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Elephant ears half-dipped in semi-sweet couverture accompanied the bill.
----type places - you know,
mirrors on the walls, a big neon sign inside that says CAFE in
four garish colors, mizuna greens on every plate. It's a storefront
in the dowdy old downtown part of Seattle, which looks like the
dowdy old downtown part of Anytown, USA, but somehow it manages
to create its own little neighborhood. It's one of the two or
three restaurants that gets top markings in every book, and the
only one of those that is open on Sunday, so we chose it as the
site of our early supper before the plane back to Dulles. We
arrived (crime of crimes) half an hour early for our reservation,
the day having been cut short by severe rainstorms that prevented
our getting much good out of the Bloedel gardens and that sent us
scurrying to the Thomas Kemper beer garden (see previous post).
We were immediately welcomed and given a pleasant booth on the
first floor (there's an upstairs that I didn't check out, which
makes it into a big restaurant). The help at this place is said
to be among the most intelligent in town, and our waitress was
helpful, describing dishes as necessary, and when she didn't know
what the garnishes were, she ran off to the kitchen to ask. We
started with the Hogue Chardonnay '93, which is a good wine but
not worth twenty a bottle: it's light in body but with good acid;
it went well with our rich and complex appetizers:
Sweetbreads in balsamic reduction with pancetta over egg fettucine.
This was a fine dish, despite the fact that we were pretty ODed on
pancetta and balsamic by now. The sweetbreads came as a large
serving (perhaps 6 oz, or twice what was necessary), well browned
but steamy-moist in the middle, over fresh noodles, the sauce being
a not-brilliant but sort of inevitable balsamic and stock reduction
with little bits of pancetta bacon (the fat trimmed off, for which
I was thankful, given the richness of the dish). Fresher sweetbreads
were never had. I justified the extra five hundred calories and as
much cholesterol as in a pound of bacon by remembering the driving
rain in which we'd spent much of the day.
Pot stickers filled with lobster, shrimp, and shiitake mushrooms
were pretty good, although the lobster didn't really make much
of an impression in this setting - minced crustacean is minced
crustacean. This is one of the two signature Dahlia dishes and
is a good example of how chef Tom Douglas blends Asian techniques
and ideas with local ingredients. The dipping sauce, mildly spicy,
was a standard soy-sake-chili oil mix not unlike what you might
get at your local House of Peking type of place; it was a bit too
salty, and I think that a lighter hand with the soy sauce would
have helped. The stickers themselves were well browned on two
surfaces, the wrappers more tender than average, the filling
delicate, reminding me of the Chinese dim sum shrimp balls with
minced lard (there was no lard, though, in this dish).
The main courses:
Garlic-roast rabbit, blackberry jus. This was an eye-opener. First,
the sauce itself had just the merest hint of berries, otherwise
being a very good espagnole-type brown sauce with a bit of wine.
Next, the rabbit was pan-roasted to medium but kept all of its
juice: you know how rabbit can be dry, well, this was not. The
seasoning was mild, with salting and garlic noticeable but not
overwhelming.
Crab cakes garnished with straw potatoes, sugar snap peas, spicy
cucumber relish, and steamed carrots. The cakes are the place's
other signature dish, consistently awarded everyone's Best of
Seattle. They were nothing like real crab cakes, which is not a
surprise, insofar as Dungeness crab, wonderful though it is, is
no substitute for Maryland blue crab, the finest anywhere. A
sizable serving (well, less than the sweetbread appetizer, but
still enough) of body and leg meat was mixed with a sizable
serving of breading, the seasonings being celery, onion, a dab
of mustard, and quite a lot of chopped pickled red Tabasco
peppers. Very tasty, very filling. Not crab cakes. A little metal
jigger of fresh tomato salsa ("Wild West sauce" - medium hot,
very good, but not in harmony with the dish) came on the side.
The veggies were fine, especially the straw potatoes, which
were french fries taken to the nth degree.
With this we had the Woodward Canyon Chard '94, perhaps, get this,
the single most perfect California-style Chard I've ever tasted.
The balance between fruit and oak was impeccable, and I gladly
paid the $25 for a half-bottle (at Ray's Boathouse, see previous
post, this runs $17.50 a half, with the Reserve at $25). The rich
fatness that I love in Chardonnay was there, but acid kept the wine
honest - usually, I have to compromise here, and I tend to prefer
a wine that errs on the side of fullness to one that errs on the
side of tartness. Today I didn't have to compromise. I've got to
look for the Reserve sometime. I couldn't tell much about the color -
the best illumination in the room came from the four-color CAFE
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* KingQWK 1.05 # 187 *Seattle, WA