Reviews

Chef Matt Costello is cooking hyper-local, avant garde and insanely delicious food out of a small kitchen in a 30-seat restaurant, and it’s the next place you must go for a weekend away.  The Inn at Langley is hardly a secret – even though the owners don’t advertise, the Whidbey Island destination was recommended to me on several occasions by friends and colleagues.  I was expecting a relaxing weekend away with my wife, but I was not prepared to have one of most surprising, innovative and delightful meals I’ve had in quite a while. 

A few weeks back, my wife and I booked our stay at the inn, cashing in a Rue La La deal we had purchased a month prior.  The deal included a night’s stay at the Inn at Langley as well as dinner and wine pairing for two at the attached restaurant.  Even from my first call to make our reservations, I could tell that this place exuded the type of warm hospitality that is often absent in the typical passive-aggressive Seattleite interactions.  When we arrived and were shown to our room, we were stunned in disbelief – the “cottage suite” included in our package was a 1400 square foot apartment overlooking the sound, beautifully appointed and peacefully serene.  And, if this were a travel blog, I’d go on and on about the room, the amenities of the inn and the charming little town scattered around it.  But, you’re here for the food, so I’ll get right to it.

Dinner started quite leisurely, just as the sun was falling low in the sky.  We were the first to arrive for the night’s seating, and we were greeted warmly by Stephen McClure, the restaurant’s sommelier.  He handed us each a glass of champagne dotted with basil seeds and we took a seat in the garden as the other guests trickled in.  Sitting in that manicured garden, watching the sunset and sipping champagne, I felt a million miles from home: relaxed, refreshed, civilized, and centered.  It’s a great way to begin any meal.

We were shown to our table which was one of just a handful in the restaurant’s petite dining room.  The room is divided by an oversized stone fireplace, and flanked by tables of two and four laid out around the perimeter.  However, the main focus of the room is

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Even if you managed to find an inexpensive solution for cooking sous vide at home, it used to be the case that you were still on the hook for a vacuum sealer, and the $150 FoodSaver was the de facto appliance for the job.  Sure, for short cooking times, you can immerse a zip-top bag in water and force out most of the air, but that strategy doesn’t let you safely cook-then-chill foods for reheating later.  Furthermore, as the small amount of remaining air expands in non-vacuumed bags, they tend to float to the surface and cook unevenly.  However, Ziploc recently introduced a line of vacuum seal bags that use an inexpensive hand pump and achieve nearly the same results as that pricey FoodSaver.  Read on for my head-to-head test and conclusions…

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Last night I had the pleasure of getting together with Brian Canlis (of Canlis Restaurant) to shoot some food.  Brian and I are both pretty enthusiastic about the subject, and the release of the Canlis Spring menu provided a great opportunity to photograph a handful of Chef Jason Franey’s stunning dishes.  The best part, though?  Not letting the “props” go to waste.

I have to say, I was very impressed with the artistry and complexity of each dish.  They look great in photos, but they’re even more impressive in person.  Canlis may be an old school establishment, but Jason Franey’s food is about as forward-thinking as it gets.

[I don’t have actual descriptions for each dish from the Chef, so I’m leaving the captions intentionally simplistic]

Above: Carrots
Below: Duck egg

Foie Gras, Rhubarb and Celery

Halibut with Artichoke
Pork Chop

Tuna Crudo, Sashimi and Tartare

I don’t have a lot experience shucking – I find it awkward and a little dangerous to go jabbing a blade into an oyster’s crevice.  So, it’s a good thing I can use liquid nitrogen to do the work instead.  Nitro-shucking, or cryoshucking, is the process of opening the shells of mollusks by dipping them in liquid nitrogen then allowing them to thaw.  Due to a process which I cannot (yet) explain, this quick freeze causes the shells to release way more easily, often just by sliding them off with your finger.

