August 2010 Archives

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.

If you were Foster Farms, you might think those daffy "Imposter Chickens" had created enough name recognition to build your brand. But listen to Nancy Piho of NTA, a PR firm in Washington, DC: "The backbone of any food media marketing program is quality recipe development."

In other words, it's chicken recipes, not cute characters, that get busy housewives to actually buy your products, be they boneless breasts or bone-in thighs. Used to be, the National Chicken Council ran a contest every year for original chicken recipes, kind of like the Pillsbury Bake Off. This year, Foster Farms stepped up to the plate to sponsor a competition in its sales territory, the West Coast.

Piho sifted through 2,000 recipes and came up with five semi-finalists for Washington State. At the Kathy Casey Food Studios in Ballard Wednesday, professional chefs followed the recipes (Foster Farms chicken, prepared with local ingredients) without making any adjustments or enhancements. The winners: a brown rice chicken salad (that we found rather ho-hum--needed zing) and a chicken breast with goat cheese and mushrooms that fit the bill: neither too complicated nor particularly exotic (except for mashing the goat cheese with a tablespoon of honey ), the sort of dish that wouldn't be out of place in a neighborhood bistro. You might not order it twice in a restaurant, but you could imagine the family around the dinner table tucking in appreciatively. "Mom, you're the best cook in the world!"

And it turns out, that's just what happened. The creator of the winning chicken dish was Monica King, a project manager at SW Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, with husband and four teenagers.

Two more rounds of semi-finals this week in California and Oregon, then the final cook-off at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, Calif. Monica King, already $1,000 richer, will be on hand.

Kurt Dammeier is one of Seattle's true Renaissance men (we wrote about him on Cornichon in 2007): an entrepreneur, investor and founder of Beecher's Handmade Cheese, who this week finds himself in the national spotlight as host of the American Cheese Society's annual conference, Cheese-a-Topia.

Technical and industry seminars aside, there's an open-to-the-public event, at Benaroya Hall Saturday night: a grand tasting and awards show. Nearly 1,500 cheeses have been entered in dozens of categories by over 300 artisan cheesemakers nationwide. Two dozen local restaurants and wineries will have tasting booths; Michael Pollan will be on hand for a VIP tasting and preview.

We care about this because artisan cheesemaking is an activity that restores a human scale to the industrialization of food: pastured rather than pasteurized cows, hand-milked goats, sheep that are well-loved, grass that's been licked by salt air, a natural product that expresses its origins and whose essential bacteria haven't been sterilized to death. Puget Sound is blessed with ideal conditions for cheese; the number of cheese artisans in Washington, a handful just two years ago, now stands at 50.

Last year, 7 of the 8 cheeses Beecher's entered won medals; the Flagship Four-Year Aged cheddar was named best in the country. It's that kind of professional validation that has prompted Dammeier to go national. Early next year he'll take a giant leap from the Pike Place Market and open a new retail outlet with expanded production facilities in Manhattan's Flatiron District, at Broadway and East 20th. Dammeier and his cheesemaker, Brad Sinko, have already developed a signature cheese for the new location: they call it Flatiron. It's a crottin-style, organic cows-milk cheese with a light orange rind, slightly stinky and intensely flavored (nutty and sweet).

Tickets to the Cheese-a-Topia tasting and Festival of Cheese will be available at Benaroya Hall on the night of the event; doors open at 5 PM; tickets are $85.

There's also a VIP package that includes a private tasting with Michael Pollan and box seating for the awards ceremony, $400. Tickets can be purchased only through the conference's VIP Guest Coordinator, Katie Crow, at 206-322-1644, ext 38.

Jon Rowley, as Cornichon readers know, is Seattle's seafood guru, the man who brought us Copper River salmon and Puget Sound oysters. He may not be a household name, but he's known to fishermen, farmers, chefs and food writers across the country. Without Rowley, a Reed College droupout who spent a decade fishing in Alaska, Seattle wouldn't know what a fresh oyster even tastes like.

So when Georgia Pellegrini first arrived in Seattle to interview Rowley for her book project about food artisans around the world, she'd already been seduced (figuratively); by a gift-box of Totten Inlet Virginicas that Rowley had sent her. At his home in Magnolia, he feeds her scrambled eggs with Swiss chard and a salad of purslane and heirloom tomatoes; at the Ballard farmers market, they buy the makings of ratatouille; at Fisherman's Terminal, Yukon King salmon. He teaches her about umami. "They were the best eating days of my life," she writes, "where I first encountered the beautiful taste."

There are 16 chapters about modern-day food heroes in Pellegrini's new book. The Seattle chapter centers on Rowley's ceaseless quest for beautiful tastes; it takes on added layers of complexity with the smells (and sounds) of Kate McDermott's pies. In a post on Cornichon a couple of years ago, I called them "Local Treasures." Saveur had just named Jon to its list of "Top 100" (tastes, taste-makers), and--separately, on its own merits--printed a picture of Kate's blackberry pie on the cover. The story of Jon and Kate's courtship (he brings her flowers: ten thousand compsting roses) is poignant, since they have since separated. (She teaches pie-making classes and writes a blog for bakers, theartofthepie.)

In addition to Rowley, Pellegrini's book profiles a potato-breeder in Sligo, Ireland, an olive farmer in Provence, a butter maker in England, a beekeeper in Norway, all lovingly showcased in glowing, late-afternoon light. Heroes from rural Kentucky, coastal California.and remote corners of Tennessee and Colorado make appearances as well. Pellegrini is a bit of a media hound, a former chef who now has a hot blog and a TV show in the works. (And ill-served by lazy copy-editing. Les Baux is the village in Provence where the mineral bauxite was discovered; it's not Les Beaux.) For the moment, she travels the world meeting the artisans who have made a lifetime commitment to good food. Yes, they begin to blur together after a while, all these uncompromising individualists, so the profiles are best taken in small doses. The overall effect, however, is one of optimism, of hope for humankind and the planet we inhabit.

Then again, you don't have to travel the world to come up with culinary artisans. Braiden Rex-Johnson's Pacific Northwest Wining & Dining (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) profiled a lineup of wine makers and chefs as part of a cookbook. So did Kurt Beecher Dammeier in Pure Flavor (Clarkson Potter, 2007). You could probably burrow down into a city, or even a neighborhood (fractal-like), and find a dozen stubborn "originals" preserving their traditional foods and culture.

One necessary word of clarification. Rowley was the first winner of Seattle Weekly's annual Pellegini award, which honors the memory of Angelo Pellegrini (1904-1991), a professor of English literature at the University of Washington and passionate writer about food. Author Georgia Pellegrini is no relation, but for those who remember Angelo, you know he'd not only love this book, he'd be in it..

Georgia Pellegrini reads from Food Heroes at 7 PM at Elliott Bay Books, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle.

