Eileen and I are back from a short week trip to Seattle. I wrote separately about some of the wines; here is a recap of the restaurants:
Wild Ginger - it may be a tourist destination, but it remains a wonderful restaurant. We kept it simple: Malay chicken satay, the classic Fragrant Duck and the even more classic Sichuan green beans. The setting on 3rd Avenue is a massive but soaring old building… I would guess a bank. The service is impeccable. The rest of the menu repays exploring.
Flint Creek Cattle Co - In the Greenwood neighborhood, north of downtown, an area I do not know. The restaurant is set in an old, high-ceiling building, bustling and loud. We ate upstairs, a little quieter.
We started with an assortment of apps; roasted olives, pickled vegetables and an outstanding duck confit salad. Eileen and I split a main of fennel braised wild boar salad with sugo and gnocchi, also outstanding. Our hosts respectively devoured a bone-in pork chop and a steak. Everybody was happy. The wine list is typical, solid and by current standards fairly priced. Glasses are mostly WA wines from good producers, priced in the upper teens.
The Harvest Vine - This was head and shoulders the best restaurant of the trip. Not sure what the neighborhood is called, but it’s 2701 E Madison St. The building is fairly old, quite possibly once a mid-sized private house. It’s comfortable and feels a good bit like Spain. The food is absolutely outstanding. We grazed through a beet salad, serrano, manchego, Tortilla Española, berenjena, asparragos and gambas. Eileen thought the Tortilla was better than at Jaleo! The eggplant with fried tomato sauce was extraordinary, as was the shrimp, with chorizo and saffron rice. The wine list is also outstanding, with generous glass pours for not much more than ¼ retail pricing. The bottle list is huge and offers a lot of wine with bottle age. Bottle pricing is not quite as wonderful, about double retail.
Service was outstanding. I ordered a glass of the current Rioja, then realized that the same wine was available as a Rose. I called out to our waitress, to specify, and she said “Oh, I knew which one you meant, I saw where your eyes were on the page”. !. Thank you Jasmine!
We then spent a few days on the Olympic Peninsula at The Lake Quinault Lodge. This is a classic, deeply comfortable hotel in the Olympic National Forest, adjoing the National Park. The only drawback to vacationing in a temperate rain forest is that it tends to be rainy.
The restaurant is the Roosevelt Dining Room. The food is good, not great… portions generous and pricing fair for the setting. I had the Roasted Chicken which the menu lists as a throwback to their 1920s menu. I believe it and I believe guests in those days expected lots of good food on their plates and got it. Eileen’s burger met with her approval.
Hotels:
I had booked the CitizenM on Pioneer Square, but we left after one night. The bed is jammed into an alcove and one person has to crawl over the other to get in or out of bed. Maybe that works for 20-somethings; we don’t qualify. The room was slightly smaller than the closet in my first apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. A $19 buffet breakfast was excellent and good value, but after that we were out of there.
We booked the Kimpton Vintage, a polar opposite. Slightly less well situated (5th Avenue rather than 1st), our room was old-fashioned, comfortable, spacious. Recommended.
I wrote above about the Lake Quinault Lodge, likewise recommended.
We flew back to Portland and Eileen was driving home the next day, so we stayed the night and had dinner at Leeward, an outstanding Italian restaurant I’ve written up before. We split outstanding asparagus. My Gnoccho pairs warm in-house gnocchi with charcuterie and cheese. Eileen thought her rabbit might have been the dish of the trip. The wine list here remains aggressively geeky, excellent, but with a reduced number of very interesting wines btg.
All in all a wonderful trip, confirming Seattle as a great food destination.