March 2010 Archives

Wait, don't get your hopes up, it's not a replay of Quincy Pondexter, has nothing to do with March Madness. It's Seattle's top two independent restaurants. Can you guess? Number one, duh, is Sky City at the Space Needle, which serves over 250,000 meals a year at an average of $60 per, for a gross of $14 million. In national terms, that puts the Needle in 33rd place, right behind Chops Lobster Bar in Atlanta, Georgia. The Top 100 list, compiled by trade mag Restaurants & Institutions, is weighted heavily to Noo Yawk and Vegas, the country's biggest markets for big spenders. (Number one in the country, in case you were wondering, is Tao Las Vegas, which served 600,000 meals and took in a cool $60 million. Old Ebbett Grill in DC served a million meals, on the other hand, and only took in $24 mill; two huge Bavarian joints in Frankenmuth, Michigan, for their part, served roughly the same number of diners apiece, but the average ticket was under $15, so no big deal.) We promised you two, so here's the second Washington entry in the top 100: Salty's on Alki, described admiringly in these very columns some months back, where 200,000 locals and visitors spent about $50 apiece in 2009.

Now the point of these numbers is grim: these are the most efficiently run restaurants in the country, fine-tuned and professionally managed. And their gross sales were down a collective ten percent from 2008. Not good news, and it explains all the plummeting prices, give-away happy hours (synonym for cheap drinks and bad food) and stretched staffing at your neigborhood bistro. When the big boys are in trouble, everybody suffers.

Will you kids please, please sit sill and eat your goddamn carrots and not try to kill each other? Can I not leave town for five effing minutes without the house burning down? Here I am in Nice, on the French Riviera, in a freaking thunderstorm, and I get word that Christina's, the restaurant that put Orcas Island on the map, food-wise, is gone for good. Damn!

You want the full story? Well, the last chapter's here, on the Islands Sounder blog. You want the earlier chapters, some of them are here, in the Seattle Times. Christina's hasn't been mentioned before in Seattlest's columns, which is a shame, but she's turned up in any number of local blogs (including Cornichon a few years back when her cookbook was published).

You might have seen it coming when Ms. Orchid sold her eatery two years ago to Maureen Mullen, a Seattle chef who'd worked for Tom Douglas. But still.

For the past couple of years, it looked like Bellevue's fine-dining scene was immune from the crunch facing upscale restaurants on the Seattle side of the lake. You'd see new places open like crazy: Artisanal Brasserie, John Howie Steak, Purple Café & Wine Bar and Barrio, for example. But there's been a hiccup. Solstice Restaurants has closed all three of its downtown Bellevue properties: 0/8 Seafood Grill, Stir Martini + Raw Bar and Twisted Cork Wine Bar. Matt Bomberger, the Bellevue businessman who bankrolled the company (and removed his original partner, chef Dan Thiessen--photographed at 0/8), pulled the plug at the end of last week, citing the difficulty of competing with the deep pockets of "corporate" restaurants like Maggiano's and Palomino. But Bradley & Mikel's Pearl, an independent with a truly difficult location across the porte cochère from the Bellevue Westin Hotel, just celebrated its first anniversary; and two independent Seattle restaurants (Wild Ginger and Boom Noodle) have just opened Bellevue branches.

Meantime, a couple of new spots in Seattle this week. First, there's Bisato, which Lampreia chef Scott Carsberg opened Tuesday night in Belltown. Carsberg had been hoping to move, but failed to find a buyer for Lampreia. The remodeled space is less formal, offers Venetian-style cicchetti (small plates) starting at $2 and inexpensive wines. And on Friday, at 7th and Olive, in the space left vacant by the bankruptcy of Oceanaire, Kevin and Terresa Davis will open Blueacre Seafood. The chef will be Bryan O'Connor (last seen at Cliff House in San Francisco) and the GM Bruce Sturgeon (of Wild Ginger).David Leck (formerly of Elliott's and winner of the Oyster Olympics five years in a row) will welcome guests at Blueacre's shellfish bar. That's one of the few bits of Oceanaire that haven't been touched by the remodel, remarkable for its efficiency. The Davises couldn't wait, you see; Terresa's expecting twins in April.

PS:Two more openings: on Eastlake, Nettletown. On Melrose, Sitka & Spruce (formerly in the Eastlake space).

This week's news: a sushi chef in Santa Monica is charged with selling whale meat. Last week's news: European countries want to ban the fishing of bluefin tuna.

We are global omnivores, are we not? Eating our way indiscriminately around an international buffet of cuisines, pizza one night, tacos the next, our noses twitching at fancified French, then embracing Japan's briny simplicity. Sushi, in fact, has become as American as apple pie; with beginners nibbling on inglorious California rolls while passionate partisans seek out the bliss of bluefin tuna.

