Hi there peeps. For the first time ever I'm posting something on the blog that isn't a restaurant review. I'm writing a novel. Here's the first chapter. Your thoughts?
The buzz surrounding this fucking place, Sandwich Tina, was intense even by Seattle standards, where the opening of every can of Vienna sausage gets a mention in the Times. So yeah, the buzz was comparable to the sound of a million bees each playing a specially designed kazoo, specially designed, of course, to be able to be played by a bee. Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square was the city’s de facto sandwich district: the area boasted shitloads of office workers, and of course these people needed to eat, and they were total fiends for sandwiches. Which made this neighborhood an obvious choice for proprietor Wilbur Tina to open his eponymous sandwich shop, Sandwich Tina.
Sandwich Tina was precious as fuck. It was twee, wry, and wizened, simultaneously old yet impishly young. If Bjork were a sandwich shop, she would be Sandwich Tina. To frame this as a convenient, SAT-style analogy, a normal sandwich shop is to clothes as Sandwich Tina is to doll clothes. Beneath Sandwich Tina’s handmade lace awning, hidden speakers dripped the kind of inoffensive music which is made by bearded fuckos and their greasy-haired girlfriends, and there are too many people in the band, and they play irregular instruments like the zither or the washboard, like a fucking jug band staffed by Muppets.
Inside Sandwich Tina, the preciousness intensified in concentric circles the closer you got to the counter, as if Dante wrote about Brooklyn instead of Hell. Every table was a carefully-sourced antique, charmingly wobbly and propped up with folded cardboard coasters. Atop each table was a handmade doily, crocheted by Wilbur Tina’s very own grandmother. Above each table hung either a dilapidated chandelier or a tortoiseshell lampshade, spotty and brown and as unappealing as fly paper, complete with those inefficient old-timey light bulbs. Decorating the walls were Ansel Adams prints and rustic kitchen utensils and apple dolls; the latter were attached here and there on Sandwich Tina’s walls, and while they might have exuded a certain charm during the day, the apple dolls’ withered and cramped faces were creepy at night, and absolutely terrifying after hours. Plus one of them eerily resembled George W. Bush.
Tina’s retarded décor obviously didn’t deter customers; it was packed daily, with lines out the door. Part of the allure was Wilbur Tina’s obsessive commitment to locally sourced ingredients. He made everything, including the cold cuts, bread, and even condiments himself, and almost all of the vegetables came from the Pike Place Market. If he could’ve found a sugar farmer in the Puget Sound region, he would’ve bought sugar for his irrationally popular clafoutis, but of course sugarcane, which is apparently much wiser than millions of people, refuses to live in the Pacific Northwest.
But today there was something going on across the street. It was such an intriguing development that no one could keep their attention from drifting to the window, to view what was going on: the bearded fucktard line cooks stopped adjusting their suspenders. The waitresses in their frumpy grandma clothes quit showing each other their tattoos. The customers ceased taking photos of their sandwiches with their iPhones, for possibly the first time ever. Even the apple dolls seemed to be checking out the flurry of activity.
Outside there was a film crew setting up. A white van was parked across the street, its side door slung open. Lots of black cables spewed out the side of the van like intestines, as though the vehicle had perpetrated some grave atrocity and had committed seppuku in disgrace. Maybe the van ran over some kittens. It was so ridden with guilt that suicide was the only option. People darted about, checking wiring and setting up lights and microphones and all the other shit necessary to make a movie or, in this case, a television program. And the focus of the filming was Sandwich Time.
Across the street from Sandwich Tina was its nemesis: Sandwich Time. “Purveyors of Fine Luncheons since 1897” read the antique shingle hanging from Sandwich Time’s door. This legacy lunch counter had been in business since the Klondike Gold Rush, when young entrepreneur Cornelius Armstrong came west to sell groceries and cheap lunches to prospectors headed north. When the Canadian government passed a law requiring gold miners to bring a year’s supply of food with them; Armstrong’s fortune was assured.
Antoine Lavoisier Armstrong was Cornelius Armstrong’s great-great-grandson, and Sandwich Time’s fifth proprietor. Times change. Sandwich Time had successfully adapted to the public’s changing appetites over 116 years in business, even weathering the disastrous 1970’s, when American food really tasted like shit. Lately, however, Sandwich Time really sucked.
This was entirely Antoine’s fault. He was a total asshole and he didn’t know how to run a business. Which was why the film crew was setting up inside his restaurant.
Dominique Beretta was Seattle’s hottest celebrity chef. His show, “Dominique Republic” was HBO’s first and only cooking show. But this was a very special episode. Sandwich Time was a Seattle institution, and Dominique Beretta was trying to save it.
Inside Sandwich Time, cameras rolled as Beretta tired to whip Antoine into shape. Beretta wanted to start by sampling Sandwich Time’s menu. Cameras trailed him as he ventured into the restaurant and sat down. The place was deserted inside: an old lady sat in the corner cheerily chewing what appeared to be an egg salad sandwich. At another table a couple douchebags were vainly trying to position their plates in the most artful possible angle to record the meal on Instagram.
