A Seattle cocktail

Have you been to Seattle? I sure haven’t, but my food-loving friend Sam has. (Sam frequently appears on my blog as an eating companion or contributor – he penned a great essay on why Chinese food is so cheap.)

In addition to being an enthusiastic eater and Chowhounder, he’s a great photographer as well. Sam kindly agreed to let me post his stunning Seattle food photos so that you, too, can do some cross-country travel from the comfort of your torn underwear and desk covered in stale Cheetos.

A recent trip to Seattle took Sam and his camera to many restaurants, including Canlis, an ultra-luxe venue nestled into a hillside; Henry’s Taiwan and the Kawali Grill, humble ethnic eateries in inexpensive neighborhoods; Long Provincial, an upscale Vietnamese restaurant open-late downtown; the Lunchbox Laboratory, a completely unique burger joint; and finally Harvest Vine, a very swank tapas place.

A parade of gorgeous photos after the jump.

Canlis

Beautifully cut sardines, cantaloupe, pepper sauce, pepper gelée, fennel, and the tiniest bits of Sichuan peppercorns. Sea salt and dill were used properly, as were several oils.  It was a very intricate dish; exactly the style that I enjoy.  My only complaint is that having come from the tasting menu, they made up a price for this dish, which was $24.  That would have made it the second most expensive appetizer on the menu (second only to foie gras, at $28) and too expensive for the portion.

Canli agnoletti

The highlight of my trip to Seattle was a plate of freshly made agnolotti filled with ricotta and with sweet corn and epazote.  The combination was as unexpected as it was truly delightful.

Canlis souffle

Soufflé is notoriously hard to make right, and a restaurant that charges astronomical prices seemed like a good place to try.

Grand Marnier soufflé may almost be a cliché, but it did not disappoint at Canlis, being almost ethereally airy. The coffee in the background is a special limited edition decaffeinated version of Starbucks’ Casi Cielo and brewed with a Clover machine (one of the few outside of a Starbucks, but from the era after Starbucks bought the Clover).

Despite being rare, the decaf Casi Cielo doesn’t hold a candle to the regular Casi Cielo, which is much richer if a touch more bitter.

Canlis cocktail

This is the Ruby Crusta (pomegranate, rhubarb soda, ginger and lime), one of several non-alcoholic cocktails on the menu at Canlis.  Their cocktail menu features all sorts of interesting ingredients, from housemade green pepper syrup, Cordial Medoc and sous-vide infused gin, to unusual bitters from Trinidad, Milan, and a truly exotic location listed on the menu only as “East Coast”.

It turns out that even without the sugared rim, the Ruby Crusta was impossibly sweet. They replaced this cocktail, free of charge, with a new one — grapefruit juice, tonic water, Angostura bitters and Cracked Maple orange bitters, which definitely hit the requested bitter and sour notes.

You can do a lot in a cocktail without alcohol.

Lunchbox Laboratory

Burgers at Lunchbox Laboratory

Two burgers from the Lunchbox Laboratory. The foreground has beef, swiss, bacon, lunchbox onions, and black truffle mayo and the background has beef, candied balsamic onions, sweet chili mayo, and honey-mustardish sauce.

The Lunchbox Laboratory’s menu is so overwhelming and confusing that it could be something out of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . . . except that the food is excellent and the lines were out the door.  There are nine different types of salt to salt your fries.  Burger meats range far beyond beef to dork (duck + pork), churken (chicken + turkey) and velk (venison + elk).

I stuck to beef (having recently made the epic failure of elk burgers at home) and have rarely consumed a better burger than at the Lunchbox Laboratory.

Sodas! (Sam loves soda)

There are few things I like more than interesting sodas, and these two were definitely interesting.  Bubble Up is similar to Sprite, but with the more full flavors of lemon and lime oils, not just lemon and lime essence.  Nesbitt’s Peach, however, is one of the worst sodas I’ve ever tasted. It’s like bubble gum in a bottle and unbelievably over-sweetened.  180 calories in a 12 ounce bottle should have been a giveaway.

Henry’s Taiwan

How to Make Thousand Year Old Eggs

Talk of a thousand-year-old egg began to scare one of my dining companions, who hailed from Iowa, but he’s an engineer, so I explained how they are made by immersing duck eggs in a solution of sodium chloride, calcium hydroxide, and sodium carbonate.

This highly alkaline solution denatures the proteins in the eggs, similarly to cooking them in boiling water, but imparting a distinctive taste.  This was the best dish (among several good ones) at Henry’s Taiwan, where the eggs were served in an innovative preparation over slivers of dried tofu, a spicy Sichuan sauce, and terrifically fresh chives and cilantro.

Kawali

Kawali stew

Filipino food is not so common on the East Coast (and actually surprisingly hard to find in restaurants even in Seattle, which has a large Filipino population).  This dish is called Pinakbet, and is a complicated stew of sautéed eggplant, green beans, okra, squash, bitter melon, ginger, onions, tomatoes and pork belly in an anchovy-based sauce.

Despite being stewed together for a long time, each ingredient can really be tasted. I was so excited to see calamansi juice on the menu — a delightful, Southeast Asian citrus fruit — but then equally disappointed that it was a watered down from-concentrate version, and nothing like fresh calamansi.

Long Provincial

Long Provincial duck salad

We wandered into Long Provincial, an elegant Vietnamese restaurant, at 11 PM on Independence Day, when it was very difficult to find anything else open.

The menu was quite innovative – this dish is Gỏi vịt (duck salad), and involved shredded cabbage, chopped carrot, pickled red onion and a variety of herbs and nuts along with cold slices of roasted duck and ginger.

Other good dishes included the Gỏi cuốn Cây Me (vegetarian summer rolls), which included a little twist of fried dough in the middle of the roll to add crunch, and very rich Phở (beef noodle soup).  On the other hand, Chả quế cớm xanh (cinnamon pork rice balls), Cút nướng me (quail with tamarind), Cớm chả cá (fish mousse crispy rice) all sounded fascinating but ended up not being worth ordering.

The best thing there may have been the drinks, with a surprisingly wide array of non-alcoholic drinks, including sweet and salty lime soda, apricot and kumquat sodas, and even a non-alcoholic cocktails on the bar menu, including a wonderful combination of lemongrass, green tea, white cranberry juice and soda water.

Harvest Vine

Harvest coddled egg

The presentation of this beautiful coddled egg on top of house-smoked salmon at Harvest Vine was as delicious as the taste.  I expected good salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and this certainly met that bar.  Does it exceed Russ & Daughters in New York City, however?  Not quite.

Harvest gazpacho

We normally think of gazpacho as a tomato based soup, but this white gazpacho is at once similar and different.  The soup is made primarily from almonds, garlic and olive oil, and yet has that smooth mouth feel and refreshing quality associated with gazpacho.  The balance of flavors in this soup was superb.

Harvest VIne cheese plate

A simple cheese plate was really livened up by a few small toppings.  Candied walnuts resting atop the blue cheese in the rear, quince paste in the center, but most interesting (and most tasty) was the candied squash in front.  These weren’t random placements either — each topping really did pair best with the cheese it accompanied.

Related posts:

1. M&T Restaurant in Flushing, NY: a Tsingtao in Qingdao
2. Toro Restaurant in Boston: Ken Oringer’s tapas
3. Harvard Square Cafes: the definitive guide
4. Harvard Square Guide: 4 Tourist Stops You CANNOT Miss
5. My mother’s cooking