Virtual
Gourmet
San Francisco Kitchen
Workers, circa 1900
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Were Seattle only
the home of Pike Place Market, it would have
legitimate claim to being one of America's great
food cities. Stretching over nine acres,
cobbled together in warrens of nooks and crannies,
up and down stairways, Pike Place seems like a
market designed by Jorge Luis Borges.
It all began in 1907 when a spike in onion prices led to a market within the city, where producers could come and sell their goods cheaply to the people of Seattle. There has been more than one unconscionable attempt to raze this valuable piece of downtown real estate, but the citizenry has always fought back to prevent it--you'll see 46,000 names in tiles underfoot for which donors paid $35 each--and in 1971 it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today it is home to more than 200 year-round commercial businesses, 190 craftspeople and approximately 100 farmers who rent table space by the day, while 240 street performers and musicians ply their own craft. The Athenian Inn was only one of several scenes shot in the Market for the 1993 movie “Sleepless in Seattle.”
There’s very little you won’t find at the Market—the first Starbucks opened here and people line up to visit it as a tourist stop—so you walk by everything from superb fish and meat markets to Beecher’s Handmade Cheese; Britt’s Pickles; the quaint little Crumpet Shop; El Mercado Latino; Grandview Mushroom Farm; Mick’s Pappadum; Totem Smokehouse; and the irresistible Piroshky-Piroshky.
Seattle’s food scene is, in fact, very textured, with well-established restaurants like Tom Douglas’ Dahlia Lounge and a slew of newcomers every season that spice neighborhoods like Fremont, where there is a lot of new restaurant action. Some of the most enticing are run by the redoubtable Maria Hines, whose restaurants Tilth and Golden Beetle have now been joined by Agrodolce, an Italian place specializing in coastal cuisine, which seems a natural for a Pacific-bound city like Seattle.
Hines, with exec chef Jason Brzozowy, offers fine seafood, too, like meaty St. Jude’s albacore tuna with garbanzo beans, bitter red radicchio, and tangy capers, while rabbit is slowly cooked with Marsala wine, farro grain and fava beans on the side, and leg of lamb is accompanied by lentils, artichoke and fresh oregano to perfume the dish and make that coastal connection plain.
You do not want to miss desserts here, which are as homey as they are delicious—steamed chocolate cake with mint, almond, and black currant; and a fat ricotta-stuffed cannoli with candied orange.
It’s a modestly sized
room with clean sharp lines, open kitchen, blue
filigreed tiles, concrete floor, and bare wooden
tables. The menu is precisely the length that a small
operation like this can handle, and prices, with apps
$9-$11 and main courses $16-$19 make sharing a capital
idea.
Non-meat dishes include a fleshy mackerel with a delightful green curry cilantro crust and sweet black currants. This being the Pacific Northwest, salmon has to be on the menu, here a lustrous sockeye with a spicy corn chow chow and a rich basil coconut cream.
The wine list is of considerable size for a small restaurant, with plenty of Pacific Northwest and California bottlings at very fair prices, with plenty of whites and reds under $50.
I ate at Matt’s at
lunchtime, but the dinner menu isn't radically
different in scope. So you want to begin with the
freshly made potato chips, seasoned with salt and
pepper and served with a hot bacon-caramelized onion
dip—the elevating of prole food to the sublime.
There’s a refreshing stone fruit salad and a chopped
Cobb salad with butter lettuce,
Certain dishes have led long lives on the menu, so you’ll always find steamed mussels and clams with chorizo, piquillo peppers, corona beans, charmoula, cava sparkling wine and fresh croutons. At lunch there’s an array of sandwiches to gorge on, like the pan-fried cornmeal-crusted catfish with sambal mayonnaise and shredded lettuce, on potato bread, and few people can resist not ordering the pork belly confit bánh mì (left) with pickled daikon radish & carrot, Fresno chilies, hoisin sauce, cilantro and sambal mayonnaise on a properly crisp baguette, once they've tried it. There’s also a “porkstrami,” decked out on rye with Gruyère, sauerkraut and thousand island dressing. By the way, the sandwiches come with soup or salad.
The sixteen dollars for Don & Joe’s lamb burger, piled high with goat’s cheese, bacon, herb aïoli and onion jam, on brioche with chickpea-sultana salad is worth every penny—one of the best burgers I’ve ever had.
For dessert, maybe the chocolate lime torte or the vanilla panna cotta? Then going shopping in the Market for dinner?
