October 2011 Archives

That stunning entrance, it's at the end of Pier 70, in the space that used to be Waterfront Seafood Grill. Same owners, just what's called a rebranding. Seems not enough people knew WSG was part of Mackay Restaurant Group (not that that's a big deal by itself) but, more importantly, that it was a sister property to the immensely succesful steak house just up the hill in Belltown called El Gaucho.

Now you're talking! Paul Mackay resurrected the El Gaucho name and Belltown's renaissance two decades ago, and has successfully extended the brand to Bellevue, Tacoma and Portland. He launched WSG because there was no upscale seafood house on Seattle's downtown waterfront, but, alas, he didn't get the same traction with fish as with beef. So he closed WSG for a quick remodel (new paint, new upholstery, new gizmos in the kitchen, keeping Peter Levine as exec chef, keeping the copper light fixtures in the dining room) and bingo, he's got a concept that should (he hopes) travel well: Aqua by El Gaucho.

Aqua by El Gaucho, 2801 Alaskan Way, Seattle, 206-956-9171  

Castello San Salvatore tops the village of Susegana, overlooking the Borgoluce estate

SUSEGANA, Italy--Call it "Field-to-Plate" or "Farm-to-Fork," it's a literal KM-0 meal, kilometer zero.

You can only do this when you're actually having lunch and dinner on the farm, eating what comes out of the ground, off the fields, and from the livestock. You don't feel guilty wasting the planet's resources because these two related farms, Collalto and Bertoluce, here in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, produce literally everything they serve: flour for bread and pasta, vegetables, meat, cheese, chestnuts, even the power needed to keep the lights on. (An earlier post describes the biomass co-generation process, which literally turns a daily ton of buffalo dung into a daily megawatt of power.) The properties have been in the Collalto family for literally a thousand years, part of a princely estate based at the Castello San Salvatore that dominates the adjacent village of Susanega.

The family's most recent leader, Prince Manfredo di Collalto, by all accounts a brilliant diplomat, instilled in his five daughters a spirit of humble yet forward-looking stewardship that has kept the 4,000-acre farm intact and prosperous. (All of King County has only 50,000 acres of farmland, spread between 1,800 properties, less than 30 acres apiece.) Where others might have sold off acreage to restore the family castle, say, Collalto has remained intact. In fact, it is a model of a vertically integrated farm, with wood chips from its forests used for fuel; grapes from its vineyards used for the region's prestigious Prosecco di Conegliano DOCG; herds of pigs and beef; butchering and cheese-making operations; mushrooms, chestnuts, walnuts, all from this Garden of Venice.

Prince Manfredo died prematureily in 2004, leaving the estate to his widow, Princess Maria de la Trinidad di Collalto, Castillo y Moreno and their five daughters. The Collalto estate is run by Maria's oldest daughter Isabella, who gave up a career in international relations with the European Union to assume hands-on management. The Bertoluce property is run by LOdovico Giustiniani, husband of the youngest daughter and an agronomist by training (and with a noble heritage of his own; one of his ancestors held the title of Doge of Venice). It's clearly an enterprise that occupies the entire family.

So what's for dinner? We start with a rich "cappuccino" of chestnuts, two swallows and it's gone. Then some mozzarella di bufala, stuffed with an anchovy, breaded with polenta and quickly fried. It has a superb delicacy and a chewy, elastic texture. Then a pumpkin soup enriched with a dollop of ricotta, followed by a pork tenderloin with chestnuts, and, finally, a typical local dessert, invented in Treviso in the 1960s, tiramisù.

"We did't want to bring the so-called industrial model to agriculture," Giustiniani tells me. "Instead, we intend to maintain the diversity of this property. With everything we do here, we communicate the landscape and respect the earth."

How exactly does one "communicate the landscape"? Well, with farmhouse dinners like this, for example. Within the next year, Bertoluce will open its own Locanda, or country restaurant, and will serve meals like this to the general public for an all-inclusive price (wine, taxes, service) for $40 to $50. It's not big-city haute cuisine, of course, but healthy and hearty, astonishingly fresh, and incredibly tasty.

The only holdup: running upgraded electric service into the ancient stone building which will house the Locanda. The public utility--the same outfit that buys a megawatt of power a day from Bertoluce's biomass co-generation plant --has given its approval. And because Bertoluce is reliable supplier and a solid citizen, the Italian bureaucracy promised to expedite the installation of the new power lines "within the next 12 months."

Can anything be done to nudge the bureaucracy and speed up the locanda's construction? Giustiniani is far too polished a diplomat to divulge his strategy. But it doesn't hurt that the farm is one of the most popular shopping destinations in the area, with a steady stream of cars pulling up in front of Borgoluce's farmhouse store to buy cryovac cuts of pork and beef (everything from traditional steaks and chops to organ meats), bottles of prosecco, flour, nuts, and the semingly endless styles of cheese from that dairy herd of buffalo.

VENICE--If home is the Palazzo Loredan dell'Ambasciatore on the Grand Canal, it's like having a penthouse on Park Avenue or a villa in Tuscany. Can't beat the view, great for parties, but a lot of upkeep.

