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RONALD HOLDEN wants you to respect your elder(berrie)s Waiting for Summer By now it's clear: there is no spring. Will there be summer? Onward, new drinks. St. Germain has come marching into Belltown. Not the cafe from Madison Park, which closed earlier this year, but a French artisanal liqueur subtitled "Delice de Sureau," distilled from freshly picked elderflower blossoms. (The website, www.stgermain.fr, tells the story, probably apocryphal, of a cohort of old men on bicycles gathering the flowers.)  Many drinks are based on the elder, a common name for shrubs that grow in northern Europe, most with fragrant blossoms. Steep them in hot water, you get a very pleasant concoction. Coca-Cola sells a Fanta variety called Shokata (only in eastern Europe) that's flavored with elder blossom.
Yamhill Valley Vineyards smuggled some cuttings into Oregon a few years back, and made a delicious elderberry-scented riesling.
Elderberry wine, you may recall, was the poisoned cordial in Arsenic and Old Lace. Elton John even recorded an "Elderberry Wine" video using clips from the movie.
Anyway, St. Germain is but the latest use of the elderberry blossom. It won best-of-show at the World Spirits Competition in San Francisco last summer, and is now available in Seattle, at the Basque wine bar Txori, where barman Brett Paulson tops off a shot of the liqueur with bright pink cava rosada. It smells like honeysuckle and pear blossoms, tastes lemony. It's a very refreshing summer cocktail, just the thing for Txori's open-any-day-now back patio. Now all we need is summer.
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It cannot be easy, being green, shade-grown and responsible. It cannot be easy, being the butt of endless Dunkin Donuts commercials. It cannot be easy, watching McDonald's roll out espresso machines. It cannot be easy, being Starbucks.
Evangelist-in-chief Howard Schultz roundly denies that Starbucks is losing its way. "Our best days are ahead of us," he says. To prove it, an extravagant product launch of a new blend, Pike Place (named for the company's first location). "We've reinvented brewed coffee," he says, and calls it "the best we've ever done."
Oh, there's plenty to do, plenty to do. There's a new site, MyStarbucksIdea.com, designed to solicit public input, and well-meaning suggestions keep coming in. And over on StarbucksGossip.com, the buzz is about (successful) lawsuits filed by employees to prevent managers from sharing in tips.
Dunkin Donuts proclaims you can order their lattes in English, not "Fritalian" (ignoring that latte doesn't actually mean coffee at all, but milk). Mickey D calls its espresso stations "McCafe." But just as the competition turns toward espresso, Starbucks is turning its attention back to drip.
When Gordon Bowker and his roommates created Starbucks 37 years ago, it was largely a reaction to the insipid coffees of the day (canned Maxwell House and MJB). Their richly aromatic "Full City" roast was revolutionary, and to this day it is still being Swift-Boated by counter-revolutionaries as "burned."
Still, Starbucks rounded up 1,000 customers and listened to 1,500 hours of comments to provide input into "what's important to them" in a cup of coffee, says Andrew Linnemann, Starbucks master coffee blender. The result is, to be honest, quite remarkable: smooth, low-acid yet full-flavored. It's going to be a huge hit.
So if this be the face of the new Starbucks, the question is: What took you so goddamn long?
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Drinks aside, Belltown is buzzing with change.
For instance, the late, unlamented Minnie's Cafe at First and Denny, shuttered for unpaid taxes. Ali Scheff reports that the owners of the Hurricane are taking over the lease and want to upgrade the joint from "dive bar" to something a bit more sophisticated. (Anything would be more sophisticated.) To prove their point, they're renaming it Whym. Or maybe WHYM. (One's a trendy restaurant in Noo Yawk, the other's a radio station in South Carolina. We Have Your Music. Take your pick.)...
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 Another gray, blustery Sunday; it felt like Seattle was going through a rinse cycle. Undaunted, Shiro Kashiba was out on the golf course, playing 36 holes before dark, then stopping for a bite of dinner in Belltown at (where else?) Shiro's, where he's been sushi master since he opened the place in 1994.
