Steelhead Diner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt's in the Market

6-28-05 Matt's in the Market

These motherfuckers are laid back. Mlle X told me two things about Matt's in the Market: 1. It is incredibly small inside. 2. The waiters are unusually cool. As with so many things, she was right on both counts.

I showed up an hour early for my reservation, because when I got off work I didn't have time to go back home first, so I had to go directly to Matt's. You see, I work in Fremont, and live on Capitol Hill. Many people think I'm some sort of Unabomber-esque madman because I walk to and from work, every day, rain or shine. “Why don't you just drive?” they inevitably ask, “The President says the only way to fight terrorism is to drive your car everywhere. Why do you hate America?” You know why, you fuckers? Because the food I eat is so very, very expensive, it means I can't afford a car. You pedestrian losers (or am I the pedestrian loser?) pay however many dollars a month for a car note, insurance, gas, and maintenance for your ride, but then at the end of the month all you can afford are fucking frozen Totino's Pizzas. All of that money that I didn't spend on a car goes into my stomach. The side benefit is that I can eat literally whatever the fuck I want to, because I walk 8 miles every day, rain or shine. A friend of mine is a food chemist. He figured out that I'm burning close to 1000 calories a day, walking so damn much. Guess what that means, assholes? I can eat foie gras for every fucking meal, if I want. I can take a bath in butter, like some sort of mad Roman aristocrat. I can wash my hair with milkshakes. I can brush my teeth with Ranch Dressing. Get the picture? I can eat a whole turducken, a Luther Burger, or four and twenty motherfuckers baked in a pie, if I want. But I hear gout is a real drag, and would in fact hinder my daily commute, so naturally I try to lay off the organ meats, and have a salad every now and then.

Anyway. Because I was walking I didn't have time to walk all the way back to Capitol Hill, get dressed, and go back down to the Pike Place Market. So i went directly to Matt's, instead, even though that made me close to an hour early for the reservation. I was especially hungry because my appetite was stoked by the squashed rat (with a side of maggots) I saw along the Burke Gilman Trail. Luckily, those aforementioned laid back Matt's employees let me sit down, without any hassle. I got a glass of Durand Syrah ($7/ 28), which is a pretty typical example of my favorite varietal. Smoky, with hints of raspberry, it went down easy. Too easy, in fact, so I had a second glass.

They put the brakes on my fast approaching fucked-upedness by delivering to my table a plate of rustic rosemary bread, served with a ramekin of olive oil. Here was a very original touch: in the bottom of the olive oil was diced white and green onion. The oil by itself was extra virgin and bright green, no doubt from the first cold pressing, and was probably the product of one of those countries that were either in cahoots with or didn't put up a fight against the Nazis, and was good enough to have been served without the diced onion. But the onion gave the oil a sweet spiciness. I'm so fucking tired of the cliché pool of balsamic vinegar, staring up at you from the bottom of a dish of olive oil like a fish eye, so when you dip your bread into it you get it completely full of oil with no vinegar on it, until all the oil's gone, then you get nothing but a soggy piece of bread soaked all brown by the balsamic, and it makes your stomach turn when you eat it because the shitty restaurant you went to used cheap balsamic and it was too acidic. So kudos to you, Matt's in the Market, for not being cliché.

While sitting at the tiny table in the tiny restaurant, gazing out across the sliver of Elliot Bay visible from the dining room windows, I overheard the table next to me raving about the catfish. They were English, though, so naturally I took their accolades with a grain of salt. After all, the English think that the most disgusting crapola is good eating. Though I'm not one to judge, because being from the south, I fucking love catfish, which many spoiled yuppie scumbags (and Jews) think is disgusting (and blasphemous).

