Monday, November 02, 2020
Menu of the Plague Year: Shake Shack
Fuck you, Shake Shack.
To put it bluntly, my introduction to Shake Shack did not go well. Despite the fact that I ordered online, I endured a harrowing half hour wait for these hype burgers, buffeted by a freezing gale, because my food had fallen between the cracks of Shake Shack’s abysmal pickup protocol. I got totally fucked over by “The Board,” a bizarre monitor that keeps track of peoples’ food orders, but which runs on its own internal logic that scientists cannot understand. I have never harbored more hatred for a tv screen, which is a damn shame, because tvs are among my favorite kinds of screens. I documented my misadventure on Twitter, so if you want the horrific backstory of my cursed quest to eat some fucking crinkle fries, follow me @surlygourmand. You’ve been warned: waiting 30 minutes for a hamburger is definitely not for the faint of heart.
Anyway, fuck The Board. Let’s talk about the food.
The ShackBurger is $5.99. That’s honestly not a bad price for a cheeseburger these days. Plus vegetables are free. So, to the ShackBurger’s default accoutrements of lettuce, tomato, cheese, and a smear of Shake Shack’s legendary ShakeSauceTM, I opted to add onions and pickles. This lettuce and tomato situation sucks. Just lettuce and tomato? Why the fuck? Of all the hamburger toppings, lettuce is the least flavorful, and tomatoes are the most likely to be shitty. It’s like they picked the wrong answers on a multiple choice test. It’s ALMOST correct, yet not quite right. This is like when you go to a foreign land and get homesick, so you try to order something american, like pizza, but you discover that the most popular pizza topping in Peru is CANNED CORN. If “What ingredients are on a cheeseburger?” was a question on Family Feud, lettuce and tomatoes are the last two answers that nobody guesses.
Given all of the breathless blowjobbery surrounding Shake Shack, I was expecting a cheeseburger so good, that if I started choking on it I’d keep taking bites of it before I died. When I opened the bag, however, my burger was smeared across the bottom, having fallen out of its paper winding shroud. No big deal; I just reassembled it. Besides, the burger’s deconstruction gave me a chance to inspect the ingredients.
The patty itself was pretty unobtrusive: a rich mahogany, it was obviously formed by hand. A skein of melted American cheese clung tightly to every crevice. The vegetables were quite fresh, even the tomatoes. Despite fall’s encroachment upon the land, the tomatoes were red and juicy. The green leaf lettuce was vivid and crisp. The pickles offered a refreshing snap when bitten into. There were way too many raw onions, but whatever; I like onions. The secret ShakeSauceTM, obviously one of those classic mayonnaise-and-ketchup style diner sauces, had a salty depth of flavor without the cloying sweetness that too often plagues this stuff. The bun was soft and golden; I think it’s a potato bun but it could just be yellow food coloring.
Taken as a whole, it’s a decent cheeseburger.
It’s the fries that are a blatant fucking ripoff. An order of Hot Spicy Fries is $3.99, and you don’t get a super huge portion of them and also, they’re fucking CRINKLE FRIES. Yeah yeah yeah, we all know the inescapable online chatter about Shake Shack’s french fries: originally an afterthought on the menu, they’re frozen. Shake Shack tried to switch to hand cut fries a few years ago, but for some reason customers rebelled, and they reverted to the original frozen ones. These customers who complained are dumbasses. I suppose the stupids prefer ridged french fries to overcompensate for their smooth brains.
Crinkle fries are easily the worst of all the fry shapes. Even Jack in the Box’s curly fries, voted “most likely to snap off and smear ketchup on your fucking shirt” by esteemed burgerologists, are better. One of the main raves about crinkle fries is that the corrugations retain more sauce. Too bad that doesn’t actually matter. You can put gallons of any fucking condiment onto a crinkle fry and they somehow remain elusively, maddeningly bland.
So with this in mind, I ordered the Extra Hot option, hoping to counteract the flavorless potato zigzags that I knew were coming. Besides, I never trust chain restaurants that offer food claiming to be “hot.” Everyone knows that, hoping to preserve their economy of scale while remaining mindful of pitiful midwestern palates, most chains dumb down the heat a few clicks. I’m no showoff, but I can handle a little bit of heat: I store my contact lenses in Taco Bell Fire sauce. So my expectations were low.
I admit, however, that the Hot Spicy fries are legit. They’re not painfully hot, but they can hold their own. The problem is that the heat isn’t evenly distributed among the fries: some fries were almost completely devoid of spice. Others were caked with seasoning, wallowing self-destructively in the maroon powder like they were trying to reboot Scarface with an all-fry cast. Yet despite this heaping pollination of spicy dust, the fries were STILL SOMEHOW BLAND. Yes there was pepper, but where the fuck was the SALT? The menu promises a ramekin of ranch dressing with your fries; my sauce was sadly missing.
To cool my burning tongue, I downed a chocolate milkshake ($5.49). Unlike its crinkle fries, Shake Shack shakes its milk in house, from frozen custard that they churn on site. It was a pretty solid milkshake; I have no complaints. Then again, I have a low bar for milkshakes. Unless they’re made of poisonous chemicals like McDonald’s shakes, they’re all pretty good. But on the bright side, I ordered only one milkshake but was inexplicably given two.
Color me a provincial rube, but I don’t see the Shake Shack appeal. I don’t give a fuck that it’s the same company as Eleven Madison Park and Granercy Tavern. It’s a solid cheeseburger, but how good do you need it to be, really? I’m not denying that the ShackBurger is objectively better than a Quarter Pounder; it sure as fuck is, but the main reason that McDonald’s exists is so that you can obtain valuable hangover-killing fat and salt as efficiently as possible. Convenience is the main reason that fast food is even a thing! Taste is explicitly coincidental. A cheeseburger that comes with a half hour wait is FUCKED.
And as I previously mentioned via my epic Twitter bitchfest, I certainly don’t appreciate the ordering system, which is a clusterfuck. Shake Shack is so densely clustered a fuck, in fact, that it collapsed in upon itself into a ShackHoleTM, which sucks your entire lunch hour into it, never to be seen again. The last thing you see before you vanish into nothingness is the aforementioned The Board, the frustrating flat screen tv I complained about at the top of this review. As your corporeal form gets pulverized into spicy fry dust by the mass of all the wasted time at the center of the ShackHoleTM, you notice that, due to relativistic effects, your order is frozen onto The Board in fifth place for eternity.
Maybe they’re understaffed. Maybe they’re struggling with the new rules imposed by the Department of Health since the plague descended. I’ve been writing reviews with kid gloves on lately, since the ‘Rona has put so many excellent restaurants in jeopardy and I don’t want to kick the industry while it’s down. But fuck that; Shake Shack is no struggling mom-and-pop. My disdain for ShakeShack is merciless: not only did they unapologetically bungle my order, they also hogged $10 million of Paycheck Protection Program loans. Although they DID return the loan, to their credit, the low interest PPP loans were intended for delicious local burger stands like Zippy’s to keep employees on the payroll while COVID cripples the economy.
So in conclusion, fuck you Shake Shack, you bunch of scammers. Nobody needs to go there.
Rating: 3 PPP’s out of 10
Shake Shack is located at 2115 Westlake Ave.
To place an order online, which won’t be ready until like a million years after you send it in, go to https://order.shakeshack.com/
Monday, April 20, 2020
Menu of the Plague Year: Le Coin
Our third Menu of the Plague Year is Le Coin.
Le Coin, which means “the coin” in French, is a charming French restaurant located in the building that previously housed Roux, and before that, the legendary malignant dive bar of pre-gentrified Fremont, the Buckaroo.
I’m a sucker for classical French cuisine, though it’s difficult to come by in Seattle because everybody insists on northwesting it up, but fuck it: in this post apocalyptic wasteland in which we live, beggars can’t be choosers. After all, yesterday I fought a raccoon for a pizza crust and traded one of my kids for a Clorox Wipe. Not a container of Clorox wipes. A wipe.
So by these wretched standards of living, Le Coin, naturally, was a real treat.
A salad of leafy greens ($7) included a lush underbrush of the eponymous flora, along with a dusting of crushed walnuts, and radishes sliced razor thin into diaphanous discs that practically floated into my mouth. This salad was doused in a transparent vinaigrette, sharp as a saber. Atop the bushy bushes of salad was a drift of microplaned pecorino or some such cheese. This was a pretty well-composed salad, all things considered, but the radishes weren’t an ingredient; they were a literary device: foreshadowing.
Truffle potato cream soup ($9) was creamy and smooth with a not overwhelming truffle flavor, but the soup was speckled with suspicious black flecks: maybe it was pepper? buckshot, suitable for reloading the shotgun shells necessary to ward off marauders? spores that will turn you into a zombie if consumed? No sweat, brah; it was probably pieces of truffle. A swirl of bright green oil on top and a few herbs lightened the proceedings, but then, incongruously, there were radishes lurking beneath the surface. Why the fuck? The crunchy, spicy little submarine mines disrupted the silky pool of what was otherwise a delicious soup.
Cassoulet ($18) was super beany: under a crunchy blanket of bread crumbs was a slumbering menagerie of beans. There were like six kinds of beans in there: chickpeas, gigante beans, lima beans, flageolets, navy beans, I don’t fucking know. Every kind of bean was represented except red beans and, I suppose, jelly beans. Amid all these damn beans were big stubbed toes of braised pork shoulder and gigantic chunks of carrots and celery: if normal-sized carrots and celery are mirepoix, then these big motherfuckers qualify as maxipoix. For some reason, there were radishes in this dish too! Like seriously, guys: stop.
Why is Le Coin so horny for radishes? Maybe they bought a fuckton of radish futures which they were unable to unload before the stock market crashed, and now they’re stuck with them. Accompanying the cassoulet was a stack of sliced rustic bread, made with the same care and attention that a toothless grandma, who dropped out of third grade, wearing a kerchief tied around her head and a brown wool skirt, would bake on a Sunday for her religious freak family.
Le Coin Burger ($16) was A BIG FUCKING HAMBURGER, easily a quarter of a cow, as juicy as a sordid secret, with a loose texture and unapologetically pink from edge to edge. I actually don’t know how they cooked it: the surface of the patty was hidebound with a delicious crust, mailliard as fuck, but the interior was pink through and though, from edge to edge. This outrageous burger was topped with a melted skein of cheese, mixed greens, and a couple slices of confit tomatoes which, by the way, are far better than the limp watery tomatoes of winter. With it was a bale of crisp and salty frites, the salt crystals glittering like sodium sparkles or whatever. Strangely, there were no radishes. But you probably thought that my foreshadowing about radishes meant that the radishes would be trespassing into every dish we tried. After all, as Anton Chekhov famously said, if you talk about shitloads of radishes in the first paragraph, you better talk about shitloads of radishes in the second. Unfortunately, real life doesn't follow the rules of literature. If it did, I would've written a story about me finding $1,000,000,000 dollars by now.
A little dessert described as a “sweet bite” ($2) was basically a quarter round of ganache with a smear of raspberry coulis or jelly or something, and a couple tiny spheres of crunchy chocolate thingies of unknown origin.
Le Coin is a glimmering gem, a bright spot in our otherwise dim world. With the plague raging outside the antiseptic confines of our homes, many restaurants will go out of business. For fuck’s sake, don’t let Le Coin be one of them! Hopefully Ruth’s Chris, the steakhouse with the puzzling possessive proper noun, didn’t steal all the government cheese.
Rating: 8 Surly’s Gourmand reviews out of 10
Le Coin is located at 4201 Fremont Ave N
To order takeout call 206-708-7207 or email them at info@lecoinseattle.com (they require you to include your phone number in the email, so if you want to fuck with them you can place a gigantic order via a burner phone and then bail on it, but don’t do that because you’re an asshole if you do).
Le Coin, which means “the coin” in French, is a charming French restaurant located in the building that previously housed Roux, and before that, the legendary malignant dive bar of pre-gentrified Fremont, the Buckaroo.
I’m a sucker for classical French cuisine, though it’s difficult to come by in Seattle because everybody insists on northwesting it up, but fuck it: in this post apocalyptic wasteland in which we live, beggars can’t be choosers. After all, yesterday I fought a raccoon for a pizza crust and traded one of my kids for a Clorox Wipe. Not a container of Clorox wipes. A wipe.
So by these wretched standards of living, Le Coin, naturally, was a real treat.
A salad of leafy greens ($7) included a lush underbrush of the eponymous flora, along with a dusting of crushed walnuts, and radishes sliced razor thin into diaphanous discs that practically floated into my mouth. This salad was doused in a transparent vinaigrette, sharp as a saber. Atop the bushy bushes of salad was a drift of microplaned pecorino or some such cheese. This was a pretty well-composed salad, all things considered, but the radishes weren’t an ingredient; they were a literary device: foreshadowing.
Truffle potato cream soup ($9) was creamy and smooth with a not overwhelming truffle flavor, but the soup was speckled with suspicious black flecks: maybe it was pepper? buckshot, suitable for reloading the shotgun shells necessary to ward off marauders? spores that will turn you into a zombie if consumed? No sweat, brah; it was probably pieces of truffle. A swirl of bright green oil on top and a few herbs lightened the proceedings, but then, incongruously, there were radishes lurking beneath the surface. Why the fuck? The crunchy, spicy little submarine mines disrupted the silky pool of what was otherwise a delicious soup.
Cassoulet ($18) was super beany: under a crunchy blanket of bread crumbs was a slumbering menagerie of beans. There were like six kinds of beans in there: chickpeas, gigante beans, lima beans, flageolets, navy beans, I don’t fucking know. Every kind of bean was represented except red beans and, I suppose, jelly beans. Amid all these damn beans were big stubbed toes of braised pork shoulder and gigantic chunks of carrots and celery: if normal-sized carrots and celery are mirepoix, then these big motherfuckers qualify as maxipoix. For some reason, there were radishes in this dish too! Like seriously, guys: stop.
Why is Le Coin so horny for radishes? Maybe they bought a fuckton of radish futures which they were unable to unload before the stock market crashed, and now they’re stuck with them. Accompanying the cassoulet was a stack of sliced rustic bread, made with the same care and attention that a toothless grandma, who dropped out of third grade, wearing a kerchief tied around her head and a brown wool skirt, would bake on a Sunday for her religious freak family.
Le Coin Burger ($16) was A BIG FUCKING HAMBURGER, easily a quarter of a cow, as juicy as a sordid secret, with a loose texture and unapologetically pink from edge to edge. I actually don’t know how they cooked it: the surface of the patty was hidebound with a delicious crust, mailliard as fuck, but the interior was pink through and though, from edge to edge. This outrageous burger was topped with a melted skein of cheese, mixed greens, and a couple slices of confit tomatoes which, by the way, are far better than the limp watery tomatoes of winter. With it was a bale of crisp and salty frites, the salt crystals glittering like sodium sparkles or whatever. Strangely, there were no radishes. But you probably thought that my foreshadowing about radishes meant that the radishes would be trespassing into every dish we tried. After all, as Anton Chekhov famously said, if you talk about shitloads of radishes in the first paragraph, you better talk about shitloads of radishes in the second. Unfortunately, real life doesn't follow the rules of literature. If it did, I would've written a story about me finding $1,000,000,000 dollars by now.
A little dessert described as a “sweet bite” ($2) was basically a quarter round of ganache with a smear of raspberry coulis or jelly or something, and a couple tiny spheres of crunchy chocolate thingies of unknown origin.
Le Coin is a glimmering gem, a bright spot in our otherwise dim world. With the plague raging outside the antiseptic confines of our homes, many restaurants will go out of business. For fuck’s sake, don’t let Le Coin be one of them! Hopefully Ruth’s Chris, the steakhouse with the puzzling possessive proper noun, didn’t steal all the government cheese.
Rating: 8 Surly’s Gourmand reviews out of 10
Le Coin is located at 4201 Fremont Ave N
To order takeout call 206-708-7207 or email them at info@lecoinseattle.com (they require you to include your phone number in the email, so if you want to fuck with them you can place a gigantic order via a burner phone and then bail on it, but don’t do that because you’re an asshole if you do).
Sunday, April 05, 2020
Menu of the Plague Year: Homer
This bust of Homer (the famous Greek poet, not the Simpson) depicts a leatherfaced geezer with a big alcoholic nose and a helical cascade of whiskers, tightly coiled like the cord of an old touchtone. He looks like a guy who got trashed and saw something amazing, like an explosion or a nipple. However, historians debate whether or not Homer was even a real dude. Was The Iliad actually written by this wizened, curly-bearded bard, or is “Homer” just the personification of the literary tradition of drunk guys telling bullshit stories to each other? I hope my anecdote about the time I tried to put on an Indian condom has the staying power of The Odyssey.
Anyway, if somebody told you that there was a restaurant named Homer, what kind of food do you think it would serve? If it’s named after Homer the Simpson, then I’d say it would probably be an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. Or maybe a Krispy Kreme. But if it’s named after the legendary ancient rhymester then it’s probably Greek food.
And Greek is what Homer is. Sort of. It’s not weird Greek food like spinialo or deep fried octopus ink sacs. It’s not even mostly Greek. It’s more Mediterranean, really, but I needed some kind of intro to this and that’s the best I could come up with so fuck you.
Like every other restaurant trying to survive the plague, Homer is bravely offering takeout. After all, they can’t close shop because if they did all their employees would be unable to pay the rent and if Trump gets reelected every American will be required to stay at Mar-A-Lago once a year and literally actually kiss the ass of a bronze Trump statue located in every city in every state or you go to jail without trial or protein until you die shivering in a pool of your own vomit. We wanted to avoid that situation from coming to pass. So as patriotic Seattle citizens, we did our part to keep Homer afloat, and ordered a few things to try.
A cabbage salad ($10) featured bigass chunks of roasted cabbage, charred on the edges with a juicy center that melted like a crayon on a minivan dashboard in the sun. A diaspora of pepitas, pickled mustard seed, sesame seed, dates, apple slices wandered this culinary landscape.
