Welcome to misty Seattle,
In the kingdom of Moneybags Gates,
Where they wash their hair with espresso
And stack salmon and crab on their plates.
The metropolis in the upper-left-hand corner of the United States enjoys one of the country's most varied and appealing restaurant cultures, sustained by a small army of prosperous cosmopolitan eaters and an abundance of choice raw materials (on display daily at the celebrated Pike Place Market). Washington wines have come into their own, and "the annual arrival of Copper River salmon," as the Seattle Times remarked not long ago, "is treated like a holiday." Loganberries and blackberries, world-class oysters, apples and pears, hazelnuts and wild mushrooms come readily to the chef's hand.
For many of the same reasons the Seahawks football team and the Mariners baseball team have labored in relative obscurity, chief among them remoteness from the principal centers of population and communication, Seattle may lack the national cachet of, say, Chicago or Boston as a food town. But you can choose with the utmost confidence among restaurants large and small, dressy and casual, costly and cheap, Asian, European and American, as my wife, Betsey, and I have done with pleasure on several extended visits during the past decade or so. Here are a dozen spots that have tooted our particular whistles, beginning with some big deals and proceeding to less grand establishments.
Canlis
In at least one restaurant in every large American city, you sense what the social historian Frederick Lewis Allen called "the tingle of metropolitan success." In Seattle that restaurant is Canlis. Founded in 1950, it has been frequented by local movers and shakers ever since and has been managed by three successive generations of a single family. Chris and Alice Canlis mind the store today, along with their sons Mark, who worked for several years for Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur, and Brian.
Few culinary edges are honed here. The goal is to perfect and reassure, not to invent and dazzle. Prime steaks and lamb chops, troll-caught salmon and dewy Alaskan halibut (currently served with caramelized honshimeji mushrooms) have held their places on the menu for decades, as has the iconic Canlis salad, enlivened by mint and oregano. Change comes slowly. Peter Canlis prawns, named for the founder, have always been cooked with garlic in vermouth, for example, and they still are, but the present chef, Aaron Wright, has added a welcome bit of zing with lime juice and chilies.
The setting for all this good eating is simply magnificent: with cedar beams and stone interior walls, the building is poised above Lake Union, with Japanese pines prettily arrayed outside sloping floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The service, attentive but never pompous, is near flawless. And the wines! More than 20,000 bottles doze in the cellar, awaiting the call of the wine director, Shayn Bjornholm, one of only 124 certified master sommeliers in the world. From his stock of Washington bottlings, Bjornholm chose a Rhone-style white, DeLille Roussanne, for us. Few restaurants in Seattle stock even one bottle of the coveted Leonetti Merlot from Walla Walla; Canlis pours it for $30 a glass. 2576 Aurora Ave. N.; 206-283-3313. Dinner Monday through Saturday.
Union
Ethan stowell's minimalist street-corner operation in downtown Seattle sputters a little more than the well-oiled Canlis, but that is to be expected: it's just a few years old. So if we found the Dungeness crab salad with avocado and basil oil a bit bland (a flaw easily remedied with a squirt of lemon juice), and if we shrank from the glare of the light hanging over our table (quickly fixed with a twist of a rheostat), we were inclined to be patient, especially given the exceptional quality of most of what we ate. "This would easily pass muster at the top level in New York," commented one of our dining companions, Clark Wolf, the prominent Manhattan restaurant consultant.
Stowell's precisely timed rigatoni, sauced with tomatoes and peppery Italian sausage, was elevated to pasta heaven by a generous dusting of chopped marjoram. His pale-green pea soup gained textural interest from crisp sweetbread "chips." So it went, success following success, one thoughtfully creative combination after another: tuna with snow peas and shallots, grilled squab with pear mustard, unctuous pork cheeks in a dark, viscous sauce with featherweight gnocchi. Afterward, huckleberries with a tart lime sorbet proved an ideal foil for the pork. And along the way I discovered another gemlike Washington wine, McCrea Cellars Grenache, made from Columbia River Valley grapes. 1400 1st Ave.; 206-838-8000. Dinner daily.
