavors are refreshing, though the ground peanuts were by this point quickly becoming unnecessary, especially since they came with EVERY dish. Even the egg rolls had ground peanuts on top of them.

The Tamarind Roasted Quail ($7.75) had crisp skin and rich flesh, but it was a little tough. The quail could have benefitted from a longer, slower cooking to make the meat really fall off the bone. The meat was well seasoned and the tamarind glaze was sticky and spicy. The worst part of this dish was the tiny bowl of seasoning that came with it: it appeared to be some kind of granular paste and when touched felt exactly like wet sand. The flavor of this paste was shocking: it was a mixture of salt, pepper, and lime juice. You could probably use that stuff to clean bicycle parts. I put some on my quail. Predictably enough, the salty acidic grit overpowered the meat just like Charlie overpowered the ARVN on the Fall of Saigon.

The Happy Beef ($10.75) was a little overpriced for what it was: cubes of grilled beef stir fried with onions and bell peppers. I liked it though, because it was simple and tasty, though not quite as simple or as tasty as the sugarcane shrimp (although to be fair, shrimp ALWAYS have an advantage, since everyone knows the people love shrimp. The people love it.). Oddly, the menu gave us the option of choosing rice or bread with our Happy Beef. I chose bread, because I fucking LOVE that crusty, flaky, Vietnamese French bread. It’s delicious. It’s light as cotton candy, and it delivers a swift gustatory kick to your taste buds’ nuts. Between the bread and the masterful cream puffs for which Vietnamese bakeries are known (but which Jasmine cruelly doesn’t sell), they should jump out of bed EVERY DAY and sing the fucking Marseillaise in thanks to the French for colonizing them. That having been said, don’t bother ordering the Crispy Fish with Orange Sauce ($12.75). It wasn’t very crispy, and the orange sauce obviously had too much corn starch in it: it was gloopy and stringy, as though the state of Florida itself jizzed on the fish. Gross.

Dessert was an adventure. I tried to order the Jelly Soup with Lotus Seeds ($6.50). Yes, it’s really called that, and even more ridiculous than the name was the fact that THEY WERE OUT OF IT. How could something called “Jelly Soup with Lotus Seeds” be so popular? Does it come with your own Vietnamese hooker, who conveniently utters quotes from Full Metal Jacket (including perennial favorite “Me so horny”) while doing obscene things with Ping- Pong balls? I have no fucking clue, because as a consolation they brought me a selection of four shitty ice cream flavors: coconut, mint, coffee, and mango. It was garnished with canned fruit cocktail and one of those tiny paper umbrellas you find in a pina colada. But I don’t think they charged me for the ice cream, which was nice.

Jasmine is a strange motherfucking place. It’s mostly good, but some of the menu items aren’t that great, so it’s like being forced by Vietnamese people to play Russian Roulette, just like in The Deer Hunter. Maybe they’re still sorting out what works and what doesn’t. I’d go back if I was in the neighborhood, but I’m not in Jasmine’s neighborhood very often, so the next time I really need a Vietnamese fix I’ll probably just do some opium and rent Apocalypse Now.

Rating: 4 Errand boys sent by grocery clerks out of 10

Steelhead Diner

2008-05-18T21:55:00.001-07:00

Steelhead Diner
95 Pine St
(206) 625-0129
Normally I hate all things that are “meta.” When someone describes something as being “meta” they’re talking about something that describes itself or which references itself. Like a dude videotaping himself jacking off. A better example is the time I was in a bar and a chick came up to me, inexplicably wanting me to READ AN ESSAY SHE WROTE. I thought it was a pretty original pickup line until I actually read the essay, which was about how much she likes to write. No doubt she expected me to skim her work and instantly say “Hey, you’re a great writer! Let’s fuck!” Unfortunately for her, she picked the wrong dude. I started drunkenly comparing her to Michel de Montaigne, deriding her unoriginal verb choices, and reminding her that now even Stephen King is writing about writing, which means YOU SUCK!

Anyway, self referential bullshit is pretty common these days, but how can you tell the difference between masturbatory congratulation and mere description? Answer: no one knows. Not even me, because I constantly engage in both masturbation AND self congratulation. But I had to figure it out so we went to the Steelhead Diner. Refreshingly, they take reservations, so I didn’t have to hang out with the geriatric set.

After 2 Sazeracs I was pleasantly buzzed in time for the caviar pie ($12.95). It was too gimmicky for my taste: a huge wedge of cream cheese dotted meagerly on top with a scant spectrum of differently kinds of caviar. Scattered about the plate were diced onion, capers, and chopped boiled eggs. You were expected to scoop up a huge glop of cream cheese with some of the caviar, mix it with eggs and capers and other shit, and spread it on the provided toast points. I won’t say the flavors were bad (it tasted like oniony cream creese), but giving top billing to the word “caviar” in a recipe that featured so little actual caviar is kind of disingenuous, just like how that girl I met called herself a writer.

The bresaola ($11.95) was, unlike the caviar pie, worth every penny. For that price you got 3 large slices of rich beef, topped by creamy rounds of mozzarella, frisee, and a long thin rosemary bread stick which looked like the magic wand a culinary wizard would use to cast delicious spells. Note: the preceding sentence was the literary equivalent of a Pontiac Firebird with a unicorn airbrushed on the hood. Or maybe this restaurant review was actually written by Ronnie James Dio.

