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belltown dining
RONALD HOLDEN says goodbye and hello Food Notes from Downtown Seattle 
BILLY BEACH on the line at Kushibar.
Last month's column led off with openings. This edition, an update.
A fond farewell, first of all, to Marjorie, which went out with a grand party last month after a decade at the corner of Second and Battery. The folks from Buckley's Tavern on Lower Queen Anne bought the whole building, so Marjorie's Donna Moodie has to find a new spot. Farewell to pulled pork sliders and mac & cheese at happy hour. Farewell to the bar, which we named Belltown's best last year. Lead barkeep Ben Sherwood moves up the street to Tavolata; he won't even have to reset his GPS. Barman Mike McSorley heads to a Thai restaurant in Bellevue Square. And Donna herself? Telling faithful clients in the lovely patio that she's still looking for the perfect location.
Say farewell to another local institution: Patrick Haight, GM at Tini Bigs. He's moving to Issaquah's the new tribal Snoqualmie Casino. Stepping in (but only as a "consultant") is barman extraordinaire Jamie Boudreau, late of Vessel.
Looks like David Selig's place didn't recover from his August hiatus: The Apartment is now empty. Other late-summer casualties: Bellino, the coffee shop on Second, is officially closed, and Rockin Burrito, Fourth and Wall, is officially "closed for remodeling."
If you're a music fan, using the term in its most generous sense, you might have shed a reptilean tear when Crocodile closed. We'd heard lately that Mike McConnell was going to shoehorn a Via Tribunali pizza oven into the space; turns out that Marcus Charles, originally of Pioneer Square's Martini Heaven and now Belltown's Juju Lounge will be taking over the vacant Croc. With a pizza parlor in the back.
Did we ever say a proper adios to Marazul? No? Well, amigo, you won't be missed. Coming soon to the Pan Pacific Hotel's circular driveway, a western outpost of John Howie's Bellevue-based Seastar. From rhum bar to raw bar, why not?
Leaving but not leaving: Scott Carsberg at Lampreia. He's heading for new quarters in the Gallery, still a-building at Second and Broad; little chance he'll move before the new year. Meantime, the asking price for his space in Belltown Court is down from $750K to $475K.
Not farewell just yet: Cascadia. Yes, chef Kerry Sear has already moved to the new Four Seasons downtown (and taking most of his kitchen and service staff with him). But he's not going to close up entirely, not with the fall season of private parties coming up. He's turned the place over to Columbia Hospitality, a local outfit that manages boutique hotels and conference centers. Asking price for the Cascadia space: $1.25 million, or roughly half a million miniburgers.
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A Belltown wine bar that's been open for a year makes it into the national magazines. Hail to The Local Vine, just named one of America's ten hot new wine bars in the upcoming issue of Bon Appetit. And the top restaurant wine list in Seattle, according to CitySearch.com. Co-owner Sarah Munson celebrated with a couple of visiting winemakers: Tom Hedges (Hedges Family Estate, who owns a condo in Belltown) and Gary McLean (Barons).
"We knew this was coming," says Munson, "we just didn't know when." She and business partner Allison Nelson were classmates at the Harvard business school, crossed paths again in Seattle after successful careers in marketing, and opened TLV a little over a year ago.
The magazine article says it's a wine bar masquerading as a coffee shop (why? because it has wi-fi and comfortable seats? Didn't you notice the 100-bottle Enomatic?). It also praises TLV's culinary consultant, Jason Wilson, who, truth be told, hasn't been on hand for almost a year.
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Brett Paulson, barman at
Txori, responds to recent violent incidents in Belltown by circulating a petition that asks Governor Gregoire to send in the Washington State Patrol "to help eradicate the open air drug trafficking." Txori is two doors from
Wally's, a convenience store that's a magnet for lowlifes, and Paulson's beginning to think it's safer to walk through Belltown's alleys than its sidewalks.
Councilman Tim Burgess is on the case as well, surprised to find mid-morning, open-air drug dealing at First and Battery and asking the mayor for stepped up police patrols.
"But the city says they don't have the manpower," Paulson says, "so everybody's jazzed about the petition." There's a copy on the counter at Txori, with others making their way around the nabe.
The folks who get shoved around (and even seriously injured) in sidewalk altercations have all been tourists unfamiliar with the neighborhood and uncomfortable around street people, addicts, crackheads, pushers and hookers. No doubt, some out-of-towners visit Belltown to score drugs. No doubt, drunken frat boys from Bellevue think it's macho to taunt some dark-skinned dude in
a hoodie. No doubt, it takes restraint to ignore taunts from a gaggle of meth-addled vagrants blocking the sidewalk; but ignore them one must, if one is to live in a vibrant downtown.