Roll back the clock 350 years or so, Francesco Loredan, the doge of Venice at the time, offers this palazzo rent-free to the newly named ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, in exchange for what were termed "extensive renovations." (Hence its current name, Palazzo Loredan d'Ambasciatore.) The owner today is Filippo Gaggia, and he has found a lively business opportunity in renovating and renting out luxury lodgings throughout La Serenissima.

Gaggia's company, Views on Venice, offers more than 70 properties, from a studio to a piano nobile (the elegant "main floor" above the waterside entrance) to an entire palazzo. Luxury can be rented at the great hotels of Venice, of course (the Danieli, the Gritti Palace, the Bauer, the Europa,the Cipriani, and so on), many of which may have started out as private palazzi but have long since been overhauled Gaggia's princely accommodations were not only designed for princes, the princes and their families are still living in the private family quarters of many of the palaces and renting out a few elegant salons. (That's a salon in Gaggia's own palazzo in the photo.)

There's no Trump Tower in Venice, no real estate on which a developer could build so much as a Motel 6, which explains the stratospheric prices of five-star hotel rooms as well as the glut of 3,000-passenger cruise ships that tie up at Tronchetto, just off the Piazzale Roma, and disgorge their budget-vacation daytrippers into the souvenir shops along the Rialto Bridge.

There's a certain advantage to the relative anonymity of a luxury hotel, just as there's an advantage to the privacy of a rented palazzo. It's not much of an issue if you can afford it: a suite at the Danielli with a view of the lagoon is $3,000 a night in high season. Even with a staff, the palazzo's not going to be as costly, and you get to bring your entire entourage.

Our introduction to the Palazzo Loredan was courtesy of Marco Giol, whose Private Luxury Accommodation Network recently hosted a workshop in Venice for international tour operators.

VENICE--Enrica Rocca, native of Venice, resident of London, returns to her handsomely appointed loft in the Dorsoduro and gives cooking pointers to paying guests. "The recipe," she says offhandedly, "is a modern concept."

Is this serious advice or another example of the Italian gift for stylish improvisation? "Just put good things in, good things will come out," she continues. Were this truly the case, she'd be out of work. But she continues: "The ingredient most often lacking is common sense."

And there, in a nutshell, is the reason for cookbooks, for the popularity of TV cooking shows and glamorous cooking-school vacations (a business I've got a stake in, truth be told): a lack, not just of common sense but of confidence.

We're in what used to be the laundry of her family palazzo, a short walk from the Accademia bridge. A butler in a tuxedo pours prosecco while Enrica and a couple of volunteers help with the risotto. Carnaroli, not arborio rice, two to three ounces per person. Put the porcini mushrooms in first, so their flavor penetrates the rice. Use stock made from prawn heads, where the flavor is. Add the prawns themselves at the last minute so they don't overcook. Stir in some wild mint and lemon zest, along with a touch of heavy cream, and let the risotto stand, covered, for five minutes before serving. We sit on stools covered with the hides of springboks, dyed bright orange, and the prosecco gives way to a Soave.

We--a coterie of international tour operators--been invited to this impromptu dinner as part of a travel project called PLANETT, Private Luxury Accommodation Network, designed by Marco Giol (the very well-connected man with the motor launch described in this post) to showcase the very best of a private, hidden Venice that most tourists will never see:. a private palazzo on the Grand Canal, a private castello in the vineyards, that sort of thing.

Enrica worries about culinary programs that promsie to teach "how to cook" in one day. ("Pretentious bullshit.") Instead, four basics: qualty ingredients, take the time to shop, read the labels, and remember that the very act of eating is fundamental. Then go fot it. "And if you fuck it up, that's what takeout is for."

Top: Enrica Rocca checks the risotto. above, Marco Giol with Karen Herbst of The International Kitchen.

You're looking at a herd of 200 water buffalo on a remarkable property in the hills north of Venice. The best vineyards for sparkling wine are just up the road, at Conegliano, in the region known as Prosecco DOCG. The Collalto family have 215 hectares of vines (over 500 acres) planted mostly to the prolific Glera grapes, part of a much larger diversified operation known as Borgoluce, and open to the public as a "didactic" or educational farm.

More about the farm and the family in future posts. First, though, let's look at the buffalo. Like all female bovines, buffalos give milk. A particularly desirable milk, for its rich flavors and high fat content, yet these curious, friendly beasts are not particularly generous. Compared with a standard dairy cow that gives some 9 gallons of milk a day, you're lucky to get the stingy water buffalo to produce a quarter of that. But what milk! And what cheese you can wring from that milk, the world-famous mozzarella di bufala. A ball of fresh cheese sells for the equivalent of $9 a pound at the farmhouse shop, twice that in stores. In the US, restaurants and cheesemongers have shipments flown in directly from Italy and charge a small fortune. The official DOP Mozzarella di Bufala zone is actually in Campania, the region of Naples, but there have long been herds of cheese-producing buffalo in the north as well, here in the rolling hills of the Veneto.

The animals are fed grain and hay grown on the property, which, in addition to vines, includes woods, pasture, row crops, a pig farm, walnut trees, and a variety of grains, and several buildings with bedrooms for paying guests. (There's a fabulous castle as well, San Salvatore, in the village of Susgana.) It's a vast property, almost 4,000 acres altogether.

