Eat All About It

Successfully combining movie theaters with restaurants isn’t as intuitive as it sounds. Restaurants are social; theaters are the place for companionable silence. At the cinema, we expect quality on the screen but devour overpriced junk; at restaurants we want satisfaction for mouth and eyes alike. I’m encouraged, though, by a pre-opening talk with the folks behind Cinebarre, an 8-screen theater opening May 29 in the space that used to be the Regal 9 in Mountlake Terrace. (It’s 8 screens now because one theater was gutted and converted to a full kitchen.)

“We feel like we stand out,” said Jeff Martens, vice president of operations for the chain, which operates Cinebarre branches in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Colorado. On the theater side, he means that they show major first-run movies. On the food side, Cinebarre serves “casual dining sort of stuff,” he said, but the pizza dough is made daily from scratch, the hamburger meat is ground in-house. It’s not that nothing comes in frozen, he said, but “We make our own chicken fingers. We cut our own French fries.”
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We took the ferry to Vashon Island to visit friends, but as long as we were there, we didn’t want to miss the Vashon farmers market and a stop at La Boucherie, the restaurant run by Sea Breeze Farm. I’m accustomed to buying raw materials such as meat and milk from Sea Breeze at Seattle venues; I liked the idea of sampling how they would cook and serve their own products, in their own island environment.

This early in the season, we were glad just to wander without fleece or raincoats; we knew we’d be lucky to find even salad greens to contribute to our friends’ kitchen. By the time we arrived around 1 p.m., though, even the greens were gone — but, unlike the Seattle markets, where eggs sell out post-haste, we still could have scored a basket of pastel beauties practically custom-laid for Easter.

Eggs at the Vashon Island Farmers Market

Hogsback Farm table: "Sorry! We sold out!"

Some markets stick purely to harvest goods, but I’ve always liked a mix of vendors. I was glad to see, especially in this spare season, some crafts, a Vashon winery, a chocolatier, and homemade caramels, among other tables. 

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A sukiyaki feast in full swing. (David Dickey photos)

Several weeks ago, we got a note from our friend Eric. It began:

“Real sukiyaki is something to behold. Like shabu-shabu, the raw ingredients (thin sliced beef, napa cabbage, shiitake, tofu, shirataki noodles) are brought to the table and the cooking happens on a hot plate right in front of you. The large shallow pot has a simmering sweet-salty sauce. After cooking in the sauce, you dip each bite in your own bowl of beaten raw egg. This is key, as it cools the food down and adds delicious richness.

I bring this up because I’ve been talking to Taichi Kitamura of Chiso and Kappo about doing a traditional sukiyaki dinner.” (more…)