Eat All About It

If you read this blog you probably already love food, and if you already love food, you probably already look for work by Jonathan Kauffman and Jess Thomson. Just in case you needed another push, though, Seattle Weekly writer Kauffman, already a recipient of a James Beard Award, just won the industry’s other big honor, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Bert Greene Award. He took it for this story on “What I Saw, And Ate, At The Pig Sacrifice.” Kauffman was not able to accept in person, as he’s eating his way around Korea this week. Hogwash writer Thomson was a finalist in the essay category for her gently descriptive, stingingly perceptive piece on nettles in Leite’s Culinaria; she was not there to celebrate the honor because she’s got another rather major life event in progress.

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Seattle’s Best Coffee is celebrating its 39th anniversary on Monday, April 6, by offering customers a free 12-ounce cup of brewed coffee. Unless you’re also 39, in which case you can get free coffee from April 6-28, among other anniversary promotions. And yes, SBC is now owned by Starbucks, and some versions of its history put its age at 40 or 41. I say it can celebrate 39 this way as many years as it wants.

Lovely Le Gourmand, where a 7-course tasting menu runs $80 and a single meticulously sourced entree could reach $50, is entering the world of the recession special. The Ballard landmark’s new “Mon Dieu” menu provides three courses for $45, “all our food, the same really good stuff” as you’ll find on the standard menu, said owner-chef Bruce Naftaly. There are three choices apiece for appetizers, main courses, and desserts; my pick would be the rabbit pate with cognac, port, and thyme, the duxelles-stuffed roast chicken in Jerusalem artichoke sauce, and Sara Naftaly’s famous creme brulee. The special will be offered nightly, along with the standard menu.

“The economy has been terrible for us too, not so much in the bar, but definitely in the restaurant,” Naftaly said. It’s a hard problem to attack: The high-quality ingredients he uses set his cost bar high before he even gets into detail like making his own poppyseed crackers. This is the sort of place, after all, where diners got one of the region’s first glimpses at the Mangalitsa, just because Naftaly couldn’t resist the idea of experimenting with the pricey pork.

If you can still handle a splurge, though, Naftaly’s also got a different special coming up at the other end of the price spectrum April 28. It’s an 8-course dinner featuring the “out of this world” Claudio Corallo Chocolates, which recently opened a rare retail store in Ballard.

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When I first picked up Coffee Love, the new book by Daniel Young, I figured readers would welcome its ’round-the-world anecdotes and succinct nuts and bolts overviews: Storing and roasting beans, selecting a coffeemaker, steaming milk, and so forth. After reading it through, though, I — perhaps slow on the uptake here — realized it’s a resource for making the sort of coffee drinks at home that are usually reserved for coffeehouses or bars or ethnic restaurants. Even for those with home espresso machines (required for some, but not all, of the book’s 50 recipes), it’s rare to find a home kitchen brewing up anything more complicated than a cappucino. If at-home baristas have been waiting for recipes, now they can do anything from a Thai iced coffee to a flambeed Cafe Brulot. 

Young, former restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, kindly answered questions on the book by e-mail from his home in London. Don’t miss his message to Seattle readers and Starbucks haters, at the end:

Q: As we Seattleites like to think the coffee universe revolves around us, I’m glad to see you divide the world (in the book) into pre-Starbucks, Starbucks, and post-Starbucks. But it does beg the question: Where do you see the specialty coffee trade going from here?

A: If the industry follows the geeks, I think the next wave is lowtech.  Up until now, everybody wanted a coffee at home like the one they got in their favorite coffee shop.  Soon they will want a cup at the coffee shop like the one they can have at home. There has been too much coffee technology, too much automation, too much hype about $10,000 brewers. And there’s almost a stigma to the pod machines that do everything except harvest the beans. I see a return to the hands-on, coddling-the-coffee experience that’s possible with a pour-though manual cone filter (Chemex, Melitta), a Japanese vac pot (siphon brewer) or even a Thai coffee “sock” (muslin bag filter).

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I have no one to blame but myself, because Lord knows I had my chance. I’ve passed by Kirirom, the Cambodian restaurant/bakery in Lynnwood, at least a half-dozen times in the last year, thinking it looked like a place I had to try. Now this is in its place: “Pho 36. Grand Opening Soon.”  (This Pho 36?) I love pho, but it doesn’t exactly spur the same intrigue.

Food & Wine Magazine has named its 10 best new chefs of 2009, and Mark Fuller of Spring Hill is on the list. Fuller, formerly head chef at The Dahlia Lounge, particularly impressed the judges with “olive-oil-poached albacore tuna with smoked king clam panzanella, arugula and avocado.” The chef has won raves for Spring Hill, and was also on the recent list of Seattle’s “Rising Stars.”

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Frndly garden in south SEA, huge lot, gd sun, seeks gardener for mutual fruit+veggie fun.

Could that lot be the right match for “green mama dying to grow her own tomatoes again”? Or for “new gardener looking to cultivate food, friendship, & a productive hobby”?

Only on Urban Garden Share,  a new site hooking up homeowners who have unused garden space with gardeners who have no land. 

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