When my friend, Becky Selengut, local private chef and distinguished author of the cookbook Good Fish, announced on Facebook that she was getting her shucking knife ready for the bounty of oysters at her book release party, I jokingly suggested that we cryoshuck them.  She said “sure”.

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Interview By Jeth Rollins Odom

Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas of Chicago’s Alinea, named the best restaurant in the country, dropped by Seattle last week to promote their new book Life, on the Line.  I was scheduled to do the interview but could not make it. I asked my buddy (and cooking pal) Jethro to fill in for him.  Because Jethro is a more of a human being than a food blogger, a freewheeling conversation ensued, and they discussed everything from their book, hunting, and music to their newest projects about to launch in Chicago: a restaurant called Next, and its companion bar, Aviary.

Nick Kokonas: So, Jethro’s not a food writer, he’s subbing for a food writer.
Grant Achatz: Thank god.
NK: So you know what that means?  Actual intelligent questions that we haven’t had.
So, any questions you don’t want to answer, just say “fuck you”, and whatever.
NK: You’re going to get like, twelve “fuck you’s”.
GA: Ah, come on…
NK to GA: By the way, I finally read that interview. Joe Satriani? That’s where you went with that?
GA: The guy can play guitar, man.
NK: Yeah, in ’84.

Nick, you were in a band.  What instrument did you play?
NK: Guitar and keyboards.
What kind of style?
NK: I went to college in the late 80s/early 90s, so you’re looking at the Cure/REM thing, but you’re also looking at Firehose, more edgy stuff like their song “Brave Captain“.  Standard issue of that era, but a lot of fun.

Concerning the book, I really liked how in the preface you start off with this really disturbing imagery of Grant peeling out his inner throat, which cuts to him giving this great speech crediting all the people he knows, and then the first chapter starts with him making Jello as a child.
NK: The reason we start the book out that way is that you know the outcome.  I mean, there’s a picture of him on the cover. If he’s dead, this sucks, right? So, because he’s not dead, you know the outcome, so it’s important to get that up front, so here’s the highlight of the book, you get that the first second, and then we show you how we got there.

Why did you choose to write an autobiography while you’re both in your mid-30s?
NK: That’s his question, it’s not my autobiography.
What do you mean? You’re in there too.
NK: The only reason I’m in there too is that I’m the Everyman, so I give the opposite viewpoint, you know what I mean? I’m like the diner guy, y’know?  The thing is that he can’t talk about his own food from the third person, right? I mean you can, but it’s kind of weird and awkward that way, so that’s why we did that.
GA: It’s a really good story, I think for one.  First and foremost, I think what we experienced, and I say ‘we’ because he’s the one who really pushed the whole thing along, in terms of seeking out treatment.  You know, people go through life, and they find themselves in situations of adversity whether it be medically related or something else.  They don’t realize that the second, third, fourth answer is not the best one.

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Right now, I’m one of the few very fortunate people in the world who have a copy of the Modernist Cuisine book.  I’ve been a vocal fan(boy) of the project for nearly a year now.  As my wife can attest, discussing the subject of this book has been a favorite pastime of mine… at cocktail parties, friends’ birthdays, on vacation, to tech support call operators, at drive-through windows, and to just about anyone else who will listen.  About two weeks ago while I was driving to work, I got an email asking if I could swing by the Intellectual Ventures office to pick up a review copy.  I nearly drove my car through the median in my eagerness.

I got the books, brought them home, and posted an “unboxing coming soon” teaser article.  That was two weeks ago.  Since then – not a single mention.  The books that I’ve been salivating over for nearly a year finally arrive and I don’t post a word.  What happened?

I had an existential crisis.

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I love discovering that someone is secretly a geek.  I love it even more when that person also happens to be a chef.

