The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [147]
Stylish American cooking arrived, by some accounts, when Karl Beckley opened his Green Lake Grill in 1979. The young chefs who followed him demanded fresher and more varied ingredients. Small farmers, cheese makers, and fish smokers responded. By the mid-eighties, the culinary excitement here was reminiscent of the Bay Area ten years before. Inventive restaurants sprang up like wild mushrooms, with young chef-owners composing fanciful platters of the most impeccable and expensive regional products: restaurant goers breathlessly followed. Now nearly every restaurant menu lists the pedigree of its ingredients, even when there is none. At one place, I was served a tall parfait glass of good Dungeness crab under cups of red cocktail sauce, which the menu described as “a homemade sauce of Heinz ketchup, extra hot horseradish, and fresh lemon.” But where else can you find a waitress, like the one who took my order at Ray’s Boathouse, who can explain why she prefers Race Lagoon mussels to those from Penn Cove and why one method of catching salmon is superior to another?
The local food press is as active and alert as any in the nation and a pleasure to read. John Doerper, food editor of Pacific Northwest magazine and an encyclopedic guide to me during my stay in Seattle, tirelessly explores the coast from Oregon to British Columbia (he has been known to drive two hundred miles for lunch); his Eating Well (Pacific Search) is an essential appetizer for the foods of the Northwest. Schuyler Ingle is now at Washington magazine; his graceful essays in Northwest Bounty (Simon and Schuster) are models for us all. The Seattle Weekly offers the most ardent and informed food coverage of any city weekly I know, as well as a column by Tom Douglas, owner of Dahlia Lounge and one of the chefs who started it all eight years ago at Cafe Sport. And Alf Collins, restaurant reviewer for the Seattle Times until recently, now has his own business newsletter, with the most knowledgeable food news around.
The Pacific Northwest has everything a food lover could possibly desire—with two exceptions. The first is bread, and the second is cuisine.
Everybody in the Northwest serves home-baked bread, and everywhere it made me yearn for the factory-made version. The bread is of two types: home-baked health-food-style bread (poorly leavened, crumbly, weak crusted, slightly sweet, speckled with carrots, herbs, olives, or nuts) and home-baked Parker House roll–style bread (traditional American, sweet, white, fluffy, fun on occasion but not three times a day and not with food).
Bad bread wrecks my outlook on life. The pathetic loaves at Seattle’s proudest French restaurant immediately made me paranoid about everything on the menu, everybody who had recommended the place in print or in person, and all the other customers. How could they sit there and smile and eat that bread-shaped impostor on the table?
But relief is on the way. Eight months ago the old Grand Central Bakery in Seattle—after a transfusion of talent and an oven from Italy—began turning out chewy, crusty, yeasty loaves of real bread, and within a few months it was operating at its full capacity of one thousand loaves a day. Others are sure to follow.
I had collected a year of restaurant reviews before coming to Seattle, and I visited plenty of restaurants after I arrived. I won’t tell you where to eat because I tried no restaurant more than once, I missed several leading contenders, and besides, I did not come to evaluate restaurants. I wanted to understand how Northwest chefs transform the incredible bounty of sea and sod into cuisine. I will reveal that my mouth still waters as it relives the smoked, steamed