The notion of more jurisdictions patrolling the corner of Second and Bell is not reassuring. On the contrary, it assumes that law enforcement alone can make all our urban ills disappear. That's Disneyland.
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On the flat screen in the Acres of Clams bar on Pier 54, the CNBC ticker is showing Boeing's market flame-out, WaMu's inexorable descent. We are doomed. You want to scream at the TV: "It's not about the ("fundamentally sound") economy, stupid! Don't you get it? It's about the fundamentally corrupt financial system!" As if in response, up at the mic, a folksinger known as Captain Charlie strums his guitar and sings a ditty composed decades ago by Ivar Haglund, the troubador of the tidelands:
No longer a slave of ambition, I laugh at the world and its shams ...
As I think of my happy condition ... surrounded by acres of clams.
 Yes, Ivar's is 70 years old and celebrating. The bedrock of Seattle's waterfront is a reminder to us all: Some things never change (the clam chowder, the fish & chips) but many survive by adapting.
The clam chowder, normally $4.50 a cup, was just 70 cents on Black Wednesday. Even better, for the next six weeks, a variety of really quite delectable small plates are just $7 apiece. And to remind you how long Ivar's has been around, there are three-course
dinners for $19.38 through the end of October.
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From a Q & A with Anthony Bourdain in the Kansas City Star.
Are there any food kicks that you get on?
"I'm on a yakitori jag. There's sort of an underground scene of casual Japanese restaurants for entirely Japanese clientele. It's very specific to Japan; you almost never see Westerners. It's very casual, usually with beer, maybe sake, and a lot of it is little bits of chicken parts cooked on skewers over charcoal. Absolutely delicious. And casual, which is really important to me. I think there's a fine dining backlash. I think a lot of the nonsense is being bled out of the restaurant scene, and it's
really a joy to get really, really good ingredients and authentic food without the nonsense and the pretense."
He could be talking about Kushibar in Belltown. Japanese street food along with an assortment of ramen and yakitori. Kushi are Japanese skewers, bamboo or metal. Threaded with a sardine, a prawn, peppers, pork belly or chicken hearts, they're grilled over makeshift charcoal braziers and served up to passersby in Tokyo. In Belltown, you get to sit. In fact, you'll be served on the new open-air deck along Second, a 40-seat expanse at sidewalk level, while executive chef Billy Beach grills your mushrooms or gizzards (over imported coals) inside.
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Travel - Leisure, that know-it-all encyclopedia of picturesque destinations and cushy hotels, is out with an issue called "America's Favorite Cities": top choices for food, good-looking people, and shopping. Shoot, that's why we travel, isn't it? To see good-looking people? Turns out Seattle is "best in the country" for cafes, farmers markets, and ... intelligent people. Runner-up for environmental awareness. Which combines to make us the number one destination in the US for a summer vacation. Seems T-L asked CNN Headline News to do a survey; they supposedly asked 125,000 "opinionated travelers." Before you get too smug, we ranked at the bottom of the heap for weather. Just as well.
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Starbucks is seeking to recapture the breakfast market by offering freshly-zapped oatmeal with a choice of fruit, brown sugar or mixed nuts. Not zapped, really, but stirred with hot water.
All this turmoil in one store, all these decisions before 8 a.m.! Pike Place Roast not sexy enough for you? How about a vanilla latte "with protein"? That must be the proprietary whey powder they get from the mozzarella factory in California.
But Howard knows best. (At least he's not trotting out anything like Dunkin Donuts' truly awful egg-white flatbread.) Then again, if you want cardboard (er, sorry, fiber), there's apple bran muffins, a chewy fruit-and-nut bar, and a multigrain roll with (yet again, a choice) almond butter or strawberry preserves. But nothing that actually smells like breakfast, because, wouldn't you know, the focus groups didn't like the bouquet of bacon.
Well, turns out you can get all three toppings for your oatmeal; all you have to do is ask. It also turns out that, you know, those smelly breakfast sandwiches? They never left. Having ridden back into town on the horse of purity, pledging to banish the bacon, Schultz changed his mind. Egg sandwiches aren't on the blackboard, but you can get one if you ask. Very much featured, however, are Berry Stella, Chewy Fruit & Nut Bar and the Protein Power Plate.
