This seems to be a back-to-the-future moment of confluence, when the forces of history, music and government converge into a meatloaf sandwich time machine. It is a triumph of the old gang, the long-haired grungers over the well-coiffed anchors and well-pressed suits. Concert promoter Dave Meinert (Capitol Hill Block Party, One Reel, Blue Scholars, The Presidents) and his girlfriend Mandy Park (longtime waitress at the 5 Point Café and its cousin, Mecca) have taken over Belltown’s longest-running dive bar.

The announcement came from music-PR gal Kerri Harrop, who’s also tied in with Neumos (and the whole Mike McConnell music-pizza-coffee organization; Caffe Vita will now supply 5 Point customers with bottomless cups of java). Meinert, whose bands perform regularly at Neumos and who also ran the old Mirabeau Room on Lower Queen Anne, was an early and enthusiastic supporter of both Dow Constantine and Mike McGinn.

All this ties to a new-found fondness for authentic dive bars and their raison d’être, the stiff drink. And what’s more authentic than a joint that announces in neon that they cheat drunks and tourists? Don’t even think about Disneyfication! “We’re re-upholstering some worn out booths,” Park admits. “The whole joint has received a good scrubbing, but, other than that, the song remains the same.” Same as it was almost 80 years ago, when Preston Smith opened the place, under the gaze of the Chief Sealth statue, in 1929, and sold it to his son, Dick, in 1975.
“Dick Smith was one of those characters you just don’t find anymore, along the lines of restaurateur Ivar Haglund or politician Charlie Chong,” Park recalls. “He was outspoken, political, and had a wicked sense of humor.”

Says Meinert: “Dick knew how to capture attention, and was a real rabble-rouser. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have met Mandy, so I owe him a lot.” Park began working for Smith in late 1996, as a server at the 5 Point. It was there that she met Meinert, while on shift. The couple recently celebrated 11 years together; their first child is due in December.

Smith’s tongue-in-cheek marketing slogans are part of the 5 Point’s dive bar appeal. Bartenders are outfitted in t-shirts bearing the tagline “Alcoholics Serving Alcoholics Since 1929.”

“The last thing we want to do is screw up the menu, or ruin the classic appeal of the 5 Point,” Park says. The chicken fried steak will still weigh in at 11 ounces (“the biggest in Seattle”), the meatloaf sandwich is 9 bucks, and breakfast is available 24 hours a day.

On the other hand, there are now a handful of vegetarian offerings, along with an old-time favorite, liver and onions, which is now listed near the “Green Cat” curry tofu scramble. A senior citizens’ discount will launch with the new menu, and cocktails will remain generous in their portion. “We call them family-sized,” Park laughed.

The 5 Point will officially celebrate its 80th anniversary in December, with a party that’s slated to include 10-cent beers and 30-cent blue plate specials. And that meatloaf sandwich (on white, with mashed potatoes & gravy and pickle slices) was just fine.
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Casting pebbles: A baker’s dozen Seattle eateries—including Belltown’s Tilikum Place Cafe—featured Bristol Bay sockeye last month to call attention to the dangers the fish will face from a proposed open pit mine. Save Bristol Bay’s salmon by eating salmon, they say! But a woman in Alaska thinks you should boycott those restaurants.

First, the fish side of the story. Bristol Bay, some 200 miles southwest of Anchorage and surrounded by thousands of square miles of Alaskan tundra, is “home” to a third of the world’s salmon; that is, they pass through the bay en route to their spawning grounds. It’s a majestic landscape, inhabited only by a handful of native villages. Except for the salmon fishery, out on the treacherous waters, there’s no industry.

Enter the developers in the form of Northern Dynasty, parent company of a mining project called the Pebble Partnership. A wealth of minerals lies beneath the tundra, and Pebble wants it. Gold, copper, molybdenum silver, rhenium, palladium. The land was opened to mining in the waning days of the Bush administration, and the project had the enthusiastic support of Alaska’s former governess, Sarah Palin.

Trouble is, getting at the riches would require a vast open-pit mine, the world’s biggest, on the headwaters of Bristol Bay. The pit would measure 15 miles across; the dam to hold back the mine’s toxic tailings would be 700 feet high and 4.5 miles across, the world’s most massive, bigger than the Three Rivers dam in China, and built on a seismic fault.
Kevin Davis, the chef at Steelhead Diner and an avid fly fisherman, was alarmed. He’s gone to Washington DC to lobby against Pebble Partnership’s plans. Seth Caswell, owner of soon-to-open Emmer & Rye and president of the Seattle Chefs Cooperative, is worried about the threats the mine would post to Alaska’s native culture.

On the other hand, John Shively, CEO of the Pebble Partnership, says the chefs don’t understand the project or appreciate what it could do for the people of the region. Going a step further, Gail Phillips up in Anchorage is outraged by the behavior of the 13 Seattle chefs who are sticking their noses into Alaska’s business. Boycott them, she says!
Seriously, Ms. Phillips, are you nuts? Every single visitor and every single local knows Seattle is famous for salmon. Like it or leave it, salmon is at the heart of Seattle’s restaurant economy. Thanks to “activist chefs” like Caswell and Davis, we now get some of that wonderful Alaska fish down here in the Lower 48, and we serve it to visitors from around the world.

Ms. Phillips, it turned out, took offense at our blog post questioning her sanity. The dustup hit the national wires when she, in turn, called me “a foolish food blogger in Seattle” who was prematurely drawing the perimeter of a project that hadn’t yet been approved. But she’s a shill for the mining industry, a former Republican state legislator and speaker of the Alaskan House of Representatives. Pebble has spent $130 million so far on the project, with another $70 million budgeted for the permit process itself, slated to begin in 2010. So the threat is more real than she admits.