Eventually Mlle X and Uncle F appeared. We perused the menu. Note: the menu, like the interior of Matt's, is tiny. Five appetizers (including salads), and four entrees. If you're looking for a 25 page opus like they have at The Cheesecake Factory, forget it. If you're a picky bastard, crazy, or on the Atkins diet (the third choice actually encompasses the first two), don't even waste your time at Matt's. Mlle X and I both chose the white anchovy salad ($9.50). I'd never had a white anchovy, and I was pleasantly surprised by its flavor. It still tastes like an anchovy, but milder. It's as if they took the salty fishy oiliness of regular anchovies, and turned the volume down a couple clicks. “Anchovy Lite,” I'd call it, if and when they make me president of the American Anchovy Association, if and when they actually get around to creating the American Anchovy Association. Four white anchovy filets were served criss crossed over a bed of endive, with kalamata olives and mandarin orange slices. Delicious!

Next I chose, predictably enough, the catfish ($18). Breaded and fried, it was served covered in Carolina Barbeque Sauce, which is light, smoky, and tangy; in other words, exactly the opposite of the gloopy, sickly sweet barbeque jizz that Kraft sells. Along with the filet were a couple oven roasted red potatoes and a coleslaw. The catfish was crispy on the outside, moist and flaky inside. They of course used farm raised fish, which is a shame because I miss the dirty, dirty taste of wild catfish, so dark and grimy like my soul. The roast potatoes were crisp outside, creamy within, and studded with sea salt.

A word about the coleslaw: normally when restaurants serve that crap to me, usually in a big pile beneath whatever kind of food I actually ordered, I leave every single strand of the shit untouched. I don't usually like cabbage. I'm ambivalent about mayonnaise. So why the fuck would I eat coleslaw? But the coleslaw at Matt's was julienned apple, red cabbage, and red onion, dressed with a vinaigrette. White, purple, and purple. No mayonnaise to be seen. Crisp, tart, and light. Brilliant. Congratulations, Matt's in the Market, you win the First Annual Surly Gourmand Best Coleslaw Award. The prize for this prestigious award: I didn't dine and dash.

Dessert was an apricot sorbet. You may have noticed I usually get sorbet for dessert. Know why? Because sorbet tastes good.

All the while, of course, our plates were dished out by the previously mentioned smooth operators on the wait staff. It's as if they exhumed the corpses of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr., reanimated them, and forced the zombies to work as waiters. An added bonus? The waiters at Matt's smell better than rotting corpses. And that's why I left them a 25% tip.

Rating: 8.5 swingin' Rat Pack cadavers out of 10

Restaurant Zoe

Upon arrival at Restaurant Zoe I was forced to engage in a game of one-upmanship with the maitre'd over whose sideburns were bigger. Winner: me, asshole. There are only a couple dudes on earth with bigger sideburns than me. One of them is the lead singer of Bloodhag. Another manly man capable of shaming my dundrearies is Burt Rutan, famous (kinda) engineer and aviator. Unfortunately, my victory in the facial hair arena did not come with free food. I guess the “prize” was that they honored my reservation.

The wine list is the only thing that sucks at Restaurant Zoe, because it is TOO EXPENSIVE. I think the bottle we ordered, Montegrossi San Marcelino, was at $42 among the cheapest on the list, and honestly I can't recall being blown away by that vintage. If you're one of those ostentatious bastards, the kind of guy who drives a solid gold car, and can afford to pay Bill Gates to walk your pet unicorn, and you have an entire staff of robot butlers which are powered by burning Picassos, or if you're an NBA player, maybe you wouldn't mind dropping $150 on a bottle of wine, but I'm so poor I would've settled for Thunderbird. Or an upside down can of Whip It.

I stopped complaining about the wine list when the food arrived. The romaine salad ($8.50) was good. It was a grilled romaine heart topped with sauteed apples, bacon bits, and Roquefort dressing. The edges of the lettuce were charred crisp, which combined with the bacon gave the salad a pleasantly smoky flavor. The dressing, tangy and creamy, delightfully balanced the sweetness of the apples.