If Sherlock Holmes could solve a crime because of the dog that didn't bark, Hajime Sato is running a sushi bar in West Seattle, Mashiko, without the industry's most famous animal. Call it the fish that didn't swim. At the heart of the international sushi experience, supposedly, swims maguro, the foie gras goose of sushi, the giant bluefin tuna with a fatty belly. But it was not always so; the ancient samurai considered bluefin unclean. And bluefin today is overfished, endangered, the subject of vitriolic debate. Yet the Japanese taste for soft, buttery bluefin tuna is relatively recent (post-World War II), when Japanese fishing vessels could venture far afield and track down the elusive bluefin, which sells for astronomical prices at the fish market in Toyko. Pre-war, Japanese palates had been satisfied with smaller, more affordable fish from local waters.

No one questions the fact that o-toro is delicious, but "We are loving it to death," writes the environmental activist Casson Trenor in his 2008 book, Sustainable Sushi "The bottom line is that bluefin is more than a delicacy, it is an essential but extremely vulnerable part of our ocean ecosystem. it should be venerated and protected, not wiped from the face of the deep in a relentless crusade of greed and gluttony." The oracle of the ocean (a Washington native who now lives in San Francisco), Trenor found an eager disciple in Hajime Sato, a lad from the Tokyo suburbs who opened his own place in West Seattle 15 years ago and who followed Trenor's suggestion to transform Mashiko from one of 200 sushi parlors in Seattle alone to one of only three "sustainable sushi" restaurants in the entire country.

As recently as eight months ago, a diner here could swoon over a gorgeous dish of pink monkfish liver medallions atop thinly sliced octopus (we took the photo on the left in 2008). No more. Neither is sustainable; they're both off the menu. But there's no self-conscious political correctness at Mashiko. You don't miss the fish because, after all, you're eating fish. It's not like going to a vegetarian restaurant and ordering "pork chops" made form tofu.

So let's look, instead, at a couple of the fish that Chef Sato does serve. Catfish, first. Farm-raised, And it substitutes for, of all things, eel. Now, you might not think that eel, wriggly things that ought to to survive anywhere in the universe, would be endangered, but they are. So Hajime (as he prefers to be called) looked for a sustainable alternative and found catfish, long considered a junk fish raised in muddy ponds of backward, backwater southern states. But no. Mashiko's catfish come from the ecologically correct Carolina Classics catfish farm in North Carolina, where a closed system is used to purify the water, and the fast-growing fish are raised without antibiotics (they're the rabbits, if you will, of the sea). The catfish makes an appearance atop the $9 Southern Roll: tempura sweet potato, avocado, and "namagi," a made-up word that combines namazu (catfish) and unagi (eel).

The star of the show, on a recent visit, was a salmon and asparagus roll, $10, which combined asparagus and tobiko with slices of bright red salmon, tightly rolled not in the usual black nori (seaweed) but in a rice paper called mamenori, then handed over to the kitchen, where it was tempura-battered and lightly fried in peanut oil until the surface was barely crisp. Cut into sections like most rolls, the roll was plated with soba noodles and a light broth of soy sauce, shiitake-kombu (mushroom-kelp) stock and ginger. The salmon was a farmed coho from SweetSpring Salmon, a Washington State company that's pioneering so-called "closed system" fish farms that avoid polluting coastal waters by operating miles inland. The layering of flavors was remarkable, enhanced by the contrasting mouthfeel of the tempura, the salmon, the asparagus and the tobiko. No, it wasn't o-toro, it wasn't monkfish liver, it wasn't foie gras. But it did provide a rich, intense and memorable experience.

Mashiko is actually far more than sushi bar. There's a whole izakaya side of the menu with Japanese gastropub fare ($4 fried fish ribs with curry salt, $4 chicken yakitori, $5 spinach and bonito Ohitashi, $7 pork potstickers). Seven or eight "small bowls" ($8 smoked turbot and blue cheese) in addition to soups, curries, tempura and bento boxes. I counted half a dozen folks in the kitchen, and, at Hajime's side, a female sushi chef, Mariah Kmitta. Well, why not, unless you're an unreconstructed segregationist, in which case you probably wouldn't have set foot inside Mashiko in the first place. After all, Rule #1, posted on his website, is "Mashiko is a non-discriminatory establishment" and Rule #21 is "Because Hajime said so." There's also a sign at the door that says "Please wait to be seated, unless you are an idiot and can't read." (An online comment at TheStranger.com found it "so offensive that we nearly walked out.") Point being, this is not a traditional spot like the old Shiro's or the defunct Saito's, nor a hybrid like I Love Sushi or Wasabi Bistro. It's irreverent. The website is called SushiWhore.com. Hajime's email moniker is sushipimp. There's a live webcam of the diners at the sushi bar, for heaven's sake. Mashiko's motto, after all, is "Shut up and eat."