The lamb stuffed pita ($11) was, and I say this without the slightest miniscule trace of hyperbole, that this was one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever eaten. A Persian rug of braised lamb shoulder was folded along with sliced fennel, a sweet and garlicky sauce, and lots of cilantro into a pita so fluffy it would float away into the sky with a gust of brisk spring wind. Prometheus, with his altruistic desire to enlighten mankind with the secret knowledge of how to make sandwiches, thought that the punishment, being chained to a cliff and having his liver nibbled by Dr. Hannibal Lector for eternity, was worth it to teach us mortals to become Sandwich Artists. Obviously, the mysterious founder of Homer restaurant was the first in line to be blessed with this skill, to create such a delicious sandwich.
A rack of lamb ribs ($17) which, by the way, a rack of lamb ribs is much smaller than you might think, was gamy and tender, with mint leaves, thinly sliced pears, and a speckle of pistachios.
Finally, an extremely silky and sweet hummus ($8) was topped with a crimson puddle of spiced oil with a couple chickpeas in the center. And if you want more of the aforementioned ultralight pita to dunk into this masterful hummus, a half dozen of them costs $6.
Nobody knows the true identity of the founder of Homer. And there is no way for us in the modern day to find out, because all the business licenses and tax forms and shit filed by Homer, were lost in the fire of the Library of Alexandria. Some say he was raised by a she-wolf and used her milk to ferment into feta. Some say he killed the Cretan Bull and ground its flesh into gyro meat. Still others say that he sowed a dragon’s teeth and after vanquishing the bronze eggplants that sprang up from the ground, he made them into a bitchin’ baba ghanoush.
We must look after one another in these times of pestilence. If you care about fine dining, throw your sourdough starter in the trash and go out to a struggling restaurant. Be a hero for humanity.
Rating: 8 hydra heads (one of them got cut off) out of 10
Homer is located at 3013 Beacon Avenue South.
Takeout can be ordered by calling (206) 785-6099 or through MobileBytes.
*In the spirit of Cinema Verite, I have to admit that I ate a bunch of edibles before I wrote this and that’s why there are so many non sequiturs and run on sentences. Sorry brah.
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
Menu of the Plague Year: Buddha Bruddah
Months ago I decided to start reviewing restaurants again, but then I didn’t: complacency settled into my lap like a curled up cat, warm and purring, and you don’t want to move for fear of making her leap annoyedly away.
But my procrastination was shattered by the arrival of the pestilence of our time: COVID-19, the coronavirus, the creeping death, whose appearance has heralded a massive blow for the service industry. Starting Monday March 16th, 2020, by emergency decree of Governor Inslee, every restaurant in Washington state has been closed for dining in.
This is a culinary apocalypse.
However, restaurateurs are resourceful. The emergency closure declared by the Governor includes a provision for restaurants to continue to offer takeout and delivery, even if the dining room must remain closed. So, like scrappy cockroaches, scuttling about the crater of the atomic bomb that failed to eradicate them, restaurant owners across the state have doggedly begun to do just that.
One such enterprising restaurant is Buddha Bruddah. I don’t have the bandwidth anymore to make fun of Buddha Bruddah’s dumb name, buuuutttt... maybe one jab: the AP style guide frowns on spelling a business’ name in dialect. So frustrating is the word “bruddah,” my spellcheck software committed suicide in protest, all the squiggly red lines inching across my laptop screen like a herd of caterpillars, to throw themselves, lemminglike, into the recycling bin on my desktop.
But is the food at Buddha Bruddah as bad as its name? Answer: no, not really.
Spicy Fried Chicken Wings were kinda sorta like a variation on Korean fried chicken. Bigass wings, which I actually think came from an eagle and not a lowly hen, were coated in a brittle panko breading, fried, and then splashed with a sweet and spicy sauce. The wings were speckled with finely chopped cilantro and studded with what I would call a confident amount of pepper flakes. The chicken meat was succulent. The spice level, despite the herpetic pepper minefield dotting the crust, was not as tastebud-obliterating as one might expect. However, the sauce was cloying, especially after eating 10 of them. I don’t actually know how much these cost because the menu says a 5-pack costs $8, so I guess 10 cost, I don’t know, $16?
Chicken katsu ($13) wasn’t bad. Once again, I question the species of bird that Buddha Bruddah refers to as “chicken,” because the breast they gave us was so enormous that even Christina Hendricks was scandalized. Seriously, it was a fucking ostrich breast, dusted in panko and fried. The coating was so thick and crunchy that it could cause tinnitus if you chomp down too hard, but sadly had trouble clinging to the slab of poultry below, instead sliding off of the meat to pile up in a humid sheaf on the plate. This was disappointing.
Included with the katsu was a double pile of rice that looked like tits, a scoop of macaroni salad, and a bale of slaw. Let me say this: I fucking loathe macaroni salad. Nobody wants a bunch of cold, flaccid pasta elbows drowned in a mayonnaise pool amid a stupid constellation of peas. Luckily this macaroni salad was nothing like that. The pasta was somehow al dente. The sauce clung unobtrusively to the macaroni, and was deceptively light, with a savory lift courtesy of celery seeds and cilantro. The slaw featured juliennes of (mostly) green and (rarely) red cabbage, lightly glistening with a crisp sesame vinaigrette of some kind. Circles of sliced scallion completed this grassy heap.
Phad Thai ($10) was a solid, generally middle-of-the-road effort. The usual tangle of rice noodles was stained a pleasant ochre by Thai dark soy sauce, flavorful enough. Not bad. You can instantly tell whether or not I’m going to be mad about an order of pad thai just by looking at it: if it's got enough tamarind paste to make all the noodles pink, then I’m going to complain. Phad thai should be beige, not pink. After all, Poor Richard’s Almanac has this to say: “If your phad thai is brown, then scarf it down; if your noodles be red, then off with its head.”
Finally, a whole chocolate cream pie ($30) was a creamy and soothing balm after the barrage of salt and sweet. When I opened the box I swooped my finger through the whipped cream topping and licked it off impudently and then shouted in outrage: the whipped scream wasn’t sweetened!
I eventually realized that they left the cream unsweetened on purpose: its blandness counterbalanced the stratus of chocolate filling beneath, a thick cocoa pudding more akin to ganache than mousse. Note: the preceding is the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written. Guarding the perimeter was a sweet and sandy graham cracker crust.
Buddha Bruddah is a hyperlocal neighborhood restaurant. And the food is interesting. That having been said, I wouldn’t bother to risk the zombie horde by driving all the way down to Rainier Valley unless you happen to be in the area. But if you live south of I-90, and you didn’t die of coronavirus, and you’re looking for something to pick up for dinner, you could certainly do worse than Buddha Bruddah. In fact, I’m so impressed by Buddha Bruddah’s inspiring tenacity, I’m going to start a Buddha Bruddha tribute band.
Called Sidhartha Sista.
Rating: 7 Steppenwolf Stepmoms out of 10
Buddha Brudda is located at 2201 Rainier Ave S. To order call 206-556-4134 or order on their website.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
A Trip to Los Angeles, Part One: Manuela
This is the first in a four-part series about places I ate in Los Angeles.
Manuela is located inside the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Los Angeles. I’m not much of an art critic. Some of the exhibits were fucking rad, like the cityscape made of cereal boxes or the futuristic chicken coop. Other things were fucking shitty, like the overturned antique armoire: that was all it was, a gigantic ornate armoire laying on the floor. That’s it. Some commentary on the fall of society or some such shit. Also, there was a video installation of a woman dry humping a column inside a museum; we watched it for a few minutes before the docent helpfully informed us that we could go because we’d seen the best part.
Anyway, the art was hit or miss, and bookstore inside Hauser-Wirth was similarly inconsistent. There were a couple preteen boys running around mocking things. I happened to be standing at the cash register, looking at a display of impulse items, when the boys ran up and started rifling through these flip books, the kind that make a little cartoon if you flip the pages fast enough.
The clerk was an archetypal Aging Art Chick: black Riot Grrl dress, a frizzy pyramid of brunette curls perched atop her head, severe bangs, American Traditional tattoos all over. The kids were flipping the flip books. I asked the clerk if it was okay for them to be doing that. “Yeah, it’s fine,” she replied. “But there are some naughty ones in there that I hope they don’t see.”
“Like what?” I asked, and she handed me one called the Stick Figure Kama Sutra, which when flipped depicted crude drawings fucking in every position.
“They’re not my kids,” I laughed, and called out to the ragazzi to come over. “Check this out!” And I showed them the Stick Figure Kama Sutra which, in retrospect, wasn’t creepy at all.
Outraged at the indecency flipping past them, the kids immediately began to riot, because that’s what kids do when they see porn, overturning spinning wire racks of Man Ray post cards and flinging all of the Jeff Koons books off the shelves. My friends and I made a hasty getaway while the clerk sighed and picked up the mess.
That kind of inappropriate troublemaking works up a mighty appetite, so we were looking for something to eat. Luckily, Manuela was next door.
We started with Devilled Eggs ($6). There were four devilled eggs, each topped with a creamy golden swirl of yolk and sprinkled with a spray of aleppo pepper flakes and a miniscule sprig of dill. The yolk was creamy and so smooth there was no way it hadn’t been forced through a chinoise, with a mellow luscious subwoofer and a mustardy tweeter. The only thing I didn’t like about these eggs was the fact that they sliced the eggs laterally instead of the typical longitudinal cut, and so the “bowl” of egg white on the bottom was the wide round end of the eggs. The more pointed end of the egg white appeared to be unused; what did they do with them? I posit that the line cooks stuck the pointy ends of the egg whites up their assholes, then downed shot after shot of hot sauce until they had ballistic diarrhea, and they sprayed the liquid egg white poop all over the floor, then they all did the centipede through the chunky wretched mire. Then they licked each other’s poopy t-shirts clean. The aristocrats!
Next up was a dish of blistered snap peas ($12), pleasantly charred, smoky, with little explosive fried bits of red quinoa which shattered in your mouth when chomped upon, ivory clouds of goat cheese, and more chili flake. Some sort of creamy vinaigrette lurked on the bottom.
We weren’t there to stuff our faces, because we had reservations at Craft (more on that in part three of this travelogue), so we wrapped things up with an order of cream biscuits ($10). Three of these biscuits came on a rustic wood block. I’m not going to waste words on my disdain of food served on a wooden slab, because I have funnier things to say later, but rest assured I consider it dumb. Along with the biscuits came a few delicious slices of salty country ham, the meat a glistening burgundy and streaked with translucent veins of fat. There was also an ENORMOUS mountain range of sweet cream butter. This was enough butter to moisturize an elephant; more butter than any human except Paula Deen could possibly eat. Even after we’d slathered our biscuits with like a four inch thick layer of butter, there was still approximately 17,000 metric tonnes of butter left, which we altruistically shipped to Somalia.
A word on these biscuits. They were as stratified as the fossil record, as flaky as a Tinder hookup, studded with salt. These biscuits were far superior to the petrified drop biscuits my mom makes. Hahaaaa, I said MY mom and not YOUR mom! What you thought was going to be a malicious barb directed at your family was ACTUALLY an autobiographical aside!
So sometimes when I was in college, I’d go back to my parents’ house for the weekend or whatever, to discover that my brother had invited all his friends over for a sleepover. After drinking all night, these fools would all be passed out on the floor like a bunch of walruses that reeked of stale Bud Light, Copenhagen, and night farts. Inevitably, my mom would dump pounds of Bisquick into a bowl and overmixed dozens of these priapic biscuits. Then she’d scramble up a dozen eggs, pockmarked unattractively with tablespoons of black pepper, and cooked until they would bounce off the floor if one rolled off of your plate.
I was hungry too, but this breakfast was a piece of shit, so after all of my brother’s dumbass friends had awaken and finished shoveling this sad breakfast into their hungover mouths, I’d sneak into the kitchen to make MY scrambled eggs.
Then usually my brother, always a late riser and an even LATER riser after a bottle of Jager, would saunter into the kitchen, clad in flip flops, cargo shorts, and an extra medium vintage tee, and see the golden pond of beaten egg I was gently coaxing into a buttery nimbus, and exclaim “DAAAMMNNN I want somma THOSE eggs.” Which of course I would give him some because I’m not mean.
The moral of the story is that I enjoyed the biscuits we ate at Manuela.
Manuela is a solid gem nestled in the bowels of the Hauser & Wirth. I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was, expecting instead a subpar tourist trap. Kudos, Manuela. You have earned this praise.
On our way out, we saw the Aging Art Chick, finished with her shift at the gift shop. She was dining at the bar with a dude I can only describe as Former New Wave Basquiat Aficionado. He had a grey shock of Dr. Strangelovian hair, those weird round cartoon glasses that Roger Stone wears, and one of those wide- necked red and white striped shirts which Picasso used to wear. On our way out I apologized for inciting the tween riot and bought them an order of devilled eggs. I certainly hope they ate the eggs instead of using them like suppositories. The aristocrats!
Rating: 7 aristocrats out of 10
Manuela is located at 907 E. 3rd St. in Los Angeles, CA, inside the Hauser & Wirth gallery complex. For reservations call 323-849-0480 or click here.
Manuela is located inside the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Los Angeles. I’m not much of an art critic. Some of the exhibits were fucking rad, like the cityscape made of cereal boxes or the futuristic chicken coop. Other things were fucking shitty, like the overturned antique armoire: that was all it was, a gigantic ornate armoire laying on the floor. That’s it. Some commentary on the fall of society or some such shit. Also, there was a video installation of a woman dry humping a column inside a museum; we watched it for a few minutes before the docent helpfully informed us that we could go because we’d seen the best part.
Anyway, the art was hit or miss, and bookstore inside Hauser-Wirth was similarly inconsistent. There were a couple preteen boys running around mocking things. I happened to be standing at the cash register, looking at a display of impulse items, when the boys ran up and started rifling through these flip books, the kind that make a little cartoon if you flip the pages fast enough.
The clerk was an archetypal Aging Art Chick: black Riot Grrl dress, a frizzy pyramid of brunette curls perched atop her head, severe bangs, American Traditional tattoos all over. The kids were flipping the flip books. I asked the clerk if it was okay for them to be doing that. “Yeah, it’s fine,” she replied. “But there are some naughty ones in there that I hope they don’t see.”
“Like what?” I asked, and she handed me one called the Stick Figure Kama Sutra, which when flipped depicted crude drawings fucking in every position.
“They’re not my kids,” I laughed, and called out to the ragazzi to come over. “Check this out!” And I showed them the Stick Figure Kama Sutra which, in retrospect, wasn’t creepy at all.
Outraged at the indecency flipping past them, the kids immediately began to riot, because that’s what kids do when they see porn, overturning spinning wire racks of Man Ray post cards and flinging all of the Jeff Koons books off the shelves. My friends and I made a hasty getaway while the clerk sighed and picked up the mess.
That kind of inappropriate troublemaking works up a mighty appetite, so we were looking for something to eat. Luckily, Manuela was next door.
We started with Devilled Eggs ($6). There were four devilled eggs, each topped with a creamy golden swirl of yolk and sprinkled with a spray of aleppo pepper flakes and a miniscule sprig of dill. The yolk was creamy and so smooth there was no way it hadn’t been forced through a chinoise, with a mellow luscious subwoofer and a mustardy tweeter. The only thing I didn’t like about these eggs was the fact that they sliced the eggs laterally instead of the typical longitudinal cut, and so the “bowl” of egg white on the bottom was the wide round end of the eggs. The more pointed end of the egg white appeared to be unused; what did they do with them? I posit that the line cooks stuck the pointy ends of the egg whites up their assholes, then downed shot after shot of hot sauce until they had ballistic diarrhea, and they sprayed the liquid egg white poop all over the floor, then they all did the centipede through the chunky wretched mire. Then they licked each other’s poopy t-shirts clean. The aristocrats!
Next up was a dish of blistered snap peas ($12), pleasantly charred, smoky, with little explosive fried bits of red quinoa which shattered in your mouth when chomped upon, ivory clouds of goat cheese, and more chili flake. Some sort of creamy vinaigrette lurked on the bottom.
We weren’t there to stuff our faces, because we had reservations at Craft (more on that in part three of this travelogue), so we wrapped things up with an order of cream biscuits ($10). Three of these biscuits came on a rustic wood block. I’m not going to waste words on my disdain of food served on a wooden slab, because I have funnier things to say later, but rest assured I consider it dumb. Along with the biscuits came a few delicious slices of salty country ham, the meat a glistening burgundy and streaked with translucent veins of fat. There was also an ENORMOUS mountain range of sweet cream butter. This was enough butter to moisturize an elephant; more butter than any human except Paula Deen could possibly eat. Even after we’d slathered our biscuits with like a four inch thick layer of butter, there was still approximately 17,000 metric tonnes of butter left, which we altruistically shipped to Somalia.
A word on these biscuits. They were as stratified as the fossil record, as flaky as a Tinder hookup, studded with salt. These biscuits were far superior to the petrified drop biscuits my mom makes. Hahaaaa, I said MY mom and not YOUR mom! What you thought was going to be a malicious barb directed at your family was ACTUALLY an autobiographical aside!
So sometimes when I was in college, I’d go back to my parents’ house for the weekend or whatever, to discover that my brother had invited all his friends over for a sleepover. After drinking all night, these fools would all be passed out on the floor like a bunch of walruses that reeked of stale Bud Light, Copenhagen, and night farts. Inevitably, my mom would dump pounds of Bisquick into a bowl and overmixed dozens of these priapic biscuits. Then she’d scramble up a dozen eggs, pockmarked unattractively with tablespoons of black pepper, and cooked until they would bounce off the floor if one rolled off of your plate.
I was hungry too, but this breakfast was a piece of shit, so after all of my brother’s dumbass friends had awaken and finished shoveling this sad breakfast into their hungover mouths, I’d sneak into the kitchen to make MY scrambled eggs.