I had the recent pleasure of dining at Kirkland’s lowercase waterfront hotspot bin on the lake and I got to spend some time chatting with the newly-arrived chef Paul Hyman (disclosure: this was a hosted dinner).  Chef Hyman’s Louisiana roots were evident in his passion for food (everyone I know from Louisiana is a food fanatic), and his previous positions at highly-respected kitchens in Boston and Portland made him seem like a very natural fit for an upscale Pacific Northwest restaurant like bin.  However, I quickly realized that behind the mandatory Ranch Name + Organic + Popular Cut Served with Locally Grown Seasonal Vegetable (which was delicious, by the way) this chef was secretly channeling his deepest inner geek.

Take, for example, the dinner menu’s only pasta course: Corzetti.  Rather than opt for the more predictable handmade ravioli (which are to Seattle menus as Subarus are to Seattle streets), he chose a fresh pasta that I’d never seen on a menu before. I was intrigued.  The chef came to the table holding a pair of round wooden blocks and explained that they were handmade stamps for the little discs of pasta he served.  Not only does stamping the pasta create more surface area for it to hold sauce (winning geek points already), but these corzetti stamps are only made by a few people in the world and required a trip to Italy just to obtain.  Exclusive, nice.

Click through for more, plus photos of dinner.

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Ferran Adrià is the most influential chef, living or dead, period.  He’s also likely the most controversial.  At his Catalonia restaurant El Bulli, Ferran has spent the last few decades turning the culinary world on it’s head, breaking rules, toying with emotions, and inventing never-before-conceived ways of imagining food. 

Unfortunately, you may know Ferran best by his most extreme techniques, which are often implemented poorly by far lesser chefs (yep, I’ve been guilty of that).  His most recognizable methods include making foams and turning liquids into encapsulated spheres, both of which quickly denigrate from masterful haute techniques into party gags rather quickly.  However, in the hands of (by all accounts) a master/genius/sorcerer/+5000 Mana Food Priest, these methods contribute to a transformative and even transcendent dining experience.

Through Colman Andrews’ unprecedented access to Ferran, we learn about his fascinating and serendipitous career progression from military dishwasher to short-order beach bum, eventually becoming the most renowned chef in the world.  We also learn much of the history of El Bulli and how the location, landscape and struggling seasonality of the restaurant ultimately contributed to its unlikely success. 

What we don’t learn, though, is much about Ferran, personally.  Although he dispenses a bevy of prolific statements throughout the chapters, nearly nothing is written about his life outside the kitchen, his wife or his relationships with friends.  In fact, reading about his many simultaneous projects and ventures, I began to wonder if there was any off-duty time to discuss at all!

Skeptics of “molecular gastronomy”, a term which Ferran and others abhor, may find this book less than satisfying – the brief chapter on the opposition to Ferran’s food only lightly grazes the surface of the common knee-jerk responses to modernist cooking, and regrettably does very little to dispel the pervasive untruths that are frequently held against Ferran and his disciples.  However, for a geek like me wishing to emulate the patterns and unbounded thinking that made Ferran Adria such a powerful force in the modernist food movement, this book was a fantastic glimpse into the mind of a genius. 

Amazon: Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food

Deep frying your Thanksgiving turkey is popular for a reason – it happens to be the same reason that Lipitor is popular, but that’s beside the point.  Unfortunately, every year, 10 million* Americans start house fires from attempting to fry their bird.  And in addition to the arson hazard, deep frying a turkey requires a ton of oil, which, let’s face it, you’re not going to filter and reuse.

Luckily, the folks at Char-Broil have created The Big Easy Oil-Less Infrared Turkey Deep Fryer, and were kind enough to loan me a unit for testing.  This cooker looks and works just like a conventional turkey fryer, except it uses no oil.  Instead, a ring of gas burners heat up the inside of the cooking chamber, roasting your meat evenly and allowing the fat to drip down, with no risk of flame-ups. 

Rather than test the machine with a turkey, though, I thought I’d try out a few other dishes.  Check out my video review after the jump.

