Oddfellows Cafe

1525 10th Ave
206-325-0807

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8 Odd Motherfuckers out of 10

Olivar

806 E Roy
206-322-0409

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spinasse

1531 14th Ave
206-251-7673

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poppy

622 Broadway Ave E
206-324-1108

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 Dalits out of 10

Cremant

Cremant
1423 34th Ave
206-322-4600

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating:

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

Lark

Lark
926 12th Ave
206-325-5275

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 9 fuck ears out of 10.

Quinn's

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 6 labradoodles out of 10.

XO Bistro

7-8-05 XO Bistro

Hmmm... this place is retarded.













I used to walk past the XO Bistro all the time on my way home from the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, where I'd have some beers with my good friend Mr. C, play a couple rounds of Golden Tee, and inevitably see the scruffy asshole from Soundgarden. I even remember walking past the now legendary Cassis and ogling the menu, though I never went inside, because I'm such a jackass (back then I was a poor jackass). Then Cassis closed, and the XO Bistro appeared in its place. Sigh. A missed opportunity I'll never have back.

We went to XO because I'd been walking up 10th Avenue after a long absence from the Roanoke. On a whim, (correction: a drunken whim), I called XO and got reservations for the next day.

Well, gentle fuckface, XO let me down. First of all was the waiter, who looked like he was secretly a carpenter. He was weird. He talked too quietly for me to hear him, especially since there was a table with screaming kids near us. His hands were dirty, cut, and bruised, which is what made me think he was some kind of manual laborer during the day. He was also dirty. You could see the cloud of dust swirling around him as he walked. Motherfucker looked like Pigpen from the Peanuts comics. Worst of all was his timing. Whenever I needed him, he was nowhere to be seen. He'd bring the food to the table, then disappear until the next course came out. I understand that service slows down when it gets busy, but the place wasn't crowded. That said, the dude was polite, even though he was fucking filthy.

We started with a side of pommes frites ($4), more commonly known to those of us who drink Busch beer as French fries. Thank god the whole “Freedom Fries” thing went down the toilet finally. If you're one of those Lee Greenwood listening, Wal-Mart shopping fucks with a flag sticker on your SUV, who calls yourself a patriot yet nonetheless doesn't know what the Monroe Doctrine is, you should know that shortly after your mother finished Freedom Kissing my asshole, I put on a Freedom Tickler and threw a classic fucking on her that would've made the original smutty Frenchman, the Marquis de Sade, proud. It was extra nasty because I made her complain about gas prices as she was coming.

The frites were pretty good, though naturally not as good as the ones they fry in duck fat at Campagne. Still, it's difficult to fuck up French fries. Even McDonald's can make them taste good, and they aren't competent enough to keep from insulting Hindus. And those Hindus can take a lot of abuse! They withstand dysentery, cholera, the plague, floods, the inevitable deadly stampede that always seems to occur during their holidays, and the inundation of a nonstop stream of jobs that once belonged to American college students and welfare mothers. When those motherfuckers die, they die 100,000 at a time, and they still pump out babies as if fucking was going to be outlawed tomorrow. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, pommes frites.

Next was an ahi tuna carpaccio. The tuna was ground up into a paste, smeared on the plate, and garnished with olive oil, pepper, and capers. I didn't like it because it had a sandy texture that was a turnoff, and despite the pepper and capers was rather bland. And at $10, it was, in my opinion, a goddamn ripoff. A waste of sashimi grade ahi tuna. I weep, weep at the thought!

After the carpaccio was the tarte flambee ($11.50), a thin crust pizza topped with gruyere, crème fraiche, onions, and bacon. Finally something that really kicked ass. I could've eaten 100 of them. The crust was flaky and light, and the creamy tartness of the crème fraiche contrasted nicely with the salty bacon and cheese. XO should remove all the other junk off their menu and just serve this. Delightful!

My entree was the lamb sirloin. The lamb itself was tender and juicy, but not really seasoned very well. It was served over a mushy, flavorless ratatouille comprised of bell peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant. There were also some kind of roasted potatoes with it, and everything came with a very intense thyme sauce (too intense- it overwhelmed the rest of the flavors). I ate all of the lamb, but almost none of the rataouille. Lame. Not worth the $19 it set me back. Do I need to make another lame joke about what I could have bought with the money I instead spent on the lamb sirloin? Okay, here goes. For $19 I could get 19 blowjobs from your mother. Are you happy now? Sigh. I'm just a hack. I wish I had gone to that medical school in Grenada after all. Why, god, why? Why is my life without meaning?

We ended the night with a pretty good crème brulee and espresso, followed by a flight of different dessert wines. The dessert flight was the surprise hit of the evening. For $20 we got 6 tastes of different ports and sherries. Definitely reccomended.