Then usually my brother, always a late riser and an even LATER riser after a bottle of Jager, would saunter into the kitchen, clad in flip flops, cargo shorts, and an extra medium vintage tee, and see the golden pond of beaten egg I was gently coaxing into a buttery nimbus, and exclaim “DAAAMMNNN I want somma THOSE eggs.” Which of course I would give him some because I’m not mean.
The moral of the story is that I enjoyed the biscuits we ate at Manuela.
Manuela is a solid gem nestled in the bowels of the Hauser & Wirth. I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was, expecting instead a subpar tourist trap. Kudos, Manuela. You have earned this praise.
On our way out, we saw the Aging Art Chick, finished with her shift at the gift shop. She was dining at the bar with a dude I can only describe as Former New Wave Basquiat Aficionado. He had a grey shock of Dr. Strangelovian hair, those weird round cartoon glasses that Roger Stone wears, and one of those wide- necked red and white striped shirts which Picasso used to wear. On our way out I apologized for inciting the tween riot and bought them an order of devilled eggs. I certainly hope they ate the eggs instead of using them like suppositories. The aristocrats!
Rating: 7 aristocrats out of 10
Manuela is located at 907 E. 3rd St. in Los Angeles, CA, inside the Hauser & Wirth gallery complex. For reservations call 323-849-0480 or click here.
Thursday, December 29, 2016
New Luck Toy
You may be wondering where I’ve been for almost two years. Well keep wondering. Suffice to say I was busy with my ill-fated culinary zine Gastronomie D’Enfer, a literary abortion whose remains I interred in September. Back issues are still for sale here, however, so if you’re so inclined, do me a fucking favor and buy a copy already.
Anyway. Sometimes you get blog posts from navel-gazing shithead bloggers lamenting how hard it is to write. Those people are bullshit artists. Writing is easy as fuck. You know what’s difficult? SELLING SHIT. Selling is impossible for someone like me; someone with a grating personality who has difficulty concealing his boredom, and zero fucks to give. But even though I’m a failure as a publisher, it’s cool. After all, if you’re willing to embrace the dour, fatalistic notion that life is futile and likely will end in disappointment, then you’ll never be truly let down. Because only when one dwells in darkness does the light even make any sense.
So suffice to say I’ve been bummed. But sometimes, though, JUST ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, there comes a glimmer of hope that sets everything right with the world again and restores your faith in humankind. No, I’m not talking about something genuinely uplifting, like Bob Dylan, or a Fleshlight. I’m talking about New Luck Toy.
New Luck Toy is in West Seattle, in what used to be a really trashy Chinese restaurant that I would order from sometimes. The old placed closed and sat vacant for a while, but then the lease was miraculously scooped up by Ma’Ono Chicken & Whiskey owner Mark Fuller and restaurant designer Patric Gabre-Kidan. Given the pedigree of these two guys, I was scared that New Luck Toy was going to be too fancy, like they were going to fill the dumplings with foie gras, or put yuzu on everything. I don’t understand the fascination with yuzu; it tastes like what some blind guy thinks an orange looks like.
Luckily they didn’t do this. New Luck Toy wasn't the only lucky one: the trip to New Luck Toy was underwritten by my lovely and magnificently titted wife, who proposed the trip for my birthday dinner. And she, my friends, is a keeper: a sarcastic valkyrie with a clit that won't quit. We started with Spicy Shrimp & Pork Fat Dumplings. $9 got us a bowl of these dumplings, delicate wrappings as thin as a baby’s nutsack enclosing a rich and densely flavored shrimp meatball. The eponymous pork fat offered its silken texture to the shrimp filling, and these dumplings splashed playfully in a burnt sienna puddle of savory and spicy sauce. My complaint, of course, is that a snowdrift of minced cilantro sullied the proceedings here: cilantro is for Thai and Vietnamese food, ese.
Shiitake Pork Egg Rolls ($7) were pleasing in that they used flour wonton wrappers instead of rice paper. It seems that here in Seattle, rice paper egg roll wrappers prevail, but I fucking hate that shit because when fried it resembles a toilet paper roll that you had to hastily reroll after your child or cat unspooled the entire thing onto the floor. The shiitake pork egg rolls were pretty nice, with finely minced pork and a few shiitakes here and there and some sautéed cabbage and glass noodles to liven things up.
Chow fun mian ($10) was great: a big pile of wide rice noodles concealed bean sprouts, scallion, some basil chiffonade, and shiitakes, all dusted in a light spotting of sesame seeds. With a deep black sweet and salty splash of soy sauce, this dish was fucking packed like a rat full of glutamates, perfectly calibrated to fit right into the pleasure slot in your brain. And they did all of this without meat! If there were some pork belly in the chow fun, I think I might have moaned theatrically while eating this like a fucking Today Show host.
The punny title of the General Oh Tso Good Fried Chicken ($11) makes an utter mockery of this august dish. When I saw the stupid pun printed in the menu I almost rebelled, but fortunately I practiced mindfulness, and patience prevailed. I am grateful that I didn’t refuse to get the General Tso’s out of spite, because it was good as fuck: crunchy slabs of fried chicken thigh were glazed in an understated sauce which was sweet enough, spicy enough, and salty enough, but not too much of any of the three. Which, to me, is the problem: while New Luck Toy’s version is very tasty, it’s too classy. I EXPECT General Tso’s Chicken to be a fucking minstrel show. The sauce should punch your face. It should taste like you’re being fisted by a clown. But at least the chicken, with its midtone crunch like a Metallica riff and flesh as juicy as office water cooler gossip, was perhaps the most perfectly fried of any General Tso’s Chicken I’ve ever eaten. Then again, I’d expect no less from Fuller, the Crown Prince of Frying the Ever Living Shit out of Some Chicken.
We finished with the Rice Krispies Treat ice cream ($5), which is another classic Fullerism: a cup of glossy soft-serve, slick and glistening and fresh from the Pacojet, tasting of marshmallows and topped with a scattering of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, was a fittingly cloying end to a frustratingly even-keeled meal.
If there’s any missteps at New Luck Toy it’s that the flavors aren’t trashy ENOUGH: Fuller’s cheffy restraint keeps getting in the way of the orgy of flavor that truly trashy Americanized Chinese food should have. In perfect trashy Chinese food, your mouth is an offramp Quality Inn and the seasonings are a bunch of old guys waiting their turn to jack off onto your tongue. Traditional Chinese cuisine emphasizes the “doctrine of five flavors,” and while Americans have taken this concept, as Americans unfortunately too often do, to its logical extreme, the concept is still there: Americanized Chinese food is an exercise in culinary S&M that jizzes all over your tits with sugar and twists your nipples with salt, pisses on your head with white vinegar then stuffs Thai bird chilis up your ass and finally dumps you, the bitterness of star anise lingering in your mouth long after you’ve gotten hungry again. But it’s still a careful mix: the graphic equalizer has been properly set, it’s just that the volume is turned up way too loud. Only places like P.F. Chang’s or Panda Express, designed to appeal to Trump voters, discard the uncomfortable sour and bitter and spiciness, keeping only sweet and salty to appease a generation of fatasses for whom Hot Pockets is, to answer the question posed in that brand’s rhetorical tagline, what they’re gonna pick.
But I digress. New Luck Toy really is the most perfectly designed American Chinese food I’ve eaten in ages. The straight-ahead versions of these classic dishes are as lovingly covered as an Iron Maiden tribute band’s rendition of “Number of the Beast,” and while I for one could really use a plastic jello shot ramekin filled with neon pink sweet & sour sauce, it’s a minor quibble. New Luck Toy is the hero we need right now. A-fucking-men.
Rating: 9 Quality Inns out of 10
New Luck Toy is located at 5905 California Ave SW. They don’t take reservations, so don’t bother calling them. Just fucking go already, and take your chances with the wait like the rest of us.
Anyway. Sometimes you get blog posts from navel-gazing shithead bloggers lamenting how hard it is to write. Those people are bullshit artists. Writing is easy as fuck. You know what’s difficult? SELLING SHIT. Selling is impossible for someone like me; someone with a grating personality who has difficulty concealing his boredom, and zero fucks to give. But even though I’m a failure as a publisher, it’s cool. After all, if you’re willing to embrace the dour, fatalistic notion that life is futile and likely will end in disappointment, then you’ll never be truly let down. Because only when one dwells in darkness does the light even make any sense.
So suffice to say I’ve been bummed. But sometimes, though, JUST ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, there comes a glimmer of hope that sets everything right with the world again and restores your faith in humankind. No, I’m not talking about something genuinely uplifting, like Bob Dylan, or a Fleshlight. I’m talking about New Luck Toy.
New Luck Toy is in West Seattle, in what used to be a really trashy Chinese restaurant that I would order from sometimes. The old placed closed and sat vacant for a while, but then the lease was miraculously scooped up by Ma’Ono Chicken & Whiskey owner Mark Fuller and restaurant designer Patric Gabre-Kidan. Given the pedigree of these two guys, I was scared that New Luck Toy was going to be too fancy, like they were going to fill the dumplings with foie gras, or put yuzu on everything. I don’t understand the fascination with yuzu; it tastes like what some blind guy thinks an orange looks like.
Luckily they didn’t do this. New Luck Toy wasn't the only lucky one: the trip to New Luck Toy was underwritten by my lovely and magnificently titted wife, who proposed the trip for my birthday dinner. And she, my friends, is a keeper: a sarcastic valkyrie with a clit that won't quit. We started with Spicy Shrimp & Pork Fat Dumplings. $9 got us a bowl of these dumplings, delicate wrappings as thin as a baby’s nutsack enclosing a rich and densely flavored shrimp meatball. The eponymous pork fat offered its silken texture to the shrimp filling, and these dumplings splashed playfully in a burnt sienna puddle of savory and spicy sauce. My complaint, of course, is that a snowdrift of minced cilantro sullied the proceedings here: cilantro is for Thai and Vietnamese food, ese.
Shiitake Pork Egg Rolls ($7) were pleasing in that they used flour wonton wrappers instead of rice paper. It seems that here in Seattle, rice paper egg roll wrappers prevail, but I fucking hate that shit because when fried it resembles a toilet paper roll that you had to hastily reroll after your child or cat unspooled the entire thing onto the floor. The shiitake pork egg rolls were pretty nice, with finely minced pork and a few shiitakes here and there and some sautéed cabbage and glass noodles to liven things up.
Chow fun mian ($10) was great: a big pile of wide rice noodles concealed bean sprouts, scallion, some basil chiffonade, and shiitakes, all dusted in a light spotting of sesame seeds. With a deep black sweet and salty splash of soy sauce, this dish was fucking packed like a rat full of glutamates, perfectly calibrated to fit right into the pleasure slot in your brain. And they did all of this without meat! If there were some pork belly in the chow fun, I think I might have moaned theatrically while eating this like a fucking Today Show host.
The punny title of the General Oh Tso Good Fried Chicken ($11) makes an utter mockery of this august dish. When I saw the stupid pun printed in the menu I almost rebelled, but fortunately I practiced mindfulness, and patience prevailed. I am grateful that I didn’t refuse to get the General Tso’s out of spite, because it was good as fuck: crunchy slabs of fried chicken thigh were glazed in an understated sauce which was sweet enough, spicy enough, and salty enough, but not too much of any of the three. Which, to me, is the problem: while New Luck Toy’s version is very tasty, it’s too classy. I EXPECT General Tso’s Chicken to be a fucking minstrel show. The sauce should punch your face. It should taste like you’re being fisted by a clown. But at least the chicken, with its midtone crunch like a Metallica riff and flesh as juicy as office water cooler gossip, was perhaps the most perfectly fried of any General Tso’s Chicken I’ve ever eaten. Then again, I’d expect no less from Fuller, the Crown Prince of Frying the Ever Living Shit out of Some Chicken.
We finished with the Rice Krispies Treat ice cream ($5), which is another classic Fullerism: a cup of glossy soft-serve, slick and glistening and fresh from the Pacojet, tasting of marshmallows and topped with a scattering of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, was a fittingly cloying end to a frustratingly even-keeled meal.
If there’s any missteps at New Luck Toy it’s that the flavors aren’t trashy ENOUGH: Fuller’s cheffy restraint keeps getting in the way of the orgy of flavor that truly trashy Americanized Chinese food should have. In perfect trashy Chinese food, your mouth is an offramp Quality Inn and the seasonings are a bunch of old guys waiting their turn to jack off onto your tongue. Traditional Chinese cuisine emphasizes the “doctrine of five flavors,” and while Americans have taken this concept, as Americans unfortunately too often do, to its logical extreme, the concept is still there: Americanized Chinese food is an exercise in culinary S&M that jizzes all over your tits with sugar and twists your nipples with salt, pisses on your head with white vinegar then stuffs Thai bird chilis up your ass and finally dumps you, the bitterness of star anise lingering in your mouth long after you’ve gotten hungry again. But it’s still a careful mix: the graphic equalizer has been properly set, it’s just that the volume is turned up way too loud. Only places like P.F. Chang’s or Panda Express, designed to appeal to Trump voters, discard the uncomfortable sour and bitter and spiciness, keeping only sweet and salty to appease a generation of fatasses for whom Hot Pockets is, to answer the question posed in that brand’s rhetorical tagline, what they’re gonna pick.
But I digress. New Luck Toy really is the most perfectly designed American Chinese food I’ve eaten in ages. The straight-ahead versions of these classic dishes are as lovingly covered as an Iron Maiden tribute band’s rendition of “Number of the Beast,” and while I for one could really use a plastic jello shot ramekin filled with neon pink sweet & sour sauce, it’s a minor quibble. New Luck Toy is the hero we need right now. A-fucking-men.
Rating: 9 Quality Inns out of 10
New Luck Toy is located at 5905 California Ave SW. They don’t take reservations, so don’t bother calling them. Just fucking go already, and take your chances with the wait like the rest of us.
Monday, February 09, 2015
FedEx
Note: this is NOT a review of FedEx, nor is it about a restaurant named FedEx for some reason. In fact, it's not a review at all. So don't fucking read it if you're going to bitch.
Sincerely, Your Friend the Surly Motherfucking Gourmand
I got a call from FedEx, asking me to look into a claim a customer made about a shipment he didn't receive. Which is really fucking weird because I've never worked for FedEx in any capacity. But in the spirit of being a good Samaritan, I thought I'd try to help.
I was told to head out to the customer's house to meet the delivery driver who was supposed to have dropped off the missing shipment. The customer's residence was a rustic houseboat floating on an idyllic pond in the woods. It looked like a Bob Ross painting, with happy little trees and a meandering stream and the houseboat itself was lopsided. I parked my car, crossed the rickety pontoon bridge out to the boat, and knocked on the door.
A grizzled gold prospector answered the door.
"Hi, sir," I introduced myself. "I'm here on behalf of FedEx to investigate your missing shipment."
"Yeah," he grunted, "I ordered a 25 pound bag of Russet potatoes and they didn't deliver it. The tracking number said it was delivered but it definitely wasn't."
"Did FedEx give you a reason why it wasn't delivered?"
The old prospector gestured blandly towards the lake. "No, but I figure the guy tripped on the bridge and dropped it into the water. It's happened before."
I turned and went back out to the pontoon bridge. It really was a shitty bridge, with no hand rails, and some of the planks were missing. I peered down through one of the gaps and sure enough, I could barely make out a cardboard box, half rotten, a mossy Styrofoam corner poking through. The barely legible label of the box said “Pioneer.” Or “Pione,” rather, since the “er” had been faded off from years underwater.
“That was a DVD player I ordered. Guy tripped and dropped it right into the gap there.”
I turned to the prospector. “Have you ever considered fixing this bridge?”
“It’s not my problem if the delivery man can’t cross a damn bridge,” he sneered.
I glanced back down into the water, but I couldn’t see anything resembling a sack of potatoes. A mechanical rumble encroached on my reverie; I looked up just as a FedEx truck pulled into the clearing. The delivery driver had arrived.
I carefully traversed the dilapidated bridge and met the driver in the meadow on the shore of the pond. He was a tall skinny kid with a lank wave of tawny Justin Bieber hair, an extra medium black and purple FedEx shirt clinging to his skinny chest. “I’m Kevin,” he said.
“I’m sure you’ve been asked a million times by now, but what happened to the potatoes, Kevin?” I asked him.
He looked suddenly bashful. “You’ll never believe me,” he replied, “but an alien zapped it.”
“You are absolutely right. I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true!” Kevin insisted. He’d arrived at the prospector’s houseboat around five o’clock. The sun was getting low in the sky, though it wasn’t quite sunset. As he lugged the bag of potatoes out to the pontoon bridge he heard a rustling noise in the grass near his feet. The weeds parted and out stepped a small crimson man.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Kevin told me. “He was an orangey red, with greasy, wrinkled skin and beady eyes.”
“Was he gross or was he cute?” I asked.
“He looked like a gingerbread man made of meat or something.”
“Sounds like he looked more like a sun-dried tomato than a meaty cookie to me.” In truth I felt sorry for the alien: stranded millions of miles from home on this planet of giants, who keep trying to either crush him underfoot or toss him into a bowl of pasta, where he would bump uncomfortably against artichoke hearts before being chowed down upon by someone whose next stop after dinner would be a Yanni concert.
“I was so scared I dropped the sack and ran!” Kevin told me. “The potatoes almost fell on him.”
Kevin darted back to the truck where he watched in terror as the sun-dried tomato alien, who had jumped back to avoid the descending potato sack, aimed a Lilliputan death ray at the bag and fired a bright red beam, instantly obliterating the entire potato shipment. All that remained, Kevin insisted, was a pile of fine ash which quickly blew away. When the alien turned angrily toward Kevin and aimed the laser, the driver threw the truck into gear and tore off.
I had Kevin read and sign the statement of his account that I’d written, then he got into his truck and rumbled back down the road. I went out to the edge of the clearing. Cars were coming. Fancy cars: Ferraris, Mercedes Benzes, an Alfa Romeo. Each one turned onto a gravel drive that wound into the forest. What was going on here?
