And now to my abbreviated list of cozier and perhaps less august establishments:
Cafe Besalu Seattle is the nation's premier coffee town. You'll find eighty-five outlets fielded by Starbucks, the home team, within the greater Seattle area and plenty of smaller competitors. My café of choice, Besalu--named for a Catalonian village--in the northwestern Ballard neighborhood, brews excellent coffee from the Lighthouse, a local roaster, but its greatest attraction is the pastries that are baked behind the counter by the forty-three-year-old proprietor, James Miller. Flaky, never oversweet, these include pains au chocolat, cheese brioches, the best croissants in town served with mascarpone and homemade jam, and succulent, photogenic apple Danish worthy of Copenhagen. 5909 24th Ave. N.W.; 206-789-1463. Lunch Wednesday through Sunday.
Ray's Cafe Sun shining? Sky blue? Drop everything, hustle straight out to Ray's Café, on Shilshole Bay, and eat lunch on the deck, facing the snow-topped Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound, with sailboats, cormorants and the odd bald eagle in the foreground. Try Dungeness crab, either in the shell or in crab cakes; manila clams, steamed or heaped on linguine; or flaw-less fish. Momentarily weary of salmon and halibut one afternoon, I sunned myself like an old turtle while eating luscious grilled sablefish (black cod) with bok choy, jasmine rice and a sauce cunningly confected from scallion oil and honey. Ray's has scores of seafood-friendly white wines from near and far, all to die for. 6049 Seaview Ave. N.W.; 206-789-3770. Lunch and dinner daily.
Salumi Artisan Cured Meats Armandino Batali, a retired Boeing engineer, makes some of this country's most ravishing Italian-style cured meats: fennel-flavored salami, cotecchino (fresh pork sausage), boar sausage, prosciutto and now culatello, the improbably velvety pork specialty of the Po Valley, near Parma. You can sample them on an antipasti plate or buy them by the pound at Salumi Artisan Cured Meats, his tiny shop and deli in the raffish Pioneer Square district. The rest of the time you'll just have to fly across the continent and order them at Babbo, the Manhattan hot spot of his exuberant son Mario. 309 3rd Ave. S.; 206-621-8772. Lunch Tuesday through Friday.
Harvest Vine Another Lilliputian eatery, the 612-square-foot Harvest Vine, in Madison Valley, features the pintxos, or tapas, of the Basque region of northern Spain. Working at a pair of ranges and a grill jammed into a minuscule space behind a copper-topped counter, the reverberantly named chef, Joseba Jiménez de Jiménez, a native of the Canary Islands' San Sebastián, regales forty-eight customers at a time with the likes of house-cured anchovies, piquillo peppers stuffed with brandade, vibrant morcilla (blood sausage), grilled Belgian endive showered with flakes of blue cheese and batons of raw green apple, and of course the nonpareil Serrano ham of his homeland. 2701 E. Madison; 206-320-9771. Dinner daily.
Szmania's Good Germanic food (no, that's not an oxymoron) is in short supply in the United States these days, a distressing reality for a strapping German-American boy like me. But at the cozy Szmania's, in the residential waterside Magnolia neighborhood, Ludger Szmania, late of Düsseldorf, dishes up fork-tender sauerbraten, perfectly balanced sweet and tart red cabbage and cheese spaetzle that would have made my grandmother grin. Not to mention first-class Jägerschnitzel (with mushroom sauce), Alsatian tarts (with cheese and bacon) and his own coarse-textured bratwurst (with strong, grainy mustard). 3321 W. McGraw St.; 206-284-7305. Lunch Tuesday through Friday, dinner Tuesday through Sunday.
Le Pichet Finally, triumphantly, we come to Le Pichet, Jim Drohman and Joanne Herron's echt bistro in the Pike Place Market. It is French in its every facet and fiber--not just in the language on the menu but in the food on the plates, the wines on the carte, the tiles on the floor, the zinc onthe bar and the moleskin on the banquettes. Surrender yourself to oysters with spicy sausages, Bordeaux style, or to a wedge of fluffy two-inch-high quiche that transforms the banal into the breathtaking, or to eggs broiled with ham and Gruyère, one of the city's two best egg dishes (the other is the winey Burgundian œufs en meurette at the Café Campagne). End, perhaps, with the wicked chocolat chaud. Drink the seldom-seen Jurançon sec or Sancerre rouge and murmur a prayer of thanksgiving. 1933 1st Ave.; 206-256-1499. Lunch and dinner daily.
Where to Stay
Opened in 1924, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel has grand Italian Renaissance-style architecture and 450 rooms and suites. Double rooms from $350. 411 University St.; 206-621-1700. The more intimate Inn at the Market, a seventy-room boutique hotel in the city's Pike Place Market, offers views of Elliott Bay. Double rooms from $210. 86 Pine St.; 800-446-4484. Just a few blocks away is the new Hotel 1000. Its 120 rooms have contemporary but warm furnishings and impressive high-tech features. Ask for a room with a water view. Double rooms from $275. 1000 1st Avenue. 206-932-3102.