Hajime Sato recognizes that his path is perilous. "Everybody's watching me, to see if I can survive," he admits, although, on a recent Saturday, there was a line out the door most of the evening. The faithful, they follow their prophet.

A final note: yes, there's one of those hi-tech Japanese toilets in the ladies room, the kind that, I've been told, spritzes your hoo-ha and dries it with warm air. Standard fixture in Japan, apparently. The men's room urinal, on the other hand, is a traditional American Standard.

Mashiko, 4725 California Ave SW., Seattle. 206-935-4339   

Sunday is March 14th, Saint Matilda's day. Also Saint Mathilda, with an "h," both 10th Century martyrs. It's also "π Day."

In Europe, they write day/month/year, so it's 14/03/2010, but we 'Merkins write 3/14/10 ... which happens to be the first few digits of Pi (3.14159, if you've forgotten). Pi as in, heh-heh, Pizza Pi (vegan, in the U District), Pizza Pi (vegan, Victoria, BC; that's their store in the photo), and a couple of also-rans: Serious Pie (savory, downtown), Seattle Pie (sweet, in Magnolia), and High 5 Pie (Capitol Hill, Montlake, Wallingford) offering 14 percent off if you buy 3 of their pies.

Nor should we forget our good friends of cyberspace, SeattlePI.com. To you all, Happy Circle of LIfe.

The Seattle Art Museum has laid out its exhibit plans for the next couple of years, beginning with its October blockbuster, "Picasso Masterpieces." The French national Picasso museum in Paris is undergoing renovations, so they're sending much of the collection--Picasso's private stash, mostly--on a worldwide tour: Madrid, Moscow, Helsinki, Seattle. Seattle? Yes, indeed. "This is what we built the museum to do," director Derrick Cartwright told a press luncheon. An extremely ambitioius undertaking, 150 pieces, that requires a couple of "Presenting Sponsors" (Microsoft and JP Moran Chase) not to mention a "major sponsor" (Sotheby's) and a hotel sponsor (the Four Seasons, duh, right across First Avenue).

Cultural tourism is expected to be a windfall for the local economy. The last really big show at SAM (Van Gogh to Mondrian, in 2004) drew nearly 300,000 visitors, a third of them from out of state. The Picasso exhibition is expected to be even more of a visitor magnet.

Arts are big business. Leaving aside sports and movies, the non-profit arts sector generates 8,000 jobs, $175 million in salaries and $28 million in local tax revenues. Another study says the city's 4,000 creative industries generate 20,000 local jobs, making the Seattle area number one in the nation in per-capita arts related businesses and organizations. The related good news is that nearly 5 million people attended an arts event in 2008, spending $120 million in addition to tickets. A third of them were out-of-towners, who dropped over $30 apiece as part of their cultural experience.

But even before Picasso arrives, Kurt Cobain gets his own show. For those who remember the days of grunge and roses, it's an altogether fitting notion that Seattle's most mainstream museum would bring together works that comemorate Cobain's life, music and suffering.

There's more, much more, on SAM's schedule. Read the whole lineup here.

Photo © Estate of Pablo Picasso, courtesy of SAM

Paul Havas, the formidable painter of Skagit Valley landscapes, has a seminal show this month at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery. The new paintings show a calmer, more confident artist, no longer shrouding his scenery in mists and fog but giving them stronger light, cleaner lines and evanescent reflections of sheds and cabins on the ponds and backwaters of the valley floor and coastal estuaries.

Havas graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1962 and earned a Master's from the University of Washington in 1965. He lives in Madrona and paints urban scenes as well: shaded staircases and dappled passageways. But his new landscapes, flecked with birds and distant human figures, show a new focus on light and shadow, form and reflection.

"I actively look for painting sites, for places or subjects that might trigger my interest," Havas says. "Sometimes it seems they find me, the unplanned glimpse through piers of a bridge or the reflections of a window on a black piano. If I see a hint of color from some electric light, I just take off." Still, his most profound inspriation seems to come from minutely observed elements--a cannery, an oyster shed, a barn, a flight of gulls--beneath the great cloudscapes of northwestern Washington. In tender greens and opaque whites, Havas creates an idealized world of stillness and peace.

Woodside/Braseth Gallery, 2101 9th Ave., 206-622-7243, 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday.