Next up was the foie gras. Aahhh, foie gras, cruelest of the cruel foods. Or is that veal? Hmmm, I can't decide, so I declare it a delicious tie (at least until they finally invent “orphan cracklin's”). That foie gras was as juicy, yielding, and soft as a cloud of titties, with hints of curry powder and saffron. It was perfectly prepared, and served with sauteed mango slices. The mango had a carmelized sugar cinnamon crust, just like on top of a crème brulee, which gave it a sweet, spicy crunch to contrast the juicy ripeness of the fruit. The foie gras cost fifteen absolutely delicious dollars.

The yellowfin tuna nicoise ($22) was quite a treat. A square block of rare seared tuna topped a bed of green beans, olives, and roasted potatoes. Usually nicoise salad has chopped up chunks of boiled egg, which I hate because it seems like the kind of crap my grandma eats. This nicoise had instead a poached egg, which stared patiently up at me from the plate, like the old dude's vulture eye in “The Telltale Heart.” The yolk was runny. The white was firm and seasoned with cracked black pepper. Fucking AWESOME.

Next was grilled branzino ($29.95. What the fuck is up with that price? $29.95? It's like a damn infomercial. “But wait, there's more. If you call now, and promise to tell a friend, you get two branzinos for the price of one!”). Served whole, the waiter filleted the branzino right at the table. It was flaky, and the flesh had a pleasantly nutty flavor, reminiscent of trout. Actually the fish looked like a trout too, so maybe it's a kind of trout. I don't fucking know. What am I, an ichthyologist? As the old adage goes, if it looks like a duck and fucks like a duck, it's a duck. Or in this case, trout.

Dessert was interesting. I don't usually go for the ultra chocolatey bullshit, puddings, or cake, so I went with the blackberry sorbet ($6). Our waiter, who looked like the dude from Swingers (no, not Vince Vaughn, the other guy), recommended the Moscato d'Asti dessert wine ($6) to accompany. A perfect recommendation! The muscat was lightly sparkling, and just a little tart against the blackberry sorbet. The sorbet was smooth, not cloyingly sweet, and without a trace of the ice crystals that plague lesser sorbets, and it really tasted like fresh fruit.

The ultimate verdict is that Restaurant Zoe RULES. If I had any criticism, it's that the Swingers guy waiter was a little too chatty. I found myself wishing I could change places with him, and I could be the waiter and he could be the customer, so I could serve him a rich creamy bowl of SHUT THE FUCK UP. Now I'm no elitist, only because I'm too poor, but I generally prefer my waiters to be like culinary ninjas, or gustatory ghosts; in other words, I want the motherfuckers to sweep away my dishes, make the occasional recommendation, and otherwise stay the fuck away. But that's a minor quibble, I guess.

Rating: 9.5 chatty waiters out of 10.

Dahlia Lounge

Dahlia Lounge
2001 4th Ave
(206) 682-4142

Years ago I went to this cooking show thing in the Convention Center. It was a pretty good bargain because wine tastings cost $1 each. Thirty tastings later I was drunk, stuffed full of free samples of pork sausage from Larry's Market, and dangerously close to jumping fully clothed into the liquid chocolate fountain. Eventually I found myself talking to this scruffy dude with a booth. He mentioned that he was a restauranteur. Later I was astonished to see the scruffy dude's picture on the cover of a cookbook. Turns out it was celebrity scruffy dude Tom Douglas. I was intrigued, since I don't get to talk to famous people very often. Once I tried to heckle that dreadlocked sucker from Counting Crows. “Hey Counting Crows,” I yelled, “you suck!” That really would have caused his world to come crashing down, I'm sure. Luckily for him he didn't hear that mind bendingly awesome put down.