I hiked up the driveway, which went up into the hills. It was about a ten minute hike up the long and winding path, during which time another Alfa, a Maserati, and even a Lamborghini drove past. The occupants eyed me curiously as the cars went by.
Eventually I reached the end of the driveway. Hidden in the woods were a number of charming Tudor cabins with whitewashed stucco walls and dark beams framing stained glass windows. The fancy cars I’d seen going up the driveway were parked all over the front lawn. In the back was a larger building in the same Tudor style as the cabins. I could see people going inside, so I followed them.
This was a large banquet hall. Rows of tables were set up, though almost no one was sitting down. Most people were milling about, drinking red wine from highball glasses and laughing and talking. This was quite a party. “What are you DOING here?” a familiar voice accused me. I whirled around: it was my friend Drew, holding an almost empty wine glass.
“Holy fuck Drew!” I laughed. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“This is my family’s place. It’s a vacation compound. And it’s my party! I got married last month.” She pulled up a charmingly scruffy guy. “Let me introduce you to my new husband Jacob.” I shook hands with the groom as he grinned wildly.
“Great party,” I told Drew. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wedding; my gorilla costume was at the cleaners.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “But you’re here now so have a drink!”
“I can’t. I’m working.”
“Working for who?”
“For whom. And it’s FedEx. I’m investigating a claim of an undelivered shipment for them.”
“Is that what you do?” she asked. “That’s not what you do. You’re some kind of scientist.”
“You’re right. I’m just trying to help FedEx out.”
“Why would you help FedEx?”
“Good question.”
“Well stop helping them and start partying!” She downed the rest of her wine in one smooth gulp and barged past me, towing Jacob by the hand. “Come on! I’ll show you all the fucking delicious food we’re cooking.”
I followed Drew and Jacob into the banquet house’s kitchen. Two old women were rolling gnocchi, deftly flicking the little loaves of dough off the back of a fork with their thumbs, then tossing them onto floured sheet pans.
“That’s a LOT of gnocchi!” I was amazed: there had to be at least twenty sheet pans, lined up on a rolling rack, each one full of gnocchi.
“Yeah it is!” Drew said as she refilled her wine. “30 pounds! We’re having eighty people here! This is a real Italian party!”
“You’re Italian?”
“They don’t call me Drew Zandonella-Whatever for nothing. But look at this,” she directed me to a handsome young man stirring a giant cauldron of stew. “This is my cousin, Stefano Zandonella.”
Stefano turned to shake my hand. “What are you making?” I asked him. “It smells delicious.”
“Braised lamb shanks,” Stefano told me. We peered into the pot, where a big pile of lamb shanks swam in a rich brown broth. He grabbed one of the shanks with tongs, then tore off a small piece of the meat with a fork and handed it to me.
The lamb was tender and fragrant with spices “Wow! What’s in it?”
“Garlic, rosemary, red pepper flakes, a few chopped anchovies,” he said, his soft Italian accent blunting his vowels and rolling his r’s. “Braised in red wine. ” He pointed to the rack of gnocchi. “We’ll serve this over gnocchi.”
“That’s fucking great, Stefano,” I told him. “Thank you.”
Just then three drunk assholes barged into the kitchen. “Stefano, that shit smells AMAZE!” one of them yelled. He was a greasy New Jersey douchetard in a suit with no tie. With him were two other dbags, virtually indistinguishable from the first except one of them had an earring and one of them sported frosted tips. The three guidos crowded around the pot, pushing me and Stefano away as they rudely grabbed spoons and started slurping broth directly out of the pot.
“Hey!” Stefano objected.
“Get the FUCK out of here you bitches!” Drew raged at them, pulling them away from the pot one by one and shoving them out of the kitchen. “It’s my party! Jacob, get them out of here.”
Jacob escorted the unruly barbarians out of the kitchen. “Fuck you Drew!” frosted tips spat as they pinballed back into the party.
“Who were they?” I asked Drew.
“My cousins Tony Toni Tone.” She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “They’re mobbed up. I’m not even lying.”
“All three are Tony? Which one’s which?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. And besides, I guess there’s nothing to see here so I should get back to work. Thanks for the tour Drew!” I turned to Stefano. “Nice to meet you.”
I left the compound and walked slowly back down the winding driveway. What the actual fuck. How was I ever going to solve this mystery? I didn’t want to let FedEx down but I was super hungry. All I could think about was how delicious Stefano’s lamb stew tasted. I bet that would be fucking killer served over some of that gnocchi. Potato gnocchi.
I’d reached the bottom of the driveway. I was too lazy to go all the way back up to the compound so I fished my phone out of my pocket and called Drew.
“What’s up Surly?” she answered. “You forget something?”
“Yeah I’ve got a weird request.”
“You?” she laughed sarcastically. “Have a weird request? Never!”
“Yeah, yeah, you fucking comedian.”
“What do you want?”
“Where did Stefano get the potatoes for the gnocchi?”
“Hold on,” she replied. “I’ll go ask him but he’s still in the kitchen and I have to go back there.”
“Okay I’ll hold.”
I could hear the noise of the party as she wove through the crowd. She gave a periodic “Thank you!” and “I know! It’s so great!” to well-wishers as she made her way back to the kitchen.
“You know,” I told her, “You could have just called me back. Besides, who even answers their phone at a wedding party?”
“Your mom answers her phone,” she spat back.
“Your mom’s a lesbian,” I snarled.
“I know,” she laughed, and I could hear her nodding over the phone. “Both of them are.” Finally: “Here he is. Hold on,” she told me, “He’s making like a million gallons of gremolata. Hey Stefano,” she asked, her voice becoming echoey and distant as she held the receiver away from her mouth while she talked to her cousin. “Where’d you get the potatoes for the gnocchi?”
I couldn’t hear his reply over the kitchen din, but Drew seemed interested. “Oh really. That’s unusually generous of them.”
“Where’d he get them?” I asked her.
“From the Tonys!”
“I knew it! Thanks Drew.”
“No problem.”
“One more favor? Do you think you could get the Tonys to meet me down at the clearing in front of the prospector’s house?”
“No, but I’ll try.”
“Thanks again. Send them down here in 20 minutes.”
I hung up with Drew and made a few more phone calls. In a half hour this whole thing would be settled. I’d reached the pond, so I sat down on a stump in front of the prospector’s house boat to wait. It was sunny, at least, but it was completely still. The pond was as flat as a mirror. The trees didn’t move. It was quiet, except for an occasional creak as the rickety houseboat bobbed upon the water. The prospector’s truck wasn’t parked out front. I was completely alone out here. Suddenly I got spooked: what would happen if there really was an alien? What if he reappeared now, in this remote area? If he turned his wrinkled crimson sun-dried face toward me and pointed that mini death ray at me I’d have no choice to defend myself and chop him up and put him into an arugula and goat cheese salad with a balsamic vinaigrette.
I was starting to get scared when the FedEx truck finally rumbled into view. Kevin shut off the engine and jumped out of the cab. He sauntered over to me.
“Thanks for coming out here again, Kevin,” I told him. “I’m almost done with the investigation but I just have a few more questions.”
“No problem,” he answered.
“I’ll be direct: we know an alien didn’t vaporize the potatoes. You lied.”
Kevin’s face went pale.
“Why didn’t you just say you’d been robbed?”
Before he could answer, another car pulled into the clearing: a black Escalade. The Tony with frosted tips was driving. The Escalade stopped and the three Tonys jumped out, followed by Drew. They made a beeline over to us.
“Hey, thanks for coming down here guys,” I told the Tonys.
“Drew said you were going to smoke us out, so let’s go,” Tieless Tony told me.
“Oh Drew said that, did she?” I looked over to Drew, who shrugged. Luckily I did, in fact, have a bunch of weed on me. “First thing’s first,” I told Tony. “Do you know this guy?” I pointed to Kevin.
None of the Tonys gave any trace of acknowledgment to Kevin. “Nah, we don’t know him,” Tony said, but the FedEx driver turned completely ashen in fear. The implication was as clear as the pond behind us. “And he doesn’t know us. Right?”
Kevin nodded shakily. I dug in my jacket pocket and tossed Tony a bag of weed. “Thanks guys.” They turned wordlessly and went back to the Escalade.
“And thank you Drew,” I told her.
“No problem,” she replied. “Come up to the party whenever you’re done doing whatever the fuck it is you’re doing here.”
“I will!”
She joined the Tonys in the Cadillac and they drove off.
More cars were arriving: the cops. A police officer with wraparound Oakley sunglasses and a buzz cat ambled over to us. “What’s going on, fellas?” he sneered.
“Officer,” I started, waving to Kevin. “This gentleman would like to change his statement about an alien zapping his potato shipment. Isn’t that right Kevin?”
“Okay!” Kevin stammered. “I admit it. It wasn’t an alien. A leprechaun stole the potatoes!”
I facepalmed as the cop quizzically cuffed Kevin and led him away. The Tonys would never face the misdemeanor charge they so desperately deserved. Kevin, meanwhile, would go to jail for filing a false police report, and would pay the ULTIMATE PENALTY: 24 hours of community service and a $300 fine.
Another car was pulling up. It was a white stretch limo with the orange and purple FedEx logo painted on the sides and hood. The limo stopped and a chauffeur hopped out. He opened the limo’s back door and a distinguished gentleman in black and purple tuxedo tails emerged. The gentleman came out to me.
“Inspector Surly!” he greeted me in a rolling baritone, and extended his hand. “I’m Jackson Woodruff, Inspector General for the FedEx Corporation.” We shook hands. “I hear you’ve broken this case.”
“Well, yes and no Inspector General. Kevin admitted he lied, but he didn’t point out the Tonys as the potato thieves, so while we know that an alien didn’t in fact incinerate the spuds, we’ll probably never bring the real culprits to justice.”
Inspector General Woodruff adjusted his Pince-nez glasses and laughed. “That’s quite all right, Inspector Surly. As long as we can pin the loss on Kevin, our insurance company will gladly pay! Ho ! Ho! Ho!” he roared. “But do tell, how did you break the case?”
“It’s simple, really: when Stefano mentioned he was making 30 pounds of gnocchi, I did a quick calculation. A 30 pound yield of a typical gnocchi recipe would require about 25 pounds of potatoes and 5 pounds combined of flour, eggs, and microplaned parmigiano reggiano. And when Stefano said that the Tonys gave him the potatoes, it all clicked into place: who would be arrogant enough to steal $40 worth of potatoes, just because they could? The mafia, of course.”
Inspector General Woodruff contemplatively twirled his neatly trimmed handlebar mustache. “I see! Kevin feared violent reprisal from the mob, so he concocted a ludicrous story about his potato shipment being destroyed by a vengeful extraterrestrial!” “That’s pretty much it,” I told him.
The Inspector General slapped me on the shoulder. “Well done, my boy! Well done! Your tenacity and dedication set quite an example for our other inspectors! I’ll never regret hiring you!”
“About that: with all due respect, I don’t even work for FedEx.”
The Inspector General pulled off his Pince-nez and fixed me with a twinkling glance. “Perhaps the $15,000 bonus you’re due will refresh the memory of your employment with our firm!”
“A fifteen thousand dollar reward for solving the disappearance of a bag of potatoes?” I was incredulous. “I’ll take it, of course.”
Inspector General Woodruff laughed his uproarious laugh again. “Of course you will! Of course you will!”
Ultimately, I spent the fifteen grand on the world’s biggest white truffle: 18 ounces! I shaved it over a SHITLOAD of pasta. And eggs. And your mom.
Drew felt really bad about serving stolen food at her wedding celebration, so she brought all the leftover gnocchi—six pounds of it!—over to the prospector. Unfortunately, as she was walking up to his houseboat to deliver the pasta, she tripped on the bridge and dropped the bowl of gnocchi into the pond.
Kevin lost his job at FedEx and hanged himself.
THE END
Sincerely, Your Friend the Surly Motherfucking Gourmand
I got a call from FedEx, asking me to look into a claim a customer made about a shipment he didn't receive. Which is really fucking weird because I've never worked for FedEx in any capacity. But in the spirit of being a good Samaritan, I thought I'd try to help.
I was told to head out to the customer's house to meet the delivery driver who was supposed to have dropped off the missing shipment. The customer's residence was a rustic houseboat floating on an idyllic pond in the woods. It looked like a Bob Ross painting, with happy little trees and a meandering stream and the houseboat itself was lopsided. I parked my car, crossed the rickety pontoon bridge out to the boat, and knocked on the door.
A grizzled gold prospector answered the door.
"Hi, sir," I introduced myself. "I'm here on behalf of FedEx to investigate your missing shipment."
"Yeah," he grunted, "I ordered a 25 pound bag of Russet potatoes and they didn't deliver it. The tracking number said it was delivered but it definitely wasn't."
"Did FedEx give you a reason why it wasn't delivered?"
The old prospector gestured blandly towards the lake. "No, but I figure the guy tripped on the bridge and dropped it into the water. It's happened before."
I turned and went back out to the pontoon bridge. It really was a shitty bridge, with no hand rails, and some of the planks were missing. I peered down through one of the gaps and sure enough, I could barely make out a cardboard box, half rotten, a mossy Styrofoam corner poking through. The barely legible label of the box said “Pioneer.” Or “Pione,” rather, since the “er” had been faded off from years underwater.
“That was a DVD player I ordered. Guy tripped and dropped it right into the gap there.”
I turned to the prospector. “Have you ever considered fixing this bridge?”
“It’s not my problem if the delivery man can’t cross a damn bridge,” he sneered.
I glanced back down into the water, but I couldn’t see anything resembling a sack of potatoes. A mechanical rumble encroached on my reverie; I looked up just as a FedEx truck pulled into the clearing. The delivery driver had arrived.
I carefully traversed the dilapidated bridge and met the driver in the meadow on the shore of the pond. He was a tall skinny kid with a lank wave of tawny Justin Bieber hair, an extra medium black and purple FedEx shirt clinging to his skinny chest. “I’m Kevin,” he said.
“I’m sure you’ve been asked a million times by now, but what happened to the potatoes, Kevin?” I asked him.
He looked suddenly bashful. “You’ll never believe me,” he replied, “but an alien zapped it.”
“You are absolutely right. I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true!” Kevin insisted. He’d arrived at the prospector’s houseboat around five o’clock. The sun was getting low in the sky, though it wasn’t quite sunset. As he lugged the bag of potatoes out to the pontoon bridge he heard a rustling noise in the grass near his feet. The weeds parted and out stepped a small crimson man.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Kevin told me. “He was an orangey red, with greasy, wrinkled skin and beady eyes.”
“Was he gross or was he cute?” I asked.
“He looked like a gingerbread man made of meat or something.”
“Sounds like he looked more like a sun-dried tomato than a meaty cookie to me.” In truth I felt sorry for the alien: stranded millions of miles from home on this planet of giants, who keep trying to either crush him underfoot or toss him into a bowl of pasta, where he would bump uncomfortably against artichoke hearts before being chowed down upon by someone whose next stop after dinner would be a Yanni concert.
“I was so scared I dropped the sack and ran!” Kevin told me. “The potatoes almost fell on him.”
Kevin darted back to the truck where he watched in terror as the sun-dried tomato alien, who had jumped back to avoid the descending potato sack, aimed a Lilliputan death ray at the bag and fired a bright red beam, instantly obliterating the entire potato shipment. All that remained, Kevin insisted, was a pile of fine ash which quickly blew away. When the alien turned angrily toward Kevin and aimed the laser, the driver threw the truck into gear and tore off.
I had Kevin read and sign the statement of his account that I’d written, then he got into his truck and rumbled back down the road. I went out to the edge of the clearing. Cars were coming. Fancy cars: Ferraris, Mercedes Benzes, an Alfa Romeo. Each one turned onto a gravel drive that wound into the forest. What was going on here?
I hiked up the driveway, which went up into the hills. It was about a ten minute hike up the long and winding path, during which time another Alfa, a Maserati, and even a Lamborghini drove past. The occupants eyed me curiously as the cars went by.
Eventually I reached the end of the driveway. Hidden in the woods were a number of charming Tudor cabins with whitewashed stucco walls and dark beams framing stained glass windows. The fancy cars I’d seen going up the driveway were parked all over the front lawn. In the back was a larger building in the same Tudor style as the cabins. I could see people going inside, so I followed them.
This was a large banquet hall. Rows of tables were set up, though almost no one was sitting down. Most people were milling about, drinking red wine from highball glasses and laughing and talking. This was quite a party. “What are you DOING here?” a familiar voice accused me. I whirled around: it was my friend Drew, holding an almost empty wine glass.
“Holy fuck Drew!” I laughed. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“This is my family’s place. It’s a vacation compound. And it’s my party! I got married last month.” She pulled up a charmingly scruffy guy. “Let me introduce you to my new husband Jacob.” I shook hands with the groom as he grinned wildly.
“Great party,” I told Drew. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the wedding; my gorilla costume was at the cleaners.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “But you’re here now so have a drink!”
“I can’t. I’m working.”
“Working for who?”
“For whom. And it’s FedEx. I’m investigating a claim of an undelivered shipment for them.”
“Is that what you do?” she asked. “That’s not what you do. You’re some kind of scientist.”
“You’re right. I’m just trying to help FedEx out.”
“Why would you help FedEx?”
“Good question.”
“Well stop helping them and start partying!” She downed the rest of her wine in one smooth gulp and barged past me, towing Jacob by the hand. “Come on! I’ll show you all the fucking delicious food we’re cooking.”
I followed Drew and Jacob into the banquet house’s kitchen. Two old women were rolling gnocchi, deftly flicking the little loaves of dough off the back of a fork with their thumbs, then tossing them onto floured sheet pans.
“That’s a LOT of gnocchi!” I was amazed: there had to be at least twenty sheet pans, lined up on a rolling rack, each one full of gnocchi.
“Yeah it is!” Drew said as she refilled her wine. “30 pounds! We’re having eighty people here! This is a real Italian party!”
“You’re Italian?”
“They don’t call me Drew Zandonella-Whatever for nothing. But look at this,” she directed me to a handsome young man stirring a giant cauldron of stew. “This is my cousin, Stefano Zandonella.”
