Former Belltown barman James MacWilliams, who used to dazzle late-night diners at Wann Izakaya, has moved to a far, far better bar atop Queen Anne: Canlis. And as Seattle's most venerated shrine of elegant dining celebrates its 60th anniversary, it fell to MacWilliams to research and resurrect the cocktail scene of the 1950s. Tiki drinks were particularly exotic; founder Peter Canlis was friends with "Trader Vic" Bergeron as well as the legendary Hawaiian mixologist known as Don the Beachcomber, so it was natural that the restaurant, in its earliest years, served them. They eventually faded from view (as did the kimono-clad waitresses) only to be revived now, modified slightly to suit current tastes for drinks that are less sweet. No extra charge for the fireworks, or the fancy garnishes.

This one's called "Yes sir, Mr. Canlis," a mixture of Gentleman Jack, pineapple, Pernod and Benedictine topped with a brûléed banana meringue. "Have a drink with us," a customer might say 50 years ago to Peter Canlis, no doubt assuming he'd have something simple like a rum and Coke. "My usual," Peter would signal. "Yes sir, Mr. Canlis," the waiter would say, and return ten minutes later with this elaborate cocktail. Tastes like a toasted marshmallow.

For all that, Cornichon's personal taste turns to the Negroni and its various Campari cousins. Among them, the version at Canlis that features a newcomer to American's shores, Bonal. It's a century-old recipe that starts with mistelle (grape must whose fermentation is stopped by adding alcohol), infused with quinine and gentian and whatever else they find growing on the slopes of the Grande Chartreuse mountains of southeastern France.

Just remember: at Canlis, you cannot be overdressed.

Canlis, 2576 Aurora Ave N., 206.283.3313  

Seattle knows Peter Lewis. He started Campagne in 1985, Café Campagne nine years later, sold them both in 2005 (to Simon Snellgrove) and went on to consult for restaurants like Bastille. A wine guy, francophile, friend of boutique winemakers in Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rhone as well as their American importers. Also, it turns out, a writer, the latest to enter a crowded field of wine-related murder mysteries in which the victim is almost invariably the industry's favorite punching bag, a pompous wine critic. Plenty of motive, many suspects.

There's been a slew, a raft, a deluge of such books lately. Murder by the Glass is one of dozens to take place in Napa. The Merlot Mysteries take place in Virginia. An Unholy Alliance, by Portland wine critic Judy Peterson-Nedry, takes place in the Yamhill Valley. An entire platoon of scribes and scribblers (five are credited, but there were several others; I was one of them) developed a particularly lurid concept (incestuous twins, gothic graphics, the pH of decomposing bodies) for Kestrel Vintners, a whole series called The Merlot Mysteries. Where's the first body found? In a vat of wine.

The protagonist in these stories is usually an insider, a divorced (yes, always divorced) wine maker on the skids or wine writer facing an impossible deadline, not a cop or a detective but a wine specialist who uses the particular talents of his (or her) profession to help solve the case. Gotta be a bit of an anti-hero (broke, overweight, impotent, whatever) but sympathique regardless; the reader has to care about and root for the protagonist. Everybody else is potentially a suspect or a false friend.

And the genre allows the author to do some travel-and-nature writing (the golden colors of Burgundy's vineyards after harvest, the hoot of owls on Howell Mountain); repay some favors or settle some scores through cameo appearances by well-known industry figures; make observations like "the French are vindictive and vengeful" by ascribing them to an otherwise sympathetic French character. There's usually a whiff, no more, of sex (a bite of caviar is a reminder of "how long it had been since I'd tasted a woman"), a lot of wine.

Which brings us to Lewis's Dead in the Dregs, which opens with, yes, a body in a vat of wine. And a missing, severed hand.