Once seated, Beretta glanced at the menu, which was waiting for him on the tabletop. He looked up, ready to order. He was immediately approached by a handsome man with a nose like a knife blade and a shark’s smile and a gunslinger’s dead eyes: this was Rex Boudreaux, Sandwich Time’s sommelier/ mixologist/ butcher. Rex never met an arm garter he didn’t like, and tonight in honor of Beretta’s visit he was wearing a vintage lacy red one. Looped twice around his left bicep, Rex had obtained the garter on auction: it once actually graced Jayne Mansfield’s upper thigh.
“What would you like, chef?” Rex asked. “The Tournedos Rossini Crostini is quite tasty.”
But Beretta already knew what he wanted. “Maybe something a little less extravagant, thanks,” he decided, handing the menu to Rex. “I’ll try the oxtail biscuit and the porchetta.”
Rex smiled thinly. “Both are delicious choices.” He backed away.
Beretta looked around the room and dictated his impressions to the cameras. “The dining room has seen better days, obviously. The fir floors are clean, but worn down.” He gestured to the art on the walls, “Oil paintings of pastoral countrysides, and long-dead lords and ladies in stupidly ornate gilt frames everywhere. Peeling Victorian wallpaper. The tables and chairs are all antiques, but…” he paused to wobble the table back and forth, “… the legs are as uneven as fuck. The pressed tin ceiling is cool but it looks like they painted over more times than the bike racks at my junior high school.” He quit looking around and gazed directly at the camera to render his verdict. “All in all a portrait of ruin, or a decadent descent into utter madness. This restaurant is the living embodiment of every Edgar Allen Poe story, condensed into a sandwich shop.”
Rex returned with Beretta's order, setting down a couple plates on the table and interrupting Beretta's reverie. “Quoth the raven," Rex sneered, "‘Eat your fucking sandwich.’”
Monday, July 08, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Mamnoon
My biggest problem with Mamnoon is the fucking words on the menu. The names of all the menu items are transliterated into the roman alphabet from Arabic, so all the words have lots of z’s and k’s and apostrophes, like the way alien language is written in really lazy science fiction. Learn to speak American, foreigners! Get a brain! Morans.
Fortunately, my rage over the weird words quickly evaporated once the food started coming to the table. For $8 we got four yalanji, the Syrian version of stuffed grape leaves. These tightly rolled flavor blunts were filled with a creamy packing of lemony and minty rice, and with each bite delivered an agrodolce haze directly to your taste buds.
The arnabeit makli ($7), also known as fried cauliflower, looks like brains but fortunately tastes way better than the average human brain. That having been said, I do find seven bucks to be a princely sum for a few florets of cauliflower. Despite my grumbling about the cost, however, the cauliflower was expertly prepared: it was burnished a warm bronze and smeared with a thin SPF 50 layer of tarrator sauce, which if you don’t know is basically fancy tahini. The cauliflower was light and tender and devoid of that shitty cauliflower flavor that plagues shitty cauliflower.
Lahm bi ajine ($11) was a kind of baked crepe, loosely rolled around a pile of diced lamb, sautéed onions, sprigs of mint, and big bunches of parsley. Much like your mom, this was a crusty loaf of pure flavor. The difference is that the lahm bi ajine tastes good. This thing fits right into the groove in my brain’s pleasure center like a record needle. The chunks of sautéed lamb and onion were highly caramelized, and the mint and parsley give it the lift necessary to keep the lahm bi ajine from gut-bombing your stomach like a common cheeseburger. The bread was thin and foamy and pleasantly nutty, as if it were the Crispin Glover of bread. I could eat a million of these things. In fact, I want my entire body to be wrapped in a huge one the size of a tarp so that I can eat my way out. Or maybe I don’t eat my way out, choosing instead to remain tightly mummified by deliciousness for all eternity. It’s like a tasty Choose Your Own Adventure book.
I know that borsch ($12) is supposed to be BORSCHT, but I can’t tell if the missing “t” is a typo or a result of the aforementioned transliteration, but even if it is a typo I don’t give a shit because this borsh rules. It was served in a clear glass teacup, the better to see the electric purple puree inside. Alongside the cup of soup was a spoon, of course, which contained two cubes of braised short rib. The instructions were clear: drop the short rib into the borsh. And eat. And keep eating, because this borsch was so fucking good. The sweet and dirty flavor of beets rumbled along in the background, with a clear and piercing citrus fanfare, and tiny starlight sparkles of dill. Then there was the short rib: perfect tiny cubes of the very essence of beef. The short ribs were impossibly crusty on the outside, yielding on the inside.They could probably charge $12 just for a couple little cubes of these magnificent short ribs, but no: you get the FUCKING BORSH TOO. It’s just such a pleasure to eat; I want to part the borsh’s velvety maroon thighs with my tongue and get lost in the center of it.