Anyway, I wanted to see for myself why Tom Douglas is so famous, so I went to one of his restaurants, the Dahlia Lounge. I opened with the veal sweetbreads. What are sweetbreads? Thyroid gland, gringos. Before I have to sit through your choruses of “Ewwww!” let me say this: 1) what the fuck are you, a third grader? and 2) considering the only partially edible BULLSHIT (cough! Hot Pockets! cough!) I see commercials for on TV, you assholes who think sweetbreads are disgusting should fuck off, but not before you realize that at LEAST they are pure, recognizable animal parts, and not a fucking bunch of frankenstein's lips and/or asshole. The veal sweetbreads were almost delicious: deep fried to a crispy golden brown, spongy, moist and sweet on the inside. Ahhh, veal, the cruelest of foods! It wasn't perfect, though. Those crispy awesome sweetbreads were desecrated by a nightmarish bernaise sauce, which was GRAINY, a sure sign that the egg yolks in it had curdled. At $11, this dish was just sad, and ONLY because of the shitty sauce! Pity.

Fortunately, the bread salad ($9) was delightful. Mixed greens were tossed with tomatoes, mozzarella, coppacola, and grilled bread. The bread was smoky, slightly salty, and deliciously chewy. The mild vinaigrette, creamy mozzarella, and croutons went well with the spicy coppacola. You ever watch The Sopranos? They inexplicably pronounce coppacola “gobbagoo.” What the fuck is gobbagoo? A Ramones song?

The mixed greens salad ($7.50) was solidly constructed, tossed with a zesty, lemony dressing which was buffered by goat cheese crostini. A perfectly serviceable salad, and no complaints here. Luckily I'm so easy to please. Note how I wrote that last sentence without a trace of irony. Fuck you if you think I'm hard to please.

The Peking duck was cooked perfectly, as I'd expect: the skin was crispy as fuck, and the meat beneath was so moist and soft it was bad ass! Unfortunately it reeked of too much Chinese five- spice powder. The fried rice was too salty, and contaminated with too many chunks of that skinny Chinese sausage that looks suspiciously like hot dogs. It was a let down, and it set me back $25.

For dessert was the crème caramel. It was okay, though for $8 you could go to Dilettante Chocolates on Broadway and get the same thing and a coffee, or a rock of crack. The homemade donuts ($8) were deliciously decadent! Lightly dusted in cinnamon and sugar, they were soft and pillowy and served with homemade strawberry jam AND mascarpone.

In the final analysis, I wasn't impressed, but sadly it doesn't matter. Why doesn't it matter? Because Tom Douglas is rich. Why is Tom Douglas rich? Because his recipes are accessible. He took out the “gross” parts of French and Asian cuisine, and left the lazy stuff in, so that his food is really just shorthand for other, better food. I'm not going to say the stuff we had at the Dahlia Lounge wasn't good. In fact, it WAS damn good. But it wasn't transcendent, which is what I expected. If you want an awesome meal go to Restaurant Zoe, and
you'll save yourself about $50. Then you can roll up the fifty dollar bill you saved and snort some coke off a stripper's ass. If you don't heed my words, that $50 will end up going into Tom Douglas's pocket, and he'll get to snort coke off a stripper's ass. Only he's so rich, it won't be cocaine, it'll be powdered unicorn horn. And it won't be a stripper's ass, it'll be Jenna Bush's. And he won't use a rolled up fifty, he'll use the Shroud of Turin.

Rating: 6 lines of powdered unicorn horn snorted off Jenna Bush's ass out of 10.

The Erath Vineyards Winemaker's Dinner- McCormick's Fish House

The Erath Vineyards Winemaker's Dinner- McCormick's Fish House
Seattle Cellars, a pretty damn good wine shop in Belltown, is sponsoring a series of dinners at various restaurants around the city. The ulterior motive, of course, is for Seattle Cellars to make money so naturally each course is served with a particular wine, which you can buy (how convenient!) after the dinner.