Lark
John Sundstrom, among the city's most gifted chefs, has pitched camp on Capitol Hill in a restored warehouse named Lark, with circular fans in the rafters, a gauzy curtain dividing the room and bright pictures on the walls. He draws inspiration from everywhere. A typical (and typically delectable) example: a bit of the East in the form of yellowtail sashimi delicately seasoned with Moroccan ingredients, such as preserved lemons, shaved fennel and fragrant picholine olives. Spectacularly sweet roasted scallops floated to the table on a raft of acidulated Savoy cabbage. Tiny Olympia oysters came one to a shell-shaped dish, with a dab of rhubarb granita on each. Seasonal treats at Lark include pea vines, morel mushrooms and wild boar as well as cavatelli with local nettles and sweetbread strudel. I wish I could have delved deeper into the wonderfully varied assortment of cheeses, from which, this time, I could manage only a creamy, tangy Schwarz und Weiss blue, previously unknown to me, made by an Amish co-op near Cresco, in eastern Iowa. 926 12th Ave.; 206-323-5275. Dinner Tuesday through Sunday.
Dhalia Lounge
Sundstrom is a protégé of tom Douglas, the gregarious, energetic culinary kingpin of Seattle, who owns five restaurants, including the much-loved Dahlia Lounge. Big, burly and bushy- haired, Douglas can lay claim to helping develop Pacific Rim cuisine since he came west from Delaware in 1977. The Dahlia Lounge melds Asian ideas with unique local ingredients, like the giant geoduck clam and the skinnier razor clam, which he pairs with ground pork in a kind of fritter. Recently, chanterelle mushrooms were featured on the menu, as was beautifully roasted saddle of Oregon lamb.
In this romantic kingdom, whose walls are painted valentine red, dreams come true, although the wine list fell short of mine. If you are a good boy or girl, the boss himself may fetch an assortment of dips (garlicky skordalia, kalamata and fig) and kebabs (pork with harissa, chicken with yogurt and dill) from his latest place, the Greek-oriented Lola, across the street. And if you are very good, the waiter will bring you a bag of house-made doughnuts with mascarpone on the side or (sigh!) a slice of Douglas's trademark triple coconut cream pie. 2001 4th Ave.; 206-682-4142. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner daily.
Wild Ginger
Rick Yoder, as geeky as Bill Gates himself but as obsessed with the freshness and quality of his ingredients as Alice Waters, brought Southeast Asia to Seattle. This former oyster shucker at McCormick's Fish House & Bar, who was smitten by the Orient during lengthy sojourns there with his wife, Ann, opened Wild Ginger in 1989. Its pan-Asian menu caught on at once, and they moved the restaurant into grander quarters eleven years later.
Today they fill their 375 seats so many times each week that they go through 4,000 fresh coconuts a month. From the polylingual kitchen come dishes like the Vietnamese classic beef la lot and shrimp salad with pomelo, a progenitor of our grapefruit, and sambal prawns with turmeric, garlic and chili. Most are authentic; some are frankly hybrids; almost all are arrestingly good. I was particularly taken with a plate of lingcod presented atop a green mango salad. The fruit, Yoder told us and our dinner guest, author Gabrielle Glaser, "turbocharges the flavor." I see his point. 1401 3rd Ave.; 206-623-4450. Lunch Monday through Saturday, dinner daily.
Shiro
On the last night of our most recent visit to Seattle, Betsey and I slid onto stools at the counter of Shiro next to the fish and shellfish expert Jon Rowley and his wife, Kate, and put ourselves in the deft hands of Shiro Kashiba. A native of Kyoto, Kashiba trained in Tokyo and came to Seattle forty years ago. We ate sushi, of course--my favorites were the deliriously fatty bluefin tuna belly from Spain and the subtler white albacore tuna from Canada--but also a salad of local smelt, a savory custard and sliced sea cucumber from Puget Sound on a bed of mozuku kelp.
It seemed to me that Kashiba's shioyaki, or salt-broiled chinook salmon, from the Columbia River summed up what makes him and his restaurant memorable. Naturally the fish was of prime quality, and naturally it was expertly cooked, with a thin strip of crisp silvery skin on top. But it was an evanescent delight, available for just a few fleeting weeks in spring, when the salmon, migrating from the sea back to their spawning grounds, are at their oiliest and tastiest. The rarity of the experience only enriched it. 2401 2nd Ave.; 206-443-9844. Dinner daily.