Shiro doesn't have to eat at Shiro's; he wants to. He loves sushi, and loves feeding people.  After all, he's been doing this for 42 years now. There's a myth that sushi is "easy" because there's no cooking, just slicing. That sushi has to modernize. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The future of sushi, according to Shiro, is nothing less than traditional Edomae, nigiri (raw fish on rice) sushi.
As the dozen or so diners at his counter know, Shiro-san believes Americans use too much wasabi and soy sauce; he puts just the right amount of wasabi on each piece of nigiri before serving it. "The best way is simple," he says. And those dozen or so diners have the best meal in town.
 But Shiro no longer owns Shiro's. He sold all but a minority interest last year to a Japanese investor and to Yoshi Yokoyama, of Bellevue's I Love Sushi. He's still behind the counter three nights a week, but the restaurant is now part of the I Love Sushi Group. The new investors recognize that Americans eat bigger portions and want to fill up on rolls ($20 for a roll, a bowl of miso soup, tax and tip), but they don't think fusion is the frontier. (The eclectic Mashiko, in West Seattle, with a website called SushiWhore.com-with a freaking sushi-bar webcam-would be like the Third Circle of Hell.) For now, the I Love Sushi people intend to keep the Shiro brand, as a beacon of orthodoxy in an increasingly sushi-fied town...
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Then there's Cellars. Owned by Kauser Pasha, who previously had a hand in Twilight Lounge and Tabella, Cellars (in the space that once housed Jai Thai) offers an Italianate menu by chef Jared Velasquez, an alum of the former Isabella's. An all-day happy
hour on Mondays includes two thin burgers (but fine fries) for
five bucks.
Go out the back door (behind the cocktail bar) at Umi, turn left and go north a block to the former soccer store. Umi's owner, Steven Han, is moving in to the space, separated from Tavolata by one narrow door (a hair salon called Stylus). Wasabi's half a block away, in the other direction...
Marazul is no more. Anyone who ate here and drank enough to seek the distant, distant facilities (past the lobby of the Pan Pacific) will be embarrassed to explain the most significant logistical issue. The culinary problems were more difficult: a lack of focus, primarily. "World cuisine" and "rum fusion" are terms to flee. How this train wreck ever made it into Seattle Magazine's Top Ten New Restaurants beats me.
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Seattle is Edible at last! We think we're such hot stuff here in Seattle, but Portland and Vancouver got their Edibles many harvest moons ago. So did Cape Cod, the Twin Cities, and the Iowa River Valley. No matter, the first issue of this new full-color quarterly is finally on the stands (at Metropolitan Markets, PCC, Whole Foods), circulation of 70,000, handsomely produced on recycled, ecologically correct, non-glossy stock. Five bucks a copy, but $28 a year for
a subscription.
Its publisher is Alex Corcoran, who'd previously bought an Edible franchise in Rhode Island. (The concept was launched in Ojai, Calif., six years ago and has grown to 40 local mags.) Editor for Seattle is veteran foodie (Seattle Weekly, Seattle CitySearch) Jill Lightner, and a stable of local food bloggers and photographers (Jess Thomson, Bethany Jean Clement, Jerome Richard, Lara Ferroni, Pat Tanumihardja, Heidi Broadhead).
There's also an EdibleSeattle blog, Fresh Sheet (with a link to by own blog, Cornichon.org, yay!).
And, coincidentally, there was a good feature story in USA Today about agricultural tourism, visiting farms not as a grade-school field trip but to learn more about the source of your food. Visitors to Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley can pet the Berkshire pigs, but readers of Edible Seattle know the next big thing will be swallow-bellied Mangalitsas: foraging pigs from Austria being raised at Rocky Ridge Ranch west of Spokane. Check them out at WoolyPigs.com.
EdibleSeattle's fine, but so's our own concept, DeliciousCity.com.
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Just got back from France, oyster heaven. Have written before about the covered food market in Lyon, Les Halles de Lyon (now officially renamed Les Halles Bocuse). Dozens of vendors (cheese, charcuterie, fruit, etc.) not to mention four or five shellfish stands.
Lunch at one of them, Merle (no website), just last month:
A dozen absolutely perfect fines de claire, a "pot" of Macon blanc, half a St. Marcelin cheese from La Mere Richard: about $55. Seems kinda high for lunch, perhaps, but wait...
