[Photographs: Leslie Kelly]

I am so steamed! The beautiful coppa and lomo I have been curing with Earth & Ocean chef Adam Stevenson since November has been 86-ed before ever making its way to the menu.

In Seattle, the health department started cracking down on charcuterie programs at the beginning of the year. Adam got wind of this development and took all house-cured meat off the menu. Goodbye gorgeous lambcetta, tangy red wine salami, and so long to the prosciutto project.

Of course, public health and safety is paramount when it comes to dining out. Listeria is nasty stuff and the germs that cause it can grow when meats are improperly cured. Too much moisture can be the culprit. But the chefs in Seattle who cure their own have been doing it for some time and take the proper precautions. Stevenson learned from the king of cured meats, Armandino Batali.

This is just a temporary moratorium until Adam can fill out Health and Safety Plans for each of the products he plans to cure. Chefs love to fill out paperwork as much as dishwashers relish cleaning out the gunk in the bottom of the sink at the end of a shift.

After taking a tour of his meat locker last spring, I asked Adam if he would be willing to show me the ropes. We started the meat aging project in November, roughly rubbing pieces parsed from a whole beast with salt and preservatives. I came into the restaurant every three weeks or so to apply more salt and then the seasonings before hanging it in a walk-in reserved for curing.

The crackdown is vexing because we were so close. My mouth was watering. When I went in earlier this week, I was making plans to invite friends to a "meat-up" to sample the stuff. Fat chance!

While I'm disappointed, Adam has got to be totally bummed. There's a spread on his charcuterie program in the current issue of Northwest Palate, a regional food magazine. It has been such a shining star on the restaurant's menu, but no more. Not for a while anyway. In the meantime, he's going to experiment with some cooked sausages, including bologna!

This bump in the road serves as another reminder that being in the restaurant business is so much more than the triumphs at the stove. Along with the satisfaction of creating memorable meals comes the drudgery of cleaning and ordering, and scheduling and dealing with a binder's worth of rules and regulations. Does knowing about the incredible multitasking that goes on in the kitchen make food taste better when you're a diner? Probably not. But being behind the scenes has made me much more understanding when there are slip-ups than I was when I was a critic.

About the author: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer restaurant critic Leslie Kelly has been apprenticing in professional kitchens since the newspaper folded in March 2009 and chronicling her culinary journey from pen to pan for Serious Eats. She also blogs at LeslieKellyWhiningandDining.blogspot.com and is working on a story-telling project for Northstar Winery following one wine from the vine to the table.