Nosh Pit

Fun With Health Department Warnings

Seattle Met would like to inform you that reading menu warnings may make you laugh.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Apr 09, 2012 at 09:00AM 4 Comments

Warning: spontaneous combustion ahead. From Blind Pig Bistro.

Was it Matt Dillon who wrote the first smartassy one at the original Sitka and Spruce? That just seems right, though the proof has long since been erased from those old blackboard menus.

They’re all over the place now, of course: sarcastic tweaks of the Health Department–mandated warning that in its straight-faced form goes something like this: The King County Department of Health would like to inform you that consuming raw or undercooked foods may contribute to your risk of foodborne illness.

At first it was funny just to have the ante upped, as in this warning from Staple and Fancy: The King County Department of Health would like to inform you that consuming raw or undercooked foods may indeed kill you.

I noticed that soon after Madison Park Conservatory opened, death was likewise invoked. By midsummer, the Gothic tone had subsided to this: Check yourself: Eating raw or undercooked foods may make one sick.

My colleague Allecia Vermillion last year reported on one from Anchovies and Olives: The King County Department of Health would like to inform you that consuming raw or undercooked foods may contribute to your risk of foodborne illness. The chef would like to inform you that overcooking fresh seafood is a crying shame.

Take that, Health Department: You’re not only alarmist, you’re the enemy of fine cuisine. In a similar vein from Altura, penned with admirable brevity: Food not overcooked may be hazardous.

The Health Department has even been cast as the enemy of health. Recently spied at the soon-to-open Juice Box in Capitol Hill’s Farmer’s Market: The Health Department would like you to know that fresh vegetables might kill you.

These days we seem to be trending away from the dire and/or political, with sprightly bits of madcap nonsense. Recently spied at Blind Pig Bistro: King County says these items may cause spontaneous combustion. Fun!

Or this from Manhattan Drugs, which may be my all-time favorite: Eating raw or uncooked foods may kill you…as could an M–16 wielding ram.

You’ll get it the minute you walk in the door.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Ethan Stowell, Juice Box, Anchovies and Olives, Matt Dillon, Manhattan Drugs, Altura, Sitka and Spruce, Blind Pig Bistro, Critic's Notebook, Madison Park Conservatory

New on Menus: Buy the Cooks a Beer

How do you feel about the latest trend in tipping? I know how I feel about it.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Mar 26, 2012 at 09:00AM 12 Comments

Kitchen booze? Photo via Seattle Food Geek.

“What’s ‘Kitchen Booze’?” my husband mused the other night, over dinner at the Blind Pig Bistro. I looked up and saw it scrawled on the chalkboard above the menu items. “Oh, that just means that for five bucks you can buy the kitchen staff beers,” explained our server. “You know, as appreciation if you liked your meal.”

Hmmm.

We’d seen a similar item last year on the menu at The Coterie Room —“A six-pack of beer for the crew, $10”—which provoked a rather vivid reaction at our table. “So now a salary and a tip aren’t enough…they need to get hammered too?” said…uh, one of us.

Coterie Room’s owner-chefs, Dana Tough and Brian McCracken, hastened to clarify—letting us know first-off that the beer was for after-hours, from a supply of Olympia they have piled in their walk-in. Then a few months later (apparently ours wasn’t the only opinionated table) they changed the wording from “crew” to “kitchen”—a constituency that isn’t always rewarded with the tips the front-house workers get.

“We didn’t do this to make the customer feel sorry for the kitchen,” Tough and McCracken told me last week by phone. “We just thought it was quirky and fun, providing a way for the customer to be able to communicate directly with the kitchen.”

Inspired by a similar menu offering at The Publican in Chicago, the Coterie gents liked the casual, just-folks tone it lends the fancy, white-on-white comfort food house. Asked how many folks order it, they answered simply, “quite a few.” At Blind Pig our server said they get between one and five orders a night.

And yes—it’s legal, confirms Justin Nordhorn, enforcement chief for the state Liquor Control Board. Provided cooks don’t imbibe on the job or after close. If you’re wondering when exactly that leaves, Nordhorn allows there’s that fuzzy period after the last guest has been served but before the joint is formally closed. (He also admits that policing this might not be the LCB’s very highest priority.)

A lot of folks aren’t bothered by this at all. Many restaurants provide staff with shift drinks—a little tipple for after they’ve clocked out; why not allow a grateful patron to subsidize that? After all, it’s not mandatory. Sure, Coterie Room charges that patron the mark-up cost to do so (as you may surmise, a sixer of Oly does not cost a restaurant $10)—but Tough and McCracken split the remainder among the kitchen staff.

Add to this the red-haired-stepchild status the back-of-the-house has traditionally experienced, compensation-wise. Though often paid a higher hourly wage, the kitchen staff hasn’t typically been offered a share of the tips the minimum-wage-paid front-of-the-house staff collects. That’s the big dough—and the norm until recently hasn’t been to share it with kitchens.

That’s changing, agree chefs, as diners get “foodier” and more interested in the folks making the magic happen. The owners at Coterie Room report that their servers voluntarily put one percent of their food sales into a pot at the end of the night to distribute among the kitchen staff.

Still: It’s one percent. And not the good kind of one percent.

I guess that’s what gets under my skin: Buy-the-kitchen-booze feels like one more way the diner’s asked to put out. If the kitchen staff’s doing a great job—shouldn’t their bosses be paying them more? Famously fair restaurateurs like Tom Douglas already do—something to think about when criticizing Douglas’ pricepoints. It’d be nice if we rewarded our city’s stunning kitchens with something better than a few cans of watery beer. Something they could really use, like, I don’t know— more money.