After wandering through the exhibition halls, with room after room of lighted glass and collections of photographs and crafts collected by global artist Dale Chihuly, you may need to sit down and let your mind settle. To do so in the Collections Café (below), which is itself done up in expanses of glass, with more collections of antique carnival chalkware, vintage accordions, radios, cameras, shaving brushes, and tin toys, is to increase your wonder.
The wine list, a paltry three dozen bottlings, focuses on Washington and Oregon, and there is a good selection of craft beers, with dude names like Kaleidoscope Kolsch Ale, Chuckanut Pilsner, Whistling Pig Hefeweizen, Men’s Room Red Ale, and Scuttlebutt Blonde. As at Matt’s, the burger here is first rate, topped with red onion jam, bacon, Beecher’s Marco Polo cheese and garlicky aïoli. There is a tasty strawberry and goat’s cheese polenta cake with rainbow chard salad and bacon vinaigrette, and a pressed pork sandwich on ciabatta bread.
I kind of liked the meatballs here, served without pasta but with a charred tomato sauce on sourdough bread. The pasta dish to try is ravioli stuffed with red onions in an onion pistou with watercress salad and hazelnut vinaigrette. Plates can be ordered small or large, and I recommend sharing large plates of the seared prawns with smoky paprika, garlic, chili flakes, and a dash of Sherry on grilled sourdough. The grilled spare ribs here are terrific, too.
Open
for lunch Mon.-Fri., dinner nightly, brunch Sat.
& Sun. Starters $5-$15, main courses $11-$19.
Also here from the beginning is the Skycity Restaurant (below), which gives you a historic sense of a post-war period when such ideas were rampant, leading to other icons like Windows on the World in the original NYC World Trade Center.
Skycity
As has been said, you can’t eat the view, but, if you regard an evening in Skycity as something of a culinary and visual divertissement, you’ll have a pleasant enough evening, even if the service staff seems out of step. You’ll dine well if you choose simply, dishes like Dungeness crab cakes; ahi tuna crudo with wasabi dust, rose petal limeade, baby spinach and raspberries; and wild king salmon with spring onion nage, roasted sunchokes, and shaved asparagus-Dungeness crab salad.
❖❖❖ NEW YORK CORNER
(Suburban Division)
The
Old
Post Road winds through upper Westchester County
through pretty towns like Bedford, and on a little
knoll alongside a bucolic stretch sits the Bedford
Post Inn and Restaurant. This is a labor of love for
actors Richard Gere and his wife, Carey Lowell (below), with
partner Russell There are two places to dine here--the casual Barn and the more upscale Farmhouse; the former has 50 seats in a room with wood beam ceilings, tile floors, bare wooden tables, and an open kitchen and fireplace; upstairs, the Farmhouse has 75 seats, with bar (there is also outdoor seating now), and there is a Chef’s Table off to the side, seating twelve. The dining room is done in soft colors on wainscoting, with buffed wooden floors and well-spaced antique tables, set with breadbaskets, soft linens, fine stemware and good silverware. The lighting seems a bit lower than it used to be. The wine list, under director Men Chang, has more than 2,500 bottles. The wine cellar can accommodate 24 guests. Chef
Jeremy McMillan (below),
now here almost three years, has a fine kitchen
pedigree, having come from He also does what he calls “farmhouse tapas,” from hamachi crudo with apricot, vadouvan Indian spices and almond yogurt to oven-dried strawberries with whipped lardo and lovage. Even carrots get a char, served with Puglian mozzarella. Pastas have become as American as any dish by now, and all I’ve tasted of McMillan’s have been outstanding, particularly the pappardelle with rabbit sausage and fava beans, and fagotelli with a richly satisfying parmigiano fonduta and a generous amount of chopped truffles.
I highly recommend the pork
chop with sweet grilled cherries and a dash of
balsamico vinegar for balance, while branzino with
salsa verde
and lemon is the best, simplest way to go for
seafood. There’s much more to the menu and
it’s all highly seasonal, so the vegetables and
fruits That goes for the desserts, which are rich in berries and cream, with little touches of summery herbs.
Samuel Johnson once
observed that “There is nothing which has yet been
contrived by man, by which so much happiness is
produced as by a good tavern or inn.” That is
still true today when an inn of the grace and
hospitality of the Bedford Post contrives to please
its guests in every possible way.
The Barn is open for breakfast Mon.-Fri., for lunch Mon.-Fri., for dinner Mon. and Tues., for brunch Sat. & Sun.; The bakery is open daily. The Farmhouse is open for dinner Wed.-Sun. Dinner appetizers run $10-$17, pastas and main courses $16-$35. There is a $75 tasting menu.