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If making alcohol had been this easy during prohibition, homemade hooch would have been everywhere.  A few weeks ago, I began playing with a product called Spike Your Juice, which was advertised as a way to turn juice into alcohol in 48 hours.  It works like this: pick a juice with at least 20g of sugar per serving, add a packet of their specially-designed yeast, plug the bottle with an airlock, and wait 48 hours.  Just like the fermentation process used in winemaking, the juice’s natural sugar is converted into ethanol, with a byproduct of carbon dioxide.  The result is an alcoholic drink with a champagne-like effervescent fizz.

I bought a box of these magic bacteria and started experimenting.  The instructions recommend using filtered juices that don’t require refrigeration and aren’t artificially sweetened. But, I’m bad at following instructions, and I don’t trust a juice that doesn’t require refrigeration.  I grabbed a bottle of Pink Lemonade, Mango, Blackberry and Sweet Tea from Trader Joe’s.  The pink lemonade worked well – after 48 hours, it was quite fizzy, though I couldn’t really taste the alcohol.  The Sweet Tea fizzed a bit, but also didn’t taste “spiked” – it just tasted awful.  The Mango juice (which wasn’t fully filtered) formed big solid clumps during fermentation.  I’m not sure why, exactly, but they were gross so I filtered them out with cheesecloth before drinking.  Again, some fizz, no buzz. 

The Blackberry juice was the winner by far.  It also developed some solids (even though it was very clear juice to begin with), and you’d never mistake it for wine, but it was delicious.  Think blackberry Lambic, but with an adjusted price of $1.75 per bottle (64oz of juice at $3, $1.50 per packet of yeast, 25oz in a wine bottle).  This is something I’d make again, and certainly something I’d serve to dinner guests or corruptible children. 

The instructions state that you can allow the fermentation to continue longer than 48 hours to achieve up to 14% ABV.  It also recommends using Welch’s or Ocean Spray – I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree there.  To me, the best part of this product is that you’re free to choose great starting ingredients, like a locally-produced cider, or raspberry juice from plants in your back yard.  But for the fun of quick, easy DIY booze, I’ll raise my glass to this product!

Spike Your Juice – $9.99 (or $20 for a 2-pack on Amazon)

The nice folks at Polyscience were kind enough to loan me their new SousVide Professional heating immersion circulator. This is the first circulator that they have designed specifically for sous vide cooking, and it performs exquisitely. 

After a few weeks of intense use, I found the temperature accuracy to be precise (eggs are a great test!) and the stability to be very reliable.  The powerful circulating motor is a little noisy, as you can hear in the background of the video above, and I often wished it had a low-speed setting – instead, there is a valve you can adjust to regulate flow. 

The video below displays the results of a heating and temperature stability test I ran.  The machine is heating three gallons of water to 65.5C with no lid on the water bath.  The video is sped up by 20x so you aren’t bored to tears (and because a watched pot never boils becomes delightfully tepid).

Polyscience SousVide Professional – $799

Before I begin this story, I should let you know that it doesn’t contain any references to sous vide or molecular gastronomy or any other geeky cooking technique.  It is simply a story about a great meal that I will never forget.

Rachel and I just returned from a week in New Orleans.  In my humble opinion, New Orleans has the best regional cuisine of any city in America – the heavily French- and African-influenced flavors of Creole food are simply unmatched by any other American ethnic cooking style.  So, needless to say, I was quite pleased to eat my way through the city.  We made sure to hit most of the predictably great spots – Galatoires, Brennan’s, Felix’s Oyster Bar – but it was our meal at Irene’s, a quaint Italian restaurant off the beaten path, that we will remember most fondly.

It was our last night in town and Rachel had chosen Irene’s based on the suggestion of a local couple we had met (and with whom we subsequently shared take-out gumbo on the roof of their 1790’s apartment building).  After the long walk from our hotel to the restaurant, we were greeted with the same hospitality shown to us by every place we had eaten, and to which we were becoming pleasantly accustomed.  We were seated in the corner of one of three intimate dining rooms, surrounded by wall-mounted photos of past patrons, who we assumed were of some significance.  Rachel and I ordered Gin Mojitos and split a crabmeat gratin appetizer, which, as with much of the cuisine in New Orleans, was an unabashedly indulgent combination of seafood and dairy. 