Each thousand-pound animal, having contentedly munched all day, does what animals do: poop. Bovines generally poop about ten percent of their body weight every day, which means there's a lot of buffalo crap for the farm to deal with. A ton or so every day, in fact.

The waste is scraped into enormous tanks, mixed with silage from nearby fields (like corn husks) and pumped into giant cone-shaped digesters. The sludge produces methane gas, which in turn is converted (by an Austrian co-generating machine that runs 24 hours a day) into electricity. A full megawatt every day. The farm only needs five percent of that megawatt to run every piece of equipment on the farm, so it sells the surplus to the government-run electric utility. It's enough surplus power to supply 250 homes.

Under a European Union mandate to produce more energy from renewable sources the utility pays Collalta twice the going rate of 14 cents per kilowatt hour. It's not a boondoggle; Collalta's managers figure they spend 18 to 20 cents to produce one KWH. Even so, they're still making a nice profit by doing the right thing. That is, the buffalo are doing the right thing, the only thing they can do. And we get to turn the lights on.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.

Location:Conegliano, Italy

What's the point of going to Venice if all you do is follow the tour groups along the Rialto-San Marco axis, and the Murano-Burano glass-making, lace-making excursion? You've got to go further, out past the Grand Canal and the Lido, and find the beating heart of the Lagoon.

There are perhaps 300 islands in the lagoon (in addition to the 100 or so that make up what most people think of as "Venice"). And two vineyards. One, the Orto di Venezia on the island of Sant'Erasmo, is a respectable six hectares, and produces a very pleasant white wine with its plantings of Malvasia d'Istria, Vermentino and Fiano.

The other, on Mazzorbo, is a single hectare of a variety called Dorona, which I hadn't even heard of until yesterday. It's produced by Venissa, a project of the well-known Bisol producer in Prosecco, the wine-growing region to the north of Venice. The Bisol family's particular interest is the restoration of the vast and threatened lagoon. They found an three curious vines on an abandoned parcel of land on Massorbo, a forgotton variety identified as Dorona di Venezia. On other islands they found more specimens, a hundred plants in all. From these vines they propagated a sufficient number to create a one-hectare vineyard whose first crop, harvested in 2010, will be bottled next spring (half bottles and magnums only) and released in November of 2012. The yields was half what you might expect for a red, a quarter of what Bisol gets in Prosecco, so the Dorana is a big-bodied wine,with an antriguing nutty aroma, rich and satisfying, with a clean, mineral finish, close to a Ribolla Gialla in appearance and mouthfeel. (Understandable if you also haven't heard of that grape either; it's also indiginous to the northeast of Italy and has a passionate group of followers that I wrote about last December.) The wine will be a collector's item, a curiosity, but it's a good example of what you can do with a an abandoned plot of land behind a wall on an island in the lagoon, if you have the will, the patience, the technical expertise and the money.

Sunday lunch at a farmhouse in the countryside 90 minutes southeast of Rome. It's almost a cliché, a scene you've watched in countless movies; just close your eyes and imagine the scene.

There are long tables under a pergola, there is sunshine, there is a medieval hilltop village in the distance. There is music (a gent playing a rustic bagpipe called zampogna), there is the cheerful sound of children playing soccer, there is wine, and, of course, there is food. A seemingly endless procession of food!

Assorted antipasto plates to start: slices of prosciutto and coppa, fresh ricotta, an older ricotta salata, home-baked bread, roasted peppers, a frittata, a potato salad, grilled eggplant, bruschetta with fresh tomatoes, bruschetta with arugula and cheese, cannellini beans...I confess to losing track.

Then comes pasta. Pacchetti (wide noodles stuffed with cheese, baked in the oven), strozzapreti amatriciana (thick noodles--priest stranglers--in a tomato sauce with guanciale, pork jowl), oricchietti (shell-shaped pasta) with artichoke hearts.

Then a couple of local specialties, braised goat (utterly delicious) and lumache, snails in tomato sauce (you pull the meat out with a toothpick).

Finally, some cookies for dessert. This was at an agriturismo (farmhouse inn, two guest rooms and a restaurant that uses almost exclusively the production of its own land) called Il Rusponte.

The price for the feast, which included a carafe of house red and a shot of house-made grappa with the coffee, all served by cheerful waitresses, was 35 euros per person (about $50), everything included. If you'd had a similar meal in a big-city restaurant, you'd pay three or four times as much.

The zampogna guy, on the other hand, was freelance. He showed up and played for the fun of it, then passed around his hat.

Flying across country, 30,000 feet or so, head above clouds, Bloody Mary in hand, iPad on lap. Wi-fi as well, bouncing around the ionosphere @ $12.95 for the duration of the flight. And so, in this contemplative mood, I ponder a few questions. 

Names, for example. Jamie Boudreau, barman extraordinaire, has a new place on Capitol Hill in the space that John Sundstrom once called Licorous.  In French, that would be liquoureux, sweet. In English, it becomes a pun on licorice. Boudreau continues the game. He named his place "canon," but the logo, as you can see, is a cannon. Does this mean he can't spell? Or does the name signal an intention to follow a strict canon of cocktails? Or maybe Nikons and Leicas aren't welcome? 