To sum it up: though certainly affordable, XO Bistro is too lame to bother with shitloads of courses. Their wine list is cheap and there are some good choices available. Your best bet is to sit in the bar, get a bottle of the L'ecole 41 Merlot, and order the tarte flambee and some frites. Then go across the street to the Roanoke and play Golden Tee. Be sure to name your Golden Tee guy (you know, the little golf playing character who looks like the ass baby of Will Ferrell and George W. Bush) “ASS.” That one gets me every time. I'm so mature.

Cellar Bistro

7/3/05 Cellar Bistro

One time I went to a party, years ago, in Baton Rouge, LA. My brother, in his first year at LSU, was there with his friends. I was there with all the lowlifes I called (and continue to call) friends. The party was at this random guy's parents' condo. I don't know how we got invited, since I knew neither the host nor any of the host's friends. Crazy old Mr. D got my brother and my brother's friend with the fucked up ear high in the host's parents' bedroom. They smoked pot out of a coke can (classy!!!!) and Mr. D, the clinically insane art major, took to calling the kid with the fucked up ear Vincent van Gogh. The fucked up ear kid didn't get the insult. Pity, because that was probably the cleverest putdown that guy would ever hear about his cauliflower ear. “Hey, nice ear asshole,” or “Your ear is ugly,dude,” is probably the extent of the levity he was used to, since he was, after all, from Houma. So he should have thanked crazy Mr. D for the sublime comparison to that tortured, earless, prostitute soliciting bastard genius from the Netherlands.

Anyway, later that night a fight broke out after one frat boy called another frat boy's grandmother a dago. Now, my grandmother is a dago, and I wasn't in the least angered enough to resort to fisticuffs, but apparently the frat boy's opponent was, because they started tussling drunkenly in the living room, upsetting a framed Anne Geddes print and causing a general ruckus. Luckily, the glass in the Anne Geddes shattered when it fell off the wall. I say it was lucky because Lt. Dan's dog had a piece of stringy shit hanging out of his asshole, and the good Lieutenant used the Anne Geddes print to remove the offending shit string. “What do you feed that bastard?” I slurred drunkenly at Lt. Dan, in reference to his dog, “Towels?” Clever, eh? Yeah, well after a case of Shiner Bock you try to sound like the fucking Algonquin Round Table, shithead. Do I need to make a joke about the appropriateness of using an Anne Geddes to wipe a dog's ass? I'll let you fill in the blanks on your own. It's kinda hard to miss at this point anyway, isn't it?

What does any of this have to do with the Cellar Bistro? Fuck if I know, so I'm going to weakly segue into the review by talking about dagos. Like I said, my grandmother is a dago, which makes me ¼ dago. So I'm at least ¼ qualified to talk about dago food, which is to say, any kind of pasta covered in red sauce. The Cellar Bistro is dago food par excellence. Simple, no nonsense, generic Italian food. Eye-talian, as Mr. E, my no- nonsense pal from Cumberland Gap, TN, used to say. Yeah, it's plain, but sometimes less is more, as I've said many times, and besides, it's cheap.

I took Mlle. X to the Cellar Bistro because we'd heard it was awesome. Well the short answer is that is IS awesome. There exists a triple point in restaurant quality. Were any of you bastards aware of the culinary triple point? I bet you weren't. It's the nexus at which quality of food, quality of service, and price intersect. If you go too far in any direction, either the quality of food goes down, or the quality of service goes down, or the price goes up. The Cellar Bistro is one of those rare establishments that straddles the triple point (fuck you, Beavis, I know “straddling the triple point,” sounds like the title of a gay porno, but I'm trying to make a point here, 'kay?).

We started with the gorgonzola dolci ($5.95), which is a plate of sliced gorgonzola, drizzled in a balsamic vinegar reduction, and served with toasted bread and a small ramekin of roasted garlic. Normally I hate when stuff is drizzled with other stuff, but I'll make an exception this time. The bread was a sourdough. Normally toasted sourdough is as impenetrable as kevlar, and grates the flesh off of the roof of your mouth when you bite into it. In this case it was acceptable because a sturdy substrate was needed on which to spread the gorgonzola, which was served at less than room temperature and so was a little chilly- were the bread not toasted we'd have destroyed it trying to smear the stiff cheese all over it. Also included was a ramekin of pureed roasted garlic. My only complaint is that I wish they'd use a more tangy balsamic to offset the sweetness of the gorgonzola and garlic. But I guess that's why they call it dolci. Verdict: fucking delicious!