We continued on with a steak and a Pompano Meunière Amandine, the latter of which is a local classic: a pompano fillet broiled and topped with browned butter, crabmeat and toasted slivered almonds.  The food was all excellent, and armed with the knowledge of our immanent return to Seattle and the requisite post-vacation diet that would follow, we savored every bite until our clothes no longer fit correctly. 

And it was right then, at the end of the meal, that our dinner really became spectacular.  During the step of the waiter-patron protocol at which your server normally delivers the check to the table, our waiter instead informed us that our meal would be free.  We were puzzled.  He explained that another couple had been in the restaurant just slightly earlier that evening to celebrate their wedding anniversary.  Apparently, this couple had adopted the custom of anonymously paying for the dinner a random pair of diners who appeared to be out of town.  As luck would have it, we ended up being that pair for the evening.  I asked if we could meet our benefactors or at least send them a bottle of champagne in return, but alas, it was against the rules of their charity. 

Rachel and I were stunned by their generosity and we were at once giddy and deeply touched.  Unable to identify and thank the couple personally, we decided that the best thing we could do is to pay forward this incredible gesture.  It is an all-to-rare occurrence these days to witness a truly altruistic act, particularly one as substantial as buying an upscale dinner for strangers.  However, I knew that the only thing that matched our joy was the contentment of the generous couple who had made our night so special.  Personally, I look forward to being on the other end of the transaction now and then.  If we can provide to another couple the happiness and lasting memory of a meal paid for by anonymous strangers, it will be well worth the cost of dinner. 

And for that reason, I probably shouldn’t tell you where we’re planning to eat on our anniversary

I love sous vide cooking.  Those of you who have discovered it know what I’m talking about – nothing short of a new frontier of culinary technique, and one of the first pure intersections of science and cuisine.  However, if you aren’t willing to drop $1000+ (or you don’t have a soldering iron and some patience) it used to be the case that you were excluded from the inner circle of sous vide wizardry.  Professional thermal immersion circulators are extremely expensive and, due to their scientific design aesthetic, aren’t very likely to show up on the shelves of Sur La Table anytime soon.  But, for the first time, a home cook willing to spend $450 (the price of a top-of-the-line stand mixer + accessories, for example) can experience for themselves the eye-opening, mouth-watering, religious revelation of their first sous vide steak.

I’ve blathered on for the last handful of posts about how great sous vide is, and to a certain extent, I’ve become obsessed with the method.  So, you can imagine my delight when the nice people at SousVide Supreme offered to let me test drive a unit for two weeks (there’s my disclosure).  When the unit arrived, I anxiously brought the box inside and began unpacking.  The first thing that struck me?  “Damn, this thing is big!”  So big, in fact, that there was no hope of ever storing a unit like this anywhere in my kitchen.  For the entire two week trial run, it sat on top of my stove, next to my stockpot that’s also too big to find a home.  If you can’t tell from the picture above, the unit is about the size of a large bread machine.  And although it’s handsome enough for what it does, I’m not sure I would acquiesce to the idea of making this behemoth stainless brick an objec d’art atop my precious counter space.  That said, I’ve found myself cooking nearly everything sous vide recently, so perhaps it wouldn’t be such an inconvenience to have the machine on display all the time.

Once I got over the size issue (like a blind date with a girl who has “a great personality”), it was time to put this unit through its paces.  By now, I had already been cooking with my DIY sous vide machine for a few weeks, so I had some reasonable expectations of heating time, temperature evenness (temperature measured at different spots in the basin) and temperature fluctuation (how well the target temperature holds over time).  I filled the unit’s basin with hot water from my kitchen faucet to speed up the pre-heating time.  If you haven’t been to the gym in a while, you might notice that the water-filled unit is quite heavy.  The unit features well-placed inset handles to help with carrying, but even so, it’s a precarious beast when full – especially when full of hot water!  It would be great to see a drain valve in version 2, since it’s very difficult to negotiate 30 lbs of 120° water up and into the kitchen sink without spilling everywhere.