Lunch at Etta's in Seattle upon return: A dozen assorted oysters (Penn Cove, Hunter Point, Emerald Cove, none quite as plump as the French oysters), $2.50 each, so $30 for oysters, $14 half of a bottle of wine (Rulo's Combine, from Walla Walla), + tax + tip = not really very different in price. So let's stop this moaning about how Old Yurp is just too expensive, shall we? And order another dozen.
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Meanwhile, Harry's Bar in Venice, between the Grand Canal and the Piazza San Marco, is giving a 20 percent "poor American" discount. Just on the food, mind you; the bellinis (invented here) are still almost $25. But airfare from Seattle (via Paris) is a relative bargain at $800. Anyone want to join me?
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What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle?
Frank Bruni, their restaurant critic, puts together a list of ten hot new restaurants around the country. Geographic balance, gotta find one in the Pacific Northwest, let's see: Green corner of the country, organic is hot, women chefs are hot, anything fit the bill? Wow! A two-fer, right in Seattle: Tilth, all green and a woman at the stove to boot.
They send Matt Richtel to write about a winter's day in Seattle; he starts his piece thus: "Drink coffee. Put on another layer of dry clothes. Repeat." Hit snooze button. Repeat.
They send their "Frugal Traveler," Matt Gross, to Seattle for the express purpose of sampling happy hours. He goes to Cascadia, but finds their $1 miniburgers "bland and overcooked." You idiot! The "dollar" miniburgers haven't been around for well over a year. (They're $2.50.) Don't they have fact-checkers at the Times? Or can't the Frugal Traveler afford to google "Cascadia Miniburgers"?
Which brings us to The Times's "local" observer of our local economy. The thought is that newsroom editors in New York are out of touch with what's happening around the country and can't be bothered actually reading online editions of papers in other towns or asking their own bureaus; they need "local" stories with a fresh perspective. And who better than a British travel writer and novelist to spy on Seattle?
That would be Jonathan Raban, who moved from London to Queen Anne in 1990.
Here we have the author of two works of fiction conveniently set in Seattle (Waxwings and Surveillance) writing now about a poetry-spouting homeless man, whose favorite poem just happens to be a rambling piece of proto-feminism reinterpreted as an attack on materialism (Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"). The observer who interpreted the dot-com bust-
in fiction-as a medieval morality play would now have us believe-in non-fictional reality-that
Seattle is a Gomorrah of overwrought selfishness. The Gucci counter at Nordstrom's aside,
Raban and his homeless alter
ego paint an unreasonably upbeat picture of Seattle, lusting after
expensive new baubles while the rest of the country pawns
its jewelry.
The fault doesn't lie with Raban, who has every right to his vision, but with the editors who print this nonsense. It's fine when a critical essay for British readers is reprinted in a local blog like Crosscut; not so much when it's massaged for national exposure.
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While we're at it, might as well piss off my good friends at Gypsy, Vagabond, Cache, OnePot, KillTheRestaurant, and Culinary Communion. You got busted. Somebody called the Liquor Board to complain that a cooking class used-oh my God-wine to deglaze a dish. Argues the state: If you use a controlled substance (like wine), you've gotta get a license. And not just some one-off, ten-buck Class J permit, either.
You'd think the sky had fallen. "Betrayal!"
Well, now, look, fellas. Every restaurant in the state (except, maybe, Minnie's) plays by the rules. They pay rent while you use private premises, they pay utilities and insurance, they pay B&O on their gross receipts, they pay accountants and lawyers, and, above all, they pay their effing taxes (13.7 percent on liquor sales, my friends, in addition to sales taxes and all the rest).
You want to be like Costco, complain that you're so big you deserve "special treatment?" Think again. Costco lost its suit against the Liquor Board last month. You want "special treatment" because you're edgy and underground? Hey, every legitimate, taxpaying restaurant in the state will fight you, tooth and nail. What makes you think you're so goddamn special?
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Restaurant critic Ronald Holden was dubbed "Belltown's Boulevardier" by Seattle Magazine. See his blog at Cornichon.org |
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