The subtitle of the (very pleasant) bar is Whiskey & Bitters Emporium, which has a a bit of an Old-Fashioned  (get it?) ring to it. Still, I wish the graphics designer or whoever spec'd the classy Classic Typerwirter font, had actually spelled it Cannon.

That confusion isn't nearly as dumb as the new pizza joint on Queen Anne, the one that took over from Sezoni. Yes, Domino's sells lots of pizza, but calling your shop Domani isn't going to get you a lot of accidental walk-ins since there's a real Domino's about half a mile north. I've got to think the owner just liked the Italian sound of "Domani" without realizing that domani is the Italian word for tomorrow. 

Do you really want your pizza delivery business to be called Tomorrow? As Annie sings it, your pizza's only a day way. There's a similar sentiment in an  Italian version of the lyrics: tomorrow never comes.

Art Institute students in Seattle: victims of a predatory Goldman Sachs subsidiary?

We've seen the Occupy Seattle demonstrations at Westlake, vaguely protesting the Wall Street bailouts. "Ragtag, bongo-playing hippies without a cause," the folks at Fox are saying. Well, here's something specific you can all talk about: the Goldman Sachs subsidiary Education Management Corporation.

Cornichon first revealed the connection between Goldman Sachs and the predatory, for-profit EMC in this post over a year ago. Since then, the issues have continued to fester.

The Associated Press ran stories last month about students in San Francisco suing their culinary schools for making misleading promises about employment after graduation.

Huffington Post's Chris Kirkham has plenty of hair-raising details in a long, long post this morning.

Earlier this year, a Kirkham post pointed the finger at the Obama administration for "caving" on regulations that would have tightened the rules regarding for-profit education.

That's something specific the #OccupyWallStreet and #OccupySeattle demonstrators should be shouting about. That's a drama we can all understand, villains and victims alike.

It's been four years since Kathleen Flinn's first book came out. A journalist and Seattle native, she was working in London as an editor for an Internet publisher (starts with an M, as I recall) when she got laid off; she decided to use her severance to pay for tuition at Le Cordon Bleu, the prestigious culinary school in Paris. Her boyfriend (now husband) joined her, and they had a great time learning how to cook. In The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, we watched Kat fillet a sea bass, dispatch a live lobster, rip the tendons from a guinea fowl. We shared her cold Chablis in an apartment overlooking Paris streets; we sat beside her as she sipped Champagne at three-star Ledoyen. Living, Kat points out, requires that you taste, taste, taste.

So she was stunned, at the QFC on Broadway, one day in 2008, to watch a woman with a shopping cart full of boxed industrial cans and boxes ("edible, food-like substances") like Hamburger Helper, bottled gravy and Dino Bites, complain about the price of chicken breasts. Trying to be helpful, Flinn pointed out that whole chickens were on sale for 99 cents a pound. "But I wouldn't know what do with a whole chicken," the woman said.

From that moment of epiphany, that most housewives really have very little idea how to actualy cook, Flinn embarked on her project, chronicled in her new book, "The Kitchen Counter Cooking School." First she recruited a nine women (the lone man to volunteer dropped out), and, in the privacy of their own kitchens, gave them ten weeks of cooking lessons...and a lifetime of confidence in their own abilities.

The universe doesn't need another restaurant chef, Flinn believes, so much as it needs people who can teach others how to cook. "Cooking on TV is like a magic show," she says; Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential doesn't inspire confidence in the kitchen.

Fllnn's husband, Mike Klozar, videotapes every session, allowing Flinn to keep a good record of her students' progress. And one by one the good women experience their own epiphanies. "That stuff in a box?" one exclaims, "You can make that!"

One revelation for Flinn herself: "Season to taste" as a recipe instruction is useless, since most of her students have no idea what the dish was supposed to taste like in the first place, and dodn't trust themselves to know. So the back of her book includes a helpful "cheat sheet" of flavor profiles: French is "butter, shallots, onions, celery ..." Italian is "garlic, onions, basil, prosciutto, parmesan ..." Tex-Mex is "cumin, chili powder ... " North African is "mint, lemon, saffron, turmeric ..."

Flinn's advice to Seattle's busy, bustling, often self-absorbed "foodie" community: spend less time oohing and aahing over perfect peaches and fresh ramps, and more time in the center aisles of supermakets. "Every grocery cart tells a story," Flinn reminds us. And the center aisle is where real people shop for dinner. Hamburger Helper sales are way, way up this year.

As a companion to her book, Flinn has partnered with an elegantly designed local website called Rouxbe.com (pronounced Ruby) to offer a series of online cooking classes. The first lesson, "How to Cut Using a Chef's Knife." sounds a bit like her first title, and is free. There's plenty more, on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and an ambitious website, KathleenFlinn.com. She knows that the first rule of teaching is keeping the attention of your audience.

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, Viking Adult, 304 pages, $26.95

The bubbles, that is. In some Champagnes, they're what you want. Why else bother? But sometimes, you want fewer bubbles.

Here's Sam Sifton, outgoing (and out-going) restaurant critic for the New York Times, on decanting a brut rosé at Per Se. He's skeptical, but the sommelier knows what she's doing.

"The sommelier brought Champagne, a brut rosé from H. Billiot, which she then poured into a giant decanter and swirled theatrically, over and over again, to dissipate the bubbles. She said this would highlight the flavor of the pinot noir grapes in the wine, and make it a better pairing for the food.