The SousVide Supreme comes with a wire food rack (shown in the picture above) which actually does a great job of keeping your food in place and allowing ample circulation.  Unfortunately, since the unit doesn’t have circulator of any kind, you’ve gotta rely on convection currents to distribute heat evenly through the basin.  I was initially quite concerned that this would result in hot and cold spots (which it does) but the temperature differences were reasonably small – within .5°F as measured with a laser thermometer.

Heating from faucet temperature (about 110°F) to cooking temperature (about 144°F) took about half an hour – a time scale consistent with my DIY machine, and certainly reasonable for anyone who’s ever waited for an oven to preheat.  However, I was quite surprised to see the temperature fluctuations of the machine over time.  The video below shows 1 hour of cooking time condensed into 2.5 minutes.  The target temperature remained fixed at 144°F, and there were no external factors influencing the temperature (eg. I never removed the lid, opened a window, turned on the stove – in fact, I wasn’t even home!).  The temperature varies between 142.1°F and 144.5°F, and if you watch closely, you’ll notice that this variation happens in a very cyclical manner.  In other words, the machine is programmed to allow a zone of acceptable temperature that is at least 2.4°F wide.

These temperature fluctuations weren’t noticeable on beef short ribs or potatoes, where there is a wider zone of doneness.  However, if you’re finicky about your steak, and especially if you’re aiming for the Goldilocks zone on eggs, those temperature swings may make a difference.  As you can see in this invaluable guide to sous vide cooking there’s a substantive difference between eggs cooked at 146°F and 148°F.

All in all, however, the SousVide Supreme did a fine job cooking.  Plus, I felt completely comfortable leaving the unit unattended to run overnight or while I was away at work.  The all-in-one design certainly is convenient, but the machine’s bulk means you’ll have to annex the dining room to find storage.  I’m delighted to see the SousVide Supreme bring sous vide cooking into home kitchens for the first time, and very excited at what the future may bring!

View Slideshow

I had the recent pleasure of a visit to the newly-opened Sip at the Wine Bar & Restaurant in downtown Seattle.  I’m typically cynical of places that 1) are chain restaurants, and 2) have both “wine bar” and “restaurant” in the title.  However, I’m happy to report that the folks at Sip exceeded my expectations, in general.

The first defining feature of Sip is its location – directly across the street from the architecturally fascinating Seattle Public Library.  And although the restaurant’s design isn’t quite as extreme (no curvy iridescent escalators), the wrap-around picture windows and dimly-lit ambiance take full advantage of the location’s urban scenery. 

As you might imagine, the wine list is extensive, offering both local and international bottles.  Bottles start at $25, glasses start at $7, and if you’re a fan of variety, you’ll be happy to know that all wines by the glass are also available by the half-glass.  I chose to start off the meal with a gin cocktail in a burnt sugar-rimmed glass.  It was a slightly sweet-and-sour, and a nice accompaniment for Sip’s salty and seared appetizers.

I enjoyed the tender and well-seasoned Vietnamese Caramel Beef ($12), but the standout of the starters was the Bacon & Eggs ($13, pictured above).  The dish is served as a cube of braised pork belly with a soft-boiled and lightly fried duck egg.  I thought this was a great interpretation of the classic combination – salty, sweet, crunchy and… porky.  I also enjoyed the flavors of the pickled beet salad, particularly the crispy beet chips.  Unfortunately, the salad was impossible to consume without spilling half on the tablecloth; for reference, 2” wide olive dishes don’t make good salad plates.