Next up was the beet tartare ($8.95). Diced golden beets glazed in a gorgonzola sauce were crammed into a cylindrical mold with a side bowl of fried yucca chips. Even though I’m really tired of cylinders, it was superb. The beets were crunchy and sweet, and the flavor was nicely offset by the tangy gorgonzola sauce. The yucca chips were crisp and dusted with cinnamon and paprika. Tasty, but not as tasty as the smelt ($9.95). I’d call it a good deal for a huge pile of about 30 of these tiny fried fish. The batter was flaky, and the smelt were fresh and accented nicely by the accompanying mustard sauce.

For $18.95 you get HALF a fried chicken, which means a breast, a drumstick, a thigh, and a wing. Shit, for that price you can get four times as many pieces of chicken from Popeye’s. But the juicy, flavorful fried chicken from the Steelhead Diner, with the same crispy crust as the fried smelt, was easily four times tastier than Popeye’s, so I guess it evened out.

The black cod ($19.95) was creamy as fuck but luckily not as fishy as your mom. A small square of fish swam in a salty sea of kasu broth with shiitakes, carrots, bok choy, and ginger. The cod was meltingly tender and was a refreshing change of pace after a huge plate of fried chicken.

What came next more than made up for all the relatively pricey stuff we’d eaten so far, and was possibly the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time: the Rich Boy Sandwich ($11.95). It seems the dude who owns the Steelhead Diner is from Louisiana. So am I. Ever since I moved here I’ve had trouble finding a decent poboy. If you don’t know what a poboy is, allow me to explain: it’s a delicious sandwich. This may seem like a simple concept, but believe me, it’s very difficult, like explaining “yellow” to a blind guy or “women’s suffrage” to the Mars Hill Church. Here in Seattle they either cheap out (by putting TWO shrimp on a poboy), or try to use wacky condiments like red leaf lettuce or sunflower seeds or a copy of Microsoft Vista. But the Steelhead Diner fucking NAILED it. The Rich Boy Sandwich is what we in the bayou would call a sausage poboy: slices of grilled sausage were piled onto French bread (NOT the mouth shredding classic Parisian baguette with its stern Gallic crust, but the fluffy, flaky Vietnamese variety) with shredded iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and dill pickles.

What more do you need, besides air, water, blowjobs, and poboys? The answer, my friend, is NOTHING. The poboy is the answer to life’s mysteries, balm of all wounds, the Platonic Ideal of the perfect sandwich. It’s the Ozzymandias of all sandwiches: “Look upon my condiments, ye mighty, and despair!” And unlike me, a poboy never ever gets drunk and turns in poorly written restaurants reviews at 3:00 am on the day it’s due. How’s that for “meta?”

Rating: 7 things that are “meta” (except Metallica) out of 10 (NOTE: the Rich Boy Sandwich gets its own separate rating of 9.5, that’s how badass it is)

How to Cook a Wolf

2008-05-18T21:54:00.001-07:00

How to Cook a Wolf
2208 Queen Anne Ave N
206-838-8090

One of the occupational hazards of reviewing restaurants is having to wait in line with lots of old people. This is especially true when the restaurant doesn’t take reservations, which unfortunately is the case with How to Cook a Wolf. The inevitable queue usually congeals around the place’s door about a half hour before it opens. Whenever I find out that a restaurant I’d like to patronize doesn’t take reservations, I typically skip lunch because I know it’s going to be an Early Bird Special. So there I was, dutifully lined up at the top of Queen Anne Hill at FOUR THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON on a Saturday to await How to Cook a Wolf’s opening. Luckily it was sunny. Sadly, we were the SECOND party in line, behind some overachieving geezers. More dessicated pensioners showed up after us.

The door finally opened, but not before an employee of How to Cook a Wolf felt the need to take a picture of the line. I waved. I think he deleted that picture from his phone and took another. I didn’t wave this time, and so he saved the picture. We went in and sat down. You should know that the inside of How to Cook a Wolf looks like a basketball court designed by M.C. Escher. I don’t usually care about ambiance: I’ve had some of the best meals of my life in places that look (and smell) like the emergency room in a charity hospital. But the décor inside How to Cook a Wolf is really unique.

We started with the Hamachi Crudo ($16). Six thin slices of raw sashimi grade yellowtail were drizzled with olive oil and lime juice, and peppered with finely diced jalapeno. It was very refreshing, mildly spicy, and perhaps BEST of all they resisted the clichéd urge to ruin this dish with cilantro. The olive oil was SUPERB, the jalapeno was piquant without overpowering, and the lime juice was a bright top note. It felt like a shorthand version of something vaguely Iberian, maybe Mexican, possibly Sicilian, but probably all three.

Next came the polenta ($13). Two hockey puck- sized discs of polenta, crispy on top but creamy beneath, were served in a shallow dish of a silky béchamel sauce which was so grandma fuckingly good I sopped the rest of it up with bread. After polenta the spaghetti arrived. For $15 you get a bowl of spaghetti anointed with plenty of the same bright green extra virgin olive oil they put on the hamachi, plus garlic, anchovy paste, and red pepper flakes.