Tenderloin kebab ($28) was, like all the other stuff at Mamnoon, an exercise in technique. Big chunks of beef tenderloin were roasted in what must be the inside of a star, which left the meat with a deep, deep sear that just danced away from being charred, while still remaining a lurid and vaginal medium rare inside. The tenderloin was beguilingly spiced, and accompanied by roasted pearl onions and cherry tomatoes. The onions, sadly, were undercooked, and I honestly have never seen the appeal of whole roasted cherry tomatoes, which inevitably ejaculate a gout of sour watery tomato entrails into your mouth when bitten into. Still, the sheer deliciousness of the tenderloin amply compensated for the vegetable failures.
Dessert was paloudeh ($9), a lime sorbet with a drizzle of pomegranate syrup and some fried rice noodles on top. The sorbet was light and creamy and refreshing without being cloying, and the syrup was a bracingly tart counterpoint. Unfortunately the fucking squiggle of crispy pubes on top was so 1980’s, they should’ve garnished it with a copy of Sports by Huey Lewis & the News, which they could’ve inserted vertically into the scoop of sorbet like a Billboard chart-topping tuile. I’ve been a fan of Mamnoon’s chef Garrett Melkonian ever since I encountered some of his mind-bendlingly fucked up desserts at Spring Hill, but the fried noodles just made me as confused as a Republican Congressman’s sexuality.
Luckily the mouhallabia (also $9) more than made up for the paloudeh’s gastronomic “Where’s the Beef” bumpersticker. The mouhallabia, which by this point I felt they were just fucking with us with the words on the menu, was described as “milk pudding pistachio,” but this minimalist caption hardly does justice to the silken cup of creamy deliciousness we were served. The mouhallabia was like spanking a pinup’s ass: creamy and jiggly and it made you feel like a big man. It was sweet, but not too sweet, and topped with a pastoral green field of ground pistachio.
Middle eastern cuisine is an ancient art which dates back to the time when George Washington walked the earth, and Mamnoon is a sterling example. If I have any complaints, it’s that the different dishes just randomly appear at the table with no apparent order or structure. I only wish they delivered, because if they did I would construct a conveyor belt directly from Manoon to my house and I would have them convey food directly into my mouth 24 hours a day. Even on Christmas day. That’s how delicious Mamnoon is.
Rating: 9 Christmases out of 10
Mamnoon is located at 1508 Melrose Ave
For reservations call 206-906-9606
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
Ma'Ono
I was impressed by the speed with which Spring Hill changed concepts and became Ma’Ono Chicken & Whiskey. Seriously, these motherfuckers turned on a dime: Spring Hill was closed for maybe a couple days while they revamped the menu. Then they unveiled the new concept: all fried chicken, all the time.
This, of course, was a brilliant idea: Spring Hill’s weekly fried chicken dinners on Mondays were perennially sold out. If you’ve got a goose that lays golden eggs, you make that motherfucking goose lay eggs ALL WEEK, not just on Mondays. Which is what they did. Was the change worth it? I wanted to find out for myself, so off we went to Ma’Ono.
We started with an order of brussel sprouts. For $10 we got a plate of roasted brussels sprout halves, caramelized until they were a pleasing mahogany on the cut side, and as vibrantly green as a leprechaun’s jizz on the other side. Accompanying these masterful sprouts were big sautéed slices of apple. The whole thing was shingled on top with savory medallions of thick-cut bacon. The only way this dish could possibly be more autumnal would be if it were garnished with a fallen leaf and a sense of foreboding.
Manapua were $7. For this price we got two of these barbeque pork buns: delicate ivory spheres of pastry filled with finely shredded roast pork. Unlike the usual humbow you get on the street, purchased from some shady dude under a bridge, who glances repeatedly over his shoulders before surreptitiously palming a dimebag of pork buns into your hand, the manapua at Ma’Ono are fucking legit. The dough was airy and foamy, like Gwenyth Paltrow’s thoughts, with a filling of what tasted like real barbequed pork. They were the total opposite of the aforementioned street pork buns, whose gloomy maroon filling usually resembles red Kool Aid mixed with sausage. The only downside to the manapua was the dipping sauce, which was too brassy and tasted like a doorknob with lightning bolts shooting out of it.
A side of grits ($6) was so slick it could convince a carney to give up a giant stuffed Spongebob Squarepants. Seriously, these grits are so smooth and creamy and rich, it would make the most comfortable and also most disturbing waterbed filling ever. I didn’t want to eat these grits as much as I wanted to jump into a giant tub of it and luxuriate as though I were an obscene roman aristocrat. But at least then my elbows wouldn’t be ashy.
A whole fried chicken is $38 and this, of course, is Ma’Ono’s signature dish. It came to the table dismembered into 10 pieces, of course, as fried chicken typically does, because nobody deep fries a whole chicken, despite the fact that it would be cool as fuck. The crust was a rich bronze, which shatters when bitten like the stained glass in a bombed out cathedral. Beneath the chicken’s brittle armor was a succulent and yielding flesh, dripping its juices erotically down your throat with every bite. And that was the white meat. The dark meat practically melted, collapsing into your mouth like a fainting Victorian matron, overwhelmed by a challenge to the social order by some dashing vagabond.
