Entries tagged with 'Seattle'
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David Chang and me. [Photograph: Traca Savadogo] Lucky me—I recently got a double helping of David Chang, who unwittingly reaffirmed my culinary quest to try and make the leap from critic to cook. First, at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium last month in Oxford, Mississippi, I shamelessly ingratiated myself by offering the superstar chef a little "Trick or Meat" on Halloween, sharing some salumi I toted from Salumi in Seattle. Chang and his crew were at the awesome annual event to make lunch for the 300-plus participants. (One highlight of the meal was beautiful, paper-thin slices of Allan Benton's country ham draped over tender salad greens.) After sampling some salumi, I think "mole" might be David Chang's new favorite four-letter...
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"Seattle has many hot dog joints but until recently didn't have its own definitive Seattle Dog." [Artwork: Hawk Krall] Past Weeks' Dogs Beer Marinated Chili DogDepression Dog24-Hour DogThe Philly ComboTijuana Dog Whenever I think I'm out of regional hot dogs to cover, I get four or five e-mails about hot dogs I've never even heard of. It's amazing how quickly a hot dog style can be established. This week's dog, the Seattle Style cream cheese dog, seems to have popped up out of nowhere. Served at carts and trucks all over the city, popular for a quick lunch or after the bars at 2 a.m., the Seattle Style hot dog is a wiener or Polish sausage grilled and often split...
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Over the weekend our Seriously Meatless blogger Michael Natkin toured the Pike Place Market in Seattle with food photographer extraordinaire Lou Manna. Check out what Natkin learned about photographing nectarines over on his blog Herbivoracious....
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Pink box from Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland, Oregon. [Flickr: mulmatsherm] There are many cultural differences between the West and East coasts but it takes a true doughnut eater to notice the one involving different-colored bakery boxes. When Jessie Oleson of Cakespy (and our own baking blogger) moved out west, she spotted the Pepto Bismol-colored boxes after being so used to white ones. It turns out the difference has something to do with Cambodia (yes, we're all over the map here). According to an "Ask Chris" column in Los Angeles Magazine: Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s arrived in large numbers in Southern California, where they were recruited by Winchell’s. At the time the coated, greaseproof boxes...
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[Photograph: Rachel Strawn] Frank Bruni and I have at least two things in common: We’ve both hung up our professional feedbags and we’re both over the moon about the lardo lollipops at Salumi in Seattle. I got to meet the author of Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater when he was in the city on a West Coast leg of his book tour. We had lunch at the renowned salumeria started by Armandino Batali and now run by his daughter, Gina Batali, and her husband, Brian D’Amato. But before he sat down at the head of the table for 10, my friend and former Seattle Post-Intelligencer colleague Rebekah Denn and I double-teamed the former New York...
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[Flickr: pouryourheartintoit] This might sound corny, but as a food critic I always appreciated when a restaurant was a labor of love. As much as I admired the panache and precision of many a white linen tablecloth venue, there was something especially charming about a Mom-and-Pop place trying so hard to please. That's how I would describe the newest hot spot in Seattle, Delancey, a pizza place run by a young couple who’ve put a lot of heart and soul into doing things just right. And I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to butter up the boss and get my foot in the door either. When I wrote a few weeks ago about my frustrating efforts to...
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[Flickr: capndesign] I spied this photo of Seattle's Maximus Minimus pig truck on my friend Matty's Flickr account. The menu there seems pretty simple: pork or vegetable sandwich with various add-ons (Beecher's handmade cheese, slaw, chips). Sounds delicious. I'm hungry. [Note to Erin: I think these folks should be our next Street Food Profile.]...
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Rachel Yang assembling her dishes. Since coming out from behind my critic's cloak of anonymity, I've met a few chefs whose restaurants I’ve reviewed. There’s often that awkward pause during which I wonder whether they're going to stick a fork in me. Not so with Rachel Yang, the chef-owner of Joule, who said she was happy for us to finally meet. Yang and her husband/business partner Seif Chirchi came to Seattle a few years ago after working in New York for some of the biggest names in the business: Alain Ducasse (at the now-shuttered Essex House), Thomas Keller (at Per Se), and Daniel Boulud (at DB-Bistro Moderne). The French-Korean restaurant she helmed in 2007, the now defunct Coupage, was...
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For those of you who pooh-poohed the Un-Constipated Gourmet post we posted over the weekend, here's something else to digest. Slog, the blog of Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, dropped this photo on Sunday of a poster in the window of Seattle's Uwajimaya, a Japanese food and gift store. It advertises the Japanese manga and anime series Crayon Shin-chan, about which Wikipedia says: "Many of the jokes in the series stem from Shin-chan's occasionally weird, unnatural and inappropriate use of language, as well as from his inappropriate behavior." Not completely surprising, considering the fact that the children's book Everyone Poops is also a Japanese import. [Thanks, dmarina!]...
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Critic Turned Cook follows former Seattle Post-Intelligencer food critic Leslie Kelly on her journey away from the keyboard and into the kitchen. Take it away, Leslie! Rolling out sheets of pasta at Betty. Seattle is such a chill city—frosty, some might say. (I'm not talking temperature. This week, we’re experiencing a record-breaking heat wave.) This casual vibe might explain why I have yet to witness a fiery meltdown in any of the kitchens I’ve worked in so far. Where are the Gordon Ramsay-like tirades? How come these chefs don’t scream at their staff? Nobody has come to blows or exchanged bitter words. No plates have been smashed. At the latest stop on my journey from keyboard to kitchen, a neighborhood...
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