Kaleberg Archive for Keyword: restaurants, Page: 4

02/10/06 - Le Gourmande - Adventure in Ballard

Maybe that's a bit dramatic for a headline, but Ballard has always been somewhere in the wilds of Seattle, as yet unexplored. We now know a bit more about Ballard, and a lot more about an excellent, elegant restaurant where France meets the Pacific Northwest.

Keywords: restaurants, seattle

01/07/06 - Reviews of Lampreia and Joy's Wine Bistro

Here are two new Kaleberg reviews. Lampreia is an elegant restaurant in Seattle's Belltown, and quite a dining experience. Joy's Wine Bistro is a less formal newcomer in Port Angeles, and shows a lot of promise these early days.

Lampreia is an elegant restaurant in Belltown. It is a foodies paradise. We dined on truffles, white and black, foie gras and langouste. We also checked out the wonders of cooking sous vide, a recently popular slow cooking method for concentrating flavors and optimizing textures. Our Review

Joy's Wine Bistro is an informal newcomer on glamorous Front Street. It is a beautiful place with an excellent wine list, and a number of great dishes. Not everything was perfect, but the spirit is right. We'll be back to try more of the menu, and to see how they develop. Our Review

Keywords: seattle, restaurants, port angeles, wine, kale

11/14/05 - Fresh Alaskan King Crab Legs

This is one of those dishes that one reads about, but that one never sees served in restaurants. Most Alaska king crab is frozen when it is caught, or as soon as the ship arrives in port. The only people who get fresh king crab legs are people who catch them for themselves.

One of the advantages of living in Washington State is that Alaska is sort of the next state to the north, if you don't count British Columbia and the like. This means that the folks at Bella Italia were able to snarf a some fresh Alaskan king crab legs from their friends to the north. We were trying to figure out what to do for dinner when we got the call. Dave Senters was cooking, the crab was in, and we were ready.

The dish pictured above is a plate of fresh Alaskan king crab meat with fried bread crumbs, fried garlic, baby potatoes, and fresh scallions in brown butter sauce with balsamic vinegar on angel hair pasta. We were quite impressed. The crab meat was richer in flavor than our own local Dungeness crab meat, and had a meaty, almost chunky texture. It was as sweet as local crab, but the chunks were larger. If you've ever had Alaskan kind crab legs at an upmarket brunch, you probably remember them as a bit bland and watery, perhaps even a bit stringy. There was none of this here. This crab had legs, and it stood up to a powerfully flavored pasta dish quite nicely.

We aren't sure if your local restaurant provides this kind of service, but if you do get a call saying that the fresh Alaskan king crab legs are in, don't wait. Even at 3AM it is worth scrambling down for a taste of this king of the crabmeats.

Keywords: fish, food, dungeness, restaurants, washington state, alaska

09/20/05 - Extreme New York

New York City may be a summer festival, but we Kalebergs tend to melt in the sun. The summer is not our season, but thanks to our high tech Cool Vests, and despite the collapse of the St. Regis Hotel, we managed a great trip and found a great new restaurant, Esca, walked everywhere, and enjoyed two great museum exhibits. We also tried some barhi dates (see below). To find out more, read The Kaleberg Report.

Keywords: new york city, special report, restaurants, kale

09/14/05 - Lake Crescent Lodge and Sabai Thai

Well, it's about time. We're back from New York City, so it's time to post a couple of reviews from August. Go figure. We finally checked out Lake Crescent Lodge, and we were impressed.

We also checked out Sabai Thai. We had tasted some of Victor's cooking before, at a friend's house, but his restaurant is really impressive. Who ever thought of Thai cooking with great Northwestern ingredients? It really works.

Keywords: restaurants, lake crescent, new york city

06/18/05 - Carlsborg Tacos

We were driving around in Carlsborg and noticed a food truck parked by the side of the road. Its signage mentioned tacos, tortas and other Mexican goodies. Does anyone know anything about Fita's Catering?

Keywords: restaurants, food

04/12/05 - Yum Yum - The Original Online Restaurant Guide

While rummanging in the archives we came across what is probably the first internet based collaboratively edited dining guide, the venerable Yum Yum which was produced by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory back in the mid-1970s. The food scene was quite different back in those days, and no, it was not better. Go back in time and see what was for dinner in the early days of the world wide web.

