It was the most hyped new restaurant since The French Laundromat. (Charlie Trotter's ill-fated fast food joint).
Nationally worshipped Jerry Traunfeld, the gardening, food elf who shook the saute pans for 17 years at the sacred site in Woodinville, The Herbfarm finally got his own place; foodies were wet with anticipation.
In September, Traunfeld opened the 110-seat Poppy on Capitol Hill, named after his mom.
At Poppy, Traunfeld offers each diner a tray-like platter from India called a thali
(pronounced tally) serving a single diner a variety of small dishes
--at Poppy you get 10 or 11. They're like "small plates," or tapas --
so hot these days -- except everybody gets their own.
Villa Victoria was once a Madrona neighborhood gem, known only to the neighbors, the slavering critics, and to foodies who
flocked from wherever it is foodies hang when they're not eating on
something.
It was a little take-out window through which was pushed food that was
unexpectedly good, and unusually Mexican, a sort of creole with
tortillas. You know -- burritos with collards.
That's because owner Naomi Andrade Smith is Afro-Mexican, and
descendant of freed slaves who escaped the injustice of the American
South by emigrating near the Mexican Gulf city of Tampico.
After a bout with cancer, Smith reopened a sleek take-out last year in Seattle's Columbia City
neighborhood.
The daily changing menu items are unusual and ready to be microwaved,
the traditional cooking method of the post-Columbian (City) peoples.
This ain't Tex-Mex. Her food's got more color, bananas, and the beans
are the black tropical kind. There is the whole roast chicken adobo; or
chicken tamales with with Oaxacan molé or cheese/jalapeno. There are
meat-and-bean burritos; rice, black beans and spicy collard greens; or
caramelized beef with red mole; caremelized plantains; and cotija and salsa negra, a Veracruz-style mixture of chipotle peppers and garlic.
She's famous for empanadas are filled with cinnamon-scented beef and raisins.
It's a feast with dishes and ingredients that cross a lot of borders.
At the onset of the Jim Crow era around 1910, Smith's family started
relocating to Mexico. There was plenty of work there with oil fields,
mines and ranching -- and most important: opportunities to own more
than 40 acres and a mule and to prosper without worrying about
segregated toilets, fried pies, and flaming rednecks wearing bed sheets.
The Smith clan became ranchers, and retailers, cowboys, bakers, and candlestick makers
in the much less racialized environment and therefore a very different
economic reality than did their family left back in Oklahoma and Texas.
Smith's parents (her mother has no African blood and is from Michoacán)
moved to Southern California after WWII where Naomi was raised speaking
Spanish,sand English, and eating tortillas and collard greens.
She traveled to Tampico a few years ago on a familial anthropological
expedition.There she met an old man with the Smith name, the
spitting image of pictures she had of her grandfather.
"I found family, she says, "we didn't know we had."
Villa Victoria reflects Naomi Smith's diverse cultural roots, and
even better for us, its a unique and tasty stop. "That these people,
just up and left the unjustice situation they were, learning a new
language changing their culture, I find an amazing story," she says.
For foodies only: Enjoy this brief video of a woman named Rosa chopping greens at Villa Victoria. (Warning: this is for the only rarefied foodish few who might enjoy a brief video of a woman named Rosa chopping greens.)
Dana Tough, and Brian McCracken were veterans of the W Hotel's Earth & Ocean under
diminutive superchef Maria Hines. In 2006, Hines catered an
intercoastal dinner to the foodly swells of Manhattan at the James
Beard House, the foodly Greenwich Village shrine. I traveled East with
the restaurant crew which included the two young cooks and wrote about it for The Seattle Weekly.
Since then I'd run into Dana cooking atTilth,
his mentor's hugely hot Wallingford restaurant where he changed my life
one evening by telling me how to crisp up pork bellies (I take my epiphanies as they come these days).
I was happy to hear Dana and Brian had opened their own joint in the Belltown space long inhabited by Mistral.
Spur Gastropub had been open but a few weeks when we arrived last week --
there still was no signage outside, yet the joint was jumping with the
20-30-something eaters and drinkers who seemed to be taking in stride and for granted this
unpretentious wow-food.
We said wow.
A straightaway wow was the Summer Vegetable Salad. a lemony, toss of
peeled cherry tomatoes, wispy sprouts, yellow squash, nasturtium
flowers, and thin carrots... the best part, though was the yellow corn
panna cotta in tiny, (about twice the size of a pea) invisible skinned,
"raviolis."
You might know that panna cotta is a Northern Italian "set dessert" of
cream, milk, sugar and gelatin that's frozen or served with fruits like
berries. Here was a savory version but encapsulated in a clear skin by
the use of sodium alginate and calcium chloride.
