Eat All About It

As you know, there ain’t no such thing as one. But we do have some other attractive freebies coming up:

1. Celebrate the opening of Street Bean Espresso (2702 Third Ave.) with free drip coffee all day on Wednesday, Nov. 18. You might want to kick in some cash anyway, though, as the non-profit Belltown cafe, a partnership with New Horizons Ministry, is aimed at giving street kids job skills and steady work as baristas. Organizers said the cafe got its start through community help, with cash donations, with the owner of the Kroll Map Co. offering a year’s free rent in part of his building, architects and builders donating the remodel, and a carpenter and one of the employees building the tables. All this, and free Wi-Fi.

2. Pike Street Fish Fry (925 E. Pike), under new management, will have “Free Fry Friday” from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 20, giving away free boats of fries and selling $2 pints of Fat Tire and Mothership. They plan to continue the tradition the third Friday of every month. 

3. On Wednesdays, Grand Cru Wine Bar in Bellevue (1020 108th Ave. N.E.) is offering a free two-course dinner (a choice of selected starters and entrees) starting at 5 p.m. every Wednesday. The only catch (and it isn’t much of one); an 18 percent tip will be added to the entire bill, including the amount the free food would have cost.

4. And, through November, the Dahlia Lounge (2001 Fourth Ave.) is celebrating its 20th anniversary with daily giveaways. There are free prizes (e.g., a dozen free donuts one day, or a free duck entree the next), for the first 20 people at the lounge and the bakery each day to say “Happy 20th Anniversary Dahlia.” And, there are “golden tickets” distributed daily for fabulous prizes like a taco feed at your place, cooked by Douglas himself. I know, when it’s someone else’s birthday, are they supposed to be giving us presents? You can give back by contributing to Food Lifeline, one of Douglas’s longtime causes. Bring in a bag of food to donate with a $10 value, and — here go the presents again — they’ll take $10 off your tab. Full list of daily giveaways here.

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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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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I’m down in California for a few days, but checking in often enough to notice that the weekend of May 16-17 is filling up awfully fast. Ruth Reichl is speaking about her latest book, the International Food Bloggers Conference is taking place (with a Reichl event as part of its festivities), and it’s also the fifth annual Seattle Cheese Festival at Pike Place Market.

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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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Ethan Stowell's StarChefs crudo (recipe below)/Photos by David Dickey

Seattle’s “Rising Star” chefs got a chance this week to collectively show off the dishes that won them the honor from StarChefs, the online magazine that’s been called the industry’s Gourmet. Here’s the tough part, though:

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Ethan Stowell’s band of merry competitors, having worked their way through chili, hot wings, and other challenges, are participating in a “Battle of the Lasagna” at Union on April 19. Thirteen professional and amateur cooks will compete that night for the title of “Lasagna Champion of Seattle” (because I don’t know anyone else in town who’s going to challenge them on that), plus a chance to raise money for a good cause.

Where do you come in? For $50, all benefiting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, you get all the lasagna you can eat, plus salad, garlic bread, and beer — and a scorecard to vote for Best in Show.

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