This mind-altering chicken is served with a perfectly serviceable bowl of rice and a little jar of kimchee, fresh-tasting and briny, without a trace of the farty smell that plagues shitty dented cans of lesser kimchee. Also included with your fried chicken purchase are two dipping sauces: a pretty lame honey mustard, and a fucking PRISTINE chili sauce which is sultry and sweet, with an ocher heat that approaches slowly from behind. Just like your mom. Ignore the honey mustard the way I ignore your mom. Go for the chili sauce. I insist.
Dessert was milk chocolate crème ($5), which was basically a fancy name for pudding, which came with a dusting of superfine sugar and some macadamia nuts. We also had a huge wedge of banana cream pie ($7) which had such an intense banana flavor, a monkey would stop throwing his shit at you if you only offered him a slice. A coconut milk shake ($7) was okay, but they made the mistake of putting cubes of tofu or something else that’s leathery and bland and cubular, and I wasn’t very pleased by that at all. I realize that tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s in, but the texture is always just too gross to me. After all, I imagine that tofu cubes are what Q-Bert’s jizz probably closely resembles.
This is expensive fried chicken. There’s no sugarcoating it. But like all handcrafted works of art, the food at Ma’Ono is of high quality: the ingredients are exquisite, the preparations skillful. The decision to change Spring Hill’s fine dining format to Ma’Ono’s slightly more casual family-style Hawaiian menu was a gamble, but it’s one that has clearly paid off because the place is fucking PACKED every day now. Make a reservation. And you should mention whether you want to order the fried chicken when you call, because they DO run out. Don’t worry: the Spring Hill classics, like the saimin and the cheeseburger and the popcorn ice cream, are all still on the menu. But the permanent addition of this magnificent chicken to Ma’Ono’s menu is just the icing on this perfect solid gold cake which is garnished with a leprechaun.
Rating: 9 perfect cakes out of 10
Ma’Ono is located at 4437 California Ave SW
For reservations call 206-935-1075
This, of course, was a brilliant idea: Spring Hill’s weekly fried chicken dinners on Mondays were perennially sold out. If you’ve got a goose that lays golden eggs, you make that motherfucking goose lay eggs ALL WEEK, not just on Mondays. Which is what they did. Was the change worth it? I wanted to find out for myself, so off we went to Ma’Ono.
We started with an order of brussel sprouts. For $10 we got a plate of roasted brussels sprout halves, caramelized until they were a pleasing mahogany on the cut side, and as vibrantly green as a leprechaun’s jizz on the other side. Accompanying these masterful sprouts were big sautéed slices of apple. The whole thing was shingled on top with savory medallions of thick-cut bacon. The only way this dish could possibly be more autumnal would be if it were garnished with a fallen leaf and a sense of foreboding.
Manapua were $7. For this price we got two of these barbeque pork buns: delicate ivory spheres of pastry filled with finely shredded roast pork. Unlike the usual humbow you get on the street, purchased from some shady dude under a bridge, who glances repeatedly over his shoulders before surreptitiously palming a dimebag of pork buns into your hand, the manapua at Ma’Ono are fucking legit. The dough was airy and foamy, like Gwenyth Paltrow’s thoughts, with a filling of what tasted like real barbequed pork. They were the total opposite of the aforementioned street pork buns, whose gloomy maroon filling usually resembles red Kool Aid mixed with sausage. The only downside to the manapua was the dipping sauce, which was too brassy and tasted like a doorknob with lightning bolts shooting out of it.
A side of grits ($6) was so slick it could convince a carney to give up a giant stuffed Spongebob Squarepants. Seriously, these grits are so smooth and creamy and rich, it would make the most comfortable and also most disturbing waterbed filling ever. I didn’t want to eat these grits as much as I wanted to jump into a giant tub of it and luxuriate as though I were an obscene roman aristocrat. But at least then my elbows wouldn’t be ashy.
A whole fried chicken is $38 and this, of course, is Ma’Ono’s signature dish. It came to the table dismembered into 10 pieces, of course, as fried chicken typically does, because nobody deep fries a whole chicken, despite the fact that it would be cool as fuck. The crust was a rich bronze, which shatters when bitten like the stained glass in a bombed out cathedral. Beneath the chicken’s brittle armor was a succulent and yielding flesh, dripping its juices erotically down your throat with every bite. And that was the white meat. The dark meat practically melted, collapsing into your mouth like a fainting Victorian matron, overwhelmed by a challenge to the social order by some dashing vagabond.
This mind-altering chicken is served with a perfectly serviceable bowl of rice and a little jar of kimchee, fresh-tasting and briny, without a trace of the farty smell that plagues shitty dented cans of lesser kimchee. Also included with your fried chicken purchase are two dipping sauces: a pretty lame honey mustard, and a fucking PRISTINE chili sauce which is sultry and sweet, with an ocher heat that approaches slowly from behind. Just like your mom. Ignore the honey mustard the way I ignore your mom. Go for the chili sauce. I insist.
