Best Food Writing 2013 (5 page)

Then there was the little problem that Seattle is the size of the head of a pin. Even before everyone's everything was all over the internet, unless you lived under a rock, you could not hide. In 2006, I happened to be sitting at the bar at the Hideout with a friend, and I let my attention drift away up among all the weird and marvelous art on the walls, helped along by a nice cold martini. I reentered reality when my friend sitting next to me said, “That's funny—my friend Bethany writes about restaurants!” Then she leaned back and indicated the man on the next bar stool down: “This is Matt—he just opened a restaurant on Eastlake!” And there was Matt Dillon, the chef/owner of a brand-new place called Sitka & Spruce, before he became one of
Food & Wine
's 10 best new chefs (2007), opened the Corson Building (2008), and won a James Beard Award for Best Chef Northwest (2012). He said no offense, but that I wouldn't be
getting any special treatment if I came in—he cooked for people like he was cooking for friends at his house, which sounded good to me.

When I went to the original Sitka & Spruce in its tiny strip-mall spot, it was already packed. Matt Dillon said hi, and we waited and waited, standing at the tiny counter, because there were only about six tables. Eventually, he sent us a bowl of clams on the house, which (as I wrote in my review) he probably would've done for any group standing at the bar waiting and waiting and basically chewing on their own arms—or as he would've done for friends at his house. But there were no bigger steaks, or faster food, or magically more cushiony chairs. There was just the adorable space, and the sharing (and some hoarding) of plates, and his really wonderful—as in, inspiring moments of wonder—food.

There's not a lot a restaurant can do to significantly improve a critic's experience—either they've got it together or they don't. For
The Stranger's
reviews, I arrive unannounced, visit with a guest (almost always) twice, and am reimbursed by the paper. Are they going to come out and grate truffles over my head? That would be noticeable—and so, ultimately, are bigger steaks or better service, which can, in fact, be cross-checked with others' experiences. (If online review sites can be useful, it's in gleaning a very general sense of such things from very careful reading.) And restaurants are never going to be able to inject a sense of wonder where there isn't any.

Over the years, I've occasionally accepted invitations to media dinners or events out of (sometimes morbid) curiosity, as well as to investigate places that otherwise would tax
The Stranger's
definitely not-unlimited budget. When I accept such invitations, that is acknowledged in any writing that might come of it—e.g., the 2010 article “This Is Not a Review of Sullivan's Steakhouse,” describing the absurdly lavish “VIP” party that the Texas chain threw itself when it opened downtown. This party had a red carpet, multiple open bars, multiple live bands, oceans of people as dressed up as they get in Seattle, and mini steak sandwiches and crab legs and itty-bitty quiches and etc.—all perfectly tasty, if not at all outstanding. The service was as good as giant-party service gets; they forced a glass of bubbly on you at the very threshold, and if you were too lazy to make your way through the crowd, trays with more drinks and piles of hors
d'oeuvres, carried by smiling and attractive people, would find their way to you.

But sometimes even if a restaurant knows a critic is there—even if they know she's coming ahead of time, if
they invited her
—still, they flounder mightily. In 2007, I was invited to dine at Troiani, a cavernous expense-account restaurant downtown. This dinner fell into the morbid-curiosity category; the place had been there for quite a while, and it was run by the same people as the beloved El Gaucho steakhouses, and yet one never heard anything about it at all. It was also the kind of place
The Stranger
would probably never review, even if it were new, which it very much wasn't. The restaurant was empty in a way that felt windswept; you wouldn't have been surprised to see tumbleweeds blowing between the well-spaced tables. Marooned in the far reaches of the place, we glimpsed staff occasionally in the distance. They never managed to bring us a bottle of sparkling water we wanted, and when we ordered a Caesar salad that was to be mixed tableside, there was an unnervingly long delay. Finally, a guy wheeled a cart up to our table, confessed that he'd never done this before and that no one else was there who had, mixed the salad in a way that made you want to get up and help him, and then said he was going to have a smoke. I wish I could say that this is completely atypical of Seattle restaurants' A-game; I cannot. I felt so bad for the salad-mixer and the emptiness, I never wrote anything about it at all. Troiani closed down in 2009.

Selfishly, not being anonymous as a food writer has meant doing much more interesting things. Before Matt Dillon opened the Corson Building, his lovely oasis in Georgetown, he let me poke around the property; I got to see the 1910 building when it was still dilapidated, before the meat-curing room and new kitchen were built, when the foliage was rampant and there was a rusty bedstead instead of raised beds. (Later, I also jotted a few things down during a many-coursed dinner there, eventually causing the woman sitting next to me at the communal table to confess that her name was not actually Barbara and that she was a restaurant reviewer, too. She joked about borrowing my notes.) At events like Gabriel Claycamp's 2008 “Sacrificio” in Port Orchard—the sacrificed one being a pig, killed in front of, then butchered and eaten with the help of, a paying
crowd—it just seemed bizarre to be all cloak-and-dagger about it. To talk to Claycamp and the other attendees with transparency about my role seemed only respectful. (I am pretty sure that another food writer, seeming awkward and introducing himself as Del, was there.) At Burning Beast, held for the fifth year this summer, you've got a dozen or more of Seattle's best chefs sweating over open fire pits in an idyllic field; are you going to pretend you're just an especially curious bystander, one who likes to write things down, and then make up a name when they want to shake your hand? Will they treat you so differently back at their restaurants in Seattle that you will be unable to assess whether the place is any good or not?