(Photo: Dana Tough in the headlights)
In case you've been eating in only in the 19th or 20th centuries lately
(as so many of us have) you might not know about the 21st century food movement called
"molecular gastronomy" (MG) in which geeks using high tech techniques
and sophisticated lab equipment have developed to make some definitely interesting and very delicious
things.
Sodium alginate, which is derived from seaweed, is a common emulsifier
and thickener in the food industry. If you've ever wondered how a
McDonald's apple pie maintains its jam-like consistency, wonder no
more. When sodium alginate meets calcium chloride, the sodium ions in
the alginate are replaced by calcium ions, thus creating a polymer skin
that holds everything inside.
The use of sodium alginate in a calcium chloride bath is MG 101. In
Spur's salad, the corny, creamy stuff is mixed with the sodium alginate
and dropped into a calcium bath forming a globule full of the corn
mixture with enough tensile strength to be handled and chilled.
Chefs, and geeky cooks are making "liquid raviolis," and clear dumplings both sweet and savory.
I must tell you that Spur uses only a few MG techniques which are
well integrated into a brief small-plates menu notable for its
execution and tastiness come of good old fashioned cooking skills and
ace ingredients.
The other MG toy they use is the sous vide, a thermal immersion circulator, an expensive piece of medical equipment that's been pressed into cookery by a growing number of chef/geeks.
For a recent Monday night menu, Larkin, the sous chef, made
a 12-hour pork shoulder that was absolutely amazing. We have been
making our fennel, baby turnips, carrots, sablefish and pork loin using
the sous vide method. Basically, the process involves cooking foods
that have been vacuum packed in a plastic bag in a water bath that’s
kept at a constant temperature. The slower heat allows the food to
retain its inherent flavors and nutrients. Pork tastes like pork!
Carrots taste like no carrots you’ve tasted before. The flavors in
general are “cleaner.” This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but
the subtleties also shine. How I describe the taste of sous vide
vegetables is that they taste raw but have a cooked texture and they
retain all the vitamins and minerals.
At Spur, we had butterfish (black cod, sable fish) cooked in the sous
vide. It flaked as any cooked fish would, yet retained a dense
moistness, and transparent look that suggested undercooked, even though
it didn't eat that way. It was poached fish without the leaching of texture and color or
other battle scars of regular poaching. It was served on a bed of
English pea slurry, whole peas, peavines and a vividly flavored duxelles of morels.
(Holy shit, er... wow, we muttered, the sleek, well-employed
children at the surrounding tables smiled in agreement: Whadja expect?
they murmured).
Brian and Dana's menu also has a suveed flat-iron steak
which is flopped onto a charbroiler after the long bath. I'll be trying that next time, so curiouso am I.
I was
(and still am) agoggle with the high tech stuff, but I gotta tell you
that another high point were the pork belly sliders made with tiny
brioche burger buns, Dana's famous crispy pork bellies, broccoli
sprouts, smoked orange marmalade, mustard and sherry gastrique. These were simply roasted, crusty pigmeat with tangy sauces served on the buttery-est buns since Brigitte Bardot's And God Created Woman (1956).
(pork belly sliders; photo by Rocky)
(Pork bellies, of course, are uncured slab bacon, also known as
sidemeat. They've become the seared ahi of this decade -- they're on
every tone-y restaurant's menu. But pork bellies aren't just glitz:
There's a reason they're popular: they eat real good, as my fat Aunt Lulu might have said just before her stroke).
Spur is one of those intentionally noisy joints with loud music, and a
pub feel. That's mainly because it IS a pub. The service, while not at
a high level (no linen except napkins, no crumb scrapers, no fevered table re-settings, no host or hostess) the waitroid was attentive, very friendly, funny, and proficient.
At the end I ordered Pistachio Financier -- couldn't resist it... made with foie gras ice cream
as it was. Duck liver ice cream? Yes, but the livery flavor was hard to
distinguish, sharing, as it was, the same plate with macerated Rainier
cherries, elderberry puree, and lots of pistachio flour. The Tiny
Architect would have none of that -- it was, after all, her birthday.
So she had lemon balm ice cream with sea salt shortbread, and poppyseed
jel which she slathered all over herself in a celebratory fugue of
crazed whoop-de-do. (The woman gets nutty on her birthday).
We're pretty sure that once this restaurant gets its sign up and the
other food weasels discover it, you won't be able to get near. So time
to go is now.
The bases of my worst fears about the Obamenon are memories of
George McGovern, the last inspirational Democratic presidential
candidate who was hoisted up in 1972 on the shoulders of fired-up
students and other inspired (or clearly stoned) grassrootsers. Unfortunately, after all the lovely change-election winds had blown,
the kids forgot to vote; wandering off instead to a "happening" or some
damn thing, and Richard Nixon landslid into a second term despite his
felonious manipulations, 5 o'clock shadow, and tin ear for being a
human.