Food Heroes: 16 Culinary Artisans Preserving Tradition (Stewart Tabori & Chang, 240 pages, $24.95)

Crosscut.com, where Cornichon's meanderings sometimes surface, has had a couple of popular bike-related posts in the past week.

Hugo Kugiya reports on the difference between bike lanes in New York City and Seattle here. Something similar is planned for Broadway, on Capitol Hill, but opponents are already commenting that dedicated bike lanes will snarl traffic.

Meantime, Peter Philips--publisher of maritime-industry magazines and a former president of the French-American Chamber of Commerce--says bike lanes will force small business to leave Seattle. Much skepticism in the comments.

All of which brought to mind an afternoon in Paris three summers ago.

I can't believe I'm cycling past the Eiffel Tower!

Stendahl dedicated his books to "Les Happy Few," the small number of readers who would get it. Velib (short for "velo en liberté"), the one-way, short-term bike rental program for Paris, is like that. You still can't get it unless you have a French bankcard or a transit pass issued by a local authority that requires an attestation by your French employer. No short-term exceptions for the 25 million annual visitors to Paris, many of whom would no doubt love to pedal around for an hour or two. Les Happy Many! Unless you have an American Express card.

Launched three years ago, Velib started with 10,000 bikes on the street, twice as many bike stations as Metro stops. The price is right: first half-hour free, second half-hour, one euro, with increasingly steep rates thereafter. Idea being that you get where you're going and return the bike to the nearest "station." Think of it as a one-way Zipcar rental.

Summertime lunch (pasta, Frascati) with my Paris pal, and I carry on about the failures of Velib to accept Visa and Mastercard's striped credit cards as if it were the end of western civilization. At a Velib station near the Arc de Triomphe, Paris pal swipes his Amex. The gates of Paradise swing open, and a 3-speed bike is released from its stanchion. Blazer and shoulder bag into the bike's basket, and I'm off in the mid-afternoon sun, no helmet (this would be a problem in Seattle), down the bone-jarring cobblestones of the Champs Elysées, right at Le Fouquet's, past the George V and the American Cathedral down to the Place de l'Alma and across to the Left Bank, passing directly above the Princess Di crash site.

Once I'm on the Boulevard St. Germain, there's a dedicated lane shared by bikes, buses and taxis. Stick to the right and you're fine, they say. Unlike my bicycle demeanor in Seattle, I dutifully stop for traffic lights and don't climb the curbs. An 80-year-old guy gives me the thumbs up. "A bit heavy, but practical," he says. "Bonne visite," says a young Frenchwoman. A hot, 45-minute ride. Bike reattaches to rack near my hotel. ParisPal, I owe you a euro!

Okay, you Fremont Naked Bike Riders: I get it now.Would I do this in Seattle? In a heartbeat.

It's perhaps the most visible corner in Seattle, at the north end of the Market where Pike Place meets Virginia, and for years it was nothing more than a furniture outlet. Before the condo building, though, it had a noble history: Bavarian Meats was in that space; if memory serves, so was Starbucks. Now it's being given a new lease (heh-heh) on life as Seatown Snack Bar, the latest spawn of the expanding Tom Douglas empire. (It's also just across Western from Victor Steinbrueck park, where Douglas launches his Salmon-Chanted Evening barbecues this Saturday.)

With nary a flourish or drumroll, Seatown opened this week with a menu of sandwiches ($12 to $15), smoked seafood on buckwheat blini ($9 or $10), "Seatown Platters" (ribs, chicken, veggies, $18), and an assortment of crab concoctions, all designed to please locals looking for a sidewalk spot where they can plop down and watch the wandering tourists. If there's no room outside, you can make do just as well with lunch-counter seating indoors, or a cluster of high tables. There's also a takeout next door, if you're in a hurry to get home.

The kitchen's still in the throes of figuring things out, but I have high hopes for the "Wild Thing" plate of Dungeness crab, avocado and tobiko ($15), once they reconcile the name with the timid execution.

The best cocktail is called Prosser Pump, a libation of locally sourced ingredients (Dry Fly vodka from Spokane and Tuscan melon from Douglas's own farm in Prosser) with a rim of exotic aleppo pepper.

The menu credits Heath Ceramics of Sausalito, Calif., for the tableware. Can we see what's coming next? A salute to the Auto Chlor tech who services the dishwasher? (But, hey, that's just Cornichon being a dick.)

If anyone in town can bring this off, it's Tom Douglas. Here's hoping he doesn't dumb Seatown down for the tourists; the rest of us want to eat here, too!

Seatown Snack Bar, 2010 Western Ave., Seattle, 206-436-0390  

So here we are in Torino, or were, four years ago, drinking a coffee at the storied Caffè Mulassano and watching smartly dressed Italians walk by. Their shoes cost more than a month's rent, but their aperitivo's a bargain, since it comes with access to a buffet that puts Seattle's happy hours to shame. (Not to rub it in, but where else do freeloaders expect happy hour deals as if they were a birthright?) And the coffee! Sure, it costs five euros at the baroque counter, but it's the most fragrant, flavorful espresso you'll ever drink.

And while we're on the subject: remember how McDonald's used to bitch about Starbucks and its fancy-pants coffee? The YouTube commercials are here. Well, Slog invites you to take a look at the billboard campaign Mickey D is running now!

Which brings us to the next item: Nespresso. I tried the machine a couple of times on a recent trip to Vancouver, BC, where the Tourism Vancouver people generously put me up in two new luxury hotels. The coffee was surprisingly good, and a lot tastier than the filter-basket drip you find in most upscale hotel rooms. A nice range of styles, organized by pod color, from robust to mellow. Of course you've got to start by shelling out at least $300 for a machine (and up to ten times that much), but that's just the beginning.

The cost per capsule is 55 cents, and there are 16 different flavors and intensities. Nespresso boutiques in Europe are like high-fashion show-rooms. Once you buy the machine, you return regularly as if checking out the latest couture designs...or the latest movie star. George Clooney made a string of witty commercials for Nespresso; the one with John Malkovich is here. You can buy the pods online, too, if you figure out how to navigate the too-cool-for-school website.
Nespresso doesn't sell its pods in supermarkets, but its competitors do. And boy, does that make Nestle mad! Big story in the NY Times today because the patents (held by parent company Nestlé) will expire in 2012.

Nestlé has been working on other ways to prevent competitors from hacking a system that uses unique water dynamics to pump an espresso kissed with foam out of a hermetically sealed aluminum capsule.

The biggest competitor, Sara Lee's Senseo, started selling its own pod, a perforated plastic capsule called l'Or, in French supermarkets this summer, priced at 37 cents. The company says they've sold 30 million units since June. Another rival, Ethical Coffee, found its factories raided by French police on a claim of patent infringement. And an Italian rival, Lavazza, announced last week that it is buying a stake in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters so that it can compete head-to-head with Nespresso in the US market.

More than three quarters of Green Mountain's $800 million in sales last year came from espresso brewing systems and their disposable capsules --single-use, nonrecyclable, nonbiodegradable pods made of plastic and tinfoil that are made to be thrown away, filter, grounds and all, after a single use.