In rapid fire succession came the Bucatini ($15). Bucatini is one of the few pasta shapes I hadn’t tried: it’s like really long macaroni, or maybe like thick spaghetti with a pinhole through its center. Either way, it’s awesome. The bucatini was dressed in a light tomato sauce with oregano and guanciale. Guanciale is an air dried pig jowl. Yes, jowls, just like Queen Elizabeth has. The guanciale was diced and seared crisp, and dotted the sauce like little salty porky flavor mines.

Following the bucatini was the Duck Salad ($16). Yes, the salad came out last. One quirk of How to Cook a Wolf is that the dishes seem to come out at random, so you pretty much HAVE to share with whomever you’re dining with, or else your bucatini may come out early while your companion waits for her duck salad. But anyway, I should point out here that How to Cook a Wolf’s duck salad is the first dish I have ever had that really didn’t need the duck, and it’s my opinion that EVERY dish needs some duck in it because I love duck. I’d eat duck ICE CREAM if it existed (which it probably does, thanks to all the Ferran Adria imitators who think they’re “molecular gastronomists,” when they’re ACTUALLY in fact turd burglars). But I don’t need to prove my duck loving cred to you losers. The duck salad was a mix of beets, orange wedges, and thinly sliced rings of red onion, and really didn’t need the roast duck breast which topped it. Don’t get me wrong, the duck was delicious: seared rare, it was juicy and expertly cooked. Still, the salad’s flavors were balanced enough without it. But fuck it, I’ll never turn my nose up at duck because, as the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and fucks like a duck it’s a duck, and that means it’s damn tasty.

By this point we were stuffed like motherfucks, so we wrapped it up with the cheese plate ($8) and the sorbetto (also $8). The cheese plate was a thick triangle of La Tur, which is a mildly pungent Italian soft cheese. A dollop of tomato jam accompanied the cheese, which was a great match because the tomato jam wasn’t cloyingly sweet, and was tart enough to cut through the creaminess. The sorbetto was of three scoops of mango, and was easily as creamy as the cheese, and also not too sweet. Altogether it was a fine ending to a delightful meal.

Unfortunately I have a complaint: the name “How to Cook a Wolf” is dumb because it takes too long to type. It references the title of some 1950’s book where the author talks about, among other things, how to create the cheapest possible nutritious meal, which I guess is some kind of hamburger gruel. This is ironic because my other complaint is that the food is expensive. Fifteen bucks is a lot for a bowl of pasta, especially since the waiter admitted that the pasta wasn’t made in house. That having been said, the dishes were masterful and the uncluttered palette of flavors seemed almost architecturally designed, as mod and crisp as How to Cook a Wolf’s interior. If only they could reduce the prices just a little and change the name to something cool like “Lucifer’s Dining Room,” which is the literary equivalent of a tattoo of a skeleton riding a dragon, I’d have nothing to complain about. And THAT, gentle fuckfaces, would be a FIRST.

Rating: 8 geezers (except Geezer Butler) out of 10

Shadow Land

2008-05-18T21:52:00.001-07:00

Shadow Land
4458 California Ave SW
206-420-3817

Why did they name this place “Shadow Land?” Seriously. It sounds like the title of a mid 80's sci- fi thriller, like Dreamscape or Runaway. Runaway is so fucking rad because it's got Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons, and POISONOUS ROBOTS. How random is that? Answer: as random as Shadow Land's menu. But not even poison robots could get me to eat at Shadow Land again because it sucks.

Everyone has seen menus at restaurants where below each menu item is listed a key ingredient or two, so you know what's in each dish. But Shadow Land ridiculously apes this practice by listing irrelevant ingredients. For instance, I don't need to be informed that fried Marcona almonds ($5) have sea salt and olive oil in them. Salt? and Oil? on something FRIED? No shit, Sherlock. Likewise, if I was on the fence about ordering the hummus ($7), I doubt that letting me know that the hummus contains PAPRIKA would be a definitive selling point. And why mention that the pulled pork sandwich ($7) has pickled red onions on it? Is it because they think pickled red onions is the BEST ingredient of the pulled pork sandwich? Why not print “A Bun” below the listing for the pulled pork sandwich? After all, a bun is clearly a crucial part of a sandwich. Or “Pulling,” which I would argue is the most important ingredient besides the pork because without any pulling it wouldn't be pulled pork.

They also name drop exotic ingredients. I know this is in vogue right now, ever since the beginning of the arms race about who has the oldest balsamic vinegar, or the most rustic bread, or the ham which came from the breed of pig which is the closest to becoming extinct, but as usual Shadow Land takes this already ludicrous conceit to an even more ludicrous extreme. The carpaccio ($6) has truffle oil on it, and the seared Ahi tuna comes with a boiled quail egg, but I guess that isn't fancy enough because the management of Shadow Land would like to inform you that the marinated Crimini mushrooms ($7) have black LAVA SALT in them. Perhaps most pretentious of all is the nebulously named ”Cassie,” which is ostensibly macaroni and cheese but which for the low low price of only $8 comes with the rarest and most intangible ingredient in human existence, LOVE.

