February 2012 Archives

William Burden as Orphée, Davinia Rodríguez as Eurydice. Photos © Elise Bakketun

The lyre belongs to Orpheus, a mythological demigod whose music has no equal. His wife, Eurydice, is dead, bitten by a poisonous snake, and the inconsolable Orpheus implores the gods to let him join her in the underworld. Enter Amore, goddess of love, to grant his wish but with a big string attached: he cannot look at her, else he will lose her forever.

This cannot end well, right? Sure enough, Orpheus descends into the netherworld and tames the Furies of hell with his lyre whose music is represented by a (barely-audible) replica of an 18th Century harpsichord. He finds Eurydice in the Elysian Fields (not the Champs Elysées of Paris but a greensward that could be Gasworks Park on a sunny Sunday) and sets off to bring her back to the real world.

William Burden's burnished tenor is perhaps a shade too warm for some of the elaborately ornamented passages he's asked to sing in Orpheus (where's Lawrence Brownlee when we really need him?), but there's no denying the heartbreak of his "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice" when the poor girl dies a second time. Davinia Rodriguez doesn't have much to sing beyond the manipulative "Why won't you look at me?" As the cute-but-wise Amore, Julianne Gearhart shows up at key moments on a beach-cruiser bicycle, dressed like like a cross between Shirley Temple and pre-Sesame Street TV host Shari Lewis wielding sock-puppet mortals as if they were Lamb Chop and Charley Horse. Love triumphs, however, when Amore allows Eurydice to return to life a second time.

Heidi Zamora, longtime costumer for Seattle Opera, undertakes her first assignment as lead designer for this production, with a collection of pastel hospital scrubs and togas to complement Orpheus's white leisure suit. Best was imaginative costuming for the Furies of the Underworld; whose efforts to emerge from stretchy body stockings made them look like thrashing, tentacled monsters.

The original set, by Philip Lienau, also shows creativy. Hades is represented by a backdrop that could be the inside of a human body, with muscle tissue and blood vessels. Neural ganglia persue the lovers as they look for the outside world.

Maestro Gary Thor Wedow certainly understands Baroque music; he conducted a fine "Giulio Cesare" (1724) for Seattle Opera five seasons ago, as well as Mozart's "Magic Flute" (1791) last year. I only wish that he'd found a way to put more emphasis on Orpheus's ability to charm his friends and enchant his enemies through music, the way Papageno uses his bells and Tamino plays his flute.

This staging of Orpheus premiered in Paris in 1774 (just 15 years before the French Revolution); it was a rewrite of Gluck's original version presented a decade earlier in Venice. Audiences in Paris expected ballet scenes in addition to arias and recitatives, so Gluck added a French libretto and reworked the score to include several ballets. To a modern audience, much of the dancing, choreographed by Yannis Adoniou, seemed to me--apart from the battle with the Furies--rather aimless.

A footnote: by 1858, the public had tired of Gluck's serious approach and was ready for a full-fledged parody of the Orpheus myth, which Jacques Offenbach happily provided in "Orpheus in the Underworld." What Offenbach's hero encounters in hell is frantic music and lascivious dancing: the infamous Galop Infernal known as the Can Can. Paris was scandalized...and art was once again shocking.

Seattle Opera presents "Orpheus and Eurydice" by Christoph Willibald Gluck, through March 10 at McCaw Hall. Tickets are $25 to $203. Reserve by phone at 206.389.7676 or online at SeattleOpera.org.

Three years ago, I had a reasonably good dinner on Capitol Hill at a little spot called Thomas Street Bistro. I'd met up with a friend, and a couple of his friends showed up in the course of the evening, and a music student from Cornish dropped by to play a few tunes. It wasn't great, but it wasn't expensive, and I wrote a post that was mildly encouraging. But this quirky neighborhood spot, all of 20 seats, with a French owner-chef, Adam Freeman, who did everything himself (cook, wait tables, wash dishes) fell victim to the crack-cocaine of so-called "social media" coupons (Groupon, Living Social, Tippr, Amazon Daily Deal, and many more).