"I called shenanigans then. I was laughing as I said it, but I used language inappropriate to any restaurant. My mother would have slapped me, no lie. .

"But the sommelier only laughed. It was as if she had heard a pigeon swear in the accent of a Bowery Bum. "We'll see," she said, and poured the wine. "I think you will like it."

"We swooned. Swirling brut rosé Champagne in a decanter to dissipate the carbonation before eating burrata is standard operating procedure for all of us now."

I first encountered the practice of decanting Champagne at Veuve Clicquot's private townhouse in Reims over a decade ago. You figure they ought to know what they're doing. And they decant the Rich Reserve, to reduce the distraction (and the acidity) of the bubbles and to highlight the wine's luscious flavors. With dessert, as shown.

By the way, if you're curious about Veuve Clicquot's practice about releasing its best Champagnes in vintage-dated bottles, read this.

The Wall Street Journal's admirable online food & drink section had an interesting story yesterday about txokos, which it described as all-male bastions of culinary invention and clubby dining.

In Spain's Basque Country, perhaps, but not in Seattle.

Carolin Messier and her ex-husband Joseba Jimenez di Jimenez used to run monthly txoko dinners at their Belltown pintxos bar Txori (pintxos being Basque tapas). Coed, lively, and open to all. Txoko, Messier points out, literally translates as "corner" in Basque and refers to places where men gathered to cook and enjoy their own food and drink, gastronomic societies, in other words.

"This spirit of preparing and enjoying good food can be appreciated at Txori," Messier wrote in an email newsletter three years ago, "but don't worry, women are very welcome!"

Alas, Txori is now closed, but Messier remains at the helm of Harvest Vine in Madison Park, where the Txoko tradition continues!

Harvest Vine, 2701 E. Madison, Seattle, 206-320-9771   

And now a couple of boozy photos.

Negroni at Txori

Digestivos at Cafe Iruna in Pamplona, 2008

Now I ask you, isn't that platter something to behold? A thing of beauty. Two dozen Virginicas, a baker's dozen Olympias. Fresh off the beach at Totten Inlet, perfectly shucked (by Tom Stocks, the assistant store manager), served up at the new Taylor Shellfish retail outlet on Capitol Hill. Unshucked, the Virginicas are $13 a dozen, the Olympias $12. Stocks will hit you up for $5 to shuck the first dozen, $2 a dozen after that. By my math, that platter runs $47. It fed four of us quite regally.

We (myself, oyster guru Jon Rowley, Chelsea Solomon of Dry Soda, and a friend of hers who was visiting from New Orleans) drank a 2009 Chateau Ste. Michelle Sauvignon Blanc, one of this year's West Coast Oyster Wine winners. We also polished off about three pounds of Totten Inlet mussels ($4.95 a pound). More pictures on my Facebook album.

Taylor Shellfish Farms, 1521 Melrose Ave., Seattle, 206-501-4321  

What's the big deal, you might ask? Well, here's the translation:

• Crostini with mushroom & game pâté


• Egg & parmesan flan with black truffles


• Pasta with more truffles


• Risotto with porcini


• Roast suckling pig with forest mushrooms


• Wild strawberry tart


• Coffee with homemade liqueurs. 

The price: 30 euros (about $40, tax, tip and five wines included).

It's being held at the restaurant of a working farm, an agriturismo called Borgo del Riso, in the fertile Po River Valley 20 miles outside Bologna. Might be too late to get there this season, unless you don't mind shelling out two grand in last-minute airfares, but the rooms are only $65 a night once you arrive. And there's a lot to see nearby: the gorgeous "art cities" of Emilia-Romagna, Parmigiano dairies, Prosciutto farms, and one of the world's largest radio telescopes.

(More of those sights below, from a trip with the Italian Tourism Promotion Council back in 2006).

Me, I'm actually going to this one in Lazio, a cooking school called Casa Gregorio, an hour outside of Rome, next week. Promise to keep you posted.

Wheel of Parmigiano cheese

Baptistry ceiling in Bologna

Changing of the guard at Campagne as it becomes Marché: founder Peter Lewis (r), with current owner Simon Snellgrove (l) and chef Daisley Gordon

The farm-to-table movement hasn't always existed; it's been a long, not always easy campaign. We idealize the bucolic countryside, that distant vista of fields and farms, but it takes a leap of faith to "eat your view." The French know better. Spending a weeked à la campagne isn't an abstract concept (or going camping), it's just "getting out of town." The concept of Campagne, in the Pike Place Market, was to reconcile the two notions, to bring the farms closer to the city.

So here we are a quarter century later. Peter Lewis, the restaurant's creator, sold it in 2005 to a Bay Area real estate developer named Simon Snellgrove and became a writer of murder mysteries. The kitchen was in the capable hands of CIA-traiined Daisley Gordon; Cyril Fréchier, Seattle's best French sommelier, had been on staff for four years. The Café downstairs was full of Market-visiting tourists. But in the sheltered courtyard upstairs, the sails of the fine-dining flagship were luffing. A big, big breath of fresh air was called for.

