Saffron

5100 S Dawson St Suite 100
725-0388

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 sporks out of 10

Spinasse

1531 14th Ave
206-251-7673

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zayda Buddy's Pizza

5405 Leary Ave NW
206-783-7777

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 5 bitterly cold Minnesota winters out of 10

Poppy

622 Broadway Ave E
206-324-1108

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 Dalits out of 10

The Corson Building

5609 Corson Ave S
206-762-3330

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 9 precision gustatory assaults out of 10