Dessert was milk chocolate crème ($5), which was basically a fancy name for pudding, which came with a dusting of superfine sugar and some macadamia nuts. We also had a huge wedge of banana cream pie ($7) which had such an intense banana flavor, a monkey would stop throwing his shit at you if you only offered him a slice. A coconut milk shake ($7) was okay, but they made the mistake of putting cubes of tofu or something else that’s leathery and bland and cubular, and I wasn’t very pleased by that at all. I realize that tofu takes on the flavor of whatever it’s in, but the texture is always just too gross to me. After all, I imagine that tofu cubes are what Q-Bert’s jizz probably closely resembles.
This is expensive fried chicken. There’s no sugarcoating it. But like all handcrafted works of art, the food at Ma’Ono is of high quality: the ingredients are exquisite, the preparations skillful. The decision to change Spring Hill’s fine dining format to Ma’Ono’s slightly more casual family-style Hawaiian menu was a gamble, but it’s one that has clearly paid off because the place is fucking PACKED every day now. Make a reservation. And you should mention whether you want to order the fried chicken when you call, because they DO run out. Don’t worry: the Spring Hill classics, like the saimin and the cheeseburger and the popcorn ice cream, are all still on the menu. But the permanent addition of this magnificent chicken to Ma’Ono’s menu is just the icing on this perfect solid gold cake which is garnished with a leprechaun.
Rating: 9 perfect cakes out of 10
Ma’Ono is located at 4437 California Ave SW
For reservations call 206-935-1075
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Rione XIII
If you don’t know how to read roman numerals, you’ll be pretty sad indeed when you go to Rione XII. That’s because you’ll tell your friends you had a great meal at “Rione ex eye eye eye” and they will mock you. But if that actually IS the case, and you really don’t know how to read roman numerals, then you’ve got bigger problems than Rione XII because you probably pronounce movie sequels wrong too and go around talking about how “Rocky vee” is the worst of the Rocky movies. Luckily for me, I learned a lot about roman numerals in school, since in my home state of Louisiana they still actually use them, along with leaded gas, phrenology, and those old-time exercise machines with the vibrating canvas belt that goes around your waist. So I felt right at home at Rione XIII.
We started with the zucchini street pizza ($15). The crust was thin and bubbly, simultaneously chewy and crackly, as good pizza crusts should be. Thin rounds of roasted zucchini dotted this pizzascape, along with cloudy globs of the softest and sweetest ricotta I have ever tasted. A generous dusting of microplaned cured tuna heart topped it all off. I was hesitant to order this pizza, but it was definitely tastier than it had any right to be: sweet and salty with just a briny hint courtesy of the tuna heart. If you were expecting a big bloody beating heart, you would be disappointed because the reddish brown flecks of heart looked more like grated nutmeg than anything else. This flavor combination, unlikely as it might sound, really worked. My biggest complaint about this pizza is that they unfortunately call this “street pizza” on the menu which is, as everyone knows, a synonym for roadkill.
Trippa alla romana ($12) was interesting, to say the least. Gigantic ass beans, each the size of a fetus, bathed in a rich amniotic fluid of tomato sauce with squares of tripe, bread crumbs, and a little mint. Like the street pizza, the tripe featured an unlikely combination of flavors and textures, but it was utterly bewitching. Still, to this day I have no idea why people eat tripe. It’s fucking stomach lining. Why would you want to put MORE stomach in your stomach? Plus it tastes vaguely dirty. Or maybe it’s not tripe’s fault. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just want to gripe. Gripe about tripe.
Bucatini Amatriciana ($14) was the best thing I ate at Rione XIII. Big slippery pasta tubes, which your mom likes even more than MY big slippery pasta tube, writhed joyfully in a bright tomato sauce. Also in the sauce were little porky batons of guanciale and sautéed arcs of red onion. The plate was dusted on top with grana. This was generally good but I take issue with the red onion. There’s no reason to put red onion in anything: raw, it’s too strong. Cooked, looks like worms. You can’t win. The only reason people use red onions instead of yellow is because they’re red supremacists. Go to hell, you fucking onion racists.
Gnocchi alla romana ($14) was okay but very cheesy. Too cheesy. Cheesier, even, than Kenny G’s newest album, “Kenny G Performs a Thomas Kinkade Christmas.” Big soft round areolas of polenta were topped with melted mozzarella and tomato sauce. These were quite tasty: the rich satiny pucks of polenta sported a charmingly bruleed skin of mozzarella on top, but in general it really just tasted like pizza.
Oxtails alla Vaccinara was, for $19, a relative bargain. For this price you got a couple silky chunks of braised beef that dropped effortlessly off the bone. Unfortunately there was a lot of bone: too much bone, in fact, even for your mom, whose appetite for bone is legendary. And these weren’t regular, unassuming bones, they were big fucking dinosaur vertebra. It looked like HR Giger plated this fucking thing. Beneath the macabre beef cadaver was a big slick pile of polenta, with tomato sauce on top. This tasted a lot like the gnocchi, which tasted a lot like the bucatini, which tasted a lot like the tripe, which is to say: it all tasted red. You can blame me for choosing the wrong menu items, but the waitress could’ve mentioned to us that all the shit we were ordering had identical flavor profiles.