Snellgrove closed Campagne in January for a remodel and repositioning. Like all do-overs, it took a lot longer than expected, but the results are stunning. Except for the dining room chairs, it's a completely new restaurant. Now named Marché, the French word for market, it promises a much simpler, less expensive menu (pork shoulder, $22, is now the most expensive item on the menu) along with a short list of approachable wines.

A francophile cycling enthusiast named Cameron Williams has been recruited as general manager, and the Australian-born Snellgrove, satisfied with the transition, has formally passed the baton of "owner" to his Jamaica-born chef. The transition from field to market is complete.

Marché, 86 Pine St. (in the courtyard of the Inn at the Market), Seattle, 206.728.2800  

We Americans spend more money on soda than on real food. And it gets worse when you include flavored waters, energy drinks, and fruit juices, not to mention coffee and tea, and leaving aside beer, wine and spirits. We are a nation built on liquids enhanced with artificial flavors and sweeteners, and we're getting bulkier every day.

Sharelle Klaus

Into this fray, six years ago, stepped a local woman, Sharell Klaus. A foodie, yes, but primarily a high-tech consultant with four little kids. She set out, very deliberately, to create a new category of "natural" carbonated beverages (water, cane sugar, natural flavoring, and phosphoric acid) called Dry Soda that would pair with food.

At the time, there were basically three flavors of canned soda: cola, lemon-lime, and root beer. So she thought about it for a while and came up with four candidates: Kumquat, Lavender, Rhubarb and Lemongrass. (She would soon add Vanilla and Juniper Berry, drop the Kumquat when it turned out that not many people knew what a kumquat was; she substituted Blood Orange.) Each flavor required a lot of experimental formulation in her Tacoma kitchen, a thousand batches each, Klaus says.

Now 42, she's grateful for the guidance she received from a food scientist and a beverage industry consultant. Turnstile Design Studio of Ballard, back then a startup as well, did the appealing logo. Dry's flavors are developed in association with a company in California; the bottling is handled by an outfit in Portland. "Building a beverage brand is very expensive," Klaus acknowledges, so, in addition to its own sales team, Dry Soda has hired a savvy, $2 billion national food broker, Acosta, to make sure Dry gets onto the right grocery shelves and into the right restaurants (like the French Laundry).

There's an air of Energizer Bunny around Klaus. On the day she was named one of Seattle's 15 Women of Influence by Puget Sound Business Journal, she was launching a new flavor of soda, Wild Lime (think 7-Up on steroids) at Dry's headquarters in Pioneer Square, then hopped the red-eye to South Carolina to launch a new venture with Urban Outfitters. She'd been hoping to run in the New York Marathon next month, and hired her daughter's soccer instructor to be her running coach, but she concedes she's run out of time. "I'll have to put off the Marathon until 2012."

And then we have Evan Wallace, ex-physicist and former software exec, who lives in a condo at the Market and spends a lot time in his "living room" downstairs, the Zig Zag Café.

Evan Wallace at Zig-Zag

Wallace is a tinker and inventor with a fondness for bubbles and abhorence of flat Champagne. How to keep the sparkle in a sparkling wine? Icy cold temperature helps; an airtight stopper helps, but really, once the bottle has been opened, the only way to keep the contents perfectly fresh is to exactly recreate the conditions in the bottle before the cork was popped. Wallace's solution, patented as the Perlage system, is to encase the entire bottle in a clear safety enclosure, and then repressurize the headspace of the bottle to its original state. At $200, it's an item for serious consumers of fine Champage.

But wait, there's another product from Wallace's company that will add sparkle to your bar: it's called Perlini, a $200 kit (in a Mafia-style metal attaché case) that includes a shaker, a pressurizer, and a dozen CO2cartridges. Here's a video that shows how the system works; here's another one of Seattle bar guru Jamie Boudreau using Perlini to make a sparkling Negroni.

Miles Thomas makes Negroni at Branzin

Boudreau's new place on Capitol Hill, Cannon, is also at the forefront of another trend for craft-cocktail bars: homemade bitters, which he keeps in glass pitchers atop the bar.

Finally, for bars that don't have the time to brew their own, there's Scappy's Bitters, a local company founded by Miles Thomas, who went from tending bar at Branzino to the forefront of the bitters trend. (Technically, if it doesn't contain bitters, it's not a cocktail.) But bitters have gone way past the dark-and-dodgy days of Angostura's, first concocted two centuries ago in South America and still brewed in Trinidad. Scrappy's comes in a handful of flavors (orange, lime, grapefruit, lavender, celery--ideal for Bloody Mary--and chocolate). Demand has been intense; Thomas keeps moving to bigger quarters (he's currently in Fremont) but the product remains handmade.

The Perlini allows bartenders to produced a greater range of flavors without resorting to traditional mixers. Dry Soda allows non-drinkers to enjoy the flavors as well. And Scrappy makes it all (bitterly) worthwhile.

You can understand why they get written, these tasty memoirs. Written and published, one should add. Full many a story might have bloomed unseen, but here they are nonetheless, perfect-bound or case-bound. We thank (or blame, depending on how you feel) Elizabeth Gilbert's EPL, Peter Mayle's YIP, Francis Mayes's UTS. Three relatively recent titles fall under their spell.

Let's start with Mark Leslie, author of Beyond the Pasta, who's going to be on national television next week.