It's easy to see why a restaurant owner would become addicted to Groupons: the deal goes live, promising bargain-hunters a half price dinner (or massage, or vacation, or lasik eye surgery). Click! Within a short period (a day, three days), hundreds of people sign up. Groupon, having collected tens of thousands of dollars, sends the merchant somewhere between half and two thirds of the take. Great news for the merchant: depending on the deal, he's suddenly holding a four-to-five-figure check. It's as if Mr. Belvedere stopped in for dinner and left a million-dollar tip!

Except not.

Groupons may bring 500 or 1,000 people into your restaurant, but now you've got to feed them. Feed them for free. It's break-even at best if your food costs are 25 percent of what your menu price, assuming that you've carefully put aside your Groupon check to cover the cost of feeding the hordes of new customers. Trouble is, that money's long gone. Bills, payroll, back rent, taxes, special projects.

The math is simple: a single Groupon "bump" of $15,000 costs the user up to $35,000 in foregone revenue. (Briefly: 1,000 x 50%-off Groupons @ $25 each = $15,000 cash to restaurant requiring $50,000 worth of food at full price, they'd have $50,000. Instead, they've "borrowed" $15,000 against future free dinners. That's outrageously expensive advertising, or else an extortionist loan rate.) If you told a restaurant owner he'd have to pay $70 cash to bring in a four-top, he'd call you crazy, but that's what Groupons cost. I used to say it would be cheaper to corral people with a $20 bill; with Groupons, it's cheaper to give them $20 to stay away.

And once you get a Groupon "bump," you can't stop. Every social media sales rep in Seattle will call you day and night, will stop in, will send email, will not leave you alone. Eventually, most restaurant owners give in and try again. Our friend Adam Freeman--whose restaurant was so small, and overhead so low, that he really, truly did not need a full house to break even--nonetheless continued to offer online discount deals. To get bigger payments from the daily-deal pushers, he had to inflate the price of his dinners to unrealistic levels; meantime, more customers meant higher expenses, so he had to cut corners. His regulars were crowded out by coupon-wielding newcomers whose negative reaction to the food, service and ambience was voiced with increasing frequency on Yelp: "Yuk!"

Finally, Groupon couldn't take it any more. As complaints rolled in and Freeman's Yelp rating fell to two and a half stars, out of five, they pulled their current deal.

Now let me say with absolute confidence, from the vantage point of a longtime industry observer and occasional paid consultant to Seattle restaurants, that users of Groupons and their siblings hardly ever return for a full-price meal. No, make that never. Never ever. Did I say never? I meant never. You've trained them that your food is worth half of what your menu says it costs, you've trained them that you undervalue your own product. There's no incentive for restaurants to provide anything like the full-price experience in terms of carefully prepared food; and, since coupon-users almost never tip on the actual menu price, there's no incentive for waitstaff to provide anything but perfunctory service.

I should add that bargain-hunting cheapskate diners--the embodiment of today's Entitlement Culture--are the worst, pickiest customers imaginable. They complain, incessantly, about everything, right or wrong, texting from the table about their waiters, the food on their plates, the decor, the music.

Even with the brutal reviews on Yelp, though, Freeman tells the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, "I think we achieved what we wanted. We achieved enough return business from those daily deals." Assuming he's sophisticated enough to have tracked repeat customers, he's looking to the future: "We think what is best now is to go back to being a small neighborhood business."

And yet: the user is on his way to becoming a pusher himself. Freeman is the founder of a new venture called Pricemobster, which he describes as a merchant-owned publisher of daily deals. In a rare admission that maybe, just maybe, restaurants that use coupons to drive traffic are making a big mistake, the Pricemobster site quotes Freeman: "he realized that while the business owners received a large influx of cash all at once, many were actually losing money and not gaining either customer loyalty or appreciation."

Thomas St. Bistro, 421 E Thomas St, Seattle, (206) 307-9131  

Paul Havas, the landscape painter who died of pancreatic cancer last week at the age of 71, was a prolific, gifted, and enthusiastic ambassador for the serenity of his adopted Northwest, moving easily from the quiet, confident vibrancy of Seattle at night to the wistful, fog-shrouded expanses of Western Washington's valleys and waterways.

Havas was raised in New Jersey and graduated from Syracuse. He arrived in Seattle in 1963 and earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Washington.

His "Night City" paintings of the 1980s evoke a dormant, languid Seattle, with muted flashes of light that foreshadow its vitality. His mountain series was more abstract, with powerful shapes and jagged contrasts.