For a restaurant reviewer to eat what's on their plate in the shadow of their wig, then hand down a verdict in an airless vacuum seems strange when meeting the people involved gives insight into their ethos, their interconnections, even our city as a whole. I interviewed about a dozen local chefs and food writers and cheese-shop owners between 2009 and 2012 for the magazine
Edible Seattle
—interviews at their homes, in which I documented (among other things) the contents of their refrigerators. Ethan Stowell had half a sandwich from Subway. (“It's a bad sandwich—I'm not gonna lie to you,” he said. “It's not a good sandwich. It's only five bucks, though.”) Zephyr Paquette had a bomb-shelter's worth of home-canned goods, a dog that loved carrots, and a slingshot she was using to shoot corks at the squirrels ravaging her vegetable garden. (Having invaded her home, it was not easy to write later that I did not love the food at her new restaurant, Skelly and the Bean, which closed after less than a year, but it did help me understand the community that helped her build it, and why people like her so very much.)

For another
Edible Seattle
interview, I visited Kim Ricketts, a force of nature who'd put Seattle on the map in terms of food-oriented book events, doing 100-plus dinners and parties and readings with the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Michael Pollan, Patricia Wells, Thomas Keller, Jerry Traunfeld, Greg Atkinson, and Langdon Cook. Her home was as if Martha Stewart actually had good taste; she made baked feta rubbed with oregano, and we drank a lot of wine, and she called the owner of Whole Foods crazy and lightly disparaged the University Book Store and said a lot of stuff no one else ever would. Her husband and one of her kids eventually joined us, sitting around
by the fire. For yet another of these interviews, Christina Choi of Nettletown and I sat out on the deck of her Eastlake apartment, talking about growing up in Seattle and her wild-food-gathering days with Foraged & Found and all sorts of things. She'd done a photo shoot for
Seattle Metropolitan
earlier that day, and she insisted I stay for dinner to eat the gorgeous photo-shoot coho salmon with a motley crew of people she maybe only half-knew—an architect who'd made the most beautiful meringues ever seen outside a bakery, a woman who talked about a past job nannying for a very, very rich family during which she'd drugged the children to calm them down (at which only Christina and I looked askance).

Both Kim Ricketts and Christina Choi have since passed away. I was so lucky to get to know them, even just a little—they each had the ability to, in one afternoon, make you feel like part of their family. How could anonymity compare to that?

 

 

T
YRANNY
: I
T'S
W
HAT'S FOR
D
INNER

By Corby Kummer

From
The Atlantic

In the three-plus decades that senior editor Corby Kummer has been with
The Atlantic
—earning a slew of writing awards and accolades along the way—he has seen plenty of dining trends come and go. So what's different about this one?

“D
inner? I'm afraid we can't serve you dinner,” the waiter at Charlie Trotter's said starchily as we arrived at the celebrated Chicago restaurant. For 25 years, people made special trips from all over the country to brag about the dozens of courses Trotter served on his ever-shifting tasting menus. But as other chefs became more celebrated, the traffic slowed, and Trotter—the first American celebrity chef to build a cult following for elaborate, very long, take-what-I-give-you meals—announced he would be closing for good.

I'd never been to Charlie Trotter's and called the restaurant to ask when in the next six weeks or so they could possibly seat us. After a long time on hold, the man on the phone told me they could fit me in at 5:30 on a distant Friday. We booked our flight, invited Chicago friends who had likewise never been to the restaurant, landed on time, and then were stopped on the runway to wait out a freak thunderstorm—a storm that lasted two full hours, during which we anxiously texted our waiting friends to keep the table.

Keep it they did—but they also, at the restaurant's insistence, ate their way through the eight-course tasting menu. For us, the waiter pronounced when we finally got there, it would be the dessert courses. Or nothing. After a good bit of protestation, the maître d'
agreed that we could be served the full meal—at a forced-march pace, all eight appetizers and main courses plus two preliminary and two post-dessert “complimentary” courses. It turned out to be a mercy: we were able to get out in just under three hours.

Mercy is a rare commodity at restaurants like this, where the diner is essentially strapped into a chair and expected to be enraptured for a minimum of three and often four and five hours, and to consume dozens of dishes. Choice, changes, selective omissions—control, really, over any part of an inevitably very expensive experience—are not an option. Course after course after course comes to the table at a pace that is “measured, relentless,” as the former
New York Times
restaurant critic Sam Sifton wrote (admiringly!) of Blanca, the latest tasting-menu-only cult restaurant in New York.

When Trotter began, chefs were just breaking out of their backstage supporting roles and putting themselves on display—often literally, in open kitchens. He helped unleash a generation of chefs no longer willing to take orders. The entire experience they will consent to offer is meant to display the virtuosity not of cooks but of culinary artists. A diner's pleasure is secondary; subjugation to the will of the creative genius comes first, followed, eventually, by stultified stupefaction. The animating force radiates outward from the kitchen, with no real chance of countervailing force from the table. The chef sets the rules; the diner (together with the cowed serving staff) obeys. The reason we were initially denied dinner at Trotter's, we later learned, was that it didn't suit the cooks to have us start late. They were making all the courses for all the tables at exactly the same time, and didn't want to break their lockstep pace to accommodate the inconvenient exigencies of customers.

How did the diner get demoted from honored guest whose wish was the waiter's command to quivering hostage in thrall to the chef's iron whim? I found clues in the signed menus on the walls of the guest bathrooms at Trotter's—a history of revered restaurants of the past 25 years, almost all of them in France, the menus inscribed affectionately to Trotter. Paul Bocuse, Frédy Girardet, Michel Guérard, Marc Veyrat—these were the kings of nouvelle cuisine, champions of the techniques of classic cooking married to rigorously seasonal and local ingredients, and lightened to create a supremely elegant dining
experience. Many of the menus were degustations, or tasting menus—but tasting menus that were modest in their ambitions. They listed four, five, maybe six courses.