Eat All About It

Rob Sudar, a.k.a. “Fishmonger,” who kindly answered readers questions on all areas of buying and cooking fish, has alerted me that fish are arriving in the Seattle markets now for the last Columbia River spring Chinook likely to be available until mid-May. The fish are carried by PCC, Metropolitan Market, and Wild Salmon Seafood Market, among others. I just called Wild Salmon, and was told their supply just arrived, with whole fish going for $17.99/lb. (If you walk in right now they won’t be out in the case yet, but you can ask for them.) PCC’s got fillets at $19.99/lb.

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Follow this one carefully: Forty-eight restaurants are participating in a new dining promotion in May, called “Urban Eats.” It’s the replacement for the deal previously known as “New Urban Eats” (which focused on newer restaurants) and the one known as “Seasoned Seattle” (which focused on older mainstays.) And, no, the merger is not reserved for adolescent restaurants. It’s a 3-course, $30 dinner open to any place in King County offering “a significant value” by participating, which means, for instance, that Garage will have bowling or pool as “dessert,” and Snoose Junction Pizzeria in Greenwood is including a glass of wine.

I’m not sure why these promotions keep morphing, but I do prefer the confusion to the days when people just talked about how boring it was to see the same old places in 25 for $25. (That deal, if you’re wondering, was reborn as Dine Around Seattle, and will be back in November.)

Here are the restaurants participating in the May Urban Eats. The site isn’t updated yet, but looks like you should be able to find menus after April 24 here:
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After years of reading food blogs and forums, some names become as familiar and reliable as acquaintances and colleagues. I didn’t know “elswinger,” any more than I know the movie stars I read about in celebrity magazines, but I shared enough of his interest in Seattle restaurants to make a point of reading what he had to say on sites like eGullet. I never knew he had a blog of his own, or hardships that made him give the blog this subtitle: “LIFE IN SEATTLE FOR A 40-SOMETHING WHO IS LEARNING TO LIVE ON HIS OWN IN A WHEELCHAIR AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF IN A NURSING HOME.” And I certainly didn’t realize how much he struggled, or how ill he was. The Stranger’s blog, where he was a frequent commenter, reported over the weekend that he died on April 8.
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We already knew that the Seattle empire builder favors Pho Bac and Tai Tung and Sea Garden when he’s not eating in his own restaurants, and I was struck by a couple of items on his “10 thoughts” list printed in Restaurant Hospitality:

#4. If there was no duck, I’d have no reason to live.

#9. My idea of a perfect day is work, dim sum at 11 a.m., golf at noon, work 4-8, dinner with Jackie on the sunny side of the house and some wine.
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A handful of restaurants are offering tax day breaks to lessen the pain. Boom Noodle and Blue C Sushi are offering 15% off the bill at all locations (alcohol excluded), along with $2.50 Sapporo draft beers. Cinnabon will give away free “bites” from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m, P.F. Chang’s offers a 15% discount, and Taco Del Mar will e-mail you a coupon for a free taco if you sign up here. USA Today has a nice list of restaurant deals here, and I liked Ravenna Nation’s local version, which not only reminds us that McCormick & Schmick & Kidd Valley are also offering discounts today, but refers to the P.F. Chang deal by asking “Do you love salty glop that barely resembles Asian food?”
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I just got back from California, finishing up my own travel and leisure just in time to find Travel & Leisure’s new article on the “50 Best New U.S. Restaurants.”
When I see a lead-in like this, I know Seattle’s going to do well in the rankings:

“You know the American restaurant paradigm is shifting when communal benches become more desirable than leather banquettes. When humble kimchi is suddenly chic, and the words local and seasonal are recited as routinely as fried or sautéed.”

Indeed, we’ve got seven of the top 50, and the editorial commentary that “You don’t need a crystal ball to divine that American restaurants of the future will probably resemble Seattle’s new crop: quirky spots defined by chefs’ personalities and the region’s agricultural bounty.” The winners are:

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Image courtesy www.cakespy.com

I’ve craved a piece of original Cakespy art since the first time I saw Jessie Oleson’s dessert-centric work. It took until last month, though, when I saw this “goodbye Seattle P-I” piece, that I knew I’d made my pick. The framed original has a prime spot on the shelf by my home computer right now. But, in a piece of brighter news, what’s coming to my screen these days is the “Seattle Post Globe,” a new Seattle news site by former Seattle P-I reporters, photographers, editors, and (thank you, whatever deity oversees newspapers) copy editors.  Along with names from the  pre-shutdown P-I staff of 2009, I’m also thrilled to see the return of old colleagues like Jane Hadley and Neil Modie, who spent decades afflicting the comfortable, spurning easy PR answers in favor of digging out the hard truth, and generally working on behalf of the little guys — which I take to include all of us. 

Read all about ‘em here. (And remember, if you’re looking for a P-I journalist whose name you don’t see there, we have a listing here of how to find them.)

I’ll always miss the old P-I, but when I see an invitation like this — “Let us be your advocates” — it makes me want to commission a new piece of happier Cuppie art.

Sabrina Tinsley of La Spiga, who recently did battle on TV’s Iron Chef, is taking on a more interesting challenge than Bobby Flay: Teaching kids to cook. She’s offering courses on how to make pasta (including a pasta dinner) from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on April 28, and again on May 26. Cost: $45. The class is for kids ages 6 to 14, and limited to 8 students per class. The only hook, to my mind, is that parents aren’t invited, so you have to bank on your children taking in enough information to make you dinner another night. (If you already know how to make pasta yourself, hopefully you’ve already invested the time to teach your kid for free.)

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The old Crocodile Cafe had some surprisingly decent omelets and burgers, but the reincarnated Croc has its teeth in something else entirely. It’ll boast the latest branch of Via Tribunali, which the Friend from Trieste once called the most authentic Italian pizza she’s found in the U.S. Look for the fifth VT to open on Thursday (April 16) at 2200 2nd Ave.

Israeli salad

A friend of mine in Israel used to argue that the country had no original ethnic cuisine beyond the infamous soy schwarma served in the college dorms, that most of the dishes we enjoyed, from Sabbath cholent to stuffed felafels, were carried over from European ancestors or borrowed from Arab residents and neighbors. It’s true that dishes that struck me as most intensely authentic during my time there were authentic versions of someone else’s food — the baklava from the Druse villages near Haifa, or the Yemenite stews at the restaurant near my bus stop in Jerusalem. The overflowing harvests of cucumbers and tomatoes that ruled so many meals came home with me only in European forms — cold gazpacho, say, or Greek salad.

It’s been years since that conversation, and it wasn’t until last week that I remembered the “Israeli salad”: Stripped-down simple, distinctive in its small dice, and ubiquitous even to the point of appearing on breakfast tables. A young cousin set out a bowl as part of lunch when we visited California last week, and it seemed distant but familiar, basic but so good we devoured every bite. It was so appealing, I think, partly because she used fresh lemon juice in it, from the ripe fruits hanging all over the backyard tree. They were so abundant, so matter-of-fact to everyone who lives in a citrus-growing climate, but so magical to those of us from colder zones. I haven’t smelled a fresh-picked lemon in so long, that alone made it feel like we were returning to a foreign land.

Israeli Salad

Serves 8

Several cucumbers (there were 10 small Persian cucumbers in the bowl pictured)
2-3 tomatoes
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper to taste

Dice cucumbers, seed and dice tomatoes, and combine. Drizzle with olive oil, add lemon juice, and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste.

(Too simple for you? If you want to up the salad ante, try Smitten Kitten’s version with onion, sumac powder, and some other additions.)