Mark has a mind like a steel trap. Everything he sees and does in the course of a month in Italy (cooking with Nonna in the village of Viterbo in southern Tuscany) is recalled with the precision of a stage manager writing down the rundown of light cues, props, entrances and sound effects. (In his day job, Mark really is a stage manager for a community theater.) The format, one chapter and one menu per day, turns this memoir into an undifferentiated vacation slide show; there's no fast-forward to the best photos, the happiest memories, just one day at a time. What saves this from terminal boredom is Lewis's infectious and self-deprecating good humor. He escapes the village for a weekend in Rome, cruises the gay bars, then phones his boyfriend back in Alabama (We get the word-for-word conversation.)

The book is published by a Seattle outfit, and we met up with him (at Bisato, in Belltown) on a book tour a year ago. Even without the negroni cocktail, Mark would be your ideal dinner party guest, always good for an anecdote (or two, or three) about his travels. Much is made of transportation issues, getting lost on country byways, the way 'Merkin travelers used to tell funny stories about the plumbing in Yurpeen hotels. (You might want to say, Dude! It's not about your ride!)

Anyway, as it happens, Mark is going to be on the TeeVee next week, appearing on the Today Show alongside with Kathie Lee & Hoda Kotb, no less, during the 10-11 hour, on Monday, October 10th. Mark will preparing two Columbus Day-themed dishes, Minestrone alla Genovese and Scampi. He'll also discuss a "Southern Cornbread" recipe done in the style of farinata di ceci, the popular chickpea flour skillet bread from Columbus's hometown of Genoa.

The second of the current triad isn't a memoir but fiction, and by a professor of creative writing, yet. Erica Bauermeister's School of Essential Ingredients received much praise from the foodie community when it came out a couple of years ago, though my own enthusiasm is more, shall we say, nuanced. It's about the romance of cooking claases taught by a famous chef, whose dishes work their magic on a handful of ragtag misfits. What bothered me wasn't the hackneyed story line but the author's schoolmarm assignment: you could almost hear her saying, "Good, now go back and put in the some metaphors and similes." So sho-nuf, missy, we have at least one every page or two, creating images that are puzzling ("watching the butter melt across the pan like the farthest reach of a wave sinking into the sand") if not incomprehensible ("a business meeting smoldering into a passionate groupe session by the recycling bins in the back" and "The ring James gave her [...] slid onto her finger like his hands moving across her skin.") So why bring all this up at this late date? Well, it seems that School has its pupils, a new generation of foodie writers with ambitions that approach the limits of their story-telling abilities.

Barbara Elaine Singer's Living Without Reservations acknowledges its debt to EPL, but disputes the notion that only a trust-fund baby can afford to chuck it all and take off in search of happiness. Having done the wife-mother-corporate thing, she survives the sudden death of her cultured fiancé, Tom, and takes off for Alaska in a motorhome with her dad (180 pages; "a treehouse for grownups"). Regrouping in Florida, she sets off to sail the Carribean with Captain Pete on his 42-footer (another "treehouse for grownups") with Captain Pete, then flies off to Tuscany where she meets a handsome winemaker named Giuseppe. Relentlessly upbeat, she turns her adventures into a dense, 435-page book as well an advice website" Wake Up and Start Living, she says. And ride a Vespa.

Didn't take long: there's even an offshoot website devoted to visiting Singer's new home. That would be Jennifer Young, a friend of a friend, who visits Singer at the winery where she now lives with Giuseppe, and turns the experience into a blog of her own, Jennifer's Life in Tuscany.

Two funny things. First, when I took Italian lessons two decades ago, there were two gents in the class. I was preparing a wine tour to Italy; the other fellow had a business importing terra cotta from Italy. The other students were half a dozen thirty-ish women from a variety of professions, but they were all there, they told us one by one, because their life's dream was to make enough money so they could live in Tuscany.

Second, both Beyond the Pasta and Living Without Reservations are published by small houses, with nearly identical logos: a woman on a motor scooter, ponytail flying in the wind. Where do you suppose they're going?

Woodford Reserve certainly seems to be doing alright for itself, with a few dozen high-profile "preferred partner" relationships around the country, including two in Seattle. The brand didn't even exist 15 years ago; now it has sales of 200,000 cases. It's not your grandfather's bourbon (that might be Early Times, or Jim Beam--six milliion cases a year!) or your rich uncle's, either (Jack Daniel's, perhaps, though that's Tennessee, not Kentucky; ten million cases nonetheless). These days, it's all about small batch bourbon, and Woodford's, along with brands like Knob Creek and Bulliet, are reviving the sagging fortunes of the spirits industry. Woodford's parent, Brown Forman, is the nation's oldest wine and spirits distributor, and their marketing plan for Woodford involves creating "personal" barrels of bourbon for this elite group of buyers.

Chris Morris, Master Distiller

Usually, the top brass at the participating restaurants or hotels travel to the picturesque town of Versailles, as The Metropolitan Grill's staff has done the past couple of years. That's Ver-SAILS, not Ver-SIGH, by the way. (We wrote about Met Grill's Manhattan contest last month.) But Duke's Chowderhouse, a chain of six local restaurants, has been a preferred partner even longer, so this week Woodford's master distiller, Chuck Morris, left Kentucky's bucolic bluegrass country and brought his barrel samples to the Duke's at Southcenter. A Seattle institution, Duke's is just shy of 40 years old, and still run by its founder, Duke Moscrip.