In his career, Havas returned again and again to the flatlands of the Skagit Valley, the Snohomish Valley, and the Long Beach peninsula, much as the plein-air painters of Paris moved from the city to the river estuaries of the coast of France. In cranberry bogs and tulip fields he found a vivid foreground; in the long, low oyster sheds of Willapa Bay a steady keel for what his fellow plein-air artist William Elston called his "wet, salty landscapes." It was Elston who anointed Havas the Poet Laureate of Northwest landscape painting.

Havas started showing at the Gordon Woodside Gallery in 1970. His most recent one-man show two years ago, at what is now the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, showed what Cornichon called "a calmer, more confident artist, no longer shrouding his scenery in mists and fog but giving them stronger light, cleaner lines and evanescent reflections of sheds and cabins on the ponds and backwaters of the valley floor." The review was titled "Under the Skagit's sheltering sky"

Glenda McPherson, a Madrona neighbor of Havas and the owner of one of his Skagit Valley canvases, said, "I delight every day in the product of his heart, mind and soul. I am truly sad, for me and for Seattle."

A memorial service is being organized by the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, 2101 9th Avenue, Seattle, 206-622-7243.

It's a deliberately retro spot that's been born, after an eight-month buildout, at the corner of Fourth & Vine in Belltown. Mark and Katie Stern, the owners of the Big Picture cinema three blocks down the street, have recreated, at Henry & Oscar's, the atmosphere of a mid-Manhattan lounge.

The bar now takes up what used to be the main room at Shallots, long, narrow, lots of windows. At Shallots, the tiny bar was an afterthought; here, it could be the main event, like the saloons back in Noo Yawk. No accident. Mark Stern's grandfathers, named Henry and Oscar, were in showbiz, and the concept was to emulate Toots Shor's legendary sports and showbiz hangout on West 51st St. (Those were the days! El Morocco, the Stork Club, the 21 Club! Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra! Toots sold the place at the end of the 1950's, reopened down the street a year later, and eventually got closed down for non-payment of taxes.)

What you don't see from the bar is the rest of the restaurant, down the hall, swanky seating with private booths as well as large tables. One is labelled The Chairman, another The Godfather.

Happy Hour prosecco is five bucks, the fried calamari a notch over six, a colorful Chicago hot dog four. There's a decidedly old-fashioned beef stroganoff on the dinner menu for 18 simoleons, and if you've got a fat roll of bills in your pocket, you might want to go for the filet mignon or the ribeye. The exec chef is Mark Wadhwani, a veteran of Ruth's Chris, the steakhouse chain that's good at relieving diners of their benjamins.

Lots more pictures on Eater.

Henry & Oscar's, 2525 4th Avenue, Seattle, (206) 448-2444  

Are you there, Needle? Come in, please. Needle, this is Belltown, can you read me?

Angelo Pellegrini, the sage of Seattle's culinary revolution in the 1960s, grew up in Tuscany, where he would gather up roadside cow pies and sell them for fuel to earn a few coins. That's hardly the boyhood one expects for a revered professor of literature at the University of Washington, but it was not an unusual story.

In the first half of the 20th century, southern Europe was racked by unimaginable poverty. Millions fled toward land they hoped could feed them; those left behind boiled and ate whatever they could find. And when there's literally nothing to eat, one invents. Vegetables, maybe, if they'll grow. Game, perhaps, if it's available (squirrel and possum on the North American continent), otherwise milk from a scrawny cow, flour milled from chestnuts or bread baked without salt because salt is too expensive.

What's remarkable is that those dark days, whose details are vividly recalled, decades later, by survivors at the end of their lifespan, produced a culinary culture that is nothing short of glorious. Their stories, as recounted by Pamela Sheldon Johns in her new book, Cucina Povera, "were sad, bitter and desperate." Almost every person she interviews says the same thing, "We had nothing to eat," yet their memories of the food they did have (and that enabled them to survive) were almost always pleasant.

This compilation, the food of hard times, the cooking of the poor, turns Cucina Povera (subtitled Tuscan Peasant Cooking) into the most positive book I've reviewed in years.