On one level, Dregs is a romp, a roman à clef game of guess-who that you play while following Lewis's narrator, a former Seattle sommelier named Babe Stern around Napa (That fatso "Jordan Meyer"? Can't be Harvey Steiman, can it? The body, once inhabited by the person of wine writer "Robert Wilson"? Clearly Robert Parker! "Jacques Goldoni"? Parker's associate Pierre-Antoine Rovani! Maybe, maybe not, but this is sure fun!). Some 100 pages into the book, Stern flies off to Burgundy, where the wine and familiar faces become more interesting (There's Kermit Lynch! There's Per- Henrik Mansson! They're drinking Chambolle-Musigny!) even as the geography and the occasional French phrases gets murkier. (You can't see the spire of St. Nicholas in Meursault from the north side of Beaune; an investigating magistrate is a juge d'instruction, not a juge d'enquête.)

Still, there are plenty of delicious moments and characters, most notably a French police colonel, Émile Sackheim, who always takes time to have a proper lunch. There's a Hispanic California vineyard manager annoyed by the young French intern who's come "to see how we Mexicans make wine." There's a drinking scene which introduces the term "Incoming" to denote a fruit-bomb of a wine.

Because it's a first-person story, the reader can't ever know more than the narrator, which means there's a lot of driving around, from winery to restaurant to hotel lobby, requiring a cascade of coincidences, starting with the imperious wine writer being Stern's brother-in-law, to get the right characters into place, at a wine bistro in Beaune where Stern can overhear a crucial conversation. On the other hand, Stern has a nose for more than caviar; in the action-packed finale, he comes up with critical evidence based on his sensory memory of a distinctive perfume that lingered in the victim's apartment..

Stern doesn't end up solving the case but he does witness its grisly denouement, involving more gruesome murders, distilled body parts, sulfate poisoning, explosions, suicides, human blood used as a fining agent, and the grim, convoluted histories of French several wine-making families. When it's all over, Stern returns to California, where his ex-wife and their ten-year-old son await.

Is this the end, then? Not a chance. Having created his character, Lewis won't let go so easily; the subtitle of Dead in the Dregs, after all, is "A Babe Stern Mystery." Next stop, says Lewis: Babe returns to the scene of his first success as a sommelier, Seattle.

Lewis has three local readings and book-signings this month: Sept. 8th at noon, at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (113 Cherry St.), and at 7 PM at Third Place Books, (17171 Bothell Way NE, Lake Forest Park);. Sept. 15th at 7 PM at Elliott Bay Book Company (1521 10th Ave.) .

There are three kinds of people in the world, Kate McDermott will tell you: pie-makers, pie-eaters, and pie-seekers. The epic pie odyssey of New Yorker writer Sue Hubbell 20 years ago concluded that you could not get pie west of Oklahoma; you got cobbler. But that was in 1989. There's another argument: there are pie people and there are cake people, a distinction that eluded me completely, since I didn't consider myself either one, or didn't until I watched McDermott bake her peach pie. After all, people have been making pie since the dawn of civiliization (or since the advent of milled grain, at any rate), and McDermott's mission these days (she used to be a musician) is to teach the mechanics (as well as the art) of pie-making to whoever comes through the door.

Begin, she insists, with King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour. "I want wheat growers to take this class," she says, "so they can see what a difference the right flour makes." Irish butter, foil-wrapped Kerrygold, with high fat content. Leaf lard; she gets hers shipped from Pennsylvania. Regular supermarket sugar, a touch of seasoning (salt, nutmeg), some thickener so you don't get fruit soup.

For the fruit, at this time of year, McDermott uses Frog Hollow Cal-Red peaches, shipped in single-layer boxes that cuddle a dozen peaches from the farm in Brentwood, Calif. Her ex, Jon Rowley, started the Peach-O-Rama promotion for Metropolitan Markets with these peaches, using a refractometer to measure the sugar content: at least 13 brix (percent sugar). For last week's demonstration at Diane's Market Kitchen in Post Alley (at Madison) , she used peaches that measure 20 brix, off the charts. "The omigod peach," McDermott called it.

The details of the pie-making process are not complicated as long as you keep everything ice-cold, and won't be repeated here. They're at McDermott's website,, and she teaches pie-making classes in Seattle and Port Angeles. Trust me that when you taste the pie, with its flakey crust and luscious filling, you will become a believer. The very act of pie-eating will turn you a pie-seeker. You are a disciple now, and recite the mantra: be happy, eat pie.