Dessert was a chcolate amaretto cake ($8), with a quenelle of straciatella gelato on the side. It’s a pretty moist cake, and the gelato was creamy enough. You really can’t go wrong with cake and ice cream, but isn’t there a more “authentic” Italian dessert with tomato sauce and polenta in it? Actually there must not be, because if there was we would’ve probably ended up with it.
Rione XIII isn’t bad, but I’d hardly call it mind-blowing, though maybe that’s not the point. I definitely give them credit for some very creative flavor profiles, and a competent (though no-frills) preparation, but something about the place just doesn’t do it for me. I think I might just be suffering from Ethan Stowell Fatigue: the indefatigable restaurateur seems to be opening new establishments at a pace that rivals the proliferation of facebook posts that complain about the president. In fact, by 2025 there will be one Ethan Stowell restaurant for every hummingbird on earth. So watch the fuck out.
I could also be suffering from Italian food fatigue, which as we all know is notoriously technique-free, mostly because Italians would prefer to spend time honing the ability to grab a woman’s ass while piloting a speeding Vespa instead of making elaborate terrines and delicate sauces. The French like to fuck too, mind you, yet they somehow ALSO find the time to create the world’s finest cuisine AND complain about American hegemony AND they manage to do all of this in a 35 hour work-week. Still, if you like Italian food and you are on Capitol Hill and Spinasse is booked, which I assure you it will be, then why not give Rione XIII a shot?
Rating: 6.5 street pizzas out of 10
Rione XIII is located at 401 15th Ave E.
For reservations call 206-838-2878
We started with the zucchini street pizza ($15). The crust was thin and bubbly, simultaneously chewy and crackly, as good pizza crusts should be. Thin rounds of roasted zucchini dotted this pizzascape, along with cloudy globs of the softest and sweetest ricotta I have ever tasted. A generous dusting of microplaned cured tuna heart topped it all off. I was hesitant to order this pizza, but it was definitely tastier than it had any right to be: sweet and salty with just a briny hint courtesy of the tuna heart. If you were expecting a big bloody beating heart, you would be disappointed because the reddish brown flecks of heart looked more like grated nutmeg than anything else. This flavor combination, unlikely as it might sound, really worked. My biggest complaint about this pizza is that they unfortunately call this “street pizza” on the menu which is, as everyone knows, a synonym for roadkill.
Trippa alla romana ($12) was interesting, to say the least. Gigantic ass beans, each the size of a fetus, bathed in a rich amniotic fluid of tomato sauce with squares of tripe, bread crumbs, and a little mint. Like the street pizza, the tripe featured an unlikely combination of flavors and textures, but it was utterly bewitching. Still, to this day I have no idea why people eat tripe. It’s fucking stomach lining. Why would you want to put MORE stomach in your stomach? Plus it tastes vaguely dirty. Or maybe it’s not tripe’s fault. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just want to gripe. Gripe about tripe.
Bucatini Amatriciana ($14) was the best thing I ate at Rione XIII. Big slippery pasta tubes, which your mom likes even more than MY big slippery pasta tube, writhed joyfully in a bright tomato sauce. Also in the sauce were little porky batons of guanciale and sautéed arcs of red onion. The plate was dusted on top with grana. This was generally good but I take issue with the red onion. There’s no reason to put red onion in anything: raw, it’s too strong. Cooked, looks like worms. You can’t win. The only reason people use red onions instead of yellow is because they’re red supremacists. Go to hell, you fucking onion racists.
Gnocchi alla romana ($14) was okay but very cheesy. Too cheesy. Cheesier, even, than Kenny G’s newest album, “Kenny G Performs a Thomas Kinkade Christmas.” Big soft round areolas of polenta were topped with melted mozzarella and tomato sauce. These were quite tasty: the rich satiny pucks of polenta sported a charmingly bruleed skin of mozzarella on top, but in general it really just tasted like pizza.
Oxtails alla Vaccinara was, for $19, a relative bargain. For this price you got a couple silky chunks of braised beef that dropped effortlessly off the bone. Unfortunately there was a lot of bone: too much bone, in fact, even for your mom, whose appetite for bone is legendary. And these weren’t regular, unassuming bones, they were big fucking dinosaur vertebra. It looked like HR Giger plated this fucking thing. Beneath the macabre beef cadaver was a big slick pile of polenta, with tomato sauce on top. This tasted a lot like the gnocchi, which tasted a lot like the bucatini, which tasted a lot like the tripe, which is to say: it all tasted red. You can blame me for choosing the wrong menu items, but the waitress could’ve mentioned to us that all the shit we were ordering had identical flavor profiles.
Dessert was a chcolate amaretto cake ($8), with a quenelle of straciatella gelato on the side. It’s a pretty moist cake, and the gelato was creamy enough. You really can’t go wrong with cake and ice cream, but isn’t there a more “authentic” Italian dessert with tomato sauce and polenta in it? Actually there must not be, because if there was we would’ve probably ended up with it.