Johns is on a US tour this winter to promote her book and to teach private classes. She'll be in western Washignton for ten days in early March, and will teach a couple of classes at Dianne LaVonne's Market Kitchen (1101 Post Alley in Seattle) at 6 PM on March 7th and at noon on March 9th. There's still space for a couple of other classes; check the Food Artisans website.

To be fair to the long-established scholars, it's a landscape that's been plowed before, especially by Lynn Rossetto Kasper, another culinary writer (and public radio host) with Italian-American roots whose books have been honored by the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Half a generation ago, Rosetto Kasper called this the cooking of ingenuity. "You take what the land gives and you make something of it," she wrote in The Italian Country Table (1999).

Bread baked without salt dries out within a day, to be revived with wine or stock or olive oil, giving way to ribollita (bread soup), panzanella (bread salad) and bruschetta (toasted bread with toppings). As winter subsides, tomatoes ripen and their flavor explodes. Pigs become prosciutto (not to mention guanciale, porchetta, coppa, culatello, pancetta, mortadella, lardo, lombata, speck, salami and so on), milk becomes cheese (from fresh ricotta to aged Parmegiano). Fruit can be preserved with sweet grape must or honey if there's no refined sugar.

Cucina Povera is a collection of some five dozen recipes that should make the reader appreciate the ease of modern cooking as well as the depth of flavor that comes from unprocessed food. Johns is an American food writer who now lives on a farm in Tuscany, Poggio Etrusco, outside Montepulciano, where she teaches culinary workshops. Almost every recipe is accompanied by a deftly drawn profile of an Italian friend who recalls the days of true poverty. The ingredients are accessible, the methods are straightforward, the accumulation of the recipes is one of joy and plenty.

There's one for acquacotta, for example, that's a sort of stone soup: nothing but coarsely chopped vegetables for flavor, with a poached egg and a crust of crust of country bread. Dandelion greens or arugula leaves provide a savory filling for a six-egg frittata. A recipe for ricotta cheesecake needs only half a dozen ingredients (eggs, milk, sugar, lemons, flour, baking powder), can be assembled in 15 minutes, baked for 35, and enjoyed for dessert.

I admit to a couple of instances of confusion. "Guanciale" refers specifically to the jowls of a pig, not cows. Sure, bovines have jowls, and restaurants (even in Seattle) offer dishes featuring beef cheeks. But it you're going to call something guanciale, it better be pork. Perhaps it's just a Tuscan thing.

Second, the classic white sauce of European cuisine--butter or oil, flour, milk or cream--is Béchamel in French, Besciamella in Italian, not "Balsamella." It's called Béchamel because its "inventor" was a specific historic personage, a 17th Century nobleman named Louis de Béchameil, the Marquis of Nointel. A velouté with a lot of milk or cream added. Again, perhaps it sounds like "Balsamella" in Tuscan dialect. Pseudo-Italian TV chef Emeril Lagasse calls it Balsamella, too, but that's probably what they call it on the Jersey Shore.

No discussion of this book would be complete without an enthusiastic endorsement of the photographs, by Andrea Wyner: portraits that evoke the hard lives the Tuscan elders have lived, as well as refreshing reinventions of Tuscany's landscapes.

Cucina Povera: Tuscan Peasant Cooking, by Pamela Sheldon Johns, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 186 pages, $21.99

The first vineyards on the banks and bench lands of Lake Chelan were planted in the 1880s by Native Americans (the Wapatos, father and son), who'd been trained in agricultural techniques by an itinerant Jesuit priest, Father Urban DeGrassi. Within a decade, several families of Italian immigrants had claimed homesteads along the lake and were cultivating black muscat, among other grapes. By the 1920s, German wine-growers from the Rhine were also tending vines.

Like many farming pursuits, however, one crop gave way to another. For a time, in the latter part of the 20th century, apple and cherry orchards dominated the landscape, only to give way to "development." Chelan's spectacular mountain setting, midway between Seattle and Spokane, made the lake a magnet for vacationers, retirees, resorts and second homes. But in 1998, two friends, Steve Kludt and Bob Christopher, decided against turning their cherry orchard into condos; they wine grapes instead, and four years later, the Kludt family launched Lake Chelan Winery.

