It’s that time of year, and it seems like everybody’s got fresh drink menus and new snacks.
Duke’s, for starters, has gone all cockeyed, with slanted highball glasses and wacky drinks.
Henry & Oscar’s, the swanky cocktail lounge and supper club in Belltown, offers a Chihuahua Martini.
At the Triple Door in midtown, the Musiquarium Lounge is serving scrumptious shrimp toasts.
Cha:n, a new Korean bar in the courtyard of the Inn at the Market, has fabulous bulgogi sliders.
POP, that awkward space in the armpit of the EMP, is back with crab cakes, hot wings and garlic fries. Kingfish, up on Capitol Hill, has a new series of bites, including crab cakes. Crab cakes also turn up on the new happy-hour menu at 35th St. Bistro in Fremont.
Back on Capitol Hill, there’s a new spot, EVO Tapas Kitchen & Cabaret, with a menu of Spanish croquettas (serano ham!) and cocktails.
Bastille, in Ballard, celebrates its second birthday at the end of the month with half a dozen new cocktails.
And at the new Chihuly Garden and Glass, at the foot of the Space Needle, there’s now a restaurant called the Collections Café, with a menu designed by Crush chef Jason Wilson and executed by Ivan Szilak (The Hunt Club).
In other news
The Seattle Wine Society has gone bottoms-up. Founded in 1975 as the Enological Society of the Pacific Northwest, it was the oldest volunteer-organized wine-appreciation group in town.
Renamed Seattle Wine Society in 2004, it continued to sponsor monthly wine dinners and an annual wine judging whose international wine judges helped put the Pacific Northwest on the map.
John Bell, an engineer who spent his career working at The Boeing Co., while he made wine in his Everett garage, is among those who regard the Wine Society’s work with fond nostalgia.
A board member who voted to close up shop, he said, “We are proud of our accomplishments. It’s the end of an era, but it was truly a bright era, wasn’t it?”
Thomas Price, the lead sommelier at the Metropolitan Grill, has been awarded the top rank of Master Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers. He joins Shane Bjornholm and Joseph Linder of Seattle in the elite organization, which counts fewer than 120 members.
Metropolitan Grill, where Price heads a wine team of eight professionals, was named Restaurant of the Year earlier this year by the Washington Wine Commission for its commitment to local wine producers.
Earlier this year, Price had been a candidate for TopSomm, a competition of leading sommeliers. He was eliminated in the semifinals but called the experience a practice run for the final leg of his certification as a Master Sommelier.
He was one of only four successful Master Sommelier candidates nationwide this year.
Luciano Bardinelli, who came to Seattle exactly 30 years ago, is retiring to a little restaurant in Morro Bay, Calif. His first restaurant in Seattle was Settebello, on Capitol Hill, and during his tenure in the region, he was a sort of godfather to the city’s Italian restaurant renaissance.
Though not a chef by training or temperament, his strong suit was Armani (topped these days by a full head of white hair), served with an urbane elegance. Carmine Smeraldo, who had a restaurant in Pioneer Square, and Luciano were best friends.
“Carmine and I were the same age. We were like brothers,” Luciano told me recently. “After he died in January, I thought, it’s time to scale down and do something else.”
(There’s a third “brother,” Raffaele Calise, who’s still working at Picolino’s in Ballard.)
Luciano’s last place, Ristorante Luciano, had a great location in Bellevue Square. Spice Route Cuisine, a mid-market Indian restaurant, currently at Crossroads, will replace it.
Around town
New in Belltown: Green Leaf. Owner Ridgley Kuang hired a team of lion dancers to exorcise the evil spirits of past unsuccessful tenants: Gompers, Mira, Zaina, Vela.
Down at the Pike Place Market, Cutters Bayhouse has reopened as Cutters Crabhouse.
Atop Capitol Hill, the new bakery, Crumble & Flake, sells out well before noon.