But what can they do? More biodegradable packaging? Recycling programs? Reusable filters?

"The whole concept of the product is a little bit counter to environmental progress," says the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If you are trying to create something that is single use, disposable, and relies on a one-way packaging that can't be recycled, there are inherent problems with that."

No problem at all, though, if you're sitting with your macchiato on the Piazza Castello in Torino in the late afternoon. Might even come up with a solution: why not simply mail the spent pods back to the company and let them deal with the problem? Me, I'll just head along the arcade to the next cafe, Roberto or Florio, maybe or even Torino, and get started on the aperitivo buffet.

Those scanners at the grocery store, they ingest barcodes. Never mind that Safeway knows you've switched brands of peanut butter, it's the big picture they capture, and it's depressing.

Americans spent almost $300 billion at supermarkets in the past year (the 52-week period ending June 13th, to be precise). The details, by dollar sales in 299 categories, are here. Now, supermarkets account for about half of all spending on food, but it's the only sector (including restaurants, farmers markets, convenience stores, and so on) that has the industry-wide infrastructure to track every penny we spend.

Not surprisingly, if you think about it, the number one item, about $12 billion, is carbonated beverages (Coke, Pepsi, and their cousins; bottled water and juices are counted separately). Milk and bread come in second and third, roughly $10 billion apiece. But "salty snacks" are number four, with $8.4 billion in sales. That doesn't include crackers (#16), cookies (#17), snack bars & granola (#37), or pastries & donuts (#46).

You want vegetables? Fresh, they're #30 on the list, $2.4 billion a year. Frozen is #42, $1.8 billion.

Dog food comes in at #22, $3 billion, and cat food at #35, $2 billion. Dog & cat litter (#112) are only worth about $630 million, lagging far behind toilet tissue (#25, $3 billion) and diapers (#73, $1.1 billion). Trash bags? They're in 54th place, good for $1.4 billion.

Let's see if there's anything instructive here for Washington State, which is facing a couple of momentous questions: whether to invalidate the tax on soda pop, and whether to allow the sale of liquor in grocery stores.

First, Slog has a piece today about $7 million in campaign contributions from the American Beverage Association to support I-1107, the tax rollback. Disingenuously, their website is called "Stop Grocery Taxes," and the ABA's $7 million contribution is just a drop in the bucket to the soda producers. Note that the writer of the Slog item, Dominic Holden, is, ahem, my son. We did not collaborate on this.

Now, on to alcohol. Beer accounts for fifth place in supermarket sales, with $8 billion a year. Wine is in 9th place, $5.7 billion (just ahead of cigarettes, $4.8 billion). But what about liquor and spirits, sold in supermarkets in three dozen states? A relatively lowly 31st place, a mere $2.25 billion in sales, beaten by refrigerated coleslaw, frozen novelties, laundry detergents and, yup, those fresh veggies. That's right, even when they stock the booze next to the broccoli, American shoppers still buy more Tide than Tanqueray.

WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE Good thing we put this up when we did! Along comes Bon Appetit this morning, naming Ethan Stowell's Anchovies & Olives one of the Top Ten New Restaurants in America. Congratulations, Ethan! And way to stay on top of things, Conde Nast! Anchovies has been around for 18 months and counting. (Cornichon's review, last November, is here.) Now, back to yesterday's post

We're not going to make a habit of this, reviewing a restaurant on its second night, but hey, Ethan Stowell's a big boy, he's done this before, and it's not as if he's got too fragile an ego. Roger Downey wrote an excellent preview of Staple & Fancy Mercantile for Crosscut last week, but don't wait for the rest of the critics to weigh in before deciding whether to try it. There isn't even a storefront sign yet; just go.

It's the most approachable of Stowell's restaurants, completely open to the sidewalk at the south end of Old Ballard, with maybe 50 seats in all. Stowell's parents were occupying the best table, showing off their son's new cookbook, Ethan Stowell's New Italian Kitchen (to be published by Ten Speed Press next month). The menu is short and straightforward, althouth, in a typical Stowell linguistic curlicue, it says "Sweet Cream Ricotta." Which is true, there's a blob of fresh ricotta on the plate...that just happens to be garnished with some of those delicious heirloom tomatoes waiting on the bar. (Good Negroni, by the way; they use Vya vermouth.)

Staple & Fancy wants you to let the kitchen decide what you'll eat: ideally, a four-course prix fixe dinner, served family-style for the whole table, for $45 per person. Appetizers arrive, cicchetti-style: pork-liver mousse on crostini, for example, or grilled spot prawns. A pasta like potato gnocchi with mushrooms. The main dish could be pork shoulder or a grilled fish; with ricotta cheesecake for dessert.

The atmosphere, on this warm summer evening, is relaxed. At the back of the restaurant, windows overlook Renee Erickson's new oyster bar, The Walrus and the Carpenter. Stowell himself works contentedly in the kitchen and plans to make this his base of operations, now that he's got lieutenants installed as chefs de cuisine in his other outposts. For Staple & Fancy, he had the the appliances and counters custom-built for "tall."

As he writes in the cookbook, Stowell wants his places to be "sexy without being slick." And the food? "I want to reinforce the idea that food shouldn't be formal or fussy, just focused. It's got to be good, but it's also got to be fun." If Stowell keeps his focus, this could well his big year.

Meantime, let's have some fun with this mystery:

First, keep in mind that the Kolstrand Manufacturing wasn't the first owner of the premises, and that the restaurant occupies an addition to the original brick building. Before Kolstrand installed its marine hardware business in Ballard in the early 1900s, it had been a boarding house. Upstairs was a grocery identifying its goods as "Staple & Fancy" (hence the name to the restaurant). The outdoor advertising found on the south wall of the original building, a beautifully rendered sign for some brand of CIGAR, was uncovered in the course of restoration. The lower corner of the ad reads Foster & Kleiser, a local company that, by 1980, was the largest outdoor advertising agency in the country. (F&K was acquired in 1995 by ClearChannel, which also bought out rival Ackerley Communications.) But here's the mystery: the hand-painted signature isn't "Foster & Kleiser" but "Foster & Klieser." How can a painter mis-spell the company's name? Is the whole thing a forgery, or just an embarrassing mistake?

Staple & Fancy Mercantile, 4739 Ballard Ave. NW, Seattle, 206-789-1200
 

You already know the restaurants, Zoe and Quinn's, now meet the namesake kids. Their names are Zoe and Quinn Staples, their father is Scott. We snapped this at the 12th Avenue Street Festival on Sunday.

Yes, Assumption. That would be today, the 15th of August, a feast day in the Catholic church, known as Ferragosto in Italy. It happened to fall on a Sunday this year and it turned into the hottest weekend of the summer in Seattle. Between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, Cornichon checked in at half a dozen events.