Terry Avenue Building. Photo courtesy of Vulcan Real Estate

The shoe has dropped: Seattle restaurant entrepreneur Tom Douglas has finally confirmed what everyone suspected for months: his next restaurant(s) will be in South Lake Union. Cornichon anticipated the news in a report on the neighborhood back in January.

Douglas is going to open at least one restaurant in the historic Terry Avenue Building, a former truck factory from the early 1900s between Thomas and Harrison, surrounded by the rising concrete bookends that Vulcan Real Estate is building for Amazon.com's headquarters campus, around the corner from the new.Flying Fish location.

"It's an exciting area full of new opporutnities for us that we couldn't pass up," Douglas says. No names announced yet for the restaurants to be housed in the two-story building, which will be completely renovated inside but maintain its landmark brick exterior and connect to an outdoor plaza and streetscape.

The new Amazon.com campus includes 11 buildings (totalling 1.7 million square feet) on 6 blocks in the heart of South Lake Union. The first space will open next month with full occupancy by 2013.

"South Lake Union has become a true extension of downtown with lively shops and restaurants, a diversity of housing, vibrant parks and world-class employers who call the area home," says Vulcan's Robert Arron, adding that the Tom Douglas restaurants "will further activate the exciting retail landscape...attracting even more new amenities and visitors to the area."

The City's "Terry Avenue Street Design Guidelines" [PDF] draw on the rich historic character of Terry Avenue to create a new type of street where pedestrians have priority on 31-foot sidewalks enhanced with benches, trees, and bike racks. Vulcan sees similarities to Portland's Pearl District and Vancouver's Yaletown, and hopes that the pedestrian-friendly elements being incorporated along Terry Avenue will create "a lively retail corridor that accommodates pedestrians, bicyclists, cars...and the streetcar line."

As for the restaurants, whatever they turn out to be, Vulcan is delighted. "We're positively thrilled to welcome Tom Douglas to South Lake Union, and his new restaurants will contribute greatly to the neighborhood's growing retail district.," said Vulcan VP Ada Healey.

Giuseppe Verdi's final opera, Falstaff, composed when he was 80, has no great melodic lines, triumphal marches or consumptive heroines; at its center there is only a drunken old man who imagines himself a seducer. Falstaff's lack of self-awareness permeates the opera and gives it broad brushes of comedy. Handsome once, he has grown grotesque and fat, yet not without wit ("I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am about thrift"--and "If Falstaff were thin, no one would love him"). He behaves like a boor; oblivious to his own hypocriscy, and lectures his servants about "honor."

It's Verdi's only comic opera, based on Shakespeare (mostly The Merry Wives of Windsor, with bits of Falstaff's character adapted from the Henry plays), and it uses sprightly.language and brilliant orchestration to tell the story or Falstaff's comeuppance.

The current Seattle Opera production is homegrown. Originally designed by Peter Kazaras three years ago for the company's Young Artists program, it migrated to Los Angeles and Cleveland before returning to Seattle, where the set needed only a slight stretch to span the proscenium at McCaw. It's a stylized version of the Globe in London, with a raked stage bordered by bleachers, where the singers retreat when they're not performing. In the third act, a cantilevered cloud of chairs descends to create a stylized forest.

As always Jonathan Dean's supratitles capture the essence of the Italian libretto, often returning to Shakespeare's original language for the perfect couplet. Under Riccardo Frizza's deft baton, the orchestra sounds like they're playing Mozart. Indeed Kazaras directed Seattle's staging of Marriage of Figaro last year with several similar scenes of letter-reading and singing at cross-purpose.

Peter Rose, whose previous appearance at McCaw was as a randy Baron Ochs in Rosenkavalier, triumphs in the title role, a sympathetic character despite his considerable flaws, surely not deserving of "death by a volley of turnips" but saved from drowning by his own swollen belly.

There's no curtain; the performers arrive in street clothes and change into costume in full view of the audience. Stephanie Blythe waves to her fans; Doug Jones is on a cellphone, Peter Rose puts on a preposterous fat suit (shades of Pagliacci's "Vesti la giuba"). And when all is said and sung (Falstaff properly humiliated and chastened, "I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass"), he leads them all in a cheerful chorus, "Tutti gabbati," Hah-hah, it was all a put-on! He who laughs last, laughs best.

It's the perfect opera for self-doubting Seattle in these angst-ridden times, full of linguistic curlicues and wink-&-nod references that we're all in on the joke.

Seattle Opera presents Falstaff at McCaw Hall through March 13, For tickets ($25-$168), call 206-623-0800 or go online..

Seattle Opera photos © Rosarii Lynch.