The weird fucking menu isn't the only thing wrong with Shadow Land. I could forgive a quirky, poorly written menu if the food was really good or really cheap, but unfortunately it's neither. Some things seemed irrationally expensive: pork chops cost $28, while the ribeye is $32. For $12, the rare seared ahi tuna is a very tiny portion (about the size of the slice of tuna you would get on top of a piece of nigiri sushi, maybe a half ounce) and comes with a gimmicky cylindrical mold of green beans topped with the aforementioned boiled quail egg. The flavors here are light and well balanced, but 12 bucks is too expensive for a tiny fleck of raw fish. And while the carpaccio is a large portion for the price, the crispy fried squiggles of potato that top it are WAY too salty. The salad costs $9 and yeah, that's all it's called, “salad,” like the old black- and- white label generic grocery store products, and it seems like when they made the “salad” they just threw leftover shit together. Soggy mixed greens were topped with sunflower seeds and orange zest, which was completely and utterly overwhelmed by a massive dose of tarragon, of all things. Tarragon is not a salad herb. It's best suited to a dense or creamy substrate like roast chicken or an egg salad or in a bechamel sauce. Lettuce and orange zest are just too ephemeral to stand up to tarragon's muscular flavor assault. And don't get me started on the abomination that is poutine ($7). Poutine is a bowl of French fries with cheese curds and GRAVY on it, and in case this dish isn't funny enough, you should know that it's the NATIONAL DISH OF CANADA. I'm tired of bitching so feel free to insert your own joke about Canada here: . The fries were okay, and Beecher's cheese curds are always delightfully creamy and nutty, but the gravy was (surprise!) too salty and gloopy and tasted canned.

Anyway, Shadow Land is at a shitty nexus where the food is too shitty for it to qualify as fine dining and not cheap enough for it to be good bar food. The service is absent minded at best. The drinks are expensive. The menu is really, really pompous, and like every other goddamn shithole new bar the plasma screens are always tuned to ESPN. Even Shadow Land's fake movie title name is shitty. I'd rather have one of Gene Simmons' poison robots from Runaway inject me full of H2SO4 than go back there. If Shadow Land really WAS a movie it would be written by Kevin Smith, which means it's shitty, unrealistic, trendy, and tries way too hard. Can I say the word “shitty” once more in this review? Sure I can.

Rating: 0.0001 poisonous robots out of 10

Ama- Ama

2008-05-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ama-Ama
4752 California Ave SW
206-937-1514

Heath Ledger is dead. Who will play the Joker now? More importantly, whom will I dream about? In consolation we went to Ama- Ama, a self described “oyster bar” in West Seattle. I was surprised by the décor: with all the starburst clocks and wood paneling, Ama- Ama would be an exact facsimile of my great aunt’s house, if only they had more doilies, a Sacred Heart, and a velvet painting of JFK. It’s a perfect tableau of 1963, frozen in amber. I don’t know what the fuck they were thinking. Perhaps they were trying to bring back some kind of mythical past that never existed in which Elvis movies DIDN’T suck ass and people DIDN’T eat recipes that somehow contained corn flakes AND canned tuna fish AND gelatin.

We started with the Mojo Shrimp Salad ($11), which was fucking tasty. Three large prawns skewered and grilled with some kind of sweet spice rub, served over a bed of frisee, watercress, and avocado, although the avocado was a little too firm for my taste. I prefer avocado to melt in your mouth the way my heart melted for Hollywood heartthrob Heath Ledger.

Next came baked oysters. For $9 you get a half dozen oysters, baked in the half shell in a Pernod cream sauce and dotted with bacon bits. This was pretty good, though I personally couldn’t taste any Pernod. The fried oysters (also $9) were breaded in Japanese panko crumbs and served with a fucking BRILLIANTLY AWESOME slaw of cabbage, red onions, and red bell peppers in a citrus- tasting vinaigrette. I should point out here that the oysters were REALLY FRESH. They tasted as though they had died as recently as Heath Ledger.

The lamb sliders ($9) were awesome. A globe of ground lamb the size of a tennis ball came served draped in melted gouda and doused with chipotle sauce on a brioche bun. When you bit into the slider the lamb gushed forth a lurid torrent of juices down your chin onto your hands and down your forearms. How’d they make the lamb so juicy? ice chips? pork fat? stem cells? I don’t know, but the BRIOCHE BUN was somehow the best part. What’s brioche, you ask? Answer: a French dinner roll. They’re light, eggy, as soft as a comforter made of vaginas, and utterly superior in every way to the shitty 3 X 4 grids of dinner rolls we get here in the USA for Thanksgiving. How awesome is brioche? Allow me to frame the answer in this convenient S.A.T. style analogy: dry shitty pre packaged American dinner rolls are to brioche as Monica Lewinsky is to Nicolas Sarkozy’s SMOULDERING HOT mistress. In other words, the French do everything better. Yet even the mighty French cannot bring my beloved Heath Ledger back from Death’s cold embrace. Sigh.

One pound of steamed Penn Cove mussels cost $15. The mussels came in a big bowl, steamed in a sauce that the menu claims is “tomatillo” but which looked and tasted like plain old Hunt’s tomato paste, which would be fine with me because the tomato sauce flavor was a good complement to the mussels, except they had to put on airs and claim that a common ingredient was fancier than it actually was. After all, if you’re willing to fake tomatillo paste with tomato paste, why not go all out? Serve chicken liver and call it foie gras. Claim beef brisket is “Unicorn Roast.” A side dish of crack rocks could be billed on the menu as “Professor Cornelius Fantabularius’s Magic Pebbles.” Still, I must point out that like the aforementioned oysters, the mussels were fresh and very tender. Almost as tender as the tender love I once shared with dearly departed hunk Heath Ledger.