Keywords: food, restaurants

04/11/05 - Tendy's Garden

We've only been home a few hours and haven't even written up our New York City notes, and we're eating Chinese take out food. We finally tried Tendy's Garden, and we liked it. Our favorites: General Tso's chicken and the crispy duck.

Keywords: restaurants, port angeles, food, new york city

03/08/05 - Wildfire Wood Fired Cuisine

There is a new wood fired restaurant out in western Port Angeles, on 8th Street. We had been hearing rumors, and when the urge for pizza struck, we went and checked the place out. We were quite impressed. Wildfire is basically a wood fired, sit down restaurant, and a rather elegant looking place at that. The menu includes wood fire rotisserie prime rib, chicken, salmon and halibut, all simply prepared to make the most of their wood fired oven.

The pizzas were great. We tried two of them and they had the characteristic wood oven crust with that combination of chewiness, smokiness and crispness. The toppings were fresh and well chosen. Check out our review for more info.

Keywords: restaurants, port angeles, salmon

02/08/05 - Five Star Cellars

- Just a quick note on the Five Star Cellars dinner at Bella Italia. Dave Senters outdid himself with that bollito misto. That's a lovely country dish of beef short ribs braised in red wine with cippolini onions, and it tasted even better than that sounds. As for Five Star Cellars, they are up and coming with that big Walla Walla bramble.

Keywords: restaurants, wine

01/18/05 - Buty Winery

Bella Italia held its first wine dinner of the year last night, and we were there. Wow, Dave Senters was at the top of his form, and we were pretty impressed with Buty Winery. Interested, read on...

Keywords: restaurants, wine

11/05/04 - New York City Update

We have just returned from a visit to New York City, and we must admit that things are bustling there. The tourist trade seems to have recovered. Thanks to the weak dollar Europeans seem to be shopping again. We did some shopping ourselves. We loaded up on chili and curry powders at Aphrodisia in the Village, we bought some books at the Lenox Hill Bookstore, we found a new annular hat at Boyd's, and we got our building supplies at Home Front, a 7/24 hardware store and lumber yard not far from the Empire State Building.

First, we'll talk about the bookstore. There used to be a really nice little bookstore on Madison Avenue. Not the one owned by the IBM heiress by the Whitney, but the other one. It always had an interesting collection of literature and art books. Even when we didn't buy anything, the place always got us thinking. When it closed, we stuck with the Borders on 57th and the Barnes and Noble on Union Square.

Madison Avenue has been changing. It has always been upmarket, but it is going international. This means it is getting more and more mall like over the years as upmarket global vendors leave Fifth Avenue and move north and east. So, we've been spending more and more time over on Lexington Avenue, and the Lenox Hill Bookstore is our latest find. It's a homey little place crammed full of books, including a lot of good reading. They tend to stock fewer authors, but more titles from those that they do. The art book collection was full of interesting stuff, not just coffee table gifts. This is a sign that they know their customers. We bought a few things for the flight home and some Christmas presents.

As for HomeFront, the hardware store and lumber yard, we stayed for part of a trip at a relative's apartment, and there were a few deferred maintenance items, as they say in commercial aviation. We needed to buy a light switch, a door knob and mechanism, tapes, glues, a screwdriver and some other goodies. We have heard that there is a new Home Depot on 14th Street, but our favorite hardware store is on 29th Street off Third Avenue. They are open seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, and they stock a broad supply of electrical, mechanical and plumbing items. They also sell glass, lumber, steel plates, cleaning supplies and the like. It's a big place for Manhattan, with three floors and a basement, and the staff knows its stuff.

We had a less satisfactory experience at Magnolia Bakery. They still have the buzz, and the lines run around the corner, but the quality of the cakes has been slipping over the past year or two. Has this trend reversed? We couldn't find out. We ordered German chocolate cake, but our box contained spice cake. We wound up doing a forced march to Buttercup Bake Shop where the German chocolate cake is still excellent.

Since we are on the subject of cakes and confections, we should note that La Maison du Chocolat is in excellent form, and that our current favorite hot chocolate is Caracas.

