Nosh Pit

Lentil Soup to Go: Three to Try

Plus: Bread! You know, for dipping.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jun 15, 2011 at 01:41PM 0 Comments

Lentil Soup!

Photo: Michael Hilton via Flickr

Is soup a winter thing? To some. But I like it all year round. And as someone who tries not to eat too much meat, I like how filling and flavorful it is despite the fact that it involves no animal flesh. Flesh is not an appetizing word, sorry. Anyway! Lentil soup. It tastes good! Here are three of my favorites in Seattle.

1. Café Paloma: Paloma in Pioneer Square makes a hearty, lemon-laced lentil soup in the Lebanese tradition. You can get a cup with salad—excellently tart vinaigrette, and just the right amount—or a bowl that comes with toasted pita triangles. Dip those babies in there.

2. Cherry Street Coffee House: Cherry Street makes a sulfur-colored Egyptian-style lentil soup that’s pureed. It’s not served everyday, so call ahead to ensure its existence. Being a puree, it has a uniform flavor, but that uniform flavor has a really subtle peppery note to hold your interest so that you don’t think about hamburgers and how juicy-delicious they are. It comes with slices of toast (ask for olive bread) that have been doused in butter. You can pretend that it’s too much butter but you and I both know you’re secretly thrilled that your toast has been so extravagantly slathered, because when you dip it in the soup: holla. That’s a tasty combo. Besides you’re eating lentil soup for lunch, your gastronomic virtue has already been established.

3. Eltana: Yup, the bagel place on Capitol Hill. Its lentil soup, another Lebanese recipe, is brothy with about as many lentils as there are stars in Cambell’s Chicken and Stars soup. Withered islands of dark-green chard float around on top. Again, the citrus is pretty bold and definitely doing a lot of the heavy-lifting from a flavor perspective. The soup comes with an unadorned Eltana bagel and when you rip off a piece and submerge it into your soup you’ll see, as I have seen, just how absorbent Eltana bagels really are. I mean, wow. Those suckers were made for dipping.

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Tags: Capitol Hill, Pioneer Square, Lunch, Soup, Bagels

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup in Seattle

A sad, soggy forecast looms. Fight back with the ultimate comfort food pairing.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Mar 08, 2011 at 10:15AM 5 Comments

Much tastier than Paxil.

Photo courtesy Whatwereeating.com

In some parts of the world, rain is a sign of spring. Here, however, rain is just a sign that you’re in Seattle, and it’s not June.

To compensate, we excel at being indoor people. Thus the reason everyone in your office saw most of this year’s Oscar finalists and has read (the first 30 pages of) Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Thus grilled cheese and tomato soup still sounding like a good idea as the ides of March approach. Endless winter? Fine. So long as melted cheese and tart tomato are involved.

Here are five places for getting your GCTS on.

1. The new thing in grilled cheese is a grilled cheese menu, with variations that feature novel breads and spreads. Grim’s, the Capitol Hill bar and lounge from the lady who brought you Po Dog and Autobattery, offers three variations on the grilled cheese. There’s one with tomato, basil, prosciutto, and gruyere. There’s another with chipoltle spread, pico de gallo, and cheddar. Finally there is the sandwich with truffled leeks, herbs, and havarti. Tomato soup is sold separately.

2. The winningly rustic Row House Cafe in South Lake Union, a place that will remind you of breakfast joints you ate in while visiting friends in small college towns, is also offering riffs on the classic grilled cheese. Five variations named for monuments and museums (the Colosseum, the Louvre, the Smithsonian, etc.) come on Essential Baking breads such as potato and walnut raisin.

These grandly named sandwiches come with grandly named dipping sauces. The “rustic tomato relish” that accompanies the Smithsonian, for instance, is basically salsa. The tomato soup has a lovely chunky consistency, but true tomato people will find it a tad sweet.