Snarky? Guilty as charged. It’s just that when I add up the restaurant industry trends over the last half-dozen years (communal tables, no reservations, prix-fixe set meals) I see a pattern: restaurants increasingly serving their own interests over those of their customers.
In the end, that’s the nerve the whole kitchen booze thing hits for me. Pretty soon we’ll be going to restaurants only to stand in a line, get seated with strangers, eat what they tell us to eat, pay for the privilege—then get hit up for a beer.

Oh wait—we already are.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Chefs, Tipping, Critic's Notebook, Blind Pig Bistro, Coterie Room

Music to Dine By

Restaurateurs pour bucks and intention aplenty into interior design, lighting, ingredients, menu, and big-name chefs. But who’s minding the music?

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Jan 09, 2012 at 09:00AM 8 Comments

He’s not the ambiance you’re looking for.

The first Phil Collins song was okay; pleasant and mildly nostalgic. By the time the fourth rolled around we had fallen into an easy-listening coma. We were at Blind Pig Bistro, Charles Walpole’s teensy hideout in an Eastlake strip mall. The food was newfangled and variously intriguing; the unlikely space still radiant with the legacy of its two former occupants, Nettletown and Sitka and Spruce. Fellow diners were card-carrying Capitol Hill hipsters and independent foodie-types who could not possibly have been reacting any better to the insipid soundtrack than we were.

Oh! Change of music! Oh. Sting, circa 1985.

Please.

Was this merely a matter of taste? I asked my tablemates. Like a restaurant critic who doesn’t like eggplant—er, that would be me—unfairly dissing a restaurant for serving it? No, we all agreed, this is different. Restaurants are mood-makers; good restaurants like little theater sets which create a unified world for the diner to inhabit. The best restaurants match music to atmo to food, creating that intangible quality which builds memories: ambiance.

So Sting and Phil Collins in a family restaurant in a mall, perhaps? Ideal. No one’s dissing the musical chops of these talented gentlemen. But in a boutique foodie haunt known for the unique seasonal inventions of a name chef? (A really small foodie haunt?) For such a place, lowest-common-denominator pop is a jarring mismatch to the message of the enterprise. “Is it even possible to enjoy grilled radicchio with pumpkin puree and Moulard duck while listening to ‘If you love someone, set them free…’?” posited a tablemate with something like existential fervor.

The sting (ha) intensified when we reminisced about the turntable Sitka and Spruce owner Matt Dillon used to spin in this very space, playing his own quirky collection of world music and old jazz. Sigh. A few places around town have turntables, like Mulleady’s in Magnolia—but the match I’m talking about isn’t dependent on vinyl. It’s simply a matter of aesthetics. When perfect matches of music to mood to food happen the effect is so seamless you might not even notice.

When they don’t? You notice.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Critic's Notebook, Blind Pig Bistro, Sitka and Spruce

Gettin’ Piggy With It

Seattle restaurateurs love naming their establishments after animals—but one beast tops them all.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Dec 05, 2011 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Photo: Nick Feldman

Owner Kurt Beecher Dammeier poses with the Maximus Minimus pig.

The Seattle area has restaurants whose names honor creatures many and various: there’s an insect (Golden Beetle), a horse (Brave Horse Tavern), a couple of birds (Lark, Crow), a handful of sea creatures (Chinook’s, Steelhead Diner, Flying Fish, Seastar, Kingfish Café) an eel (Bisato), a moose (Señor Moose Cafe) and at least two joints that appear to reference the devastating social problem that is caprine inebriation (Fainting Goat Gelato, Stumbling Goat Bistro).

There’s even the generic: La Bete.

But the recent launch of Blind Pig Bistro in Eastlake reminds us that the far-and-away top, er—dog among restaurant animals is the one made out of bacon. Consider: Pig Iron BBQ, Three Pigs, the Honey Pig, Inner Sanctum of the Temple of Porcine Love at the Swinery, and the late, great Pig ‘n’ Whistle. El Puerco Lloron honors pigs in Spanish; Lecosho in Chinook. (Place Pigalle has a lot more to do with prostitutes than pigs, but that’s academic.)

We even have a mobile restaurant shaped like a pig: the Beecher’s Cheese people’s Maximus/Minumus.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Pigs, Restaurant Names, Critic's Notebook, Blind Pig Bistro

An Opening Date for Charles Walpole’s Blind Pig Bistro

The former Anchovies and Olives chef launches his own kitchen November 3.

Posted by: Allecia Vermillion on Oct 28, 2011 at 02:45PM 0 Comments

Photo: Blind Pig Bistro via Facebook

The fall flurry of openings continues: Charles Walpole says his new restaurant, Blind Pig Bistro, opens its doors on Thursday, November 3 at 5pm.

Walpole and partner Rene Gutierrez have been busy transforming the former Nettletown address (which, before that, was Sitka and Spruce). The blue walls are now a deep red, and an irregularly shaped assemblage of old school chalkboards will display the menu.

The pair met back at the original Mistral, then went on to enter the universe of Ethan Stowell. Walpole was the opening chef at Stowell’s Anchovies and Olives, and Gutierrez most recently worked the front of house at Staple and Fancy.

The menu itself will change daily, but Walpole says it’s all about small plates, particularly fried and crispy pig, and the crudos that helped him build up quite a fan base back at Anchovies and Olives. Blind Pig Bistro bills itself as new American, says Walpole, but expect some Spanish and Mediterranean influences as well.

Add a Comment »

Tags: New Seattle Restaurants, Seattle Restaurant Openings, Blind Pig Bistro, Charles Walpole