I was pretty disappointed, and utterly convinced the Republic would
never survive; so me and the little woman packed up our bell bottoms
and styling jel, and headed off to Africa; where, eschewing common
comforts, toilet paper, primal beef cuts; and regular bathing we led a
life on the open road.
We'd been out nearly a year when we reached Ethiopia, that ancient,
mountainous country in the Horn of Africa still ruled at the time by
the oppressive monarch, Haile Selassie whose public relations efforts
obscured those of his human rights.
But after Selassie was overthrown in 1974, thousands of Ethiopians were given political asylum in the US.
And what's the near universal act of all emigrants? Making restaurants serving the food of the motherland. God
bless America and pass the injera!
Picking though the maze of Ethiopian restaurants in Seattle has always
been a bit confusing, which is why we were so happy to find Fana's.
Natives of the now independent northern neighbor Eritrea, the Asress
family arrived in Seattle a decade ago. Asress Araia, the patriarch,
was an Ethiopian Airline pilot (now retired); his wife Fana
Estifanos, (women don't take their husbands name in Eritrea) who
cooks, was a flight attendant. Their grown children, Sabrina, and Vahid
help out in the restaurant which is located in bottom of a new
apartment complex on Rainier Avenue at Courtland Place.
Eritrea has Italian colonial history, and Fana cooks the cuisine with
Italian sensibilities, and flavors. There's a pasta (penne) with
tomato-ey sauce; and a pizziti. We loved the sauteing of the
thin-sliced beef or chicken in the Kilewa/Nech Tibs rather than the
usual stewed meat that can make Ethiopian dishes seem all the same.
Please try my favorite: the ginfilfil, torn injera marinated
in the spicy berbere chili paste with flavorful abnd tender Ethiopian beef
jerky and served with buttery cracked wheat.
There's the traditional Doro Wat, the saucy, spicy chicken with boiled
eggs and a homemade cheese reminiscent of Mexican cotija.
There's foule, those long-cooked beans with peppers and eggs that are the staple of northern Africa and the Arab peninsula.
Fana cooks a burger and a burrito, and a Philly cheese steak, but we
haven't tried 'em, so involved have we gotten with such as the Zesty
Spinach Chicken with rice; or Fana's chicken wings, that we hear literally fly out the door.
The family are members of the universalist Bahai Faith; it's a
gentle,inclusive,19th century Persian religion and a sweet spiritual grounding for restaurant
service, let me tell you!
The Purple Dot Cafe 515 Maynard Ave S Seattle (206) 622-0288 map
So
where do you eat after being immersed for hours in Tudor England;
having witnessed a couple of cinematic beheadings and privy to the
nasty palace politics of the court of Henry VIII, the worst rat with
women since Vlad the Impaler?
Why... the Purple Dot, of course, the see-and-be-seen hive in Seattle's China Town-International District.
We'd just seen The Other Boleyn Girl and were feeling horny
and pre-colonial, so I said: "Let's go for Hong Kong Chinese!" As
tribute, of course, to our Anglo-Saxon heritage and a tip of our flat
Tudor cap to the Pacific we rim daily.
(Don't be writing to correct me about this Chinatown-ID designation.
Forever it was called Chinatown. Then back in the 1980's,
Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians swarmed the neighborhood association,
and got it renamed The International District. In 2000, the Chinese (who pretty much own all the property) again grabbed
power and the naming rights. They put the Chinatown back in Chinatown, where it is today).
The Macao Peninsula is the home to a staggering fusion of
ethnicities, had long British influence; plus, it's Asia's homeport.
Needles to say so there's one hell of a bunch of different foods in
Hong Kong and often they're found in an East/West, fastfood/slowfood,
Cantonese, Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, American
Coffee Shop mish-mash... all on one menu.
I have a theory about why people love the pizza they love.
It's the "My Pizza is Pizza but Yours is Crap" theory. Simply:
everyone judges pizza based on what they grew up on, regardless of its
quality. Everyone's an expert, arguing about it will get you nowhere,
though everyone does. We each know precisely what the best 'za is, but
when you dig down a little into what that may be -- it's always the one
from the neighborhood, or city, from which the speaker originates.
We're too snide, hip and urbane to dine out on Valentine's Day night, a
restaurant event akin to Rape of Nanking if a quiet, romantic tête á
tête is what you're after.
Cool people like us (that would be me and The World's Tiniest
Architect) avoid those nights -- and also New Year's, St. Paddy's,
Mother's Day; Easter, and Cinqo de Mayo -- holidays promoted to near
frenzy by the restaurant-industrial complex.
Poppy
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