The gentleman's name is Evan Peterson, a teacher from Florida who's lived in Seattle for the past year and retains an outsider's bemused perspective on our local eccentricities. In his spare time, he writes what he calls "science fiction poetry," some of which finds its way onto his blog, poemocracy. For fun, he'll show up at your next event, ceremony, celebration, conference or competition and compose spontaneous poetry.

At Kate McDermott's Art of the Pie class last week,down at Diane's Market Kitchen, he reeled off this 17-syllable creation, called, of course, a pie-ku:

And a blend of culinary and Emerald City observations:

In Seattle, I learned
to make rain pies, their crusts
liberal but stiff

Only fair that, having teased your palate with previews of two Seattle culinary events, we now return to tell you what actually happened.

First, the Salmon-Chanted Evening event at Victor Steinbrueck Park. At one end, Team Douglas and their fish. At the other, Team Homeless and their hot dogs. Had we not known for the past couple of months that the two were mortal (and almost moral) enemies with widely divergent views on what constitutes acceptable conduct in public places, we would have thought them great friends. Salmon and grilled corn prepared by General Douglas himself for those with $15 to spend on dinner; a brace of hot dogs dispensed by volunteers for $4 (the cost of a shelter bed for the night). Both teams raised money to serve the needy, and it was too nice a night to attempt parsing the precise niche of the recipient charities. Seattle's scruffiest and Seattle's finest both get the same grade: plays well with others.

On to Cheese-a-Topia, the annual conference of the American Cheeese Society. Over 1,400 cheeses entered in the country's largest competition. Conference co-chair was Seattle's Kurt Beecher Dammeier, whose 4-year-old cheddar won a blue ribbon. Two blue ribbons for Oregon's Rogue Creamery, two for Mt. Townsend Creamery just outside Port Townsend, multiple prizes for Estrella Family Creamery in Mntesano and Samish Bay Cheese in Bow, as well. The grand prize, best goddamn cheese in the country, Uplands Cheese Company of southwest Wisconsin for the only cheese they make: a washed-rind wheel called Pleasant Ridge Reserve. It's the third time they've won, a testament to the two families, the Gingriches and the Patenaudes, next-door neighbors who merged their operations in 1994 to make a single gruyere-style cheese using only the raw milk from their grass-fed cows.

The Society's executive director, Nora Weiser, speaks sensually of the amazing growth in the US of gooey, stinky, oozy cheese; that's her in the photo, with Mt. Townsend's Matt Day. We emerge from the awards ceremony into the grand lobby of Benaroya Hall to the cheesy aroma of all 1,432 entries, carefully mounded and ready for sampling: raw milk, sheep and goat milk, washed rind and marinated, a cloud of lactic fragrance.

Conference Scholar-in-Residence was Roland Barthélemy, as the leading cheesemonger in France, member of the Legion of Honor and head of the worldwide Guilde des Fromagers. His massive book, Fromages du Monde is both indispensable reference and personal memoir; ten years ago, he could find only a handful of American cheese worth including. Now he signs my copy "to our friendship and to the glory of cheese."

You'd think there'd be nothing particularly controversial about a barbecue at the Market, but things got all confrontational for a while there. Tom Douglas, who owns Etta's Seafood and the new Seatown Snack Bar across the street, had in mind a $15 salmon bake at Victor Steinbrueck park, proceeds to go toward park security and the Pike Place Senior Center. Not so fast, said a quick-to-coalesce coalition of homeless advocates, who feared they'd be pushed out of the park if they couldn't pay for their dinners; they proposed a free wiener roast at the same time. No dice, said the Parks Department, Douglas got his permit first. The spat was defused this week when Douglas's ceo Pam Hinckley agreed to share the permit; hot dogs at one end of the park, salmon at the other.

This only-in-Seattle opera starts at 5 PM, Saturday, August 28th at Victor Steinbrueck Park, Western Ave. at Virginia.