The New York strip steak was a mistake. At $24, it’s the most expensive thing on Ama- Ama’s menu. It was a calculated risk, but I have a test: at steak houses I always get seafood, and at seafood restaurants I try the steak. If they can get it right they pass because it’s supposed to be extra difficult because everyone knows a cow is the opposite of a fish. After all, the Metropolitan Grill’s crab cakes are awesome. When I order a rare steak I expect it to come out a dark crusty brown outside and bright red inside. But Ama- Ama’s New York strip wasn’t that great: it was barely seasoned, and grilled to a watery blonde color, as though the grill wasn’t hot enough. It was just sad: as sad as the untimely demise of promising young actor Heath Ledger.

The meal limped to a close with dessert: the Praline Dream ($8) was some sort of chocolate mousse thing which resembled a real praline only in its sugar content. The lemon tart (also $8) was okay, but the most depressing thing about these desserts was that the menu ADMITTED they came from Bakery Nouveau, the Parisian style patisserie across the street, as if that were a selling point. I’m not saying Bakery Nouveau isn’t good; quite the contrary. What I’m saying is this: when you run a restaurant, you can’t buy stuff made by someone else. After all, if you can do that, then I too can own a fucking restaurant! Please bear with me, faithful patron, because it’ll take a while to fulfill your order, since when you choose a steak from the menu I’ll have to drive to the Metropolitan Grill, order the steak, wait for it to come out, get it to go, then drive back to West Seattle to serve it up to you.

Ama- Ama is an easygoing neighborhood joint. The seafood is really fresh and the lamb slider is superb, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there, mostly because the name is too dumb. And now it seems I’m out of clever asides about Heath Ledger so…. Heath Ledger Heath Ledger Heath Ledger. There. Satisfied?

Rating: 5 Heath Ledgers out of 10

Lark

2008-05-18T21:38:00.002-07:00

Lark
926 12th Ave
206-325-5275

My brother used to be friends with this guy who was born with only one ear. Actually the “missing” ear was still there, but shriveled, as though the kid had used the Ronco food dehydrator as a pillow. One day my brother and the earless kid went to a party with my friend and me. My friend ended up smoking pot with the earless guy. Eventually my friend got so stoned that the hilarity of being in the same room with an earless dude eclipsed political correctness and he started calling the kid “Vincent van Gogh.” The rest of us laughed the shrill snorty titters that can only come out of the mouths of the sky high, but the kid with the missing ear didn't get it. Pity, because that was probably the cleverest put down that the guy would ever get about his cauliflower ear. After all, the extent of the levity he was probably used to hearing was “Hey, nice ear asshole,” or “Your ear is ugly, dude.”

Well what's all that got to do with Lark? Nothing, except that Lark is as awesome as that dude's ear is fucked up. Which means it's really fucking tasty. I was crestfallen upon my arrival at Lark because the place was packed, but they took my name and even offered to CALL MY CELLPHONE when my table became available. I've never heard of a restaurant that would do that. What could be more convenient? Only the Door-to-Door Cotton Candy Blowjob Mobile.

When our table came up I immediately sat down and started laughing at the guy next to us, who was chowing the fuck down. He kept stuffing his face and wiping up all the sauces and gravy on his plate with bread. “Why?” I wondered to myself? I would soon find out.

We started with the hearts of palm salad ($10). Hearts of palm are the inner core of a palm tree. While some people would shun the idea of eating the inside of a tree, I jumped at the chance to eat the inside of something besides your mother for a change. The salad featured thinly sliced palm hearts (which taste like artichokes), frisee, and satsuma wedges. The secret weapon was a VANILLA BEAN vinaigrette, which blew the fuck out of my mind. It was bold and innovative and left me feeling like one of those wide eyed Chinese kids you always see playing with a butterfly in commercials about “technology.”

Next up came the Muscovy Salami ($11). Muscovy is a kind of duck. Salami is a kind of awesomeness, solidified into sausage form. To paraphrase the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cups slogan, they're the two great tastes that kick so much ass together you'd let Mike Tyson molest you to taste them. The thinly sliced muscovy salami was dense, chewy, and studded inside with whole peppercorns. It was accompanied by a small ramekin of raspberry mostardo, which is just a fancy name for jam and mustard mixed together.

The bacon wrapped cod was at $18 the most expensive thing we ordered, but it was worth it, though not merely because it was wrapped in bacon, which I find is too easy. Wrapping stuff in bacon is the culinary equivalent of saying “Hitler was a bad guy.” Not a difficult position to justify. It's too easy because ANYONE can wrap ANYTHING in bacon and it will taste good. You could wrap a leper's used condom in bacon and eat it, and not only would you not puke, you'd reminisce about that meal years later. That's how powerful a tool bacon wrapping is. While the cod was creamy and succulent with a perfectly crisped corona of bacon, it wasn't the best part. No, surprisingly the highlight of the bacon wrapped cod was the SAUCE: a black truffle and celery root cream broth. The celery root gave the sauce a fresh woodsy base, while the truffle came through with that subtle organic, almost petroleum bouquet of flavor which justifies the fact that perigord truffles cost $400 a pound. The sauce was so good I soon found myself in imitation of the dude seated next to us, wiping up the sauce with first bread and then, when I ran out of bread, my fingers. I would've licked that sauce off of ANYTHING. I would've licked the sauce off of an electric fence while peeing on another nearby electric fence at the same time. That's how damn tasty it was.