Next we tried the fried mozzarella. Let me tell you about the time my dad tried to make fried mozzarella. When I was a kid we had this big party at my house. My mom took out the good silverware (as opposed to the usual set, that was mostly stolen from Denny's). The white zinfandel was flowing like, um, shitty wine. My dad manned the Fry Daddy. To say he dropped the ball is to put it kindly. Half of the sticks were undercooked, so that the breaded exterior was barely toasted and the cheese inside was cold. The other half were cooked too well. You'd bite into the breading and find it fucking hollow, an empty breaded husk, as if it had been victimized by some kind of spider that eats cheese. The cheese inside had either vaporized or leaked out through a hole in the breading into the hot grease in the Fry Daddy, which caused the oil to froth and bubble, the way milk bubbles when you blow into it with a straw.

The fried mozzarella at the Cellar Bistro wasn't quite as bad as my father's sophomoric attempt, but it was close. At $6.95, this was about $5.95 too expensive. It was just lame, breaded, fried, mozzarella sticks. The cheese was rubbery, and overall the mozzarella tasted like it came pre- breaded and frozen from Costco. Boring. Plus they served it barely warm, so the cheese wasn't melted, just like 50% of the ones my dad tried to cook.

The antipasta plate ($8.95) was perfectly serviceable. It was served with provolone cheese, olives, pepperonici peppers, sopressetta, salami, and my perennial second-favorite cured meat, coppocola. Enough said. Except that the olives were the shitty pitted black olives that look like garden slugs and taste like a tin can.

On to the entrees. Verdict: good enough. I had the veal marsala. The veal was too thick for this dish, and chewy. I'm guessing it was overcooked, and the marsala sauce was too sweet. When I cook this dish I use dry marsala. These fuckers obviously used sweet. Bizarrely, they served it with a side of fettucini alfredo. Overkill, anyone? If you were Paul Prudhomme , that morbidly obese, Dom Deluise looking fuck, you might think it's a good idea, but I don't. On its own the alfredo was good, but you can't pair a pasta that heavy with an entree as heavy as veal marsala. I'd have substituted angel hair with olive oil and lemon juice. But that's just crazy old me. Still, at $14.95 the price wasn't that bad.

Mlle. X had the linguine puttanesca ($11.95). This dish is one of my favorites, if only because it appeals to my juvenile sense of humor: in case you didn't know, this dish literally translated means “whore's linguine.” This is supposed to be a light, not too filling dish. The flavors of anchovies, garlic, roma tomatoes, capers, and olives should all be discernible and separate, not in competition with each other, but all working together to make the prostitute eating it feel satisfied, but not full so that she could go back to whoring after lunch without feeling too bloated. After all, I know I wouldn't want a 250 pound mafioso on top of me on a full stomach. Ultimately, it was another mild disappointment. All the bases were covered, but they just couldn't pull it off. The flavors were muddy, and the pasta came drenched in marinara sauce, so that tomato paste dominated. Blah. If I were a hooker who ate this puttanesca, I'd give up streetwalking and become a real estate agent. Or an Italian Member of Parliament.

We finished with sorbet. In the true Italian style they served the sorbets in the shell of the fruit from which the sorbet was made: coconut for Mlle. X, lemon for me. Unfortunately, they were frozen to absolute zero and so were impenetrable by spoon for about 30 minutes. To pass the time we finished the bottle of sturdy, passable chianti ($22) and had an espresso. Finally we were able to (sort of) dig in to the sorbets, but they were served, oddly enough, in martini glasses, so it was fucking unwieldy to eat, because you had to constantly worry about tipping over the glass while you wrestled with the ultra frozen ice age sorbet. Though they were obviously frozen too hard, they tasted fresh, and representative of their native fruit, so it wasn't all bad.

With all these misfires, why do I, harsh master of all things culinary, give the Cellar Bistro a passing grade? It's my ¼ dago talking. The place fucking rules. According to Mlle. X there's a velvet painting of Sinatra in the women's bathroom (no, no, you got me, I can't lie. I confess. It was I who saw the velvet painting of Frank Sinatra. I like to sneak into women's bathrooms in restaurants, and, um, in every other kind of building too). The Chairman's velvet men's room counterpart is Sophia Loren, predictably enough. The Cellar Bistro's interior is red, and cavernous, with a fake trellis of fake grape vines suspended from the ceiling, Every doorway is arched, like a roman crypt. The wait staff is competent and friendly. Plus, it's cheap. All these factors combine to make the Cellar Bistro a good place to swill cheap chianti, eat some inexpensive (if overly saucy) pasta, and enjoy the company of a fellow dago. If my dago grandmother weren't senile, and if she didn't live 3000 miles away, I'd take her there. If your grandmother's a dago like mine, you should visit the Cellar Bistro with her, post haste, you filthy fuckers.