Organizers Borghesi and Droman

Two summers ago, we wrote about Osteria La Spiga's mahvelous Ferragosto buffet. This year, they outdid themselves: they turned the whole damn street into a block party. They had help, obviously; joining La Spiga's Pietro Borghesi and Sabrina Tinsley were Jim Drohman of Café Presse, John Sundstrom of Lark, the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, the folks at the Capitol Hill Housing. Two dozen vendors filled the street between Pike and Union, including Scott Staples and his two "restaurant kids," Zoe and Quinn. A Ferragosto cocktail on the bar at La Spiga. Every major nearby business also kicked in.

The weekend actually started at Westlake and Denny, where downtown meets South Lake Union. A block party (see previous post) sponsored by Vulcan Real Estate to promote its new neighborhood, with apparent success. Two years ago, the condos were still a-building; but even six months ago they were still not a-selling. But Vulcan has pulled it off, closing on enough units (at Enso, specifically) to allow buyers into their new high-rise homes. A dozen or so wineries were pouring samples inside the Discovery Center for a $15 entrance fee, the best bargain of the month.

Over in Bellevue, El Gaucho commandeered the lawn in front of City Center Plaza for a $95, 3-hour, 28-winery tasting Saturday afternoon."My favorite event of the summer," said one young matron in summer decolleté and matching, wide-brimmed hat. "I can actually talk to the wine makers, because they're here." And it's true: the food was terrific, the wines by and large excellent, the attendance, alas, somewhat sparse.

Down in Belltown, organizers of the inaugural Founders Day explained it was time to present the neighborhood as more than a nightlife destination. They hired actors to portray Doc Maynard, Arthur Denny, etc.. As festival director Ben Borgman, owner of Bedlam Coffee, told the Seattle Times, it's "more than what Seattle has already seen." And less, truth be told. Although the adjacent restaurants along Second Avenue were open, there were very few food vendors in the widely spaced tents, which were on the sunny (and exceedingly hot) side of the street.

Which takes us to the top of Queen Anne, to the block-square park known as the East Queen Anne Playground. Here the Canlis family, for the past four years, has sponsored a community gathering of exceeding simplicity for the young families of the neighborhood. Burgers cost $3, with paterfamilias Chris Canlis himself collecting the cash and dropping the bills into a giant kettle that gets turned over to the Queen Anne Farmers Market. Everything else--condiments, chips, watermelon, soda, chipped ice--is free. No giant bandstand, just a good-natured crowd and muted, feel-good Hawaiian melodies. The Fire Department hooks up a hose, kids run through the spray, now that's summer in Seattle.

Talk about a changing skyline, here's a perfect example. Immediately below, the South Lake Union skyline two years ago.

Now the same scene two years later.

The occasion, on both occasions, was the festive South Lake Union block party. This year, there was a lot more "neighborhood." Real life is actually beginning to look like the model homes inside the South Lake Union Discovery Center.

The weekend arrives, and with it the inaugural Seattle Founders Day, more than a street fair, more than a block party (several of those this weekend elsewhere around town) in the heart of Belltown. Founders Day (no apostrophe, no plural) is in the nature of an urban "country fair," with plenty of food, crafts, live music, and actors costumed as historic Seattle characters on hand: Arthur Denny, Doc Maynard, Austin Bell and the infamous Mercer girls, among others. Festival-goers are encouraged to come in costume as well.

The free event takes place at the intersection of Second Avenue and Bell Street, Saturday and Sunday, from 10 to 10. Street closures in all directions; who knows what havoc that will wreak. The organizers say it's the "first annual," so we can expect repeats.

We know you've been waiting for this piece of good news: Suite 410 is back in business. The cocktail lounge closed earlier this year but has been brought back from the dead by the owners of Oliver's (in the Mayflower Hotel, across the street). Two cocktails on happy hour special ($6 instead of $9 between 4 and 7 PM), the iconic Hot Mango Love, with Finlandia vodka, Fee's peach bitters and a muddled jalapeño. There's another one we like even better, a grapefruit cosmopolitan shaken up with Finlandia, Grand Marier, lime, white cran and a twist of grapefruit.

Suite 410, 410 Stewart St., Seattle 206-682-4101  

Michael Stasinos, a plein-air painter who lives in Seattle and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, sets up his canvas in familiar places (overlooking the city from Capitol Hill or the Market, for example, or along the Ship Canal under the freeway bridge), then uses the city's ribbons of concrete or water as the baseline for exquisitely detailed panoramas that provide an entirely new perspective on familiar surroundings. He is a figurative-narrative painter working in an impressionist-pointillist style, refusing to edit the slightest urban blemish, finding beauty even in telephone wires.

Under Seattle's great arc of gray sky, the buildings have intense color. The foreground gardens are lush, lovingly painted. Then a ribbon of concrete freeway, empty of cars, providing a barrier beyond which lies the painting's real subject: the bewildering complexity of a modern city. No postcard views of Needle or Market, just a patient, ever-so-patient notation of all the landscape's information. (The freeway in a Stasinos painting is like the Grand Canal in Canaletto's Venice, an omnipresent force of nature.)

There's also a remarkable, luminous scene of Volunteer Park in bright sunshine, titled "Sunday," with trees and lawn meticulously rendered, leaf by leaf, blade by blade, an homage to Georges Seurat's "La Grande Jatte." Yet the small figures playing soccer, they're not pointillist "things" but entirely natural, an "event." It's a moment perceived with such intensity that you can almost hear them: "Pass it here! Shoot, shoot! Goal!"

Paintings by Michael Stasinos are at the Woodside Braseth Gallery, 2101 9th Ave., 206-622-7243, www.woodsidebrasethgallery.com. Open 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday. The free exhibit runs through September 4th.

(Okay, okay, we're sorry; twice in one week is a bit much)

But seriously, you ever see one of these babies? A Chinese roasting box for a whole suckling pig? You If you're having a big summer party, you might, just might, be tempted to try this for yourself. But why, when you can get a pro to do it for you?

The pro here is Dalis Chea, executive chef at the vast and gorgeous event space Herban Feast in SoDo. For the past several weeks, Chea's been roasting pigs every Tuesday night at his other place, Fresh Bistro in West Seattle, using his spiffy new roasting box . Now he's taking his show on the road.

Four flavors from four distinct cultures (see below). They'll roast the pig wherever you're having the party, pair it with sides, serve it buffet style. Minimum of 50 guests, $18 a head.

And where o where to hold this pig-blowout? We asked Herban Fest's owner, BJ Duft for suggestions. "Some of the area’s best outdoor venues are Fall City Farms, The Fields at Willie Green’s, Golden Garden’s Bath House, or our own courtyard at Sodo Park." Or pick your own venue, or stay home (assuming you've got a big enough back yard). To book, call 206.932.4717.

Here are the choices:

Classic Luau: For sun-seeking, beach-loving traditionalists. Smoked pork served with macaroni salad, Spam, musubi, braised cabbage, and tropical fruit salad.