In Columbia City, Jacques Spar has moved his Afrikando restaurant into the space formerly occupied by Banadir; it’s now known as Afrikando Banadir.
The big question in Belltown is whether the “footprint” of the McGuire Building (the half-block along Second Avenue between Vine and Wall streets) will become the location of Seattle’s first food-cart cluster. No word from the owners of the property.
Closing: I Love New York deli — both its U-District and Market locations.
Chez Shea is vacating the top floor of the Corner Market building in downtown.
On Capitol Hill, Kiki is g-gone.
In Ballard, Le Gourmand got a brief reprieve but will be gone before summer’s lease expires.
Elemental in Wallingford is decamping.
Buy the book(s)
The watchword in the food biz these days is “local” — locally grown, locally sourced, locally produced, locally prepared and, of course, locally eaten.
The glossy, local monthlies rarely celebrate remote or exotic ingredients. In fact, the pitch to advertisers is that the magazine’s editorial content won’t stray far beyond the readers’ ZIP codes.
Another reason is the proliferation of self-absorbed, hyper-local, foodie blogs. Be that as it may, this month brings us two cookbooks based on the premise that Eden can be found in our very own backyard.
First is “Edible Seattle: the Cookbook,” edited by Jill Lightner. The folks at Sterling Epicure, its New York publisher, describe this city as “an adventurous, ingredient-driven destination for gastronomes,” but they’re just writing ad copy.
Lightner sets the tone from the first sentence of her introduction: “Seattle is the biggest small town in the country,” where it sometimes seems that everybody knows everybody, especially in the food community. We’re also a city of nerds, she points out: Farmers and food artisans are retired scientists, software geeks, medics. Chemical engineers make cider; nurses make cheese.
The book is filled with mouthwatering recipes (Kate McDermott’s Omigod Peach Pie) and tips from high-profile chefs like Jerry Traunfeld (Poppy), Brian Gojdics (Tutta Bella), Mark Bodinet (Copperleaf), Holly Smith (Cafe Juanita) and Lisa Dupar (Pomegranate). Among the book’s most important contributors is “Edible” co-founder Topalian herself, a photographer equally at home in the studio and the pasture.
There are fascinating profiles of local food artisans, many of whom fly below the celebrity radar: Amy Grondin of FV Duna, Wade Bennett of Rockridge Orchards, cheesemaker Rhonda Gothberg, the Vojkovich family at Skagit River Ranch.
James Hall, who runs the shigoku oyster beds for Taylor Shellfish, gets a profile, as do René Featherstone and Lena Lentz Hardt, who grow whole grains in Marlin, a hamlet in Central Washington; and Georgie Smith of Willowood Farms, who grows heirloom beans on Whidbey Island.
Seattle’s food scene would be much poorer without these farm families, fishing boats and chefs committed to using local ingredients. That was the impetus for Leora Bloom’s book, “Washington Food Artisans: Farm Stories and Chef Recipes.” Published by Sasquatch Books in Seattle, it contains some 50 recipes (many from the same chefs) and profiles of 17 “local food heroes.”
Bloom, a baker who trained in Paris and contributes to The Seattle Times, had never written a book but told me, “I could have written a whole book about any one of the 17.”
There’s great pleasure in meeting Bloom’s subjects. One fascinating profile is about Mary and Duncan MacDonald of Turnbow Flat Farm in Palouse. Duncan was a free spirit, a doctor of jurisprudence, a ski bum, a Microsoftie. Then he tasted Mary’s farm-fresh eggs.
“This is real food,” he realized and, virtually overnight, turned himself into a pig farmer.
And once again, the copy is enhanced by exquisite photographs, this time by the talented Claire Barboza.
Either or both, these books belong not just on local shelves: They deserve to be sent forth into the world, as ambassadors, to explain to distant friends and relatives why our land, this inlet on the western coast of the North American continent, is such a fortunate one.
RONALD HOLDEN is a restaurant writer who blogs at Cornichon.org.