3. I’m not in love with everything on the BOKA lunch menu, but the grilled cheese and tomato soup always works. The sandwich is Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheddar from Wisconsin melted between slices of sourdough, the soup is well-seasoned. That’s kind of all you need on a rainy Tuesday.

4. For those of us who’ve taken our love for comfort food to a whole new level this winter, cutting back a bit may be in order. The happy hour at Oliver’s Twist in Phinney Ridge offers a comfort-food compromise: a teeny little cappuccino cup of tomato soup frothed into a foam, and a mini grilled cheese to go along with it. Isn’t this what we’re supposed to be learning from the French, eating a little bit of really rich food? That and not drinking the entire bottle of red wine with dinner, I think.

5. The Latona Pub serves seriously delicious food, and I don’t even have to qualify that with “for a pub.” One of the best dishes on the menu is the grilled cheese and tomato basil soup. The sandwich is made from sharp white cheddar cheese and Columbia City Bakery’s walnut bread. And as for the tomato bisque that accompanies it, well, I don’t know what witchcraft the Three Pubs people employ to make their many soups, but they are consistently world-rocking, a reminder that comfort food should be as exciting, from a flavor perspective, as it is comforting, from a it’s-been-raining-for-six-freaking-months perspective.

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Tags: Downtown, Lunch, Soup, Comfort Food, Seattle Food Guides

Free Gumbo at Steelhead Diner

On Tuesday, February 1, the Pike Place eatery will give away free cups of NOLA-style stew.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 31, 2011 at 02:26PM 0 Comments

Roux la la: Steelhead Diner is giving away gumbo on Tuesday.

What makes Steelhead Diner’s gumbo so spectacular is the roux. It’s rich and dark, the kind some people refer to as “black roux,” even though it is not black. Generous pieces of juicy chicken and andouille sausage don’t hurt either, nor do lovely wilted hunks of celery and peppers, or the green onion-topped pile of soak-it-up rice that you stir into it. From my Nancy Leson reading I have also learned that Davis uses ham hock in his stock.

I had the pleasure of eating a big bowl of this hearty stew the other day and I can tell you—as someone who spent a week last summer eating her way through the gumbos of New Orleans—it’s a stand-up bowl. Chef Kevin Davis is from that part of the world, after all. He knows what he is doing.

Anyway on Tuesday, February 1, Steelhead celebrates its fourth birthday by offering a free cup of gumbo with every purchase.

Go forth and take advantage.

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Tags: Pike Place Market, Soup, Free Food, Free Stuff

Soup’s On at Joule

Each Sunday the Wallingford eatery ladles the “Best Soup in Town.”

Posted by: Christopher Werner on Jan 28, 2011 at 09:47AM 0 Comments

Joule in Wallingford hosts weekly soup suppers. Photo courtesy Joule.

Regular readers of this blog know soup is sort of our thing right now. It appears Stranger staffers maintain similar sentiments—in this week’s paper a feature titled Soup! catalogs their favorite bowls.

One mention especially worth calling out is the soup-centric Sunday suppers at Joule. A couple weeks back the Wallingford favorite rolled out the winter series (dubbed “Best Soup in Town”, which we’re inclined to believe) happening every Day of Rest until March 27.

The supper costs $25 for adults, $10 for kids, and the menu switches weekly. Past offerings meant pork kimchi stew and cassoulet; coming up January 30 is Hungarian goulash to be followed by “red hot” chili, dungeness crab cioppino, and whole bunch of other promising globetrotters (the menu is available on Joule’s Facebook page). With the soup comes up to seven dishes served family style.

To reserve a seat, call 206-632-1913.

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Tags: Special Dinners, Wallingford, Soup, Sunday Suppers, Joule

Seattle’s Best Soups?

We’re in the thick of soup season, and we all want to know where the good ones are.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jan 14, 2011 at 09:58AM 11 Comments

Korean soft-tofu soup, a current obsession.

Is everyone else as obsessed with soup as I am these days?