Another winery overlooking the lake is called Tsillan Cellars, echoing the native word tsi-laan, or "deep water." In fact, Chelan's waters are a1most 1,500 feet deep, twice the depth of Lake Okanagan, some 200 miles further north in British Columbia, with a very similar geological history and excellent potential for wine-growing. (Lake Okanagan, on the other hand, is twice as long and has three times the surface.) During the long summer days, the lake acts as a collector of heat, which it then radiates back into the vineyards. In winter, the phenomenon protects the vineyards from frost.

Geologically, the 24,000-acre Lake Chelan AVA differs from the adjoining Columbia Valley AVA because it seems to be unrelated to the glacial Missoula floods. The vineyard soil, in the narrow band of elevation between 1,100 and 1,800 feet, is granitic, covered with coarse, sandy sediment and wind-blown loess. Dr. Alan Busacca, the consulting geologist who wrote the AVA petition on behalf of the Lake Chelan wineries (granted in 2009), says the unique soils give the grapes a distinct minerality and texture.

Sixteen wineries and three vineyards have currently planted 260 acres of vines, producing fine examples of riesling, pinot gris and gewurztraminer as well as syrah and merlot. In the end, what's expected to drive this tiny AVA as much as the wines themselves is Lake Chelan's reputation as one of Washington's most stunning tourist destinations.

Another in a series about Washington State AVAs that ran originally in Edible Seattle. Photo of Benson Vineyards courtesy of the Lake Chelan Chamber of Commerce.

PHOENIX--Let's start with the newsy bit: Peter DeRuvo, the chef at Cuoco Pazzo in Scottsdale's Old Town, just quit, saying he couldn't get along with the owners, the Rana family.

My guess is that DeRuvo, a veteran of Italian-themed restaurants around the valley, was already out the door when we stopped by for dinner earlier this week, since the bar manager. none other than Mario Rana, Jr., explained that "my mom is in the kitchen and does most of the cooking."

A couple of nice items: suppli (saffron-scented rice balls stuffed with mozzarella and bits of meat, then deep-fried) arrived on a bed of marinara sauce, topped with pecorino shavings. (Yes, they're identical to the arancini sold as a street food breakfast in Sicily.) And a trio of savory meatballs (pork, veal and beef) was served on a smooth polenta.

DeRuvo arrived with great ambition: he'd do his own butchering, he'd make all his own pastas. Where and when did all that go wrong, since Cuoco Pazzo's been open less than four months?

Maybe DeRuvo did make his own pasta, but it wasn't evident in the signature dish of "black tagliolini." There's a reason that authentic Italian restaurants use squid ink to make their fresh pasta: to give it the aroma, the scent, the vitality of the Mediterranean.

If you use commercial pasta, you don't get that same excitement. Cuoco Pazzo's "tagliolini," accompanied by a medley of mussels, clams, prawns and calamari in a tangy tomato sauce, could have been spectacular had they been more than fettuccine colored black with food dye.

Let's hope Mamma Rana can get in touch with some real Italian cooks before it's too late. They don't have to be professionals, but they shouldn't be crazy enough to settle for bland.

Cuoco Pazzo, 4175 N. Goldwater Blvd, Scottsdale, AZ 480-265-9814   

PHOENIX--A low fence of white stucco, with built-in gas firepits, surrounds the spacious courtyard, where tables of diners murmur discreetly. You can imagine Clark Gable or Ray Milland sitting at the patio's indoor-outdoor bar, sipping brandy & soda. Mummy Mountain Park to the north, Camelback to the south.

This is El Chorro Resort, half a mile from Paradise Valley's Barry Goldwater Memorial Park, clearly a relic of the days when celebrities "wintered" in the desert. Unlike a lot of institutions that outlived their founders, El Chorro is up to date. The current owner is a philanthropist, Jacquie Dorrance, connected to the Campbell Soup fortune.

The old bones are in good hands, the kitchen and bar less so. A trio of pork tenderloin sliders were marred by an overly sweet, slightly congealed "bernaise." My first wine by the glass was oxidized, the second barely drinkable.

And yet the scene was something right out of Hollywood. No mariachis, just an over-eager valet.