The roast squab ($17) was tiny, delicate and meatier tasting than prime rib. Part of the unique pleasure of eating squab is the sensation of feeling like a giant when you hold the squab's miniscule drumstick in your hand. I guess I bellowed “Fee Fie Fo Fum” too many times because the waiter glared at me. But it was worth it. Note: squab is baby PIGEON MEAT. Who would have thought that such a tasty fellow could eventually grow up to shit on the worlds freshly washed cars?

Dessert was the malt ice cream. $8 is pricey for ice cream, but we got a pretty big scoop of it and it came adorned with a chewy caramel wafer stuck vertically into the scoop like a sail. Normally I'm not that big on ice cream but it really did taste like the inside of a malted milk ball, like Easter in a bowl.

Lark is awesome. The food is good enough to prompt men with otherwise good table manners to lick sauce off their fingers. The service is friendly and helpful without being annoying. The menu is very innovative without seeming trendy, precious or gimmicky. Perhaps best of all, Lark's management specifically prohibits people with fucked up ears from eating there. I personally guarantee that the previous sentence is completely, 100,000,000% absolutely true without a trace of falsehood. And if you believe that Lark would actually bar people with disfigured ears from eating at the restaurant, you're probably also one of those people who believe that college kids frequently wake up kidneyless in bathtubs of ice after a drunken evening with a beautiful stranger. So go fuck yourself. But before you do that, go to Lark.

Rating: 9 fuck ears out of 10.

Quinn's

2008-05-18T21:38:00.001-07:00

Quinn's
1001 E Pike St
206-325-7711

What the fucking fuck is up with all these fucked fucking yuppie catchprases? Labradoodle. Bo-Tox. Flex- time. Soccer mom. Gastropub. I never knew what the last one meant until I heard about Quinn's.

No one ever asks me before they open a business in this town. If they did I would have said “No gastropubs because they're for yuppie douche bags. Now make out with your twin sister and let me videotape it.” But they opened Quinn's anyway. We showed up about 6:30, which is too late. Quinn's fills up fast and they only take reservations for parties of six or more. So we sat at the bar. However I was astonished to see on the beer menu, nestled there among the $10 half pints of Belgian beers, PBR for the more than reasonable price of $2 a pint: a metaphor for my presence at Quinn's.

So I ordered a PBR and a whole bunch of food. First we tried the duck egg ($3). It was served soft boiled and sliced in half for sharing, with a filet of boccarones on each half. Boccarones are white anchovies, but they aren't as salty as regular anchovies because they're usually marinated instead of salt cured. The menu claims the duck egg comes with sea salt but it must not come with very much because it was pretty bland, and the boccarones only added a fishy flavor to the egg. The cold, fishy, clammy end result was like what I imagine a turtle egg tastes like. There's a better way to spend three bucks: for instance, I could get three blowjobs from your mom.

Next came the gougeres ($5). For this price you get three of these gruyere cheese puffs. I've had these before, and they're usually delightful, flaky and fluffy with a delicate cheesy flavor. Quinn's gougeres were filled with a gloopy cream sauce that tasted like Cheez-Itz, although the pastry itself was good.

The assorted cheese plate was for $9 a little steep, but the three cheeses (a white cheddar; a triple cream with a Chimay washed rind; and a nutty, dry sheep's milk cheese) were all unpasteurized and very flavorful and came with a dollop of apricot jam. But fuck, who goes to a restaurant for a boiled egg and apricot jam? Not even me, and I pray every night that one day Jesus will magically transform me into a European (because only Europeans order stuff like boiled eggs at a restaurant. Get it? Get it?). Jesus: the David Copperfield of the ancient Middle East. So we had to order something more substantial. Like the brandade ($7). Brandade (not to be confused with a Band- Aid) is mashed salt cod. Sometimes it's mashed with potatoes. Sometimes not. Quinn's version was combined with potatoes and lots of rosemary. The salt cod adds a rich pelagic essence to the potatoes, and while it does taste fishy, the fishiness is muted and distant and salty, like a sea breeze. Damn tasty. The brandade was served with a plate of Quinn's house made potato chips. These were a fucking revelation: easily the best chips I've ever eaten in my life, and I've been pretty stoned. The chips seemed to have been surgically prepared: they were sliced so thinly they were exactly one potato cell thick, and when you bit into them they shattered, releasing a fine spray of hot oil molecules and sodium atoms directly onto your tongue. Beautiful.

The oxtail ($13) was braised, so tender you could have shot it up intravenously, and served in a pool of not one but TWO sauces: a red wine gravy that tasted one thousand fathoms deep, and the same aforementioned Cheez-Itz flavored gruyere sauce that filled the gougeres, although in this context the Cheez-Itz sauce was actually quite tasty. Floating in this million calorie brew were six impossibly fluffy potato gnocchi and a small cylinder of marrow that was so tender it practically spread itself onto the extra toast rounds that we had left over from our cheese plate. Please buy this dish. When we'd finished the oxtail and gnocchi we soaked up the last of the gravy and cheese sauce with a $4 order of herb fries.