I’ve written about some of my favorite Downtown Seattle soups here before—though lately I’ve been digging into a lot of pho as well as sundubu—Korean soft-tofu stew. We keep pimping this recipe for French onion soup at now-defunct Artisanal, because it’s ultra-wonderful.

Other places that have fantastic French onion soup: Place Pigalle, Toulouse Petit, and Le Pichet.

But thanks to a bunch of Seattle soup suggestions posted on The Stranger’s Questionland site, I have some new places to check out. I’ve never ordered soup at Joule, for instance, or Sambar.

While we’re at it, might I suggest, once more, the sopa azteca at El Mestizo? So darn delicious.

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Tags: Soup, Seattle Restaurants, The Stranger, Seattle Korean Food, Pho

Just Eat It: Sopa Azteca at El Mestizo

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Nov 01, 2010 at 10:58AM 1 Comments

Sopa Azteca at El Mestizo.

El Mestizo’s from-scratch tortillas are made to order in the long, skinny open kitchen that stretches along one wall of the restaurant. Fried strips of these float atop the thin, tomato-based sopa Azteca, alongside avocado slices and bobbing islands of gooey white cheese.

The flavors are deep and homey; all soups should be deep and homey, but it is at the finish that you realize this brew is something special. It’s that sort of spicy that is thorough and unfakable—the heat does not hover above the soup’s principal flavors but is totally integrated into them. This takes time and expertise and the attitude at El Mestizo is friendly but not in a hurry. When the staff see you looking around a little wild-eyed, they know that you’ll be fine once your food gets there. Better than fine. You’ll be elated when your food gets there. Even if it takes a while.

A big soul-warming bowl will run you $6 at dinnertime, and should be the start of any meal at this most excellent First Hill hole-in-the-wall.

PS: Margaritas are $4.50 on Mondays at El Mestizo.

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Tags: Soup, First Hill

Talk Soup

You can never have enough soup sources, can you? Here is a roundup of downtown spots that ladle up the good stuff.

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Feb 17, 2010 at 02:08PM 1 Comments

I work downtown and I eat soup. You too? Let’s talk.

Let’s talk about onion soup first, and how the oh-so-civilized Le Pichet makes the real deal just the way they do in Lyon: that means a stewlike consistency with a beefy broth and a no-fear approach to buttery onion content, two massive croutons, and a blanket of thick, gooey gruyere that forms strings from the bowl all the way up to the spoon at your mouth. Suck those up nonchalantly and hope your dining companion pretends not to notice. Place Pigalle also makes a mean onion soup gratinee.

Let’s move on to lentil soup. You’ll encounter one of two types at the Crumpet Shop: French lentil and tomato ginger lentil, they never serve both on the same day. Order a bowl of either with sour cream and cilantro along with a crumpet doused in butter and topped with honey.

Cafe Paloma in Pioneer Square makes a fine lentil soup in the lemony Lebanese style, and they serve it with an ample pile of fresh pita triangles for dipping. By all means, dip. But prepare to exercise patience, the service here is not speedy.

In Belltown, tiny Cafe Lieto (1909 First Ave)—now also a late night biscuits-and-gravy spot on weekends—serves up expectations-defying homemade chicken and dumplings for weekday lunch. Be warned: it sells out fast.

The various Cherry Street Cafes have two or three healthy soups daily, usually some combination of tomato, clam chowder, Egyptian lentil, black bean, or coconut curry with tofu. These come with a side of buttered toast—the olive bread is the best one. Elliot Bay Café tends to have beef stew and vegetarian chili, but we won’t talk about that since it is moving. [UPDATE: I was mistaken. The EBC will continue to operate in Pioneer Square.]

As far as I can tell (please let me know if I’m wrong) the best pho in the area is to be had at Julie’s Garden in Pioneer Square. This recommendation does not necessarily extend to everything on the menu, but the soup is delicious.

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Tags: Downtown, Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, Lunch, Soup