Stefano turned to shake my hand. “What are you making?” I asked him. “It smells delicious.”
“Braised lamb shanks,” Stefano told me. We peered into the pot, where a big pile of lamb shanks swam in a rich brown broth. He grabbed one of the shanks with tongs, then tore off a small piece of the meat with a fork and handed it to me.
The lamb was tender and fragrant with spices “Wow! What’s in it?”
“Garlic, rosemary, red pepper flakes, a few chopped anchovies,” he said, his soft Italian accent blunting his vowels and rolling his r’s. “Braised in red wine. ” He pointed to the rack of gnocchi. “We’ll serve this over gnocchi.”
“That’s fucking great, Stefano,” I told him. “Thank you.”
Just then three drunk assholes barged into the kitchen. “Stefano, that shit smells AMAZE!” one of them yelled. He was a greasy New Jersey douchetard in a suit with no tie. With him were two other dbags, virtually indistinguishable from the first except one of them had an earring and one of them sported frosted tips. The three guidos crowded around the pot, pushing me and Stefano away as they rudely grabbed spoons and started slurping broth directly out of the pot.
“Hey!” Stefano objected.
“Get the FUCK out of here you bitches!” Drew raged at them, pulling them away from the pot one by one and shoving them out of the kitchen. “It’s my party! Jacob, get them out of here.”
Jacob escorted the unruly barbarians out of the kitchen. “Fuck you Drew!” frosted tips spat as they pinballed back into the party.
“Who were they?” I asked Drew.
“My cousins Tony Toni Tone.” She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “They’re mobbed up. I’m not even lying.”
“All three are Tony? Which one’s which?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. And besides, I guess there’s nothing to see here so I should get back to work. Thanks for the tour Drew!” I turned to Stefano. “Nice to meet you.”
I left the compound and walked slowly back down the winding driveway. What the actual fuck. How was I ever going to solve this mystery? I didn’t want to let FedEx down but I was super hungry. All I could think about was how delicious Stefano’s lamb stew tasted. I bet that would be fucking killer served over some of that gnocchi. Potato gnocchi.
I’d reached the bottom of the driveway. I was too lazy to go all the way back up to the compound so I fished my phone out of my pocket and called Drew.
“What’s up Surly?” she answered. “You forget something?”
“Yeah I’ve got a weird request.”
“You?” she laughed sarcastically. “Have a weird request? Never!”
“Yeah, yeah, you fucking comedian.”
“What do you want?”
“Where did Stefano get the potatoes for the gnocchi?”
“Hold on,” she replied. “I’ll go ask him but he’s still in the kitchen and I have to go back there.”
“Okay I’ll hold.”
I could hear the noise of the party as she wove through the crowd. She gave a periodic “Thank you!” and “I know! It’s so great!” to well-wishers as she made her way back to the kitchen.
“You know,” I told her, “You could have just called me back. Besides, who even answers their phone at a wedding party?”
“Your mom answers her phone,” she spat back.
“Your mom’s a lesbian,” I snarled.
“I know,” she laughed, and I could hear her nodding over the phone. “Both of them are.” Finally: “Here he is. Hold on,” she told me, “He’s making like a million gallons of gremolata. Hey Stefano,” she asked, her voice becoming echoey and distant as she held the receiver away from her mouth while she talked to her cousin. “Where’d you get the potatoes for the gnocchi?”
I couldn’t hear his reply over the kitchen din, but Drew seemed interested. “Oh really. That’s unusually generous of them.”
“Where’d he get them?” I asked her.
“From the Tonys!”
“I knew it! Thanks Drew.”
“No problem.”
“One more favor? Do you think you could get the Tonys to meet me down at the clearing in front of the prospector’s house?”
“No, but I’ll try.”
“Thanks again. Send them down here in 20 minutes.”
I hung up with Drew and made a few more phone calls. In a half hour this whole thing would be settled. I’d reached the pond, so I sat down on a stump in front of the prospector’s house boat to wait. It was sunny, at least, but it was completely still. The pond was as flat as a mirror. The trees didn’t move. It was quiet, except for an occasional creak as the rickety houseboat bobbed upon the water. The prospector’s truck wasn’t parked out front. I was completely alone out here. Suddenly I got spooked: what would happen if there really was an alien? What if he reappeared now, in this remote area? If he turned his wrinkled crimson sun-dried face toward me and pointed that mini death ray at me I’d have no choice to defend myself and chop him up and put him into an arugula and goat cheese salad with a balsamic vinaigrette.
I was starting to get scared when the FedEx truck finally rumbled into view. Kevin shut off the engine and jumped out of the cab. He sauntered over to me.
“Thanks for coming out here again, Kevin,” I told him. “I’m almost done with the investigation but I just have a few more questions.”
“No problem,” he answered.
“I’ll be direct: we know an alien didn’t vaporize the potatoes. You lied.”
Kevin’s face went pale.
“Why didn’t you just say you’d been robbed?”
Before he could answer, another car pulled into the clearing: a black Escalade. The Tony with frosted tips was driving. The Escalade stopped and the three Tonys jumped out, followed by Drew. They made a beeline over to us.
“Hey, thanks for coming down here guys,” I told the Tonys.
“Drew said you were going to smoke us out, so let’s go,” Tieless Tony told me.
“Oh Drew said that, did she?” I looked over to Drew, who shrugged. Luckily I did, in fact, have a bunch of weed on me. “First thing’s first,” I told Tony. “Do you know this guy?” I pointed to Kevin.
None of the Tonys gave any trace of acknowledgment to Kevin. “Nah, we don’t know him,” Tony said, but the FedEx driver turned completely ashen in fear. The implication was as clear as the pond behind us. “And he doesn’t know us. Right?”
Kevin nodded shakily. I dug in my jacket pocket and tossed Tony a bag of weed. “Thanks guys.” They turned wordlessly and went back to the Escalade.
“And thank you Drew,” I told her.
“No problem,” she replied. “Come up to the party whenever you’re done doing whatever the fuck it is you’re doing here.”
“I will!”
She joined the Tonys in the Cadillac and they drove off.
More cars were arriving: the cops. A police officer with wraparound Oakley sunglasses and a buzz cat ambled over to us. “What’s going on, fellas?” he sneered.
“Officer,” I started, waving to Kevin. “This gentleman would like to change his statement about an alien zapping his potato shipment. Isn’t that right Kevin?”
“Okay!” Kevin stammered. “I admit it. It wasn’t an alien. A leprechaun stole the potatoes!”
I facepalmed as the cop quizzically cuffed Kevin and led him away. The Tonys would never face the misdemeanor charge they so desperately deserved. Kevin, meanwhile, would go to jail for filing a false police report, and would pay the ULTIMATE PENALTY: 24 hours of community service and a $300 fine.
Another car was pulling up. It was a white stretch limo with the orange and purple FedEx logo painted on the sides and hood. The limo stopped and a chauffeur hopped out. He opened the limo’s back door and a distinguished gentleman in black and purple tuxedo tails emerged. The gentleman came out to me.
“Inspector Surly!” he greeted me in a rolling baritone, and extended his hand. “I’m Jackson Woodruff, Inspector General for the FedEx Corporation.” We shook hands. “I hear you’ve broken this case.”
“Well, yes and no Inspector General. Kevin admitted he lied, but he didn’t point out the Tonys as the potato thieves, so while we know that an alien didn’t in fact incinerate the spuds, we’ll probably never bring the real culprits to justice.”
Inspector General Woodruff adjusted his Pince-nez glasses and laughed. “That’s quite all right, Inspector Surly. As long as we can pin the loss on Kevin, our insurance company will gladly pay! Ho ! Ho! Ho!” he roared. “But do tell, how did you break the case?”
“It’s simple, really: when Stefano mentioned he was making 30 pounds of gnocchi, I did a quick calculation. A 30 pound yield of a typical gnocchi recipe would require about 25 pounds of potatoes and 5 pounds combined of flour, eggs, and microplaned parmigiano reggiano. And when Stefano said that the Tonys gave him the potatoes, it all clicked into place: who would be arrogant enough to steal $40 worth of potatoes, just because they could? The mafia, of course.”
Inspector General Woodruff contemplatively twirled his neatly trimmed handlebar mustache. “I see! Kevin feared violent reprisal from the mob, so he concocted a ludicrous story about his potato shipment being destroyed by a vengeful extraterrestrial!” “That’s pretty much it,” I told him.
The Inspector General slapped me on the shoulder. “Well done, my boy! Well done! Your tenacity and dedication set quite an example for our other inspectors! I’ll never regret hiring you!”
“About that: with all due respect, I don’t even work for FedEx.”
The Inspector General pulled off his Pince-nez and fixed me with a twinkling glance. “Perhaps the $15,000 bonus you’re due will refresh the memory of your employment with our firm!”
“A fifteen thousand dollar reward for solving the disappearance of a bag of potatoes?” I was incredulous. “I’ll take it, of course.”
Inspector General Woodruff laughed his uproarious laugh again. “Of course you will! Of course you will!”
Ultimately, I spent the fifteen grand on the world’s biggest white truffle: 18 ounces! I shaved it over a SHITLOAD of pasta. And eggs. And your mom.
Drew felt really bad about serving stolen food at her wedding celebration, so she brought all the leftover gnocchi—six pounds of it!—over to the prospector. Unfortunately, as she was walking up to his houseboat to deliver the pasta, she tripped on the bridge and dropped the bowl of gnocchi into the pond.
Kevin lost his job at FedEx and hanged himself.
THE END
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Meat and Bread
Sandwiches are sandwiches, but of course some are better than others. At the shitty end of the spectrum is, as you might imagine, Subway. I hate Subway. I can’t stand the weird toppings, as if anyone really wants canned black olives on a sandwich, and I hate Jared and his weird smirking fish face, and I hate the bread that smells like elementary school cafeteria bread, and I hate how fucking cheap those dickwads are, suspiciously dispensing ONE FUCKING NAPKIN to you with your sandwich purchase, as if the profit-and-loss statement of a Subway franchise rests solely on the price of paper. Then again, you know what they say about sandwiches: like a night with your mom, if you only need one napkin afterwards, it wasn’t worth it anyway.
Subway’s sandwiches are most assuredly NOT as sloppy as your mom. Subway’s legendary stinginess isn’t restricted solely to its ungenerous napkin policy: the ham is sliced seemingly by laser into paper-thin sheaves precisely one pig muscle cell thick. You might think that thinly sliced meat isn’t a bad thing: thinly sliced meat is a hallmark of a great sandwich, because no one wants a big thick slab of pork leg, looking pink and sweaty and strangely iridescent, protruding obscenely from the side of one’s sandwich. But thin slices only work if you put MORE THAN ONE FUCKING PIECE OF HAM ON THE FUCKING BREAD. And that, of course, is exactly what Subway’s cheapskate corporate overlords order their sad minimum-wagers to do: one transparent, surgically dissected slice of ham on an enormous loaf of bread that’s way too yeasty smelling for its own good.
At the OTHER end of the sandwich shop continuum, however: is Vancouver’s Meat and Bread. As the name might indicate, it’s a minimalist sandwich shop, though the minimalism applies pretty much only to the décor. Napkins are always abundant and free, and good thing, too: these sandwiches are sloppy as fuck.
A meatball sub ($9, and all prices here are listed in Canadian dollars. Because it’s Canadia, remember?) featured the kind of meatballs that everybody claims their Italian grandmother makes but nobody’s actually does. And I know: my grandmother was Sicilian and her meatballs were a study in granular globes of ground beef, cooked into desiccated golf balls, and splashed in a crimson Ragu bloodbath. But the meatballs on this sandwich were intense: silken and luscious inside, they were more like spherical terrines. Seriously, these meatballs were so delicious I wish I could cut open my scrotum and replace my testicles with these meatballs. Then I would finally be a real man. The meatballs were doused in an unapologetically spicy marinara and topped with a few melted shreds of grana. The menu promised gremolata but I think they were lying.
The most vaunted sandwich on Meat and Bread’s menu is the porchetta ($9). When the chick working at the counter told us it was their most popular sandwich, she wasn’t lying: there were only two of these left to purchase, but I resisted the impish urge to buy both. I’m actually glad I didn’t because the porchetta was a bit of a letdown. I expected the pork to be unctuous and intensely seasoned, like any good porchetta, but it was actually dry and bland, though the fennel seed flavor was at least apparent. Rather than slice the porchetta into thin sheets, so that each sandwich becomes a dense pile of meaty pinwheels suitable for Prince Meatyass, they instead chose to dice the porchetta into a porky gravel pile. The skin was crisp. Finely diced and tossed in with the meat, it was like a crouton of sorts. The salsa verde was a dizzying, lush green and had just enough acid.
The special of the day was a roast beef sandwich ($9.5). While it was more of a shredded pot roast than a proper English roast beef, I’ll forgive them because they’re Canadian and since they can’t even get bacon right, how could they possibly master roast beef? Still, the “roast beef” was superb. The meat was as tender as a child cuddling a puppy, and it was studded with a lot of black pepper. A little bird’s nest of red cabbage slaw contributed the requisite crunch. And a smear of shallot jam managed to walk the edge, like a snail crawling across a razor blade, between sweet and savory. This sandwich was a master’s thesis in sandwichology. The bread itself, curiously, was the same across the board for all the sandwiches: small neat rectangular loaves with an open, bubbly crumb, sort of like mini ciabatta, but not quite.
Meat and Bread is solid as fuck. We were befuddled by the fancy Canadian credit card reader which taunts you with a fake rail on the side of it, along which you think you must slide your card, but SURPRISE STUPID AMERICAN! you have to stick your card into the bottom of the thingy. The waitress noticed our card reader confusion, then asked if we were from the USA. When we admitted that yes, we were visiting from Seattle, she cheerfully informed me that Meat and Bread is coming to Capitol Hill’s Central Agency Building in March. Finally, Canada is paying us back for inflicting the Crash Test Dummies and Mike Myers and ketchup flavored potato chips upon America. U! S! A! U! S! A!
Rating: 8.5 Canadian dollars out of 10
Meat and Bread is located in Canada. Unless you are planning to go to Canada, you don’t need to know the address.
Subway’s sandwiches are most assuredly NOT as sloppy as your mom. Subway’s legendary stinginess isn’t restricted solely to its ungenerous napkin policy: the ham is sliced seemingly by laser into paper-thin sheaves precisely one pig muscle cell thick. You might think that thinly sliced meat isn’t a bad thing: thinly sliced meat is a hallmark of a great sandwich, because no one wants a big thick slab of pork leg, looking pink and sweaty and strangely iridescent, protruding obscenely from the side of one’s sandwich. But thin slices only work if you put MORE THAN ONE FUCKING PIECE OF HAM ON THE FUCKING BREAD. And that, of course, is exactly what Subway’s cheapskate corporate overlords order their sad minimum-wagers to do: one transparent, surgically dissected slice of ham on an enormous loaf of bread that’s way too yeasty smelling for its own good.
At the OTHER end of the sandwich shop continuum, however: is Vancouver’s Meat and Bread. As the name might indicate, it’s a minimalist sandwich shop, though the minimalism applies pretty much only to the décor. Napkins are always abundant and free, and good thing, too: these sandwiches are sloppy as fuck.
A meatball sub ($9, and all prices here are listed in Canadian dollars. Because it’s Canadia, remember?) featured the kind of meatballs that everybody claims their Italian grandmother makes but nobody’s actually does. And I know: my grandmother was Sicilian and her meatballs were a study in granular globes of ground beef, cooked into desiccated golf balls, and splashed in a crimson Ragu bloodbath. But the meatballs on this sandwich were intense: silken and luscious inside, they were more like spherical terrines. Seriously, these meatballs were so delicious I wish I could cut open my scrotum and replace my testicles with these meatballs. Then I would finally be a real man. The meatballs were doused in an unapologetically spicy marinara and topped with a few melted shreds of grana. The menu promised gremolata but I think they were lying.
The most vaunted sandwich on Meat and Bread’s menu is the porchetta ($9). When the chick working at the counter told us it was their most popular sandwich, she wasn’t lying: there were only two of these left to purchase, but I resisted the impish urge to buy both. I’m actually glad I didn’t because the porchetta was a bit of a letdown. I expected the pork to be unctuous and intensely seasoned, like any good porchetta, but it was actually dry and bland, though the fennel seed flavor was at least apparent. Rather than slice the porchetta into thin sheets, so that each sandwich becomes a dense pile of meaty pinwheels suitable for Prince Meatyass, they instead chose to dice the porchetta into a porky gravel pile. The skin was crisp. Finely diced and tossed in with the meat, it was like a crouton of sorts. The salsa verde was a dizzying, lush green and had just enough acid.
The special of the day was a roast beef sandwich ($9.5). While it was more of a shredded pot roast than a proper English roast beef, I’ll forgive them because they’re Canadian and since they can’t even get bacon right, how could they possibly master roast beef? Still, the “roast beef” was superb. The meat was as tender as a child cuddling a puppy, and it was studded with a lot of black pepper. A little bird’s nest of red cabbage slaw contributed the requisite crunch. And a smear of shallot jam managed to walk the edge, like a snail crawling across a razor blade, between sweet and savory. This sandwich was a master’s thesis in sandwichology. The bread itself, curiously, was the same across the board for all the sandwiches: small neat rectangular loaves with an open, bubbly crumb, sort of like mini ciabatta, but not quite.
Meat and Bread is solid as fuck. We were befuddled by the fancy Canadian credit card reader which taunts you with a fake rail on the side of it, along which you think you must slide your card, but SURPRISE STUPID AMERICAN! you have to stick your card into the bottom of the thingy. The waitress noticed our card reader confusion, then asked if we were from the USA. When we admitted that yes, we were visiting from Seattle, she cheerfully informed me that Meat and Bread is coming to Capitol Hill’s Central Agency Building in March. Finally, Canada is paying us back for inflicting the Crash Test Dummies and Mike Myers and ketchup flavored potato chips upon America. U! S! A! U! S! A!