Southern Swine: Looking for a Texas-inspired taste? This pig is dry-rubbed and glazed with barbeque and hot sauce. Accompaniments include hush puppies, baked beans, collard greens, grilled corn, sweet pepper coleslaw and not-to-be-forgotten Texas Toast.

Oaxacan: Swine south-of-the-border style with an ancho-rubbed pig served alongside a selection of salsas, refried beans, Mexican rice, tortillas, and sopes.

Southeast Asian: Based on classic Vietnamese dishes, this feast features lemongrass and garlic-rubbed pork served with nuoc cham dipping sauce and sweet Thai chili sauce, green mango salad, banh xeo crepes, sticky rice, Thai curry potatoes, and garlic green beans.

We posted this scowling face last week when the Blue Angels were strafing Seattle, but it deserves the full back-story.

It would be Dudley Carter's final piece, painstakingly carved from driftwood washed ashore in British Columbia, assembled overnight so it could be exhibited from the bed of a flatbed truck in Redmond's 1991 Easter Parade; Carter himself, then 99, was the Grand Marshall. Then the piece was retired to Haida House, on the Bel-Red Road, where Carter lived and worked. He made one more public appearance that year, at the dedication of a minor work in Medina, and continued to teach. He was, after all, the artist-in-residence for King County Parks, a post he had assumed at the age of 96. And he continued to work, up at dawn, calisthenics, breakfast, carving. 10, 12, 14 hours a day, dressed in gabardine pants, long-sleeved wool shirt, wool cap, modeling his subjects first in clay to get the form down, then whittling the wood, a sliver at a time, with a three-pound, double-bitted, handheld ax.

Dudley Carter was born of Scottish stock in New Wetminster, BC., on May 6th, 1891, the third oldest of nine children. (Sergei Prokofiev was born two weeks earlier; Queen Victoria would reign for another decade.) Kwakiutl and Haida bands were still performing extravagant potlatch ceremonies, and European settlers were just beginning to log the region's huge stands of virgin forestland.

Carter grew up in a remote and rugged logging camp in the interior of British Columbia, where men measured their worth by the amount of timber they could cut and move to the mills. (No concerns about spotted owls back then; no schools, for that matter.) He was six when he got his first job, greasing the skids as oxen dragged the logs to the nearest railroad, seven miles away.

When Carter was in his teens, his father got a job as a trades instructor and the family moved to Alert Bay on the north end of Vancouver Island. They lived on an island among the Kwakiutl, where young Dudley observed their dying culture firsthand: their rituals, their art, their customs--including funeral rites and potlatches--and committed it all to memory.

"I come from another world," he told me, when I wrote a cover story about him for Eastsideweek in 1991. "You can't understand my art unless you know where I come from." It was a life spent in the woods. He worked for 20 years as a timber cruiser, measuring tracts of forest to determine their value. Not until 1930 did he turn up in Seattle, where he took second place in a soap-carving contest. At the age of 39, he had won a two-month scholarship to the Seattle Art Institute, the only formal training he would ever have.

But he had found his medium: monumental wood sculptures based on Native American myths and legends. Within two years, his career took off. He went to California for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition; he taught at the University of Washington. But with the arrival of World War II, the timber industry picked up and Carter returned to the woods. For the next three decades, he would alternate between sculpture and forestry.

Despite a steady stream of commissions (totem poles for shopping centers, large scale pieces for parks), and admiration from fellow artists, Carter had almost disappeared from public view by the 1980s. His wife, Teresa, had died in 1975; his daughter and grandchildren lived in Canada. His hearing was poor (rheumatic fever as a child); he lived alone in a log house he'd built himself, often eating nothing but apples for days at a stretch. Forced to move, he lived on nearby farms and in trailers. Frugal by habit, modest by inclination, he never sought public sympathy, but was grateful when the King County Arts Commission gave him a permanent home.

"Celestial Journey" was one of many pieces left to the elements after Carter died, a month shy of his 101st birthday. Eventually, it was purchased by Joseph Roberts, an attorney and patron of the arts, board member and curator of COCA (the Center for Contemporary Art) and president of Copper Canyon Press (one of whose poets, W.S. Merwin, was named Poet Laureate of the United States last month).

Today the sculpture sits outside the Shilshole Bay Beach Club, a private event venue shared with the Ballard Elks Lodge. The bird-like form looks west across Elliott Bay, brooding, like Milton's angel in Paradise Lost, over the vast expanse of sea and sky.

With 33,000 independent pizzerias across the country, you know there's got to be a magazine like Pizza Today out there (with a blog called TheHotSlice, even). Well, there's a giant 11-page article this week naming the country's best indy: Seattle's own Tutta Bella. (Downside: best chain was Domino's.)

Joe Fugere started Tutta Bella in Columbia City six years ago; it was the first pizzeria in the Northwest to become certified by the exacting Italian association of pizza purists, Vera Pizza Napoletana. (Cornichon had a post about the process last summer.) To celebrate the award, Fugere says Tutta Bella will give away a free pizza to every table for a week, lunch and dinner, between August 16th and 22nd.

"I have personally visited Tutta Bella four different times over the years," writes Pizza Today's editor, "and this might well be the perfect pizzeria."

Hey, there's nothing as controversial in laid-back Seattle as pizza, Still, even if it's not your favorite, it's free.

Fourth quarter students at the Art Institute of Seattle; below right: Cordon Bleu master class in Paris, Kitchen Academy facilities in Kent.

Peter Lamb, a successful entrepreneur who has opened half a dozen Seattle restaurants, stands outside his latest, Belltown's Branzino. "I never hire cooks, I hire dishwashers, train them and promote them," he says. "A kid can come to work for me tomorrow as a dishwasher, and after two years, he's a $13 or $14 an hour line cook. That same kid, if he goes to culinary school, graduates two yeras later, $50,000 in debt, and he's lucky to get a job for $9 an hour."

They come from middle-class suburbs, from broken marriages, from minimum wage jobs, or straight out of high school. They come because they think it's glamorous to work in a professional kitchen, they come with the hope of a better life, because they dream of the Food Network, of being a Top Chef. Some sign up for the culinary programs at community colleges; many more enroll in expensive private academies, institutes and cooking schools.

Why? Because there's no formal apprenticeship system in this country for a trade like restaurant chef, where the traditional career path was to start at the restaurant's back door, in the dish pit. After a few months, if you kept showing up, you'd get moved up to busser, or to a prep station, earning your stripes by doing every dirty job. (Sadly, trust me, there are very few restaurants in this country with American dishwashers.) Most restaurants these days feed their staff, but few pay more than minimum wage, and a share of tips is iffy at best.

And still they come, like salmon smolt, despite the lousy odds, despite the astonishingly high price, akin to a year at Harvard. The primary reason, TV glamor aside: the ready availability of student loans for tuition.