This week's dinner took place at McCormick's Fish House and featured the wines of the Erath Winery. In attendance with me were Mlle. X, Mr. and Mrs. A, Ms. Y, and Ms. Z.
The first course was an asparagus and shrimp crepe with a pinot gris cream sauce. I've got only one single word for you: fucking awesome. I bought Mlle. X a crepe on the street near the London Eye once. Like all English food it sucked. It was dense, tough, and doughy, and was rolled into a cone, then filled with a big ass miasma of process Swiss cheese, which promptly separated into a layer of polymerized cheese solid on top and a pool of dismal pustulent yellow oil on the bottom.
Anyway, these crepes were exactly the opposite of the one we ate in London, which is to say THEY KICKED ASS. The crepes were very thin, lightly browned on top kinda like an egg roll wrapper, but a little spongy, which of course you'd expect since it's a crepe, after all. They weren't all pancakey like shitty crepes can sometimes be. The asparagus was still a little crisp, which is good because I FUCKING HATE MUSHY VEGETABLES. The shrimp weren't overcooked either, and I'm glad for that because they can get tough and stringy when overcooked and I consider the desecration of perfectly good shrimp to be a goddamn shame. The pinot gris sauce was creamy and sort of like a light alfredo sauce. Too bad I don't know what pinot gris is. The Erath 2003 Pinot Blanc was paired with the crepes. Normally I find white wine either too tart or too sweet, but this one was neither. Which is why we bought a couple bottles of it.

The soup course was a smoked salmon bisque with roe and lemon crème fraiche. The chef was playing coy and accidentally “let slip” the fact that it was copper river salmon in the soup. Big fucking whoop, Ms. Chefy van Chefferbratten: I could give a shit because once it's blended up with cream and all the other shit you put in a bisque, you can no longer tell it's copper river salmon. You coulda saved yourself a couple bucks and used just regular king salmon or whatever. That having been said, however, this bisque was good. It was rich, and creamy, and crisscrossed with intermittent threads of lemon zest, which imparted a very delicate lemony flavor. My only other complaint is that in the description of the soup they use the word “with” a little too loosely. My particular bowl had a single thin stripe of crème fraiche on top and ONE salmon egg in it. Instead of “with roe and lemon crème fraiche” they should have said “passingly associated with and may possibly contain roe and/or lemon crème fraiche.” The bisque was paired with the Erath Pinot Noir 2003, which was perfectly drinkable but ultimately distracting because the numbskulls in attendance kept babbling about how much better pinot noir is than merlot. A word about Pinot Noir: fuck Sideways and fuck you, you bandwagon jumping fucks. All red wine, it its various appellations, is good drinking (except Strawberry Cisco, which technically is red, and is wine {kinda}, and so is thus red wine). Do the vintners a favor. Buy a bottle of merlot and SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT SIDEWAYS.

Next came the salad: arugula with pears, blue cheese, and glazed pecans. Salad is salad is salad, and as long as what I get isn't a bowl of yellowing, brown- spotted iceberg lettuce swimming in a pint of warm thousand island dressing, I'm usually pretty easy to please. That having been said, I am in particular such a whore for salads with fruit and cheese. One exception: Velveeta does not count as cheese. Canned maraschino cherries do not count as fruit. Mlle. X's mom makes a salad using both of the aforementioned ingredients. Sigh. With the salad was the 2004 Pinot Gris. As I expected it was a little tart, though it was an okay pairing with the blue cheese, pears, and sweet glazed pecans in the salad. Note to Yankees: they're pronounced “puh- KAWNS,” not “PEE- cans.”