Duke Moscrip

"Bourbon, by law, is 51 percent corn," the genial yet professorial Morris reminded the tasting panel, whom he called "steely-eyed veterans." Woodford also includes 18 percent rye and 10 percent malted barley in its recipe, and uses old-fashioned, copper pot stills to create its bourbons, which are aged for at least four years in white oak barrels. By the time the tasters arrive, there are some surprising variations between barrels. The afternoon's assignment: taste eight samples at full strength, drop four, then taste all six combinations of two-barrel blends, pick a favorite.

It's an exercise that would be familiar to blenders of wine and concocters of Champagne. The final choice will combine two specific barrels of Woodford Reserve to be labeled as Duke's personal selection, 360 bottles altogether. Barely enough to last a year. Duke's isn't known as a bourbon bar, though; it's where you go for chowder, fish and chips, or planked Copper River salmon, sitting on the deck in good weather. (It can get crazy; the relatively small Alki store takes in $20,000 on a nice day.)

As for the boyish-looking Morris, who is 54, he'll return to bluegrass country, where Woodford Reserve is the official bourbon of the Kentucky Derby. Does he own horses himself? "No, thank goodness."

First posted in December, 2009, and updated to reflect recent news events.

It's an iconic photograph, this Italian street scene by Ruth Orkin, taken in 1951 when the artist was 30 and returning from her first professional assignment (a shoot in Israel for Life). Stopping off in Italy, she crossed paths with a kindred spirit, an American painter named Jinx Allen, and they spent a couple of hours in Florence, one August afternoon, with Jinx striking assorted poses and Ruth taking pictures. A gaggle of vitelloni had gathered on a corner of the Piazza della Repubblica, and Ruth dispatched Jinx to walk the wolfpack gauntlet. The figure of the lone American female, her shawl held closely, her head held high, striding with New World confidence past the leering lads and lecherous old men, appeared in a Cosmopolitan feature, "Don't Be Afraid to Travel Alone," that gave young women across America the courage to set out on their own adventures in postwar Europe.

One of those gypsies wasn't born until 1987 and was only 20 when she got to Italy. From what we've learned, she would have walked along the cobbled streets (in Perugia, rather than Florence) with that same pert, flirtatious confidence, and (from what we assume of male psychology and Italian culture) been met with the same lascivious interest. Being a university town, Perugia was teeming with girls like that, named Amanda or Meredith or Heather or Haley. Some would be more demure, some more outgoing, just as some of the boys would be shy and some more forward, with an outcome we've come to expect on the opera stage (mayhem and murder) but that shocks us when it's tabloid TV.

The mores of the Fifties were different, of course; it would take another generation before free love and pharmaceuticals made their way to the hill towns of Umbria, but we can already see in this picture the vast cultural gulf between America and Italy, between American girls and Italian men. Amanda Knox, who stumbled and fell into that chasm some two years ago, proclaims her innocence, but her voice (amplified by public relations professionals) is heard only on the Seattle side of the canyon. In Perugia, above the buzz of the Vespas, they hear the evidence and the verdict of guilty. (You would think that the last half-century of civilization had blown away, civility vanished.) Yet look again at the photograph: these are actors in a tableau, the men elegantly costumed, the woman's eyes modestly downcast as she plays the starring role in a passion play, not the bubbly comedy Roman Holiday but the Greek tragedy Phaedra.

Phaedra for Meredith Kircher's family, at any rate. For Amanda Knox, the holiday in Umbria is over.

Ever on the lookout, we are, for that je ne sais quoi to make us feel better about eating industrial food. And this morning we have it!

It's called Ticaloid GE 306, and you're seeing it go into that glass of water. Ticaloid is a replacement for industrial guar gum, you see, a substance that thickens your beverage. Thank you for sending this, TIC! Without you, I would never have realized now important your new technology is to the mouthfeel of my instant lemonade.

"There are many uses for guar gum outside the food and beverage business, principally requirements from the oil and gas industry," the news release from TIC informs me. "As different types of drilling incorporate guar gum in their processes, availability of this finite resource is further constrained."

(Comprehensability is not the strong suit of tech writers, but TIC Gums is not simply a single-product gum supplier.)

At any rate, the demand for guar gum is up over 200% compared to 2010 and tight availability will continue in the immediate future. "The guar gum supply challenge in 2011 was shaped by both raw material availability and the industry's production capacity to manage such a sudden and significant increase in demand, said Gregory C. (Greg) Andon, president of TIC Gums. "There is a 'bottleneck' around the overall guar industry's manufacturing capacity, which will remain a challenge no matter what happens to the availability of guar seeds. The bottom line is that without a reduction in demand, 2012 supply limits and historically high prices are still expected."

Thanks for that glimpse into the future, Greg.

The news release concludes: "Ticaloid GE 306 actually improves the overall mouth feel of instant lemonade because the thickness is slightly greater than that accomplished using only guar. This blend of ingredients, still containing reduced levels of guar, is cold water soluble and has comparable qualities of 100% guar gum. Ticaloid® GE 306 provides a clean flavor profile and improved mouth feel over guar gum."