El Chorro Resort, 5600 E. Lincoln Rd., Paradise Valley, AZ 480-948-5170  

PHOENIX--The moon is full but the belly is empty, so it's down the 51 we go, heading for a joint called St. Francis. Sundays there's a combo playing on the patio, but it's not Sunday; in fact, it's getting close to closing time and we're being pressured, just a bit, to make up our minds and order drinks and dinner.

The chef is named Aaron Chamberlin, and his brother David is his partner in this "urban rustic" restaurant. (As it happens, I'm here with my brother, whose name is also David.) Their place, in a part of town that's on the border between no-man's land and Bank of America-ville, has a bit of an industrial vibe (metal-topped tables, high ceiling, exposed beams) without losing the "rustic" feel (wood-fired oven, a bar that's open to the outside). The menu looks and feels familiar, in content as much as layout and typography: neighborhood Parisian bistro, Bastille in Seattle's Ballard, even Zinc across town in Scottsdale: hanger steak, pot roast, roast chicken, pork chop.

A lovely starter of roasted vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, beets, turnips); a very respectable, if pricey, cioppino; an unfortunate plate of three meatballs, one of which was inexplicably chilly; a pork chop whose saving grace was actually being undercooked (no doubt in the haste of getting it to the table before the witching hour).

Which makes you wonder what's going on in this desert enclave: it's a beautiful cool evening, what's with the need to close up and go home at 10 PM?

St. Francis, 111 E. Camelback Rd., Phoenix, AZ 602-200-8111  

For the dozen guests seated at the counter of the restaurant at Second and Battery in Belltown, the sushi master is in the house. They know that Shiro Kashiba, who opened Seattle's first sushi bar, the Maneki, in 1966 and semi-retired four years ago, nonetheless comes to work twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Occupying the inside, spot-lit position behind the sushi counter, Shiro (no one calls him anything else) is far more outgoing than most sushi chefs but it is a professional friendliness. He smiles readily but pays close attention to the guests in front of him. He is a strict but sympathetic teacher, not a show-off chef.

When he first arrived in Seattle, sushi was almost unknown outside the Japanese community. Shiro would hike the Puget Sound beaches and dig his own geoduck; he would take unwanted octopus and salmon roe from fishermen along the Seattle waterfront. He would go clamming on the shores of Puget Sound and dig his own geoduck because there was no commercial catch. Eventually, it would start selling for 89 cents a pound in local markets; now, 30 years later (with increased demand and the rise of a sushi-mad Chinese middle class), geoduck is $20 a pound.

By training and temperament, Shiro is a traditionalist, and his restaurant, Shiro's, is the archetype of a traditional sushi parlor. Guests who expect (and demand!) unusual peparations like "fusion rolls" are politely shown the door with the suggestion that Wasabi Bistro, a block south, might be more accommodating. Myself, I remember telling Shiro, after half a dozen visits, that I was ready for something "more adventurous." (I might as well have asked Bach to improvise "An American in Paris.") At any rate, Shiro set me straight: the adventure is created within a formal framework, in the pleasure of each piece of fish, in the satisfaction of the experience.

His memoir, "Shiro," is an unaffected gem. The first two-thirds recount his journey from Kyoto to Seattle, passing via years of slog in Tokyo's Ginza district. Ambitious, he persuaded a Seattle restaurateur named Ted Tanaka to hire him, and, in 1966 he arrived in Seattle. Within four years, he had opened the citys first full-service sushi bar, The Maneki. Four years later, he married Ritsuko, a fellow foreign student at Seattle Community College. In 1972 he opened Nikko (which he would sell to Westin Hotels); in 1986, Hana; in 1994, Shiro's.

The book itself is a physical delight. First off, it smells good, a refreshing cedar aroma. (The book's designer, Joshua Powell, explains that the paper used for the memoir section is known as "Yu Long Cream woodfree" and the for the recipe section "Chinese Woodfree," both uncoated.) The content is full of memorabilia: snapshots, old menus, airletters from his patron, maps, caligraphy, sketches, watercolor illustrations. The first two-thirds are Shiro's memoirs, told with good-humored modesty. It's a tribute to Shiro's character that there's not a trace of braggadocio; perhaps because it's about an unfamiliar culture that none of this gets boring. (Credit, too, to Shiro's Seattle-based translators, Bruce Rutledge and Yuko Enomoto.) Shiro himself comes across as an ideal, if somewhat formal host, whether he's preparing your dinner at the sushi counter in Belltown or Bill Gates's annual c.e.o. dinner in Medina.

