The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [148]
Does the Pacific Northwest have a distinctive style of cooking? The best culinary minds in the region worry about this question every day, write articles, and meet with each other every few months to disagree about it. But the answer is simple. Either there are a dozen distinctive Northwest cuisines, or there is a single Northwest cuisine, but nobody can tell which one it is.
You can’t name a cooking style that is not represented here. There are classical French and Italian restaurants, though most Seattle chefs seem to have come no nearer to Europe than a year or two in Santa Monica. Some menus speak in the dominant idiom of today’s regional American cooking—New Southwest with a few Cajun phrases mixed in. California cuisine has oozed up the coast, which usually means underflavored, undersalted modern French cooking hidden under edible flowers and Mexican fruits. Eclectic is in. An odd combination known variously as Pacific Rim, Pan-Pacific, or Pan-Asian is spreading fast; it typically combines every known Oriental cooking method and ingredient, minus India and Japan. One restaurant dishes up, simultaneously, the food of Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, Santa Fe, and someone’s fantasy of Native America. The Weekly characterizes this as “post-ethnic mélange,” “post-pre-Columbian,” and “neo-Mayan Span-Tex.” One local food writer recently put her foot down: “I insist on one nationality, indivisible, per plate at a time.”
The profusion of tastes and techniques from every corner of the globe gives Northwest chefs no incentive to explore their own natural niche as intensely as the Philips do at Sooke Harbour House. The desperate pace of culinary borrowing and experimentation often overwhelms the exquisite quality of the region’s produce and seafood. Many of the ethnic culinary models here were developed in places without impeccable raw ingredients and employ methods of cooking and spicing that do nothing to enhance fresh, natural tastes. In reaction, some Northwest chefs follow principles like these guidelines from the Herbfarm (whose acclaimed restaurant was closed during my visit):
• To be true to our local roots, stay away from food that could only be grown or raised in another climate—oranges, tropical fruits, coconut, etc.…
• Here are a few examples of items that should not be used: swordfish, mangoes, tiger prawns, blue crabs, grapefruit, and lobster.…
• These items could be grown in Washington but should be avoided as inappropriate and trendy: blue corn, sweet red pepper sauce (maybe), black beans, chilies, avocado, polenta, and the other overt manifestations of California, Cajun, and Southwest cuisines.
When I first read them, these admonitions sounded austere, xenophobic, almost Stalinist. But I became a convert one evening when I spent ten minutes extracting the carambola and sapote from a perfectly nice piece of fish to a waiting ashtray, and then tried to taste the chunks of fresh crab in my wife’s Thai-Cajun chowder.
As I drove from Canada to Oregon, the restaurants that interested me most were those that follow, more or less, and often inadvertently, the Herbfarm principles. The Raintree in Vancouver is one, though my afternoon snack there was only a glimpse of how Rebecca Dawson uses what her corner of the region offers. Salishan Lodge in Gleneden Beach, Oregon, is on everyone’s list, but my drive down the coast from Seattle was cut short by a savage storm that everybody told me was unprecedented but that, I suspect, occurs on a weekly basis.
I did get as far as the Long Beach Peninsula at the extreme southwest corner of Washington for dinner at Ann and Tony Kischner’s Shoalwater Restaurant at the Shelburne Inn. Chef Walker’s restrictions are not as severe as at Sooke or Raintree or the Herbfarm. But products from twenty miles around rule the menu. Local gardeners bring Ann their