Don't bother with dessert unless you've got nothing else to do. The chocolate bread pudding ($6) tasted like a box of powdered brownies. The lemon creme brulee ($6), while perfectly creamy with a nice crackly burnt sugar crust, was a little too lemony for me. Get an espresso instead, or another pint of PBR. Or another dish of oxtail. Or something. But remember, no one ever said a pub was a good place to get dessert.

End result: I'm ambivalent about Quinn's, because it's okay, but not consistently awesome enough, especially since the guy who owns Quinn's also owns my beloved Restaurant Zoe (AKA the second best restaurant in Seattle, fuck-O's). Some of the menu items are REALLY good, but others are as lame as someone who admits they own a Labradoodle. If you live on Capitol Hill and can stand the idea of eating at a gastropub, go to Quinn's. But don't go now: wait a couple of weeks until after the hipsters and “foodies” (AKA bored old people) have gotten over this place and you can actually get a table. But only go if you happen to be walking directly in front of the place. But you SHOULD go eventually, just like your mom SHOULD eventually give up the crack pipe, because the menu is unique and reasonably priced. Plus, if I had to go there, you should have to as well. After all, if I'm brave enough to face the hordes of soccer moms and labradoodles, you can be too. How's that for an inspirational message, fuckfaces?

Rating: 6 labradoodles out of 10.

Cache

2008-05-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Cache
www.cacheseattle.com

Cache is a private dining club. To sign up you go to their web site, email them and then wait for them to write you back. It's supposed to be all cloak & dagger but it's really quite simple. The hardest part is booking a reservation because they're usually sold out for 2 months. I wish I was that fucking popular.

The theme for our dinner was “The Food of Emilia- Romagna.” Emilia- Romagna is the region of Italy famous for Parmigianno Reggianno cheese and Prosciutto di Parma. Prosciutto is made from pigs that have been fed the rinds of Reggianno cheese. They like to feed pigs weird shit in Emilia Romagna: pigs fed only apples; pigs fed only acorns; pigs fed only bacon. Note: I made the last one up. But bacon made from such a pig would some kind of obscene DOUBLE BACON and would be EXQUISITELY RAD!

We went to Cache's Belltown location, which is actually some dude's architecture firm during the day. His girlfriend is the chef. Our hosts sat us down in a tiny foyer in front of an ENORMOUS plate of various varieties of Salumi brand charcuterie. The architect handed me some kind of gin cocktail and told us to dig in, which of course I did instantly, stuffing my face with handfuls of cured meats like they were going to outlaw nitrates tomorrow.

Anyway, after copious cocktails our hosts seated us around the table and started to serve appetizers. The first course was a platter of antipasti: zucchini and radicchio, olives, prosciutto, and sliced reggiano. Everything was damn tasty except the radicchio: it was sliced into huge wedges and grilled. It's just too bitter to chow down on a giant slice of it. Radicchio is better served in a mixed salad with its robust flavor tempered by arugula and red leaf lettuce. And the zucchini was limp. Otherwise the antipasto was tasty.

Next came fettuccine bolognese, known in New Orleans as “noodles with red gravy.” No, “red gravy” does not refer to anything menstrual. It's bolognese sauce, a mixture of ground beef, veal, and pork in tomato sauce. Cache's bolognese sauce featured pancetta in place of the usual ground pork, but nonetheless was rather dry, crumbly, and bland, with the meat particles barely clinging to the pasta and the noodles dyed a light pink from the meager amount of tomato sauce. Our hosts repeatedly assured us that this is how they do it in Italy: very little sauce is used so you can really taste the pasta, and the sauce is not seasoned with any herbs or spices so you can taste the meat and tomatoes. I'll have to take her word for it because I've never been to Italy, but it's plausible enough. After all, ever since the Renaissance ended the Italians are full of bad ideas: Fascism. Andrea Bocelli. Sending troops (all two of them) to Iraq. Though I must give them credit for the Lamborghini Diablo and that porn star they elected to Parliament. What the pasta lacked in flavor, it made up for in volume. That bowl of pasta was as massive as one of the EEE knockers on the old lady next to me. Luckily the pasta wasn't as flabby.

But they made up for the blandness of the fettuccine with the next course: cotechino con lenticche. Cotechino is a really fatty, flavorful sausage. It was simmered then served sliced over lentils. The sausage was very tender and bursting with spices and oozing juices onto the lentils, which were creamy and fresh tasting. This dish was pitch perfect and utterly satisfying.

When I didn't think I could eat anymore, they made us have dessert. It was a chocolate fruitcake called castagnaccio. Apparently the original Roman version of this dessert was made with chestnut flour and was almost inedible it was so heavy. The modern version isn't that much of an upgrade since it was still pretty dense. The chocolate flavor was very rich, and the cake itself was satiny and flecked with chestnuts and candied cherries. It wasn't cloyingly sweet, though.