❖❖❖ NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
KNOW WHAT YOU PAY FOR
by
Mort Hochstein
That’s the basic route for imported wines. There are brokers, however, who keep prices at a lower level by arranging for wineries to sell directly to the distributor, eliminating one middle man, and the saving is usually reflected in the final selling price. In this instance, that $12 bottle might sell for about $30 on a retail shelf.
Some of the very best Italian wines, leaders such as Vietti, Marco Felluga, and Marchese Di Greve, come to these shores via Della Terra, which practices what the trade calls direct import, the practice described above. Brian Larkey, who created Dalla Terra Winery Direct, runs what I like to think of as a commune, but it’s a commune comparable to a gated neighborhood. He and the producers who comprise Della Terra vote on just who can join their community, and no one joins the group unless the members reach consensus. As agent for his commune, linking them directly to distributors, Dalla Terra charges a 15% fee, against the 40% traditionally charged by importers. “By cutting the importer’s fee,” Larky says, “we can lower the prices of our Italian wines between 20 and 30 percent.”
But there is really no easy way for the consumer to know that the wine passed through one fewer hand and should be cheaper, unless he is familiar with the producer. You’re not likely to find a retailer explaining the ins and outs of the three-tier system and the name of the importer or wine broker seldom appears on a wine label.
It is, then, beneficial to know the wines and be able to appreciate the value in comparison to other quality wines from the same provenance. In addition to the wines named earlier, the Della Terra roster includes Tenuta Sant’ Antonio, specializing in Valpolicella and Amarone; Tascante from Mt. Etna in Sicily; Selvapiani, a classic Chianti house; Poliziano, with wines from Montepulciano, Cortona, the Maremma and Tuscany; Masseria Liveli in Puglia; La Valentina from Abruzzo on Italy’s Adriatic coast; Inama, a Soave specialist now producing a full range of European varietals; Chiarli 1860, a historic Lambrusco producer; Boroli, known for Barolo and Dolcetto; and Badia A Coltibuono (above), one of the great houses of Tuscany. It is an assemblage of Italy’s most elite producers, but those firms also turn out a good number of wines under the $20 price mark.
Knowing
the
provenance of domestic wines can also give buyers a
bigger bang for their bucks. So many of the
California producers are relatively new to the field
and start off with huge expenses. Even those who
landed in Napa and Sonoma in the 1980s are still
paying off mortgages based on expensive land
purchases, as well as equipment and, in some cases,
new regulations that add to the cost of production,
Markham (right) is a case in point, a winery known for quality wines at a reasonable price. It has been around since the start of the Napa Valley wine boom, yet it somehow flies under the radar, not getting the attention often focused on highly promoted Johnny-come-lately’s. The winery originated under the name of Laurent in 1879 and passed through several owners before being acquired by Bruce Markham in 1977. He snapped up vineyards in the early and mid-1970’s for about $5000 an acre, land now priced at about $350,000 an acre, and set out to produce reasonably priced wines. Markham's top-of-the-line Cabernets from estates in Yountville and Calistoga retail in the $50 range, but Markham also fields wines priced in the mid teens to mid twenties, wines of distinction rivaling much more expensive bottlings.
And then there is Markham’s Greystone line, value
priced at $11, with a fine ecological story
attached. Greystone, a historic stone winery
which once belonged to the Christian Brothers, now
houses the California branch of the Culinary
Institute of America. At inception, the CIA
planners were told by St. Helena officials
that the city wastewater facility
could not handle the volume of water the
school would exude from
Once processed,
that clean water is used to drip dry irrigate nearby
vineyards operated by Freemark Abbey and the
Culinary Institute. Water for irrigation is a major
expense for vineyards and recycling the wastewater
has helped cut expenses for partners in the system
and as an added bonus, notes Markham CEO Bryan Del
Bondio, the school receives royalty payments on
sales of Markham’s Greystone wines.
JUST IMAGINE WHAT A LAP
DANCE WILL DO!
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"If
there is one point around which food snobbery
coalesces, it is authenticity. If it doesn’t seem
like it’s made by your mama from Chihuahua or your
nana from Nanjing, some people just don’t want to
eat it. And if there is a cuisine that draws
maximum ire in this regard, at least locally, it
is Mexican. Me, I’m not going to kick a
crunchy-shelled, ground beef-containing creation
out of bed for calling itself a taco.—Devra First,
“Fenway Mexican
restaurant Barrio Cantina lacks sizzle,” Boston Globe
(6/13/13).
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