Back in December, a for-profit school in Portland, the Western Culinary Institute, was the target of a lawsuit claiming, among other things, that graduates could not find work in the field after they had spent between $20,000 and $40,000 in tuition, or that they made no more money after attending the school than before. The case, which could cover as many as 2,000 former students, has been certified as a class action lawsuit and is working its way through the Oregon courts. It's a warning shot of skirmishes to come between the well-connected industry of for-profit schools and disillusioned students, which has now escalated to an all-out war between the federal government and Wall Street bankers.

Here in Seattle, in a little-noticed development at the end of July, the American Federation of Teachers lost an election to represent the faculty at the Art Institute of Seattle. Teachers had complained that school was putting more emphasis on recruiting students than on teaching them properly. The high cost of tuition was another concern, the union said: an "associate degree" in photography or culinary arts costs close to $60,000; a bachelor's degree in fashion design costs over $80,000. Only the SeattlePI.com covered the issue. Although the school gave in to the faculty's request for updated computer equipment; the AFT blamed the unexpected outcome on aggressive union-busting by the Art Institute's parent company, Education Management Corporation.

Turns out, EDMC's largest shareholder, holding 38 percent of its stock, is none other than Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm that recently agreed to pay $550 million to settle civil-fraud charges related to the subprime mortgage meltdown. According to Bloomberg News, Goldman Sachs is heavily invested in this controversial for-profit educaton industry, and now finds itself under attack not only from Congress and the Obama administration but from dissatisfied students as well.

Most students take out loans to pay for their tuition, resulting in high levels of debt. For the past couple of decades, student loan debt has been "guaranteed" by a variety of government agencies, just like mortgages, resulting in a wave of subprime loans that students won't ever be able to pay back. A fulltime restaurant cook (a rarity in a turbulent industry) is lucky to make $20,000 a year, which makes paying back $50,000 worth of student loans within 10 years of graduation virtually impossible. (The Art Institute's director of communications, Mark Livingston, declined Cornichon's request to comment for this post.)

An article in Bloomberg News explains further:

A proposed government crackdown may have a disproportionate effect on EDMC. The U.S. Department of Education may restrict taxpayer-funded grants and loans to for-profit colleges like EDMC that offer $50,000 associate's and $100,000 bachelor's degrees in such low-paying fields as cooking, art and design.

"Government grants and loans to students, combined with booming enrollment, have made for-profit colleges a rewarding investment," the article continues. According to Bloomberg and the Education Department, EDMC receives over 80 percent of its revenue from federal financial-aid programs, programs that prop up the entire for-profit college industry to the tune of over $25 billion a year.

Nor is Goldman Sachs the only player. Career Education Corp. operates 80 for-profit campuses with 90,000 students around the US, including 18 schools licensed by Paris-based Le Cordon Bleu. Western in Portland is a CEC campus. Their Seattle area affiliate is the American Kitchen Academy in Kent, which charges about $20,000 for a diploma. Julia Child trained at the original Cordon Bleu in Paris, but the school has since been sold to culinary entrepreneur André Cointreau, who extended its agreement with CEC for five years in 2009 despite complaints that CEC was using deceptive practices to enroll students and misleading them about job prospects for graduates.

One notable exception is the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, a four-year professional college with a Hudson valley campus in New York and a Napa Valley campus in California. Tuition comes to about $30,000 a year (housing adds another $15,000), but CIA grads get snapped up by big-city restaurants that can afford to pay a living wage.

Community colleges, often derided as college-lite, also provide a respectable, well-rounded culinary education, and not just "knife skills." The programs at two of Seattle's community colleges, at the Central campus (called Seattle Culinary Academy) and at South Seattle, are particularly well regarded, primarily because their instructors have excellent reputations as chefs. South also has an excellent wine technology program. The biggest reason to attend a community college, however, is the probably the cost: between 10 and 20 percent of what the for-profit schools charge. A student who attends fulltime for seven quarters will earn an Associate of Applied Science degree at a cost of no more than $10,000. More students at community colleges stick with the entire program, too, while students at for-profit schools are more likely to quit. What's more, community college programs have a better reputation with restaurant managers, who are happy to hire graduates for entry-level positions.

And what of home cooks, who might only want to know the techniques of tenderizing pot roast or the mechanics of making meatloaf? Professional courses aside, there's no shortage of advice online, and plenty of recreational cooking classes around Seattle, offered by cookware shops such as Magnolia's Dish It Up, restaurants like La Mondellina and independent cooking schools like the Blue Ribbon Culinary Center on Lake Union. The cost of a class is usually between $60 and $100, often includes wine, and is more like a night at a restaurant than a master class; the difference being that there's no pretense of a professional credential.

The point is not that the Art Institute's culinary program is substandard. Far from it. The staff and instructors work hard; the program is accredited by the American Culinary Federation; several of its graduates have gone on to fame and fortune. But many more drop out, unprepared for the rigors of independent study. The casualty count is high, but the admissions office, like military recruiters, are relentless in their pursuit of ever more cannon fodder.

Restaurant life is a culture apart, with a swagger like the Marines, and it helps a lot if you don't do drugs and speak a little Spanish. If you seriously want to get into the restaurant business, and if you realize that your chances of starring on Iron Chef are about the same as being named MVP of the Superbowl, then just start working in restaurants. Dishwasher or busser, yes. Minimum wage, yes. School? A very big maybe. "Community college, for the theory and the math" suggests an industry veteran, "but keep your nighttime job in the kitchen."

At the Amavi Cellars-Pepper Bridge tasting room in Woodinville, there's a mural of the actual winery outside Walla Walla.

Should you arrive at Willows Lodge in Woodinville before the 4 PM check-in time and have a couple of hours to wander: don't do it. Don't wander, that is. Instead, make like a frog (lots of frogs out there adjacent to the Sammamish Slough) and hop ("Geo-Hop") across road and stream, bridge and highway, planter box and parking lot, to the nearby wine tasting rooms.

Winery hopping is a favorite pastime in Woodinville, home to dozens of tasting rooms. The actual wine country, the vineyards of the Columbia and Yakima valleys, are hundreds of freeway miles to the east, of course, but the wine business isn't about growing grapes so much as selling bottles, and the cash register has to be where the buyers are. Hence the rapid evolution of Woodinville from sleepy farms and pastures to busy, close-in suburb. Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia have anchored the visitor circuit for a quarter century, but it's in the past five years that "Woodinville Wine Country," promoted by Willows Lodge, has come into its own.

Whcih brings us back to the Lodge's front desk, where you sign up for the Geo-Hop. For a $25 fee, they hand you an information sheet and a GPS, and off you go on a high-tech scavenger hunt called geo-caching. (Sample question: what's the mileage on the vintage motorcycle at Mark Ryan Winery?) A dozen or so local tasting rooms have signed up and waive their normal $10 fees for thirsty wanderers bearing the GPS talisman. And you've got a canvas bag, too, in case you make any purchases.