Rione XIII isn’t bad, but I’d hardly call it mind-blowing, though maybe that’s not the point. I definitely give them credit for some very creative flavor profiles, and a competent (though no-frills) preparation, but something about the place just doesn’t do it for me. I think I might just be suffering from Ethan Stowell Fatigue: the indefatigable restaurateur seems to be opening new establishments at a pace that rivals the proliferation of facebook posts that complain about the president. In fact, by 2025 there will be one Ethan Stowell restaurant for every hummingbird on earth. So watch the fuck out.
I could also be suffering from Italian food fatigue, which as we all know is notoriously technique-free, mostly because Italians would prefer to spend time honing the ability to grab a woman’s ass while piloting a speeding Vespa instead of making elaborate terrines and delicate sauces. The French like to fuck too, mind you, yet they somehow ALSO find the time to create the world’s finest cuisine AND complain about American hegemony AND they manage to do all of this in a 35 hour work-week. Still, if you like Italian food and you are on Capitol Hill and Spinasse is booked, which I assure you it will be, then why not give Rione XIII a shot?
Rating: 6.5 street pizzas out of 10
Rione XIII is located at 401 15th Ave E.
For reservations call 206-838-2878
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Marx Foods
Marx Foods is the brick-and-mortar outlet of marxfoods.com, the online luxury food retailer which is based here in Seattle. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: unless there’s a Whole Foods somewhere with a Maclaren Stroller showroom inside it, I doubt there’s a bigger yuppie magnet than Marx Foods. I was invited by Justin Marx to visit the Marx Foods showroom on lower Queen Anne. Yes, he knows what I look like. And no, I don’t give a fuck. I don’t typically review grocery stores, so I figured what the fuck. Justin brought out a bunch of stuff for me to try, and I ate it.
I started with a jar of pistachio cream, which is dreamy. It’s a subtle green, and lightly textured. Visually it resembles the puke-color paint they used to paint public school rooms back in the 1970’s and 80’s, but you shouldn’t judge this book by its cover because it is SO FUCKING DELICIOUS. It tastes like angels fucking. The flavor is mild and sweet, yet not at all cloying, with a rich pistachio flavor. It’s $12 for a 7.4 ounce jar which, compared to Nutella, is pretty pricey, but it’s several orders of magnitude tastier. In fact, Sabatino & Co’s Fior di Pistacchio, which is the brand that Marx Foods carries, won the NASFT gold award for Outstanding Nut Butter this year. Your mom was outraged that MY nut butter didn’t win; such is life.
Maple cream is made from real maple syrup that has been whipped like a stepchild. The inevitable incorporation of air into the maple cream turns the color of the syrup from its usually glossy amber to a satiny, bland beige. Luckily, the flavor of this stuff is anything but bland: it’s creamy and very sweet and tastes like highly concentrated waffles. If some chump ever invents a breakfast mayonnaise, it would taste like maple cream. Like the pistachio cream, it’s not cheap ($17 for 6 oz) but it is totally worth it.
Madyson’s Maddy Melts ($9 for 8 marshmallows) are disc-shaped marshmallows, fiendishly engineered to float atop a mug of hot cocoa, thus melting into a perfectly even marshmallow layer. As far as marshmallows go, these are gauzy and not overly saccharine. My only complaint is that “Madyson” sounds like it should be the name of a stripper, not a marshmallow.
Manufactured by boutique confectioner We Made This, macaron mixes are probably the most retarded thing Marx Food sells. This macaron mix sells for $16 for about 6 ounces. To make macarons from scratch you only need five ingredients: sugar, salt, egg whites, almonds, and confectioner’s sugar. We Made This’s mix requires you to add your own egg whites. You’re essentially paying for 6 ounces of sugar and ground almonds. $16 macaron mixes are why the terrorists hate us.
Panforte di Mirabissi is also pretty shitty. Invented during medieval times to provide a durable source of quick energy for knights at war, panforte is basically a fruitcake puck. Panforte is about as successful a dessert as all those knights who ate panforte were successful at the Crusades, which is to say: not very. Marx Foods sells several flavors, but they all taste like a stale muffin that rolled around on the floor of a Penzey’s. Like slavery, open sewers, and hairy 1970’s pubic bushes, panforte is one of history’s bad ideas which should finally be retired. Prices range from $19-22 depending on the flavor, for 350g.
Butternut seed oil, on the other hand, is magnificent: nutty and sweet and savory all at once, with grassy hints in the finish, this stuff tastes like autumn in a bottle. Here is a list of stuff I would lick this butternut seed oil off of: a dog. An old sponge. Mike Tyson. An electric fence. Your mom. Manufactured with a grant from Cornell University, whose agriculture department was trying to find a use for unused butternut squash seeds, this oil would even taste good on Vienna Sausage. That’s how fucking good it is. $12 for 6.3 ounces.
Marx Foods sells, literally, several metric shit-tons of items. In addition to being the FIRST retailer in the USA to sell ghost chilis, Marx Foods also sells exotic meats, oils and sauces and spices and dry pastas of all kinds, as well as stylish paperware. They’re currently trying to source Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilis, currently the world’s hottest at 2 million Scoville units.