But who's dreaming up all this stuff? Who's cooking it? And where? Howard's new fitness kick is turning Starbucks into a quick-serve, health-food mini-mart before our very eyes, with more choices than a Cheesecake Factory and all the sex appeal of a GNC Nutrition Center. Makes you long for simpler times, for the days when you could wolf down a 300-calorie Egg McMuffin and just be done with it.
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Copacabana, in the Pike Place Market, is touted as Seattle's only Bolivian restaurant. It's named for the town on Lake Titicaca, but that's beside the point. The llama on its menu, beside the point as well. The food here has become deracinated, its South American roots withered. What made the Copa distinctive 20 years ago, the assertive flavors of its sopa de camarones, for example, have gone wan: a pale tomato broth, tasteless bay shrimp fleshed out (as it were) with canned carrots and peas. (Legend has it that Omar Vizquel wanted to buy the recipe before he was traded to Cleveland 15 years ago; he wouldn't bother today.) The saltena (meat pie) lacks punch and vigor. The vaunted paella, at $16, contains precisely two each prawns, mussels and clams along with one chicken drumstick. But, surprise! There's some decent pork buried below the mound of saffron rice.
No, tourists don't flock to the Copa for its food but for the incomparable setting. For decades, it had the only deck with a view at the Market (now there are several), and it's still the most spectacular. Surrounded by colorful potted plants, you're one flight above Pike Place, with the Public Market sign, Elliott Bay and the Olympics in the background.
So do go for cocktails (pisco sours or caipirinhas) and sit on the patio at sunset. There's no better view in Seattle.
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What if-just for one night-you could turn the clock back 30 years? Jay Soloff did it this weekend, once again uncorking mellow, well-aged bottles for the mellow, well-aged diners at Belltown's premier steak house.
Back in 1978, Soloff was the wine steward at El Gaucho, then located at Seventh and Olive, then (as now) one of the city's swankiest joints, with waiters in tuxes, tableside service of Caesar salads, chateaubriand for two, and flaming desserts. A former hippie and would-be history professor, Jay had wandered up to Seattle from Tempe, Ariz. Having worked his way through college washing dishes at a health-food restaurant, he cut his hair and got a job waiting on tables at the original Boondock's on Broadway. (Jerry Kingen, who built the restaurant, also started the Red Robin chain and owns one of Seattle's top-grossing restaurants, Salty's.) Soloff showed a flair for wine, and his academic cred made him a good teacher,
so he bounced his way into
the wine cellar at El Gaucho at
a time when sommeliers were a truly exotic breed. Breezy and glib, Jay was a big hit with the restaurant's clientele of cigar-chomping power brokers.
He moved on to start his own wine brokerage, and, in the early 1990s, became a founding partner of DeLille Cellars, where he heads marketing. Then Paul Mackay, who had been El Gaucho's maitre d' when Soloff worked there and who had since reopened El Gaucho in Belltown, asked him to come back for one night.
So there he was, back in his tuxedo, working the floor. "I thought I might be a little rusty," Jay said, "but approaching the tables turned out to be easy. And there's none of the concerns that people had 30 years ago about price." Yes, now that steak houses cater to high rollers and hoi polloi alike, now that most guests don't even bother wearing jackets at dinner, now that they're dropping $24 on a glass of California cabernet and $125 on a prime rib, they're not flinching at prices in the high three-digits for brunello.
Was he selling any DeLille Cellars? "For sure. That's what they all want, the Grand Ciel." It goes for modest $300.
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There's a bit of a disconnect at the Arctic Club Hotel, which has its ambitious gastronomic restaurant & bar, called JUNO, all caps, one level below the hotel's lobby and lounge, called Polar Bar. If you've come for the absinthe, you can't just wander into JUNO from Third Avenue and slide onto a stool; you've got to be aware that the Green Fairie awaits upstairs, past the hotel's reception desk.
We attended the hotel's grand opening last week and wound
up our visit with the absinthe ritual conducted by barman Viktor Kustov. Slotted spoon placed
over absinthe glass, sugar cube placed on slotted spoon, Lucid absinthe poured over sugar cube and into glass, sugar cube set afire, then extinguished by drips of ice water from absinthe fountain. Impressive ceremony, even if the result is nothing more than a cool, watery, licorice-flavored drink. Certainly doesn't taste like a dangerous poison.
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Ronald Holden has been named Seattle's
Wine & Fine Dining Examiner by the national blog Examiner.com.
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