The Geo-Hop concept comes from former Microsoftie John Chen, whose company, geoteaming, provides "technology-powered team building."

Geo-Hop Tours start in the lobby at Willows Lodge, 14580 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville, at 2 PM, Sunday through Thursday, 2-4:30 PM, until the end of August. You don't have to be a guest of the lodge to participate; but you do have to be 21. And you have to give back the GPS at the end of the tour.

Above: a table at the new Sitka & Spruce in the Melrose Project. Below, the Supersonic Gin & Tonic at Joey's on Lake Union; seared foie gras at Marjorie on Capitol Hill

Ah, summer! You can smell the smoke from ten thousand backyard barbecues (wait, unless those are the BC wildfires), so why would you even think of going inside? Wrong answer. There are more new restaurants this summer than in the past two years, so what are you waiting for? A fatter wallet? Fat chance. Here's a (partial) survey of what's new...and what's closed.

SOUTH LAKE UNION, BELLTOWN
You could do a lot worse, on these fine summer evenings, than hit the deck at one South Lake Union's “Big Six” view decks: McCormick & Schmick's Harborside, Daniel's Broiler, Duke's Chowder House, Chandler's, Joey's or BlueWater Bistro. Should you find yourself at Joey's (a Canadian chain, so you know they'll be polite), don't miss the Supersonic Gin & Tonic, a good, stiff drink enlivened with a refreshing glob of lemon slurpee for $5.

Two more new bars in South Lake Union as the neighborhood fills in and up: Citrus, and re:public.

Armin Moloudzadeh has left Ventana, the gaping hole of a dining room & bar on First Avenue where he was general manager of a confusing concept (small plates? Shared plates? Full meals?); he joins the bar staff at Tavolata. The signs in the window say to expect a “new” Wasabi Bistro any day now, but they've been up for a couple of months now. Meantime, Japanessa Sushi Cocina (wow! what a frightening metaphor) has opened at First & Union. At Second & Denny, Barracuda is serving up $4 tacos: housemade corn tortillas filled with Mexican street delicacies like lengua (tongue) and menudo (tripe), bravo! .The Local Vine, named one of the best wine bars in the country earlier this year, is now closed, moving to the Trace Lofts on Capitol Hill. Their building, the McGuire, is being torn down.

QUEEN ANNE-MAGNOLIA
La Mondellina, the Italian kitchen & deli run by the folks who own nearby Mondello and Enza Cucina Sicliana on Queen Anne, will soon become a pizzeria. You'll have to look in the window to see the Neapolitan-style pizza oven being maneuvered into place. Temporarily closed, with no date for the reopening announced. Dish It Up, the cookware & cooking-class store in Magnolia Village, has plans for a second location in Ballard with twice as many classroom spots, to open in late October. How to Cook a Wolf has a relatively new chef, Matt Fortner.His predecessor, Ryan Weed moved to June in Madrona, which has the same owners as Portage, across the street from How to Cook a Wolf.

WEST SEATTLE
Official opening Friday the 13th, in the Ovio-O2-Beato-Enness restaurant graveyard on California Avenue, Blackboard Bistro. Owner-chef is Jacob Wiegner, who's spent the past couple of years as sous-chef at Capitol Hill's Olivar. Next door, the former chef and co-owner of Harvest Vine, Joseba Jimenez de Jimenez, takes over as culinary director at The Swinery in the wake of Gabriel Claycamp's departure.

CAPITOL HILL
Marjorie is back in business, with a charming patio and an equally charming menu, produced by Harvest Vine alum Kylen McCarthy. Best dish: a seared foie gras. The Melrose Project (1531 Melrose) continues to grow. Sitka & Spruce has opened, with another Harvest Vine alum, Taylor Thornhill, and Bastille refugee Nick Coffee in control on nights that owner Matt Dillon is down at The Corson Building in Georgetown. There's a nifty little wine bar called Bar Ferdinand (also a Dillon project), a terrific butcher (Rain Shadow Meats), and an excellent artisan cheese shop, Calf & Kid. Coming soon (construction not yet underway) is Tamara Murphy's venture, Terra Plata, with complete with rooftop dining.

Tidbit Bistro is now open at Broadway & Union, a mile and a half south of its original location. La Bete (The Best), the Tyler Moritz-Aleks Dimitrijevic venture in the old Chez Gaudy space on Melrose, will be delayed--hopefully just for a short time. Long lines out the door at Po Dog earlier last night for a cheese-dog giveaway; there's also a new sports bar, Auto Battery, next door. Big Mario's is now open next to Caffe Vita; same owners and same owners as Via Tribunali, too. But Tribunali is all about Neapolitan pizza; Mario is Noo-Yawk -style.

If you're walking along Pine, stop in and say hello to the young lady in the window at Cakespy's new retail outlet. She's Jessie Oleson, cute as a bug's ear, an original writer and talented illustrator who created a national phenomenon with her sweet-natured Cuppy character (a leftover blob of cookie dough) and user-friendly baking recipes.

WALLINGFORD / FREMONT / UNIVERSITY
The Buckaroo Tavern on Fremont says it's going to close. A block away, Hunger has just opened in the Persimmon space. That bustling neighborhood spot, Cantinetta, is opening a seconed location in Bellevue with Tomer Shneor at the stove. Former sous Emran Chowdhury takes over in Wallingford. (Cantinetta's original chef, Brian Cartenuto, is now cooking at a steakhouse in Mississippi.)

We note with sadness, meantime, that Avila, on 45th, has closed its doors. So too has Divine, in Roosevelt. And Marcus Martini Heaven, down the stairs in the netherworld of Pioneer Square.

We're no friends of CSPI, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which all-too-often acts as a self-appointed, prurient scold in the arena of health, nutrition and public policy, not to mention zealots in their intolerance for all things alcohol. Still, CSPI's lawsuit against Coca Cola, the parent company of Vitaminwater, charging preposterous health claims for the sugary beverage, was a good thing. CSPI won the case thanks to Coke's own defense: "Nobody could believe our claims that Vitaminwater is actually healthy." (Really? Then why'd you spend all that money?)

There's more here, on Huffington Post.

NY Times dispatch complains about the high price of ice cream in Manhattan (five bucks & change for a small cone), comes down hard on chain of artisanal Italian gelato shops called Grom.

Grom, which has more than 20 stores in Italy, was founded in 2003 in Turin, the birthplace of the Slow Food movement. Slow Food's commitment to preserving the pre-industrial ways of making food provided Grom with a mission: to recreate the traditional ice creams of the region, which is known for dairy, nuts and chocolate, and especially for the chocolate-hazelnut combination gianduja.

Tonight's gelato requires immediate attention. A simple-enough two-layered pinguino, a take-away cone of nocciola and caffè at Grom, on a side-street across from the train station in downtown Turin. The hazelnuts come from orchards with limited yields, the coffee beans come from Antigua, and the amazingly tasty concoction costs all of $2.50.