The showroom has maybe 50 different things on display, but there’s more to it than that: shoppers will be able to peruse the store’s website, which has hundreds more items, on conveniently mounted ipads inside the store, and you can buy anything from the website because they have all of the stuff the website sells on shelves in the back. Some of this stuff is too bourgeois, and it can be quite expensive. However, the inventory is impeccably sourced, and some items are quite cheap: vanilla beans, for instance, which sell at Marx Foods for about $19 for 20 beans, are much cheaper than Penzey’s princely $36.89 for 15 beans. Personally I wish they’d start selling pot brownie mixes, but I suppose that’s a pipe dream.
Rating: 7.5 brownies out of 10
Marx Foods is located at 144 Western Ave W.
For inquiries call 1-866-588-6279, or check out the website.
I started with a jar of pistachio cream, which is dreamy. It’s a subtle green, and lightly textured. Visually it resembles the puke-color paint they used to paint public school rooms back in the 1970’s and 80’s, but you shouldn’t judge this book by its cover because it is SO FUCKING DELICIOUS. It tastes like angels fucking. The flavor is mild and sweet, yet not at all cloying, with a rich pistachio flavor. It’s $12 for a 7.4 ounce jar which, compared to Nutella, is pretty pricey, but it’s several orders of magnitude tastier. In fact, Sabatino & Co’s Fior di Pistacchio, which is the brand that Marx Foods carries, won the NASFT gold award for Outstanding Nut Butter this year. Your mom was outraged that MY nut butter didn’t win; such is life.
Maple cream is made from real maple syrup that has been whipped like a stepchild. The inevitable incorporation of air into the maple cream turns the color of the syrup from its usually glossy amber to a satiny, bland beige. Luckily, the flavor of this stuff is anything but bland: it’s creamy and very sweet and tastes like highly concentrated waffles. If some chump ever invents a breakfast mayonnaise, it would taste like maple cream. Like the pistachio cream, it’s not cheap ($17 for 6 oz) but it is totally worth it.
Madyson’s Maddy Melts ($9 for 8 marshmallows) are disc-shaped marshmallows, fiendishly engineered to float atop a mug of hot cocoa, thus melting into a perfectly even marshmallow layer. As far as marshmallows go, these are gauzy and not overly saccharine. My only complaint is that “Madyson” sounds like it should be the name of a stripper, not a marshmallow.
Manufactured by boutique confectioner We Made This, macaron mixes are probably the most retarded thing Marx Food sells. This macaron mix sells for $16 for about 6 ounces. To make macarons from scratch you only need five ingredients: sugar, salt, egg whites, almonds, and confectioner’s sugar. We Made This’s mix requires you to add your own egg whites. You’re essentially paying for 6 ounces of sugar and ground almonds. $16 macaron mixes are why the terrorists hate us.
Panforte di Mirabissi is also pretty shitty. Invented during medieval times to provide a durable source of quick energy for knights at war, panforte is basically a fruitcake puck. Panforte is about as successful a dessert as all those knights who ate panforte were successful at the Crusades, which is to say: not very. Marx Foods sells several flavors, but they all taste like a stale muffin that rolled around on the floor of a Penzey’s. Like slavery, open sewers, and hairy 1970’s pubic bushes, panforte is one of history’s bad ideas which should finally be retired. Prices range from $19-22 depending on the flavor, for 350g.
Butternut seed oil, on the other hand, is magnificent: nutty and sweet and savory all at once, with grassy hints in the finish, this stuff tastes like autumn in a bottle. Here is a list of stuff I would lick this butternut seed oil off of: a dog. An old sponge. Mike Tyson. An electric fence. Your mom. Manufactured with a grant from Cornell University, whose agriculture department was trying to find a use for unused butternut squash seeds, this oil would even taste good on Vienna Sausage. That’s how fucking good it is. $12 for 6.3 ounces.
Marx Foods sells, literally, several metric shit-tons of items. In addition to being the FIRST retailer in the USA to sell ghost chilis, Marx Foods also sells exotic meats, oils and sauces and spices and dry pastas of all kinds, as well as stylish paperware. They’re currently trying to source Trinidad Moruga Scorpion chilis, currently the world’s hottest at 2 million Scoville units.
The showroom has maybe 50 different things on display, but there’s more to it than that: shoppers will be able to peruse the store’s website, which has hundreds more items, on conveniently mounted ipads inside the store, and you can buy anything from the website because they have all of the stuff the website sells on shelves in the back. Some of this stuff is too bourgeois, and it can be quite expensive. However, the inventory is impeccably sourced, and some items are quite cheap: vanilla beans, for instance, which sell at Marx Foods for about $19 for 20 beans, are much cheaper than Penzey’s princely $36.89 for 15 beans. Personally I wish they’d start selling pot brownie mixes, but I suppose that’s a pipe dream.
Rating: 7.5 brownies out of 10
Marx Foods is located at 144 Western Ave W.
For inquiries call 1-866-588-6279, or check out the website.
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