We visited a number of our favorite restaurants including some old favorites like the Union Square Cafe, the Pearl Oyster Bar, Wallse and the Tabla Bread Bar. All were at the top of their form. The knockerle dessert at Wallse has really grown, and there is a rumor that the chef at Tabla may be producing a cookbook some time in late 2005. We can hardly wait.

On a side note, we often go over upcoming Claypool comics while having dinner with one of our Claypool friends. Comic book original artwork is oversized, so it is hard to be discreet. One of the folks working at the Tabla Bread Bar noticed that one of us was in the business and dropped by to say hello. It turns out he was Daniel Miller whose Creased original graphic novel is soon coming out from Image comics. We haven't a clue about the book, but it shows that the comic book business isn't quite dead yet.

We liked Savoy so much on our last trip to New York that we went back twice on this trip. The big hit was the roasted cauliflower with hen of the woods mushrooms seasoned with a bit of five spice powder. We also loved the fava bean fritters. That, and everything else.

October, as it turned out, was New York State Wine Month, so we had a number of good glasses of New York State wine at our first meal. New York State wines are quite good, and a lot of them haven't bought in to the Robert Parker fruit bomb 20% alcohol thing, so you can still drink them with a meal. At our second meal, all the New York State wines were gone, even though it was still New York State Wine Month. The reason: lack of demand, and a variety of issues revolving around restaurant stocking mechanisms.

We tried two new restaurants. Spice Market, Jean Georges Vongerichten's new place in the trendy meat packing district, and Tia Pol, a little tapas bar in trendy Chelsea. Spice Market was a bust with bad service and mediocre Thai food. We were distinctly unimpressed. Tia Pol, in contrast, with its imaginative little Spanish dishes and well chosen wine list, excelled. It might be a hole in the wall, but the food was excellent, and they had a great neighborhood attitude.

The Lower East Side has been getting trendy, like so many other New York City neighborhoods, so we decided to check it out. We remember Katz's "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army" promotion from the 1960s, but there have been a lot of changes since then. Katz's is still there, and you can now send a salami to Iraq. Walking around, we could not help but notice that the entire neighborhood, once the epitome of an overcrowded slum, has been moving upmarket.

This is happening one store front at a time.

In some neighborhoods gentrification comes in like a juggernaut. Entire blocks are rebuilt, store fronts are remodeled, traffic is rerouted, and if you didn't have a GPS you'd swear that you were somewhere else. On the Lower East Side the overall fabric seems intact, but here and there you will notice a boarded up store front or an empty shop with a building permit posted. That ratty looking place across the street is now selling designer clothing, and the designer is working at the shop. The menus in the window now feature foie gras.

It seems that the Lower East Side was always about retail, despite the "I can get it for you wholesale" bravado. It was a neighborhood of small shop keepers and pushcarts. We didn't see any pushcarts, but the small shop keepers were there in force. Still, we couldn't help thinking about a 1939 article in Fortune magazine about the New York City pushcarts. Apparently shop keepers used to fight to get the pushcarts on THEIR side of the street since they encouraged foot traffic and often meant 50% more business. Now, we gather, that shop keepers want the pushcarts elsewhere.

We'll keep checking out the Lower East Side and see what develops.

Towards the end of our trip, we checked out the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The subway station and new escalators are great, but inside, it's a mall. That's right, it's just a big shopping mall. There was really not much reason to look around, since we knew what we would find, so we left. We really have nothing against malls, except that they lack serendipity. Maybe we should be thinking of it as the Suburban Embassy to New York City.

So, that was our trip to New York. We'd like to thank San Juan Airlines for making this all much more convenient with their $49 (each way) air taxi from Port Angeles to Boeing Field. At $98 a pop for the two of us it was only a little bit more expensive than the cab from Newark.

Keywords: food, restaurants, shopping, new york city, art, christmas, port angeles, wine

10/18/04 - Blue Flame Barbeque

- One of the great signs of civilization is proper barbeque. For years, we at the western end of the continent have had to endure its lack. Then, one day, we were driving along 101 a bit east of Port Angeles and we saw smoke. We smelled fire and fat and cooking meat. There they were, where the old steamed burger trailer had folded, the cinderblock pits with metal lids and a little stand with a sign.