The entree took the motherfucking cake. It was listed on the menu as “Grilled Copper River King Salmon & Pan Seared Alaskan Halibut.” We thought you had to choose. Surprise, fuckers! Decadently enough, we got both! I felt like a badass emperor getting to have both, especially since I was having trouble choosing when I thought I had to choose. The Halibut was topped with Dungeness crab and morel mushroom butter. Flaky but dense, it was perfectly cooked halibut, though the crab was a little rubbery. Still, it was a minor setback because I LOVE halibut. A note to the general public: eat more halibut, assholes. It's one of the few fisheries which is sustainably managed, thanks to the International Pacific Halibut Commission. Great job dudes! Why don't you take over the swordfish racket before all those delicious fuckers are extinct?
The Copper River Salmon was served with a Pinot Noir reduction. Absolutely awesome. If you've never had Copper River Salmon, you either suck, or you're poor, because it kicks too much ass not to eat it nonstop during the retardedly short period during which it's available. It's like regular salmon, except it's darker and not as flaky, with a richer flavor and none of that strange indescribable “salmon” aftertaste you sometimes get. It's like the steak of fish. Steakfish, some might call it.
My complaint with the entree was that both fish came on the same plate, and the two different sauces mingled. Fuck that. I got the salmon's pinot noir reduction on my halibut. I got the halibut's morel butter on my salmon. Like a third grader I prefer my sauces conveniently contained, each in its own individual sauce hole, preferably served in one of those Dixie plates which are splintered into 3 different wells a la the Mercedes Benz logo. The wine paired with the entree was the Erath Anniversary Reserve Pinot Noir 2000. Now THAT was one badass wine. We duly bought a couple bottles of that magnificent vintage. It would be a crime, both to humanity and to Art itself, not to have purchased some.

Almost as an afterthought, dessert: chocolate bread pudding with crème anglaise and strawberries. Now I'm not a “chocoholic.” By “chocoholic” I mean “gay.” Curiously, the spell check software I'm using while writing this review accepts the word “chocoholic.” Has that stupid word entered the lexicon? Fuck you, chocoholics of the world, for invading my consciousness. Anyway, I'm no chocoholic, and after such a filling, rich meal I found the chocolate mess too much. Less is more, fuck-O's, and a ginger sorbet would have served nicely. Luckily that gloopy chocolate quasar distorting the gravitational field around my plate was paired with Erath's 1998 Late Harvest Gewurtztraminer. Dessert wines can be hit or miss, but this one was the unqualified awesome success of the universe: it had a rounded fruity flavor, with hints reminiscent of falling leaves and jack o' lanterns. Fall blew into my mouth with a soft kiss and suddenly I couldn't stop the lines of purple prose flooding into my brain. So I wrote it all down instead. We bought the last 4 bottles of the Gewurtztraminer. PS don't ask me to pronounce Gewurtztraminer.

Conclusion: while I have eaten at the McCormick & Schmick's on Lake Union, this was the first time I've ever been to the one on 4th ave. I was more than pleased. Total price: $50 per person INCLUDING TIP. Obviously McCormick's took a loss, expecting to make it up by getting a cut from Seattle Cellars when all the drunk fucks (read: us) bought case after case of wine. Which we did like the crack whores we are. I'm sold on both the Seattle Cellar dinners in general, and McCormick's Fish House specifically. I advise you to go to both, if you haven't already, you plebian bastards. But remember that the Seattle Cellars dinners rotate restaurants, so it wouldn't necessarily be at McCormick's next time. Thus if you go to McCormick's, it won't be that cheap usually. But I guess if you don't understand that, you're beyond my help anyway. God help you if you try to vote in Florida.

Something I wasn't pleased about was Cal Erath standing us up. The winery owner, looking like a low- rent Zaphod Beeblebrox, sidled up to our table and asked us if we wanted to go bowling with him. So we dutifully went to the Garage on Capitol Hill, but the fucker never showed. Luckily Mlle. X loves bowling, so the night wasn't a total loss. Side note: Ms. Z is allergic to wine, so she gave Ms. Y all of hers, thus making Ms. Y incredibly fucked up. As we were leaving the Garage Ms. Y was trying to walk backwards in heels and predictably fell down on the sidewalk. Oh well. It's not like that was the first time. But YOU, Cal Erath, you let me down man. I don't believe in nothing no more, man. Next time I see you, dude, you owe me a game of bowling AND a bottle of the 2000 Anniversary Reserve Pinot Noir. So there.