For his part, Caswell writes: “We are asking the restaurant diners of Seattle to cast their vote now, to vote with their forks. Please ask your friends and family to refrain from boycotting our restaurants. Who else is going to buy all of that great Alaskan fish?”
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Born Toulouse: There’s so much going on at Toulouse Petit, a New Orleans-themed brasserie that opened last month at Queen Anne and Mercer, you don’t know quite where to start.

A year in the building, you can see the effort on the walls, the floors, the table tops, in the platoons of staff and the extensive menus (food, wine, cocktails, happy hour, with breakfast and lunch still to come).

There’s something for every wallet here, starting with a fat cat’s $42 steak (fillet with foie gras, veal-cognac-shallot reduction, white truffle oil). For the frugal, the happy hour menu offers boudin blanc ($4), spicy fried alligator ($5), lamb’s tongue en remoulade ($6); for the spendthrift, a blackened USDA prime rib eye ($18).

The dreamer behind this flight of fancy is next-door neighbor Brian Hutmacher of Peso’s Kitchen. From the outside, Toulouse looks like a green stucco box full of Christmas ornaments. Inside, it’s warmly lit and inviting, with filigreed ironwork and inlaid wood, considerably less clunky than the Purple (and Barrio) models of overwrought restaurant decor.

Are you counting? The floor is made up of 18,000 Italian mosaic tiles. Are your eyes open? The bar is inlaid hardwood, the lamps are blown-glass, the walls hand-plastered. Artisan sculptor Eddie Gulberg created original metalwork for the windows, doors, tabletops, and fixtures. Chef Eric Donnelly, last seen at Oceanaire, built the kitchen and laid the tiles himself. Six other craftsmen are credited on the menu.

Oddly, despite having tasted over 1,500 wines to assemble a list of perhaps 200 bottles, GM Shing Chin (formerly of Wild Ginger and West Seattle’s Ovio Bistro) comes up with not one wine within 100 miles of Toulouse (nothing from Fronton, Madiran, Cahors or Gascogne). Okay, so you’re all about Nawlins (NOLA’s Abita Amber’s a good start on the beer side), not France, but how hard would it be to give your wine list a regional focus as well, the way Le Pichet does? .

The menu is the most ambitious Seattle has seen for some time, with salads, soups, fresh oysters and shellfish platters, foie gras, tartare, housemade charcuterie, artisan cheeses, ten seafood standards and five more seafood specials, half a dozen poultry items, ten steaks, six accompaniments (béarnaise, bleu cheese, horseradish-veal demi-glace). The bar offers seven absinthes, six pastis drinks, five sherries, and a dozen house cocktails. For the bitter or the lovelorn, there’s a cocktail called Bitter Love (Plymouth gin, Campari, strawberry syrup, orange bitters, prosecco, $9); alas, it’s too sweet.

If this is supposed to be Toulouse Petit, we can only imagine what Toulouse Grand might be. A stupendous Vieux Carré breakfast, perhaps? Or just beignets? “Previously accepted limitations no longer apply,” says the menu. Stay tuned.
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Law & Olives: In the culinary justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the cooks and bartenders who create dishes and drinks, and the food bloggers who critique the offenders. These are their stories.

Two Belltown veterans are on Capitol Hill, plying their trade. Field notes:

Tavern Law makes you think of a Wild West saloon, with swinging doors and blazing six-guns. Wrong. It’s a bashful speakeasy. You enter through a discreet door on 12th, that reveals a spacious, high-ceilinged café.

As you look around, you see a well-stocked bar and a short menu. You’re reminded of Jerry Orbach rifling through some suspect’s closet. “Where does he keep his stroke material?” There it is: a huge black safe, and, next to it, an old-fashioned telephone. You pick up the handset; a voice answers: “How many in your party?” Then there’s a click and the door to the safe swings open.

Up you go, on a twisting wooden staircase, and you’re on a narrow upper level well-appointed with couches and small tables. This is exclusively cocktail country, where the barman asks what you’ve been drinking up to that point (a Negroni, a Toronto) and fashions a drink that continues the sequence (a Perfect, in this case: the sweet vermouth and bitters providing the link). Also had a dish of three arancini downstairs, those wonderful, cheese-filled rice balls. In Sicily, they’re bigger (tennis-ball size), filled with prosciutto, hand-held and eaten for breakfast. But they make terrific bar food as well. Tavern Law’s mother ship, Spur, down in Belltown, seems to be trying a bit too hard to be hip. Here the cutesy conceit of a private upstairs cocktail lounge might eventually wear thin, but for now it’s fine.

Anchovies & Olives, in a similarly anonymous venue at the corner of 15th and Pine, is the latest Ethan Stowell outpost, with a trusty stalwart, Charles Walpole, at the stove. New here: Power Hour, from ten to midnight. Oysters for a buck, Peroni for two, fish & chips for eight. Couple of Virginicas to start, then the F&C, a welcome change from frozen sticks with fries. Instead, a real filet of cod, and homemade waffle chips. The fish is hot and tasty, the chips crisp, but staff outnumbers customers three to one, a shame. Why isn’t this place as busy as Wolf, Stowell’s outpost in TOQA (Top of Queen Anne)?

Speaking of empty: nary a diner many nights at Ventana. How long can that last?

Across the street at La Taberna del Alabardero, they’re adding cochinillo—roast suckling pig—to the Sunday brunch and dinner menus. Managing partner Paco Pena tells us he’s found a good source of piglets in Marblemount in the North Cascades. The price for a serving of cochinillo with roast potatoes, preceded by a salad and followed by dessert, will be $25.
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Correction: last month we said that the new occupant of the Minnies/Whym space was called Coco. Wrong. It’s Blush. We are duly mortified.

Ronald’s blog: cornichon.org