Rating: 8.5 Canadian dollars out of 10
Meat and Bread is located in Canada. Unless you are planning to go to Canada, you don’t need to know the address.
Friday, January 09, 2015
Tallulah's
I have two major problems with Tallulah’s, the first one being that the mid-century décor in no way matches the menu. It seems like they put a lot of effort in giving the dining room the feel of a suburban 1970’s ranch house, though noticeably missing was shag carpeting, and I also sincerely doubt that the wait staff are sporting the requisite, period appropriate, giant teddy bear tumbleweed pubes. One would logically expect the menu to feature classic midcentury dishes like gelatin salads, Steak Diane, Crepes Suzette, or Baked Alaska, and a bar menu that includes Harvey Wallbangers, Grasshoppers, and Pink Squirrels. People love Mad Men shit; mostly because everyone loves the idea of getting shitfaced at work and fucking a secretary, so why not capitalize on it?
But of course the menu is nothing like that: instead, it’s a very Matt Dillonesque flirtation with middle eastern flavors, with shit like walnut muhammara ($5) and red pepper hummus ($5) and grilled halloumi cheese with grapefruit and fennel ($12). We skipped that stuff because we’d just eaten at London Plane and everyone bitched at me about it.
Instead we started with baby beets and goat yogurt ($6). A motley collection of red, yellow, and pink beets, plated awkwardly, root side up, so that it looked like the minarets of the Kremlin, only made of beets. There was a tangy slick of yogurt beneath these. Despite the strange presentation, the beets were sweet and seasoned well, soft and crimson like an infant’s still-beating heart; the yogurt efficiently cock blocked the beets’ almost cloying sweetness.
A pick from the happy hour menu, grilled chicken wings with harissa ($6) was a pretty good deal, because for this price we got six chicken wings, grilled and tossed in a spicy harissa marinade. These were mostly good, but the “drumette” part of the wing, AKA the chicken’s bicep, was missing, with only the “forearm” part of the wing and the wing tips served. Plus, the skin was flabby and swayed loosely in the breeze like your mom’s upper arm, but on the other hand the meat was succulent like your mom at a Michael Buble concert, and the sauce had a defiant backbone of sour and spicy harissa paste. The wings were definitely not a slam dunk, though they weren’t terrible: let’s call this one a push.
Brussels sprouts with apples and hazelnuts ($6) were okay. The sprouts were halved and obviously pan roasted, caramelized as fuck on the cut surfaces, and the apples and hazelnuts were great textural additions, but in general the sprouts had that farty smell lingering about them, like brussels sprouts you were force fed by your mom as a kid. Now, however, the tables are turned: I force your mom to eat things all the time, and I assure you it’s not brussels sprouts.
A wild mushroom, chevre, and aged sherry vinegar flatbread ($11) was generally tasty, with a bubbly crust and lots and lots of sautéed mushrooms on top, but chevre always pisses me off: it’s just one rung above cottage cheese in the bland fucking boring cheese hierarchy. If you want to use goat cheese, how about one with some balls, like goat’s milk feta or a bleu goat cheese.
Lamb burger with zucchini, harissa, and fries ($14), on the other hand, was masterful: a succulent patty of ground lamb was seared ruthlessly on the outside, while still remaining a confident medium rare inside. This was topped with a mandolined ribbon of zucchini, which was as unlikely a condiment as it was tasty, serving as a cooling counterpoint to the harissa, once again used with restraint. The fries were quite salty, but not in a bad way, and very crisp.
We didn’t get dessert, which brings me to the SECOND problem I had with Tallulah’s: the bartender, hereafter referred to as Oblivia Wilde, fucking sucked. We sat at the bar to eat, and it was like an act of Congress to get the chick to get us a drink.
And when she eventually DID bring our drinks, they sucked. The house made rootbeer ($5) was fucking gross as fuck. It was a cloudy and opaque brown, like they used too much sarsaparilla, or birch, or something. The classic flavors of wintergreen and vanilla were sadly lacking, and it was bitter, and so grainy it actually clogged the straw when I tried to sip it!
I was sad like a kid whose ice cream fell on the ground when I drank this stuff. I mean, COME THE FUCK ON: I realize that this is probably how root beer was made back in the cowboy days but one of the benefits of living in the modern day is that technology improves things. For instance, there were no left and right shoes until about 1800. Doctors once prescribed mercury, a highly toxic metal, to (unsuccessfully) treat syphilis. And anyone who’s ever had a 2400bps modem knows that downloading porn in those days was an exercise in futility which could drive even the Dalai Lama to paroxysms of rage.So thank fucking god modern rootbeer like Virgil's or Thomas Kemper's doesn't taste like storm drain runoff.
I really couldn’t understand what was going on. It wasn’t like we were drinking pain in the ass drinks like a pousse café or a mojito or a homonculus. We were having whiskey and champagne for fuck’s sake. All Oblivia Wilde had to do was POUR the damn stuff. But that was apparently too demanding a task, so instead of getting dessert and drinking until I was channeling Peter O’Toole, we went elsewhere. Too bad, Tallulah’s!
Tallulah’s isn’t bad, just maddening. The food is actually pretty tasty, with a focus on interesting vegetable dishes and bold flavors that still manage to show chivalrous restraint. But it just doesn’t sync with the décor. The food should scream STAGFLATION! or GAS SHORTAGES! or even, god forbid, BRADY BUNCH! But sadly it doesn’t. And if you do decide to go to Tallulah’s, for fuck’s sake, just drink water.
Rating: 6.5 shortages out of 10
Tallulah’s is located at 550 19th Ave E
For reservations (parties of 6 or more) call 206-860-0077
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Damn the Weather
I’m pretty much done with craft bartending. If I walk into a bar like the Diller Room or Tavern Law or the Hideout, and the bartender is wearing a vest and an arm garter and a monocle, top hat, a cane, a watch fob, a cape, riding boots, driving gloves, a monkey on his shoulder, a codpiece, and a scarf, I sigh sadly and resign myself to waiting at least 20 minutes to get my drink as the august apothecary of intoxication gradually mixes some $16 concoction which doubtlessly contains house-made bitters. I thought bitters only came in two flavors: Angostura and Peychaud. Apparently I’m a provincial rube who doesn’t realize that bitters come in every flavor including mirepoix, gummy bear, and your mom.
It’s even worse if the bartender has a mustache. I really, seriously, do not get how mustaches got lumped in with precious, asexual hipster bullshit. After all, men with waxed mustaches are hard men, like John L. Sullivan or Theodore Roosevelt or Otto von Bismarck: men who are much more likely to strangle lions to death and have tertiary syphilis and unify empires and bust trusts than they are to wear a cardigan and listen to Mumford & Sons.
So it was with great trepidation that I entered Damn the Weather. With its oddly specific name and fancy cocktail list and giant ice cubes, I expected a maddening descent into twee mayhem. But the food menu seemed interesting so we decided to press our luck.
We started with chicken fat fries ($8). These are pretty much like regular fries, but with a savory undercurrent. Unlike French fries fried in suet or duck fat, chicken fat doesn’t swing its dick around (or cloaca, rather), but you just can’t get this kind of flavor from frying in any kind of vegetable oil. The chicken fat fries were crisp shoestrings and they came in a cone of wax paper nestled in a parfait glass. The presentation was too precious for my taste: I’m bored with frites served in a cone. If you want to impress me, send out your French fries in a hypercone. With a tesseract of housemade quantum ketchup.
Beef Heart Tartare ($12) was great. A neat loaf of finely diced beef heart was served with a very orange egg yolk floating atop it. When mixed together, this was unctuous and beefy like Channing Tatum, but a pile of minced cow offal is much better at portraying inner conflict than Channing Tatum is. Big crunchy sheets of what the menu billed as “sourdough crackers” but which really tasted like Munchos potato chips were provided for scooping up the tartare. The only aspect of this dish I didn’t like was the droopy pile of used-up tea leaves they garnished it with for some reason: they didn’t offer much flavor and they looked gross. At first glance I thought that these were fried sage but unfortunately no.
Celery salad ($10) was less refreshing than I hoped it would be, though it was killer nonetheless. A notebook sheaf of sliced celery was tossed in a creamy dressing, with lots of anchovy: the unapologetically fishy flavor was like an obvious hardon in a pair of tight jeans.
A reuben ($12) was the very paragon of this sandwich, an exemplar of its breed. Razor thin slices of corned beef were piled up in squamous layers, salty and smoky, draped with a caul of melted swiss, and a crisp bale of sauerkraut, on toasted rye bread which was cut too thinly to possibly maintain its integrity, yet somehow did.
The thing I liked the least was tajarin ($12). Normally I scarf down pasta like a Biggest Loser contestant, and this dish at first seemed promising: we were served a heaping tangle of very soft and supple egg noodles, with butter, diced chives, and uni. Unfortunately, sea urchin is such a polarizing ingredient that it’s going to be impossible for me to not get complaints about anything I say, so fuck it: I hate uni. Yes, yes, I know, it’s an aphrodisiac, etc. etc., but midgets are aphrodesiacs too, and you don’t see people garnishing pasta with Peter Dinklage. When used sparingly, sea urchin is a thoughtful tool for adding a nebulous briny and savory flavor, thus making any dish taste like the beach. The problem is that uni is like cilantro: NO ONE EVER USES JUST A LITTLE. Instead, the tajarin was studded with big smeary orange globs of urchin, which no amount of stirring could successfully incorporate into the bowl.
Dessert was drinking caramel ($6). This drink is fucking ridiculous. You get a coffee mug full of thick, sweet, melted dulce de leche, made interesting with the addition of Mexican spices and a golf ball of ice cream floating serenely in the midst of it all like the Unseeing Eye of Ben & Jerry. There is just no goddamned way to make this a sensible dessert option. It tastes like you are actually guzzling a gallon can of hot caramel sauce, purloined, perhaps, from a Menchie’s. The spices are a great addition but maybe they should either sell this stuff in smaller quantites, e.g a shot glass, or thin it with milk. Preferably skim milk.
Damn the Weather has an ambitious menu and the bartenders dress like regular people, instead of steampunk villains, and the gigantic ice cubes, while totally evil in their mastodon-entrapping and Titanic-sinking ways, are actually quite useful to chill a glass of whiskey without watering it down. If there isn’t a Sounders game later, go to Damn the Weather. Otherwise, avoid Pioneer Square like the plague since, you know, fuck soccer: our goal in the USA should be to adopt Europe’s social safety net and environmental legislation and DOC protections, not its effete sports.
Rating: 8 vests out of 10
Damn the Weather is located at 116 1st Ave S
Damn the Weather does not take reservations, but they can be prank called at 206-946-1283
It’s even worse if the bartender has a mustache. I really, seriously, do not get how mustaches got lumped in with precious, asexual hipster bullshit. After all, men with waxed mustaches are hard men, like John L. Sullivan or Theodore Roosevelt or Otto von Bismarck: men who are much more likely to strangle lions to death and have tertiary syphilis and unify empires and bust trusts than they are to wear a cardigan and listen to Mumford & Sons.
So it was with great trepidation that I entered Damn the Weather. With its oddly specific name and fancy cocktail list and giant ice cubes, I expected a maddening descent into twee mayhem. But the food menu seemed interesting so we decided to press our luck.
We started with chicken fat fries ($8). These are pretty much like regular fries, but with a savory undercurrent. Unlike French fries fried in suet or duck fat, chicken fat doesn’t swing its dick around (or cloaca, rather), but you just can’t get this kind of flavor from frying in any kind of vegetable oil. The chicken fat fries were crisp shoestrings and they came in a cone of wax paper nestled in a parfait glass. The presentation was too precious for my taste: I’m bored with frites served in a cone. If you want to impress me, send out your French fries in a hypercone. With a tesseract of housemade quantum ketchup.
Beef Heart Tartare ($12) was great. A neat loaf of finely diced beef heart was served with a very orange egg yolk floating atop it. When mixed together, this was unctuous and beefy like Channing Tatum, but a pile of minced cow offal is much better at portraying inner conflict than Channing Tatum is. Big crunchy sheets of what the menu billed as “sourdough crackers” but which really tasted like Munchos potato chips were provided for scooping up the tartare. The only aspect of this dish I didn’t like was the droopy pile of used-up tea leaves they garnished it with for some reason: they didn’t offer much flavor and they looked gross. At first glance I thought that these were fried sage but unfortunately no.
Celery salad ($10) was less refreshing than I hoped it would be, though it was killer nonetheless. A notebook sheaf of sliced celery was tossed in a creamy dressing, with lots of anchovy: the unapologetically fishy flavor was like an obvious hardon in a pair of tight jeans.
A reuben ($12) was the very paragon of this sandwich, an exemplar of its breed. Razor thin slices of corned beef were piled up in squamous layers, salty and smoky, draped with a caul of melted swiss, and a crisp bale of sauerkraut, on toasted rye bread which was cut too thinly to possibly maintain its integrity, yet somehow did.
The thing I liked the least was tajarin ($12). Normally I scarf down pasta like a Biggest Loser contestant, and this dish at first seemed promising: we were served a heaping tangle of very soft and supple egg noodles, with butter, diced chives, and uni. Unfortunately, sea urchin is such a polarizing ingredient that it’s going to be impossible for me to not get complaints about anything I say, so fuck it: I hate uni. Yes, yes, I know, it’s an aphrodisiac, etc. etc., but midgets are aphrodesiacs too, and you don’t see people garnishing pasta with Peter Dinklage. When used sparingly, sea urchin is a thoughtful tool for adding a nebulous briny and savory flavor, thus making any dish taste like the beach. The problem is that uni is like cilantro: NO ONE EVER USES JUST A LITTLE. Instead, the tajarin was studded with big smeary orange globs of urchin, which no amount of stirring could successfully incorporate into the bowl.
Dessert was drinking caramel ($6). This drink is fucking ridiculous. You get a coffee mug full of thick, sweet, melted dulce de leche, made interesting with the addition of Mexican spices and a golf ball of ice cream floating serenely in the midst of it all like the Unseeing Eye of Ben & Jerry. There is just no goddamned way to make this a sensible dessert option. It tastes like you are actually guzzling a gallon can of hot caramel sauce, purloined, perhaps, from a Menchie’s. The spices are a great addition but maybe they should either sell this stuff in smaller quantites, e.g a shot glass, or thin it with milk. Preferably skim milk.
Damn the Weather has an ambitious menu and the bartenders dress like regular people, instead of steampunk villains, and the gigantic ice cubes, while totally evil in their mastodon-entrapping and Titanic-sinking ways, are actually quite useful to chill a glass of whiskey without watering it down. If there isn’t a Sounders game later, go to Damn the Weather. Otherwise, avoid Pioneer Square like the plague since, you know, fuck soccer: our goal in the USA should be to adopt Europe’s social safety net and environmental legislation and DOC protections, not its effete sports.
Rating: 8 vests out of 10
Damn the Weather is located at 116 1st Ave S
Damn the Weather does not take reservations, but they can be prank called at 206-946-1283
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Vespolina
Last Friday I got my hands on a pot brownie. Not some random pot brownie that somebody’s roommate made, but a commercially packaged, legal brownie from one of Colorado’s state-run marijuana stores. Yes, Colorado. Our home state hasn't yet gotten its collective head out of its ass yet re: reefer. I split the brownie four ways with three friends. Then we went to see Interstellar. What a fucking mistake. Every second was an excruciatingly loud eternity. I think I had a stroke!
Anyway, the next day was Saturday and, still completely stoned, we went to Vespolina. We started with the antipasto misto ($11) which was delightful. A plate of mortadella was sliced as thinly as bible pages, and wouldn’t you rather swear on a 1000 page pile of mortadella instead of the boring fucking bible? Sure, mortadella is the most polarizing member of the charcuterie family; it’s the uncircumcised penis of cured meats and you either love it or hate it, but luckily for me I love it, despite the fact that mortadella is really just baloney with a master’s degree.
Along with this came a cute little pile of roasted radicchio with pine nuts and some balsamic vinegar. There was also a novel salad of cold calamari with chickpea puree and a few razor thin rounds of sliced watermelon radish. The calamari was prepared masterfully. It was very tender, which is great because if you don’t cook calamari properly it turns into a leathery cock ring that you are compelled to chew for decades. Luckily this calamari was delicate and lovely. A word of warning about the antipasto, however: the price on the menu is PER PERSON and they failed to tell us this when we ordered. Caveat emptor, or whatever.
Apple radish salad ($12) was generally inoffensive, with sliced apples and discs of watermelon radish, along with a few big curls of pecorino, and some fried leaves of arugula or dandelion greens or something. The server claimed that this was chervil but I’m calling bullshit.
Spaghetti “carbonara” ($17) was a fair interpretation of the famous Roman pasta dish, but I couldn’t understand why they put “carbonara” in quotation marks. I asked our server, and she stammered out an incoherent reply; I suppose that I wasn’t the only one still reeling from last night’s pot brownie. Still, the “carbonara” was great: supple swirls of “pasta” were tossed with a "creamy" sauce of “egg yolk”, “pecorino”, and little porky chunks of “guanciale.” See, Vespolina: “I” can misuse “quotation marks” “too.”
Squash ravioli ($22) was so fucking good that I’m breathlessly hyperventilating while reminiscing about it. The ravioli was masterful: thin pockets of pasta as delicate as an infant’s eyelids enclosed a silken and savory orange squash filling. Fried sage leaves and a few shavings of cheese on top finished this dish, and if I could eat this every single day I would. It was a symphony in orange and green and tasted like a stroll through the autumn woods. If there had been a hint of smoke in this dish I would’ve dry humped the table.
Dessert was bombolini ($7). For this price we got six fried doughnut balls, burnished a rich mahogany outside and with a mystical custard interior. The bombolini were drowned in a sticky pool of black truffle honey. I’m making no comments about the honey: I get bitched at no matter what I say about truffle flavor, so fuck you. But the bombolini were crusty outside and soft inside and being completely drenched in honey, like a group of medieval princesses bathing decadently together, didn’t hurt either.