And then, just when you're pleasantly sated, along come another 100 pages of recipes and tips: how to cook short-grain rice, how to prepare it for sushi, how to make nigiri sushi (with lovely photographs by Ann Norton), how to clean smelt, how to cut fish for sashimi, how to season and eat sushi (no dunking in soy sauce!). Plus a handy list of terms to use at the sushi counter. (Oaiso: Check, please!)

"I hope that long after I'm gone, traditional sushi will find a way to adapt to different regios of the world," Shiro concludes. "With smart stewardship and respect for the oceans, the Pacific Northwest can remain a paradise for sushi lovers."

But there are storm clouds on the sushi horizon. More of the Chinese middle class have discovered the allure of sushi, driving up the price of fish; more middle-class Americans find it sushi too expensive; fewer of Japan's trained sushi chefs want to work in the US; there's less good fish to go around.

In the meantime, Shiro Kashiba's memoir should be read and taken to heart by every food lover for its celebration of simplicity and its reverence for nature's bounty.

"I didn't want this to be just another recipe book," John Howie says. He opens his cookbook with a ten-page memoir (no illustrations) that recounts his boyhood and adolescence, culminating with a stint, at the age of 16, running the line at a fine-dining restaurant. At one point in his career, he's the chef at a spot frequented, post-game, by the Sonics, an association that provides good connections down the road. He joins Restaurants Unlimited (Cutters, Palomino, etc.), becoming the chef and GM at Triples, then opens Palisade. After 14 years with RUI, he sets off on his own, opening Seastar, in 2002, with the vision of making it the premier seafood restaurant in the Pacific Northwest. Trained by RUI to pay attention to the smallest detail, Howie nonetheless makes a wholehearted commitment to his employees. He now runs four stores (Seastars in Bellevue and Seattle, a steakhouse in Bellevue and a sports bar in Seattle) with his key personnel as vested business partners. The sports theme continues to this day: Howie represents Seattle every year at the annual Taste of the NFL dinner on the eve of the Superbowl. There's a whiff of piety at the end of the book, when he describes how his staff gathers before service begins, joins hands and thanks God, but it's quite genuine.

The book is filled with candid photographs of the staff, and not a few tributes penned by friends and family along the lines of "John cares about people" and "We will not compromise on quality." David Putaportiwon, one of the partners at Seastar, introduced Howie to sushi and is responsible for the illustrated, step-by-step guide to preparing a spicy tuna roll.

Erik Liedholm, the company's wine director from the outset, won "Best New Wine List in America" honors from Food & Wine magazine. Recuited by Howie from the Washington Wine Commission, Liedholm brings a refreshing informality to the stuffy world of wine. Yes, there are high-roller, "life's too short" picks for each recipe, but alternate "just because it's inexpensive doesn't mean you're cheap" picks. A good example: for a main course of plank-roasted portobello mushrooms, the expensive pick is the stunning Beaux Frères pinot noir from Oregon's Red Hills of Dundee retailing for $50 (and up), but the moderately priced alternate is no less stellar: Stoller, a new producer from the same region whose wine sells for $25.

It may not be possible for a home chef to cut Copper River salmon carpaccio on a meat slicer, but even some of the more exotic recipes (Hot & Sour Thai Shimp Soup, for example) only require that you follow instructions closely and use the specifically recommended ingredients. Don't go off winging it!

At the book's launch party at Seastar last week, in anticipation of a decade of operation, Howie reflected on the title of his book, "Passion & Palate." "Passion, first, because you have to have it in this business," he told me. "But Palate is no less important, because if you don't have it, your food won't taste good." The subtitle, "Recipes for a Generous Table," is no less revelatory. Howie has always been among the most generous chefs in town, never saying no to a charitable donation. "For me, it's just the right thing to do," he says.

Shiro: Wit, Wisdom and Recipes from a Sushi Pioneer, by Shiro Kashiba with photographs by Ann Norton, Chin Music Press, 320 pages, $20

Passion & Palate: Recipes for a Generous Table, by John Howie with photographs by Angie Norwood Browne, ShinShinChez, 224 pages, $42