I was excited, as always, to see braised short ribs on the menu.  The dish, $19, was described on the menu as “boneless ribs, parmesan ‘jo-jos,’ arugula salad, meyer lemon gremolata, parmigiano & red wine braising jus”.  What the menu neglected to mention was that the short rib was spiced so heavily with what I assume to be cayenne pepper, that all other flavors were undetectable.  That said, the parmesan fries weren’t bad, and the meat was tender.  The Flat Iron “Chivitio” ($22, described well by blogger and friend Jay at Gastrolust) was a much more pleasant dish, flavored intensely with smoke and char, and topped with the fatty softness of a duck egg.  If I kept duck eggs in my kitchen, I’d put them on everything, too.

I must say, though, that the best dish of the night was actually dessert – the Roasted Sugar Pie Pumpkin Cheesecake ($8).  It was light and velvety, with the vivid flavor of roasted pumpkin.  Well doe, chef  Allison Jester. 

All in all, the food at Sip exceeded my expectations, modest as they were.  However, the menu prices thus far haven’t followed the budget-conscious trend set by some other Seattle joints.  But, if you like to cap off your day of downtown shopping and public library book reading with a glass of wine and a steak, Sip at the Wine Bar & Restaurant is a fine choice.

Full Disclosure: I got free food, but that doesn’t pay for my opinion.

It always seems to be the case: it takes an out-of-town guest to reveal the greatest things about your own city.  I don’t know if we’re held back by false pride or true lethargy, but very few of us ever choose to don our walking shoes, carry a camera, and be local tourists.  Well, not anymore!

A few weeks ago, I decided to accept an invitation to the Seattle Food Tours walking tour of Belltown restaurants, and I loved it.  As a foodie and someone who goes out of his way to stay in touch with the Seattle restaurant scene, I make a concerted effort to eat at as many local spots as possible.  Even so, there are so many great restaurants in Seattle that it’s impossible to keep up.  On this tour, four out of the seven stops were completely new to me. 

This particular tour began at Lola, one of Tom Douglas’ mini-empire of restaurants downtown.  My tourmates, a group of business colleagues from Alaska, made themselves at home by ordering shots of Ouzo, presumably to keep warm for the long walk to the Queen City Grill.  Along the way, our guide provided some colorful commentary on the city’s history and development.  If you’re looking for a rich, vivid and hilarious historical tour… this isn’t it (try the Underground Tour).  But I did learn a thing or two, and our stops between restaurants made the journey feel like less of a relay race for binge eaters.  Plus, the drunk Alaskans had the patience to learn about our history, I suppose I did too.

We stopped in each restaurant just long enough to scarf down the small plate they had prepared for our arrival.  At times I felt a little rushed, but the restaurants down the line were expecting us, and the disembodied voice of my mother echoing “Your letting your food get cold” justified our haste.  The tour continued to Txori, Shiro’s, Branzino, Macrina Bakery, and culminated at The Local Vine.  All told, this was a great selection of stops both geographically and for their variety.  Though I  would offer two ways the tour could be improved: Segways (hell, why not?) and the option to ditch out at any of the stops and stay for dinner.  By the time we got to Branzino, for instance, I was ready to make myself comfortable with a bottle of wine and a braised rabbit.

In just two and a half hours, the Belltown tour introduced me to a handful of restaurants that might have taken me months to discover otherwise.  Although I was left wanting more at each stop, at the end of the tour I felt satiated, and even a little tipsy.  All in all, a great use of an afternoon.

As Seattleites, we are lucky enough to have several different food tours available.  I’d highly recommend picking out the tour that interests you most and committing to two or three hours of getting to know your own city a little better.  You get a lot of food (and sometimes wine!) for your dollar, and you never know how you might discover your next favorite eatery!

Food Tours in Seattle

Image care of Seattle Food Tours

Full disclosure: My ticket to the Seattle Food Tours Belltown tour was complimentary, but that doesn’t pay for my opinion.