Dunno, must be the high rents in the Big Apple.

Soprano Kate Lindesy and composer Daron Aric Hagen at a preview of Amelia.

Seattle Opera's Artist of the Year awards--annual honors presented since 1991 to a singer and a conductor, director or designer--went to Kate Lindsey, who sang the title role of Amelia, and to Stephen Wadswrth, who created the opera's story and directed the world premiere production in May..(Cornichon, regular readers may recall, praised the production itself but was unimpressed by the music.)

The Chairman's Award went to the creative team behind Amelia. Composer Daron Aric Hagen, librettist Gardner McFall, and story creator Wadsworth shared the honor. Said chairman John Nesholm, "This extraordinary team gave us a new opera that spoke powerfully and movingly about the complex tensions between the promise and the danger of flying, one's duty to country, honor, and familial love, all told within the context of one of the most significant periods in our recent history. We are extraordinarily grateful to Gardner, Daron and Stephen for their work with us and the legacy they leave to the world of opera."

It was a vindication for Wadsworth, who had shaped the story from a series of poems about flight by McFall. Of his work on Amelia, the Wall Street Journal said "Mr. Wadsworth's subtle and incisive directing made the opera's multiple levels and interactions absolutely clear, communicating the story's emotional weight without allowing it to slip into sentimentality."

Seattle Opera said the just-completed 2009-2010 season brought in $30 million in revenues but cost only $28 million, thanks to a salary freeze and careful planning to reduce production costs. The company's first production of the 2010-2011 season, Tristan und Isolde, premiered this weekend to mixed reviews that generally praised the Wagner's music and the conducting of Asher Fisch but were cool to Robert Israel's staging.

Clowning kitchen crew at Shallots. Kenny Lee is at left.

Shallots, the Asian bistro at the corner of Fourth and Vine, now stands empty; it was here that I had my first dinner as a Belltown resident, and I immediately fell in love with the vibrant flaors and the attention to authentic details ("slippery-coating" the prawns before stir-frying them, for example).

Kenny Lee launched Shallots in 1996 and kept the place running with a rotating cast
of investors and chefs despite the vicious economic downturn, the departure of Group
Health offices and an increasingly spotty dinner trade. For the past six years, the mainstay of his business was catering and banquets and a neighborhood delivery program.

Lee's appeals to Equity Properties for rent relief fell on deaf ears. Earlier this year, he finally found a couple of buyers, worked with them for three months and left for an extended vacaton in China. (A previous deal to sell Shallots to chef Simon Nguyen failed in half a year; he had to take the restaurant back.) The new buyers, Don Briggs and Jessica McNeese, neither of whom had ever operated a restaurant, hired a chef who used to work at Buckley's. They intended to add sliders, steaks and pub food (!), but they couldn't get a liquor license because, says Lee, Briggs had a felony conviction on his record. Without the liquor license, they didn't even bother to open. Instead, Briggs and McNeese defaulted on the lease and were evicted. Lee returned from China to find the space gutted.

"They asked me to take it back, but won't even go to look at the premises," Lee said. "I'm just very, very sad."

The notion of eating local, even a so-called 250-mile diet, seems pretty ambitious. No coffee, no salt, no yeast, no fun. Yet here's The Herbfarm restaurant challenging itself to produce a series of "100-mile" dinners and sourcing everything on the plate within a 100-mile radius of Woodinville.

Nine courses of food and wine, and not all of it salmon, either.

"I don't think anyone will feel deprived," says culinary director and co-owner Ron Zimmerman. "In fact, I'm hoping they'll be thrilled and exalted. Our farm will be bursting with summer vegetables. There will be wild mushrooms, the nation's best shellfish, new potatoes, Puget Sound fish and salmon, pastured organic beef, house-made cheese, our own honey, saffron spice from Sequim, and an avalanche of fruits and berries."

The Herbfarm has a new culinary team in place, now that James-Beard winning chef Keith Luce has returned to his family's farm on the North Fork of Long Island and sous-chef Lisa Nakamura has decamped for her own restaurant on Orcas Island. In addition to Zimmerman, there's chef Tony Demes, with Chris Weber and Ben Smart sharing kitchen duties and Cory Bennett handling pastry.

For the bread, for example, the flour is stone ground from fields within the 100-mile limit. The staff has captured and propagated wild yeast from the air to ferment the breads that will bake in their woodburning outdoor oven. The butter? "We churn it in-house, old fashioned, farm-style," says Zimmerman. "The stuff you slather up to your elbows, it's so good."

And salt? Well, they sent Weber out to Lummi Island, where he gathered sea-water in a bucket and learned to make salt. "It's really good salt," he reports.

What about wine? Although there are several fine wineries in Woodinville, most of their grapes are grown more than 100 miles away. So the staff has found a local sparkling wine "of immense quality," they say, that no one will have ever tasted., a pinot noir from an unknown vineyard in Western Washington, a sangiovese from Lake Chelan and a couple of whites from the San Juan Islands.

Herbal teas were no problem, since one of only two tea plantations in North America is 45 minutes north of here. No coffee, though, since coffee.can't grow here. Zimmerman is working on a brew of dandelion root, chicory, burdock, and roasted barley that looks promising. But if a guest can't live without coffee, he'll brew up a cup, as long as the guest brings the beans.

Says Zimmerman's wife and co-owner, Carrie Van Dyck, "With this dinner, we're kind of going where no one has been since the Salish tribes first had contact with the Europeans."

The 100-Mile dinners will be served the last three weeks of August, Thursday through Sunday. (Sunday dinners start at 4:30, the other evenings at 7.) Price is $195. For reservations, call 425-485-5300 or go online to this page

Lazy summer evenings paddling a kayak on Lake Union's Portage Bay or Lake Washington's Foster Island wildlife refuge: it sounds like the perfect Seattle activity (outdoorsy without being demanding). Nothing against the half dozen recreational kayak rental outfits along the Ship Canal, but here's another option: instead of gliding up behind a nesting heron in the Foster Island marshes, float through Seattle's unseen industrial heartland, the Duwamish Waterway.

Since 2001 the lower Duwamish River has been a Superfund site, with local stakeholders (residents, tribes, neighborhood businesses) contributing to the Environmental Protection Agency's cleanup plans. Chemicals from Boeing's aircraft manufacturing are only part of the toxic stew; overflowing sewage and industrial sludge from dozens of sources complicate the cleanup.

Some signs of progress: salmon are coming back to the river. And ospreys, seals and sea lions can be spotted in the course of the three-hour tours, which are sponsored by the and operated by Alki Kayak Tours.

The tours leave from a hard-to-find spot called Duwamish Waterway Park (7900 10th Ave. South, zig-zag your way from the First Avenue South bridge).

Wednesdays (August 4th and 25th; September 8th), from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The cost is $40 and includes all equipment; participants under 18 must be accompanied by a parent. To sign up, call Alki Kayak Tours at 206-953-0237.