Vespolina is pretty solid. The service leaves something to be desired, but in Vespolina’s defense I was as high as a fucking kite so my questions probably sounded like a poorly translated DVD player instruction manual. The dining room is gorgeous and the pasta will inspire serious Proust moments so go there now. Don’t do drugs though. Or if you do drugs, make sure you go to see a fucking mild-mannered Merchant-Ivory film.
Rating: 8.5 drugs out of 10
Vespolina is located at 96 Union St.
For reservations call 206-682-3590
Anyway, the next day was Saturday and, still completely stoned, we went to Vespolina. We started with the antipasto misto ($11) which was delightful. A plate of mortadella was sliced as thinly as bible pages, and wouldn’t you rather swear on a 1000 page pile of mortadella instead of the boring fucking bible? Sure, mortadella is the most polarizing member of the charcuterie family; it’s the uncircumcised penis of cured meats and you either love it or hate it, but luckily for me I love it, despite the fact that mortadella is really just baloney with a master’s degree.
Along with this came a cute little pile of roasted radicchio with pine nuts and some balsamic vinegar. There was also a novel salad of cold calamari with chickpea puree and a few razor thin rounds of sliced watermelon radish. The calamari was prepared masterfully. It was very tender, which is great because if you don’t cook calamari properly it turns into a leathery cock ring that you are compelled to chew for decades. Luckily this calamari was delicate and lovely. A word of warning about the antipasto, however: the price on the menu is PER PERSON and they failed to tell us this when we ordered. Caveat emptor, or whatever.
Apple radish salad ($12) was generally inoffensive, with sliced apples and discs of watermelon radish, along with a few big curls of pecorino, and some fried leaves of arugula or dandelion greens or something. The server claimed that this was chervil but I’m calling bullshit.
Spaghetti “carbonara” ($17) was a fair interpretation of the famous Roman pasta dish, but I couldn’t understand why they put “carbonara” in quotation marks. I asked our server, and she stammered out an incoherent reply; I suppose that I wasn’t the only one still reeling from last night’s pot brownie. Still, the “carbonara” was great: supple swirls of “pasta” were tossed with a "creamy" sauce of “egg yolk”, “pecorino”, and little porky chunks of “guanciale.” See, Vespolina: “I” can misuse “quotation marks” “too.”
Squash ravioli ($22) was so fucking good that I’m breathlessly hyperventilating while reminiscing about it. The ravioli was masterful: thin pockets of pasta as delicate as an infant’s eyelids enclosed a silken and savory orange squash filling. Fried sage leaves and a few shavings of cheese on top finished this dish, and if I could eat this every single day I would. It was a symphony in orange and green and tasted like a stroll through the autumn woods. If there had been a hint of smoke in this dish I would’ve dry humped the table.
Dessert was bombolini ($7). For this price we got six fried doughnut balls, burnished a rich mahogany outside and with a mystical custard interior. The bombolini were drowned in a sticky pool of black truffle honey. I’m making no comments about the honey: I get bitched at no matter what I say about truffle flavor, so fuck you. But the bombolini were crusty outside and soft inside and being completely drenched in honey, like a group of medieval princesses bathing decadently together, didn’t hurt either.
Vespolina is pretty solid. The service leaves something to be desired, but in Vespolina’s defense I was as high as a fucking kite so my questions probably sounded like a poorly translated DVD player instruction manual. The dining room is gorgeous and the pasta will inspire serious Proust moments so go there now. Don’t do drugs though. Or if you do drugs, make sure you go to see a fucking mild-mannered Merchant-Ivory film.
Rating: 8.5 drugs out of 10
Vespolina is located at 96 Union St.
For reservations call 206-682-3590
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Westward
I don’t even know where the fuck to begin with Westward. I walked into this place and was stupefied by portraits of Bill Murray and Captain Stubing and, I suppose, other notable captains of the ship on the walls. The waiters all wear striped sailor shirts, despite the fact that this is the outfit for the FRENCH Navy which everybody thinks is staffed exclusively by pussies. And behind the bar is an impressive diorama of a cargo ship, the hold of which, we are expected to believe, holds the Abominable Snowman from the famous 1964 Rankin/ Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and also the combatants from Wrestlemania IV. Requiescat in Pace Andre the Giant! We hardly knew ye!
Anyway: Westward. We started with the quick fried east coast squid ($13), and in every case I’m reproducing the name of each dish exactly as presented. The squid was lightly fried in a kind of delicate fairy’s wing fritto misto atop a fluffy mattress of mashed potatoes. Sprinkled on top was a drift of sesame and black caraway seed, and the whole thing was spritzed lots of lemon. The potatoes seemed to be strictly potato, although maybe there was some olive oil in there, but certainly not the several cups of heavy cream that I, for instance, use when I’m making some fucking mashed potatoes.
Wood baked gigante beans ($9) were deliriously satisfying. I’ve had a million different iterations of this dish and this one was great: a pile of creamy white gigante beans swam in tomato sauce amid a swirling Sargasso Sea of half melted feta cheese and a hint of cinnamon, topped with a crumbling breadcrumb infrastructure.
Potatoes cooked in the fire ($9) didn’t need to tell me that they were cooked in a fire because they looked like burn victims, but in a good way, not in the way burn victims typically look, which is totally gross. Blue and yellow marble potatoes were cooked in a lot of oil and studded with shitloads of coarse salt. This was my main complaint, actually: while the potatoes were creamy inside and their succulence restrained by a corset of crisp skin, there was almost too much salt. Like enough salt to pay a Roman general. Which is a shame because I like salty potatoes: in fact potatoes are really just vehicles for butter and salt. Sometimes ketchup. Mayonnaise if you’re a fucktard who likes soccer and pretends to understand European politics. But they just went too far with the salt.
Albacore confit ($17) was pretty good: big chunks of albacore were delicately cooked in oil, with a few chunks of radicchio on the side, a couple shishito peppers, and some grilled bread croutons. While the fish itself was actually delicious, the other stuff was lame. There wasn’t enough radicchio. We got maybe four miniscule chunks of it, and that’s too damn bad because albacore is rich, and being cooked in oil, it could’ve benefitted from the snide remarks offered by the radicchio to brighten things up. The shishito peppers could have been charred a bit more. And the croutons were billed on the menu as “grilled bread.” I was eagerly anticipating a couple slices of bread, to make like an open-faced tuna sandwich with the confit, but we got MAYBE three small chunks of bread with a thick asphalt crust that stymied my gums the way I stymie your mom.
Chilled beef tongue ($16) was generally good, but the plate was a bit too busy: four medallions of braised tongue, topped with a bushy tuft of pickled spruce needles, a smear of crème fraiche, some Dijon mustard, a scattering of pickled mustard seeds, a couple caper berries, and two slices of grilled bread. Finally, the bread I wanted to come with the albacore confit! But alas, it was too late: we already ate the albacore. The tongue itself was supple and luscious, like dry humping a silk sheet, but as was the case with the potatoes it was too salty.
Actually that’s not quite true: the medallions of tongue were shingled on the plate, and the tongue got progressively less salty the farther down we ate, so while the top tongue was too salty, the bottom piece was actually fine. And besides, when you ate the tongue with the bread, even the saltiest piece wasn’t too salty. And the crème fraiche cut the salt too. I just feel like complaining, I suppose. But I WILL say that they didn’t cure the tongue with nitrites. So it looked like a dingy dish rag. People hate preservatives but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and use it, because with nitrites braised meats looks pink and fresh, like a delicate spring blossom, but without it, it looks grey and haggard like your mom.
Butterscotch pot de crème ($7) was fucking great. A teacup filled with creamy butterscotch custard, topped with a petite quenelle of whipped cream and sprinkled on top with a few crystals of flaky sea salt. On the side was a sugary cube of shortbread.
Westward is twee as fuck. Twee like Bjork screening a Wes Anderson movie. Twee like an elf having a tea party with a squirrel and a hedgehog within a hollow tree. Twee like a midget riding a pennyfarthing. Normally I hate the word “twee” because it sounds like the noise a princess makes when she farts. The princess whose farts I’m describing is Princess Tam Tam, whose flatulence is like a lavender puff of mist escaping from between her caramel sticky buns. Her hair is spun sugar and her tits are a croquembouche, each nipple a butterscotch chip. Her thighs are creme brulee. Her stomach is pastry cream. Her eyes are white chocolate truffles, she wields a rock candy scepter, and Princess Tam Tam is the perfect match for Prince Meatyass: the union of savory and sweet that shall rule the world of flavor. “Come inside my sugar walls,” Princess Tam Tam tells you, and you of course have been waiting for this invitation for centuries, like a kid who will very soon be plundering a candy store, so how could you possibly deny her?
While not as tasty as Princess Tam Tam, Westward is good, but errors in execution marred what could have been a totally epic orgy of flavor. Still, the view is grandiose and the décor is entertaining, to say the least, so give Westward a try.
Rating: 7.5 sugar walls out of 10
Westward is located at 2501 N. Northlake Way
For reservations call 206-552-8215
Anyway: Westward. We started with the quick fried east coast squid ($13), and in every case I’m reproducing the name of each dish exactly as presented. The squid was lightly fried in a kind of delicate fairy’s wing fritto misto atop a fluffy mattress of mashed potatoes. Sprinkled on top was a drift of sesame and black caraway seed, and the whole thing was spritzed lots of lemon. The potatoes seemed to be strictly potato, although maybe there was some olive oil in there, but certainly not the several cups of heavy cream that I, for instance, use when I’m making some fucking mashed potatoes.
Wood baked gigante beans ($9) were deliriously satisfying. I’ve had a million different iterations of this dish and this one was great: a pile of creamy white gigante beans swam in tomato sauce amid a swirling Sargasso Sea of half melted feta cheese and a hint of cinnamon, topped with a crumbling breadcrumb infrastructure.
Potatoes cooked in the fire ($9) didn’t need to tell me that they were cooked in a fire because they looked like burn victims, but in a good way, not in the way burn victims typically look, which is totally gross. Blue and yellow marble potatoes were cooked in a lot of oil and studded with shitloads of coarse salt. This was my main complaint, actually: while the potatoes were creamy inside and their succulence restrained by a corset of crisp skin, there was almost too much salt. Like enough salt to pay a Roman general. Which is a shame because I like salty potatoes: in fact potatoes are really just vehicles for butter and salt. Sometimes ketchup. Mayonnaise if you’re a fucktard who likes soccer and pretends to understand European politics. But they just went too far with the salt.
Albacore confit ($17) was pretty good: big chunks of albacore were delicately cooked in oil, with a few chunks of radicchio on the side, a couple shishito peppers, and some grilled bread croutons. While the fish itself was actually delicious, the other stuff was lame. There wasn’t enough radicchio. We got maybe four miniscule chunks of it, and that’s too damn bad because albacore is rich, and being cooked in oil, it could’ve benefitted from the snide remarks offered by the radicchio to brighten things up. The shishito peppers could have been charred a bit more. And the croutons were billed on the menu as “grilled bread.” I was eagerly anticipating a couple slices of bread, to make like an open-faced tuna sandwich with the confit, but we got MAYBE three small chunks of bread with a thick asphalt crust that stymied my gums the way I stymie your mom.
Chilled beef tongue ($16) was generally good, but the plate was a bit too busy: four medallions of braised tongue, topped with a bushy tuft of pickled spruce needles, a smear of crème fraiche, some Dijon mustard, a scattering of pickled mustard seeds, a couple caper berries, and two slices of grilled bread. Finally, the bread I wanted to come with the albacore confit! But alas, it was too late: we already ate the albacore. The tongue itself was supple and luscious, like dry humping a silk sheet, but as was the case with the potatoes it was too salty.
Actually that’s not quite true: the medallions of tongue were shingled on the plate, and the tongue got progressively less salty the farther down we ate, so while the top tongue was too salty, the bottom piece was actually fine. And besides, when you ate the tongue with the bread, even the saltiest piece wasn’t too salty. And the crème fraiche cut the salt too. I just feel like complaining, I suppose. But I WILL say that they didn’t cure the tongue with nitrites. So it looked like a dingy dish rag. People hate preservatives but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and use it, because with nitrites braised meats looks pink and fresh, like a delicate spring blossom, but without it, it looks grey and haggard like your mom.
Butterscotch pot de crème ($7) was fucking great. A teacup filled with creamy butterscotch custard, topped with a petite quenelle of whipped cream and sprinkled on top with a few crystals of flaky sea salt. On the side was a sugary cube of shortbread.
Westward is twee as fuck. Twee like Bjork screening a Wes Anderson movie. Twee like an elf having a tea party with a squirrel and a hedgehog within a hollow tree. Twee like a midget riding a pennyfarthing. Normally I hate the word “twee” because it sounds like the noise a princess makes when she farts. The princess whose farts I’m describing is Princess Tam Tam, whose flatulence is like a lavender puff of mist escaping from between her caramel sticky buns. Her hair is spun sugar and her tits are a croquembouche, each nipple a butterscotch chip. Her thighs are creme brulee. Her stomach is pastry cream. Her eyes are white chocolate truffles, she wields a rock candy scepter, and Princess Tam Tam is the perfect match for Prince Meatyass: the union of savory and sweet that shall rule the world of flavor. “Come inside my sugar walls,” Princess Tam Tam tells you, and you of course have been waiting for this invitation for centuries, like a kid who will very soon be plundering a candy store, so how could you possibly deny her?
While not as tasty as Princess Tam Tam, Westward is good, but errors in execution marred what could have been a totally epic orgy of flavor. Still, the view is grandiose and the décor is entertaining, to say the least, so give Westward a try.
Rating: 7.5 sugar walls out of 10
Westward is located at 2501 N. Northlake Way
For reservations call 206-552-8215
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
The London Plane
Lately I’ve been getting fed up with the bullshit we are expected to eat. Unless it’s sushi, or Mexican food, menus are plagued with the kind of shit that simpletons eat, like hamburgers or macaroni and cheese with bacon in it, and the fucking menu guffaws breathlessly about the shitty glob of melted cheese that they want you to buy as if they themselves, in that very instant, just invented melted cheese right then and there.
The menu at The London Plane looked refreshingly adult, however, and so we gleefully attended lunch there with the anticipation of getting to pick items from a menu that seemed to come from an alternate universe in which truffle oil never existed.
We started with a paprika, caraway, sunflower seed and chevre spread ($7.50). The spread came to the table as a quenelle of chevre, studded with the aforementioned spices. I wish the seeds and paprika had been rolled around on the outside of the chevre like a holiday cheese ball, but alas: they didn’t do it that way. In general I thought that this spread was a bit heavy, a bit chevre-y, like Chevre-y Chase, and just as cheesy.
The beet hummus with harissa oil ($5) was visibly off-putting at first, but once you got past the puree’s shocking magenta color, the hummus was actually quite tasty: it was delicate and sweet and smoother than I expected blended beets to be, since I think they actually included some chick peas to give it a cohesive texture. The harissa oil had been applied with a gentle hand, offering an almost intangible heat, unlike when white people typically try to use harissa in recipes and they inevitably add too much and it ends up tasting like a burning doorknob in your mouth.
Anyway: if the Kool-Aid Man poured a bunch of vodka in the top of his pitcher, the beet hummus is what his puke would look and taste like. If you’re grossed out by that description, don’t worry: the Kool-Aid Man is fake! So you’ll never have to actually see or eat his puke. But if you get the beet hummus, that’s what it would totally be like.
Walnut, red pepper, and pomegranate molasses spread ($7) was a tasty iteration of the classic Turkish dip also known as muhammara. It was savory and sweet, with a rough grind of the walnuts to offer a little texture. You could spread this onto anything. Muhammara is sometimes used as a sort of barbecue sauce for meat, and I honestly wish there was a kebab or something on London Plane’s menu which was basted in this stuff. Since there isn’t, I’m perfectly content to lick if off of Mike Tyson’s nutsack.
Shredded carrots, currant, pine nut, and chili spread ($6.50) seemed more like a slaw to me than a spread or dip, but who’d quibbling? This isn’t, after all, the Oxford Motherfucking English Dictionary, and besides this was my favorite of all the spreads: sweet and crunchy strands of shredded carrots mingled like dickheads at a cocktail party with pine nuts, some dill, and a few black currants here and there. It was light and fresh and perfectly balanced.
An assortment of all four spreads with bread is $13, and WHY THE FUCKING FUCK WOULDN’T YOU DO THIS. Even the bread is superlative. They bake it on site and you get two kinds: a very sour sourdough which is so sour, it’s almost as sour as your mom’s demeanor, with a standoffish crust that conceals a crumb so open, you could confess any of your evil secrets to it. The other bread is some sort of herb cracker which is good, but not as good as that sour sourdough which seems forbidding and disgruntled on the outside but is really kind and understanding on the inside.
Moving on to the vegetable course: a plate of roasted baby carrots and red torpedo onions with pistachio and mint ($9) was a bit of a letdown: when I read “roasted carrots” on a menu I want those carrots completely caramelized to the point where the edges of the carrots are black and charred. If the carrot doesn’t look like it barely survived an extended hike through Death Valley, with a crusty and sticky outer skin and a soft fudgy interior, I don’t want it. Which is why I was saddened by the carrots we got: stewed in way too much liquid for my taste, with slices of sautéed onion and, you know, herbs and stuff, they seemed more like braised carrots, swimming around in a puddle with the onions and shit.
Braised pole beans with charred cherry tomatoes and dill ($10) were better, though. Like the “roasted” carrots, the beans were definitely braised. The beans were flavorful, with lots of dill flavor and bright and smoky highlights courtesy of the tomato.
Chickpeas with stewed gypsy peppers, feta and cilantro ($11) were very tasty, creamy, and salty, and sweet. I could eat an entire bowl of this. It hit every single possible flavor note. If they served this over pasta it would be like an insane epic poet’s opium dream of the most delicious possible pasta dish.