We stopped by to check the place out. The closer we got, the better it smelled. Now we could smell spices and hot meaty juices. The proprietor reached into the smoke and flames pulled out some foil wrapped samples. The chicken leg and short rack of ribs vanished before our eyes. The spice rub on the chicken and the pork ribs gave them a slight crispness, a resistance that the meltingly soft interior meat lacked. The chicken nearly collapsed at the touch leaving an array of succulent meat inside the collapsed skin. You could pull off ribs from the rack with the slightest of force.

Our first meal was an entire chicken and a full rack of ribs comprising two family meals for four. The side dishes were excellent. The fire roasted potatoes were as tender as the meat and the crisp Romaine lettuce salad with onions and blue cheese was quite refreshing. The rolls, made with shortening rather than butter, clocked in at very, very good, a notch shy of excellent.

Apparently, Blue Flame used to be Frickin' Chicken in Sequim, but their loss is our game. Construction is ongoing. They are hoping to have an open/closed dining area in the next month or two. As for us, we are already planning to head back. They are experimenting with their hours. They had been open only on weekends, but are now open all afternoon and much of the evening seven days of the week. To make sure, give them a call at 360 452 6355. They are at the corner of Route 101 and Mount Pleasant Road just east of town.

Keywords: restaurants, port angeles

09/06/04 - Seattle Notes

We were in Seattle yesterday, but we weren't going to the Huskies game or Bumbershoot. We sort of avoid stuff like that. Instead, we checked out Uwajimaya on 6th and Weller. This is the anchor store for the International District and includes a good Pacific Rim (and Pacific Middle, since it includes Hawaiian food) food court, a great fish store, a book store and it even has apartments upstairs. We were checking out stuff for our upcoming luau, so we bought some fresh gold label nori for the ahi tuna sushi, poked at the taro leaves wrapped in bundles and waved a few bunches of ti leaves about.

The real find though was in the pig department. If you were ever a Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel the Whatever fan, you may remember that the good guys often needed a reliable supply of blood to feed to friendly or captive vampires. Whenever we pass the blood distribution center on 68th and Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, we always think of this problem of feeding vampires. Only in New York City would they have a vampire friendly blood bank that delivers. How convenient can it get? If that new prima donna or best selling author has unusual culinary needs, all you have to do is call for take out. (Do they stuff menus under your door?)

Since Buffy and Angel were set in California, they couldn't just pick up the phone and order blood. They tended to use pig blood. This just gets us to the problem of getting pig blood, and that gets us to Uwajimaya where they sell it frozen. More importantly, they sell pig skin and sweet little pig's feet. It is surprisingly hard to buy pig skin. Even if you have your own pig slaughtered, the skin and feet are usually wholesaled or trashed since they requires a lot of processing to make them kitchen friendly.

So, if you do want to make a proper cassoulet, you can get pig skin and pig's feet at Savenors in Boston, Faicco's in New York City or at Uwajimaya in Seattle. A French housewife would be right at home.

We also made our pilgrimage to The Spanish Table at the bottom of Pike's Market and bought some really good paella rice. Did you know that paella rice is drier that Arborio rice used in risotto? We didn't, but now we do. In a sort of conservation of pig's blood rule, The Spanish Table was out of morcilla, black pig's blood sausage.

Then we tried out Tom Douglas's new restaurant, Lola. Lola has great Greek food, with kebabs and spreads, lamb and octopus, and all through it a bit of Tom Douglas's trademark Northwestern style. Why not salmon kebabs? Why not a real lamb burger with pickled green peppers? Go for the roasted potatoes alone.

Keywords: seattle, food, restaurants, fish, luau, new york city, salmon

06/18/04 - Salumi in Seattle

We found a new place in town. Salumi in Seattle has the best Italian salamis and other cold cuts we have ever tasted. Armandino Batali, Mario's father, runs a hole in the wall delicatessan not far from Pioneer Square, and the cured meats and sandwiches he produces are magnificent.

Keywords: seattle, restaurants, food

06/14/04 - Seattle Update - Palace Kitchen

We were in downtown Seattle yesterday, so we checked out Palace Kitchen, one of the gems in Tom Douglas's growing empire. It is a big hopping bar of a place with a true emphasis on appetizers. We all know that the appetizers are where the flavor is, so at Palace Kitchen we indulged. Check out our review for more.

Keywords: seattle, restaurants

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