After dinner the hosts sat down with us for a chat. I discussed architecture with the guy who owned the place and told him that the following architects are ALL DOUCHEBAGS: Le Corbusier. Mies van der Roh. Frank Gehry. He disagreed.

But enough talk about the world of architecture and the douche bags who populate it. What about Cache? On the bright side, Cache is CHEAP. We got a four-course meal, several cocktails, and wine with each course for $50. Plus the portions are gargantuan, the service is generous, and what they did well they did REALLY well, like the cotechino con lenticche. Plus I have to give them points for the DIY aesthetic. However, it wasn't very polished, and half the dishes were lackluster even though you could tell they put a lot of work into the preparation. On the other hand, the fact that they've got a two-month waiting list indicates that the marketplace disagrees with my assessment.

So here's my advice: decide in advance which architects you hate, email Cache, wait two months, and experience it for yourself. In the meantime, I'll be busy feeding a pig only bacon in the hopes of creating DOUBLE BACON. Patent pending, bitches.

Rating: 6 architects out of 10.

Sitka and Spruce

2008-05-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

Sitka & Spruce
2238 Eastlake Ave E
206-324-0662

Why do old people love to wait in line so much? Is it: a) because they're about to die and they're trying to imagine what it's like to wait in line to get into Heaven? or b) because they're used to waiting in line because they had to wait in all the soup lines during the Depression? or c) because they just want to piss me off by obstructing my entrance into Sitka & Spruce? Answer: obviously c). When we arrived at the restaurant no fewer than 13 old fuckers were waiting in line ahead of me. Luckily Sitka & Spruce, while tiny, was still large enough to accommodate the geriatric baker's dozen plus me.

We started with the pork belly ($12). Pork belly is a peculiar item. It tastes like a bacon-flavored booger. You heard me. The texture is exquisitely soft. Like foie gras, it’s very yielding to the bite (and salty, too), like when you cough up a loogie in church or at an Amway meeting and don’t have any place to spit it so you must swallow it. But don't let my description fool you: it's fucking delicious. The bacon booger was served over a bed of giant crusty croutons, pillowy balls of mozzarella, thinly sliced red onion, tomatoes and pine nuts.

Next came a dish of potatoes sautéed with chorizo and garlic in a bright green parsley butter sauce ($8). Potatoes are the perfect blank canvas upon which any flavor landscape can be painted. They were crisp outside and creamy within; the flavor of the bright fresh parsley butter was cantilevered by the dark smoky chorizo and rosemary.

Then we tried the rabbit loin ($12). Much tastier than your mother’s loins, which I’ve also eaten. I couldn’t tell how exactly it was cooked but it was meltingly tender, tossed in balsamic vinaigrette with radicchio, walnuts, crimini mushrooms, and small chips of a dry hard cheese that was probably Reggiano. The surprise flavor here was the addition of mint, which really freshened things up.

After the rabbit loin we had the albacore ($16), served with cubes of watermelon, slices of heirloom cucumber, red onion, dill and more mint. This dish was light, refreshing, yet complex. I’d like to take a brief intermission at this point to discuss the masterful use of spices at Sitka & Spruce. Mint. Dill. Chorizo. Rosemary. Cucumber. It was a shock and awe flavor bombardment in EVERY DISH we sampled, layer after layer of taste as dense, deep and varied as both your mom’s cunt and the Grand Canyon (both of which are also alike in that they contain many things that confuse Creationists).

Illustrating the shock and awe flavor bombardment doctrine was the duck breast ($17). It was seared rare and accompanied by a grilled peach topped with fried sage leaves. Just in case the duck breast itself wasn’t somehow rich enough, the whole dish was swimming in FOIE GRAS BUTTER! Maximalism in its purest form. A word about foie gras: It will indeed be a sad day in Hell, my friends, when the nannies that rule this state finally ban those geese livers like they’ve banned everything else fun. By “fun” I mean lap dances, smoking, malt liquor and unsecured junk in the bed of your truck. Fuck those Safety Nazis.

By the time dessert arrived I think I was both shocked AND awed, because the waitress mentioned that I had a “glazed duck look.” Yeah, my eyes were glazing over after I ate all that maximalism but I still had to pack in a few hundred more calories so we got the lemon verbena gelato. Like all good gelatos it was rich and silky yet light, and dotted with fresh blueberries. We also tried the chocolate cake. It was doused in a caramel sauce and sprinkled in granular grey sea salt. The desserts were $8.50 each.

I wouldn’t call Sitka & Spruce cheap, but it certainly wasn’t expensive. In fact, one person who wasn’t an insane gluttonous foul-mouthed restaurant critic could easily make a good meal of two small plates. Depending on what you chose you could get out of there for only $20. It’s more expensive than Hot Pockets but several orders of magnitude tastier. All those old people who lined up to get into Sitka & Spruce are fortunate to have gotten in before impending death comes to claim them. I’m young so I’ll get plenty of chances to eat there. But someday in the distant future I’ll be one of the ancient geezers waiting in line to get in and while the pork belly when adjusted for inflation will cost $4000, at least you won’t have to tip the robot waiter. Because everyone knows robots can’t get paid. Why can’t they get paid? Because robots suck. Figuratively, I mean. Except for the vacuum bots and hooker bots. They’ll suck literally.

Rating: 9.5 vacuum bots out of 10.