You can pick an assortment of three small ($12.50) or large ($16.50) vegetable dishes, and as with the dips, why wouldn’t you? Variety is, after all, the spice of life, you bunch of dickfaces.
A curried chicken salad ($19) featured a fairly standard pile of shredded chicken with a neon yellow curry sauce, atop a novel bale of roasted romanesco and an incongruous roasted piece of baby bok choy which hovered hesitantly around on the side like an awkward boyfriend at a funeral. The chicken was very succulent, and the curry flavor wasn’t too overpowering. The romanesco was roasted the way I wish the carrots had been roasted, i.e. caramelized as shit, with the curious fractal edges of the cauliflower scorched and the cut edges a deep golden brown. A couple sultanas here and there sweetened it up a bit, but then sprinkled over the top of everything was a drift of crumbled up seeds of various kinds, and sadly this resembled a bunch of birdseed. But it tasted good at least.
Finally, these spiced lamb meatballs ($14) were the goddamned piece de resistance: six perfect meatballs, so moist and yielding that they seemed more like small spherical terrines than like something you’d pile on top of spaghetti, doused in tomato sauce. The sauce was a satiny brick red, rich with hints of warm spice. I’ve never eaten such delicate meatballs. To serve these with pasta would have been a crime. Luckily they didn’t.
There’s a dessert menu, but fuck that: the meatballs were my dessert.
The London Plane is fucking awesome: sophisticated and light, with complex flavors and a deft hand with the spices and an unapologetic middle-eastern thrust, kind of like what I did to your mom last night. Nothing is too bold and all the flavors were in careful balance. It's the Alexander Calder of restaurants. The only thing that they go overboard with at The London Plane is restraint.
Unlike your mom.
Rating: 8.5 restraints out of 10
The London Plane is located at 300 Occidental Ave S
For reservations (parties of 8 or more) call 206-624-1374
Their hours are very weird so look it up before trying to eat dinner there and seeing that they’re closed and then getting mad at me.
The menu at The London Plane looked refreshingly adult, however, and so we gleefully attended lunch there with the anticipation of getting to pick items from a menu that seemed to come from an alternate universe in which truffle oil never existed.
We started with a paprika, caraway, sunflower seed and chevre spread ($7.50). The spread came to the table as a quenelle of chevre, studded with the aforementioned spices. I wish the seeds and paprika had been rolled around on the outside of the chevre like a holiday cheese ball, but alas: they didn’t do it that way. In general I thought that this spread was a bit heavy, a bit chevre-y, like Chevre-y Chase, and just as cheesy.
The beet hummus with harissa oil ($5) was visibly off-putting at first, but once you got past the puree’s shocking magenta color, the hummus was actually quite tasty: it was delicate and sweet and smoother than I expected blended beets to be, since I think they actually included some chick peas to give it a cohesive texture. The harissa oil had been applied with a gentle hand, offering an almost intangible heat, unlike when white people typically try to use harissa in recipes and they inevitably add too much and it ends up tasting like a burning doorknob in your mouth.
Anyway: if the Kool-Aid Man poured a bunch of vodka in the top of his pitcher, the beet hummus is what his puke would look and taste like. If you’re grossed out by that description, don’t worry: the Kool-Aid Man is fake! So you’ll never have to actually see or eat his puke. But if you get the beet hummus, that’s what it would totally be like.
Walnut, red pepper, and pomegranate molasses spread ($7) was a tasty iteration of the classic Turkish dip also known as muhammara. It was savory and sweet, with a rough grind of the walnuts to offer a little texture. You could spread this onto anything. Muhammara is sometimes used as a sort of barbecue sauce for meat, and I honestly wish there was a kebab or something on London Plane’s menu which was basted in this stuff. Since there isn’t, I’m perfectly content to lick if off of Mike Tyson’s nutsack.
Shredded carrots, currant, pine nut, and chili spread ($6.50) seemed more like a slaw to me than a spread or dip, but who’d quibbling? This isn’t, after all, the Oxford Motherfucking English Dictionary, and besides this was my favorite of all the spreads: sweet and crunchy strands of shredded carrots mingled like dickheads at a cocktail party with pine nuts, some dill, and a few black currants here and there. It was light and fresh and perfectly balanced.
An assortment of all four spreads with bread is $13, and WHY THE FUCKING FUCK WOULDN’T YOU DO THIS. Even the bread is superlative. They bake it on site and you get two kinds: a very sour sourdough which is so sour, it’s almost as sour as your mom’s demeanor, with a standoffish crust that conceals a crumb so open, you could confess any of your evil secrets to it. The other bread is some sort of herb cracker which is good, but not as good as that sour sourdough which seems forbidding and disgruntled on the outside but is really kind and understanding on the inside.
Moving on to the vegetable course: a plate of roasted baby carrots and red torpedo onions with pistachio and mint ($9) was a bit of a letdown: when I read “roasted carrots” on a menu I want those carrots completely caramelized to the point where the edges of the carrots are black and charred. If the carrot doesn’t look like it barely survived an extended hike through Death Valley, with a crusty and sticky outer skin and a soft fudgy interior, I don’t want it. Which is why I was saddened by the carrots we got: stewed in way too much liquid for my taste, with slices of sautéed onion and, you know, herbs and stuff, they seemed more like braised carrots, swimming around in a puddle with the onions and shit.
Braised pole beans with charred cherry tomatoes and dill ($10) were better, though. Like the “roasted” carrots, the beans were definitely braised. The beans were flavorful, with lots of dill flavor and bright and smoky highlights courtesy of the tomato.
Chickpeas with stewed gypsy peppers, feta and cilantro ($11) were very tasty, creamy, and salty, and sweet. I could eat an entire bowl of this. It hit every single possible flavor note. If they served this over pasta it would be like an insane epic poet’s opium dream of the most delicious possible pasta dish.
You can pick an assortment of three small ($12.50) or large ($16.50) vegetable dishes, and as with the dips, why wouldn’t you? Variety is, after all, the spice of life, you bunch of dickfaces.
A curried chicken salad ($19) featured a fairly standard pile of shredded chicken with a neon yellow curry sauce, atop a novel bale of roasted romanesco and an incongruous roasted piece of baby bok choy which hovered hesitantly around on the side like an awkward boyfriend at a funeral. The chicken was very succulent, and the curry flavor wasn’t too overpowering. The romanesco was roasted the way I wish the carrots had been roasted, i.e. caramelized as shit, with the curious fractal edges of the cauliflower scorched and the cut edges a deep golden brown. A couple sultanas here and there sweetened it up a bit, but then sprinkled over the top of everything was a drift of crumbled up seeds of various kinds, and sadly this resembled a bunch of birdseed. But it tasted good at least.
Finally, these spiced lamb meatballs ($14) were the goddamned piece de resistance: six perfect meatballs, so moist and yielding that they seemed more like small spherical terrines than like something you’d pile on top of spaghetti, doused in tomato sauce. The sauce was a satiny brick red, rich with hints of warm spice. I’ve never eaten such delicate meatballs. To serve these with pasta would have been a crime. Luckily they didn’t.
There’s a dessert menu, but fuck that: the meatballs were my dessert.
The London Plane is fucking awesome: sophisticated and light, with complex flavors and a deft hand with the spices and an unapologetic middle-eastern thrust, kind of like what I did to your mom last night. Nothing is too bold and all the flavors were in careful balance. It's the Alexander Calder of restaurants. The only thing that they go overboard with at The London Plane is restraint.
Unlike your mom.
Rating: 8.5 restraints out of 10
The London Plane is located at 300 Occidental Ave S
For reservations (parties of 8 or more) call 206-624-1374
Their hours are very weird so look it up before trying to eat dinner there and seeing that they’re closed and then getting mad at me.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Prima Bistro
I was skeptical of Prima Bistro after encountering a cassoulet made by them which sported a thick tuft of breadcrumbs as bushy as the pubes on a 197’s centerfold. Besides, they’re located in the charming village of Langley, WA on Whidbey Island. Plus, they’ve got a killer second story deck and a pristine water view. So I assumed that it would be like many other Oceanside tourist traps: overpriced and bland shitholes which serve yellowing iceberg lettuce and anemic wedges of mealy tomato doused in a pint of Thousand Island Dressing and they somehow also discovered a way to put slices of pork tenderloin on top of fettuccine alfredo with a straight face and everything is $23. But did they fulfill my dire prophecy? READ ON IF YOU DARE!
We started with the chickpea “fries” ($6.50), which, since the "fries" actually do seem to be fried, was the worst abuse of quotation marks since I saw a sign asking people to “Please ring the ‘doorbell’” but it was in fact an ACTUAL doorbell, and not a midget’s nutsack painted to resemble a doorbell in the hopes of tricking you into comically molesting a midget. Six big foamy yellow planks of what I can only assume is a slurry of deep fried chickpea flour were burnished a crusty bronze outside, with a yielding and almost cheese-like interior. These had the consistency of the yellow foam that mascot costumes are typically made of, but unlike the Capitol City Goofball or the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, Prima Bistro’s Fightin’ “Fries” at least come with a ramekin of curry mayonnaise.
Crispy pork belly ($6.50) was tasty as fuck. This was a typically perfect example of pork belly, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich: it had been confited, with a crunchy and salty fried exterior, and a moist interior so unguent, so tender, so delicate, it was as if the pig never did a situp in its life, which I suppose it probably never has, because pigs are lazy as fuck. The belly came with a neat quenelle of a sweet and tart apricot mostarda, which was good enough to spread upon a toasted slice of brioche and had no business playing second fiddle to a fried square of disemboweled pig.
Salade nicoise ($14.50) was an excellent template of the classic French salad. A big pile of spinach leaves were doused in a gleaming pearlescent vinaigrette, along with some boiled fingerling potatoes, a couple olives, thinly sliced apples, and a boiled egg, halved lengthwise. Slices of seared ahi tuna completed the picture. The vinagigrette was tart without being overly zingy: your mom could learn a thing or two about the way this vinaigrette comports itself. The egg was expertly boiled, with a perfect sunny orb of yolk completely devoid of the green shitty ring that indicates a cook who doesn’t even know how to boil a fucking egg.
The worst thing about this nicoise salad was these weird diamond-shaped slices of pecorino blanketed over the top of the salad, looking like cheesy Superman logos. These were worse than unnecessary because pecorino is not a proper ingredient for a true salade nisoise. The second worse thing about this salad was that they didn’t include any haricots verts. A third grader may disagree with me but freshly picked, lightly steamed green beans are tasty as fuck, and I’ll point in the face, yelling at any third grader who disputes my claim.
Salade lyonnaise ($12.50) was, like the salade nicoise, similarly well-behaved. A bushel of frisee, wilted under a warm vinaigrette like Tim Tebow under the pressure of professional football, was interspersed with crunchy lardons hidden cleverly within its midst, and topped with a poached egg. This salad worked well, with a dressing that mixed adequately with the soft yolk drooling from where I pierced the egg’s side, but I didn’t like how the frisee was so wilted it was almost cooked. I prefer frisee to be crisp and bitter as the repartee between two aging vaudeville comedy partners. Instead the frisee was as limp as my dick when I see your mom.
But the best thing was the charcuterie plate. A small one was a mere $8.50 and included: bresaola, boar and pistachio salami, fennel and coriander salami, smoked chorizo, pork belly rilettes, and lonza. The bresaola, air-dried beef bottom round for those of you ignorant of the charcutier’s art, was typically beefy and sweet, shaved into deep crimson curls, and not too salty. The boar salami, by contrast, was salty and greasy and had the rich priapic musky swagger of a rutting boar. The fennel and coriander salami was fairly standard and modest, but it seemed forgettable amid the other strong personalities on this charcuterie plate.
The chorizo was unapologetically spicy. The rilettes were delicately spiced, as silken and greasy as that first delicious thrust, and I gleefully smeared the rilettes all over the (SPOILER ALERT) bread which Prima Bistro graciously provides to diners FOR FREE. Finally, the lonza was smoky and salty like some old lobsterman guy wearing a sweater and smoking a pipe. Alongside the meat was an unnecessarily spicy pickle. This charcuterie plate was fucking legit, and it hallmarks Prima Bistro’s dedication to technique.
Charcuterie is a difficult skill to master, so I'm impressed that they cure the charcuterie in-house at Prima Bistro. Especially challenging are dry-cured sausages such as salami. I know because I tried it and it ended up looking, and smelling, like a used condom filled with decaying roadkill. But all of the meats Prima put together on this very affordable plate were impeccably prepared.
We didn’t get dessert from Prima; instead I went around the corner to the P S Suisse bakery and dropped $2.50 on a spitzbuebe, a special Swiss raspberry sandwich cookie that sounds like something I like to do to your mom.
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by Prima Bistro’s deft avoidance of being a completely shitty tourist trap. In addition to what is an obvious working knowledge of classic French technique, Prima also boasts a solid wine list, reasonable prices, and a lively small-town atmosphere. A friendly small town, that is, and not one that puts a boot on your car and plants heroin in your pocket if you voted for President Obama. If you’re ever in Langley for some reason, by all means go.
Rating: 8 small town stereotypes out of 10
Prima Bistro is located at 201 ½ 1st St, Langley, WA
For reservations call 360-221-4060
We started with the chickpea “fries” ($6.50), which, since the "fries" actually do seem to be fried, was the worst abuse of quotation marks since I saw a sign asking people to “Please ring the ‘doorbell’” but it was in fact an ACTUAL doorbell, and not a midget’s nutsack painted to resemble a doorbell in the hopes of tricking you into comically molesting a midget. Six big foamy yellow planks of what I can only assume is a slurry of deep fried chickpea flour were burnished a crusty bronze outside, with a yielding and almost cheese-like interior. These had the consistency of the yellow foam that mascot costumes are typically made of, but unlike the Capitol City Goofball or the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, Prima Bistro’s Fightin’ “Fries” at least come with a ramekin of curry mayonnaise.
Crispy pork belly ($6.50) was tasty as fuck. This was a typically perfect example of pork belly, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich: it had been confited, with a crunchy and salty fried exterior, and a moist interior so unguent, so tender, so delicate, it was as if the pig never did a situp in its life, which I suppose it probably never has, because pigs are lazy as fuck. The belly came with a neat quenelle of a sweet and tart apricot mostarda, which was good enough to spread upon a toasted slice of brioche and had no business playing second fiddle to a fried square of disemboweled pig.
Salade nicoise ($14.50) was an excellent template of the classic French salad. A big pile of spinach leaves were doused in a gleaming pearlescent vinaigrette, along with some boiled fingerling potatoes, a couple olives, thinly sliced apples, and a boiled egg, halved lengthwise. Slices of seared ahi tuna completed the picture. The vinagigrette was tart without being overly zingy: your mom could learn a thing or two about the way this vinaigrette comports itself. The egg was expertly boiled, with a perfect sunny orb of yolk completely devoid of the green shitty ring that indicates a cook who doesn’t even know how to boil a fucking egg.
The worst thing about this nicoise salad was these weird diamond-shaped slices of pecorino blanketed over the top of the salad, looking like cheesy Superman logos. These were worse than unnecessary because pecorino is not a proper ingredient for a true salade nisoise. The second worse thing about this salad was that they didn’t include any haricots verts. A third grader may disagree with me but freshly picked, lightly steamed green beans are tasty as fuck, and I’ll point in the face, yelling at any third grader who disputes my claim.
Salade lyonnaise ($12.50) was, like the salade nicoise, similarly well-behaved. A bushel of frisee, wilted under a warm vinaigrette like Tim Tebow under the pressure of professional football, was interspersed with crunchy lardons hidden cleverly within its midst, and topped with a poached egg. This salad worked well, with a dressing that mixed adequately with the soft yolk drooling from where I pierced the egg’s side, but I didn’t like how the frisee was so wilted it was almost cooked. I prefer frisee to be crisp and bitter as the repartee between two aging vaudeville comedy partners. Instead the frisee was as limp as my dick when I see your mom.
But the best thing was the charcuterie plate. A small one was a mere $8.50 and included: bresaola, boar and pistachio salami, fennel and coriander salami, smoked chorizo, pork belly rilettes, and lonza. The bresaola, air-dried beef bottom round for those of you ignorant of the charcutier’s art, was typically beefy and sweet, shaved into deep crimson curls, and not too salty. The boar salami, by contrast, was salty and greasy and had the rich priapic musky swagger of a rutting boar. The fennel and coriander salami was fairly standard and modest, but it seemed forgettable amid the other strong personalities on this charcuterie plate.
The chorizo was unapologetically spicy. The rilettes were delicately spiced, as silken and greasy as that first delicious thrust, and I gleefully smeared the rilettes all over the (SPOILER ALERT) bread which Prima Bistro graciously provides to diners FOR FREE. Finally, the lonza was smoky and salty like some old lobsterman guy wearing a sweater and smoking a pipe. Alongside the meat was an unnecessarily spicy pickle. This charcuterie plate was fucking legit, and it hallmarks Prima Bistro’s dedication to technique.
Charcuterie is a difficult skill to master, so I'm impressed that they cure the charcuterie in-house at Prima Bistro. Especially challenging are dry-cured sausages such as salami. I know because I tried it and it ended up looking, and smelling, like a used condom filled with decaying roadkill. But all of the meats Prima put together on this very affordable plate were impeccably prepared.
We didn’t get dessert from Prima; instead I went around the corner to the P S Suisse bakery and dropped $2.50 on a spitzbuebe, a special Swiss raspberry sandwich cookie that sounds like something I like to do to your mom.
I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by Prima Bistro’s deft avoidance of being a completely shitty tourist trap. In addition to what is an obvious working knowledge of classic French technique, Prima also boasts a solid wine list, reasonable prices, and a lively small-town atmosphere. A friendly small town, that is, and not one that puts a boot on your car and plants heroin in your pocket if you voted for President Obama. If you’re ever in Langley for some reason, by all means go.
Rating: 8 small town stereotypes out of 10
Prima Bistro is located at 201 ½ 1st St, Langley, WA
For reservations call 360-221-4060
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