The Never-Ending Txori
The space is small, the plates are tiny, and the experience is the full-meal deal.
Prevailing winds at Txori blow a casual, cooperative spirit, so service here makes an organic sense: Any server might drift by to take your order, and whichever server happens to walk past the endearingly low-tech corkboard on the counter might deliver it. The foie gras was potent and lush, tempered by its fruity drizzle. Even the tortilla—the starchy workhorse of any tapas repertoire—was, with its forthright flavors and pretty lacework of garlicky alioli (a Spaniard’s aioli), leagues better than the insipid versions I had sampled at Ocho in Ballard and, weeks before, here at Txori. The tiny bar with the efficiency kitchen had found its stride.
Which does not mean one should come to Txori expecting Harvest Vine, Jiménez’s flagship in Madison Valley. They both feature small plates, Txori’s microscopically so, but the two entities are night and day—Harvest Vine being a bona fide destination, with grander ingredients and higher price tags. By contrast, Txori (Basque for “bird”) is his co-owner Carolin Messier de Jiménez’s love song to the simple all-day nosh bars found across her husband’s native San Sebastian.
I had just finished savoring my bocadillo sandwich, stuffed with well-lubed pulled pork on Columbia City Bakery rolls (and, at $4.25, the downtown lunch deal of the century), when still another genial server—a sweet young man with heavy-rimmed glasses and a crooked grin—dropped over to inquire into the state of my appetite. (“You’ve got to get the octopus in the lagrima olive oil,” he gushed. “When I first came I ate it every single day for three months.”)
Has Seattle’s latest foodie fixation just trained me to see pork belly everywhere I go?
And that’s how meals grow at Txori, like Topsy, according to the incremental dictates of one’s appetite. It’s the most current way to eat, pitch-perfectly attuned to the new ethos of sustainable consumption, within the Old World atmosphere Jiménez succeeded in importing from San Sebastian: A place where folks of all ages and stations forge big, untidy community over elemental bites and drinks both upmarket and down.
Which, minus the kids, is just how Txori felt as my evening ripened. (Txori is licensed to allow children—Jiménez made sure of that—so it’s too bad Belltown doesn’t have any.) It’s the kind of bar where real life bubbles and swirls around you. Ms. Dazzling Smile and Mr. Crooked Grin suppressed giggles as they groped beneath a tablecloth for a lumpy crumb. A friend of the house walked in, hugged Carolin, then burst into tears. “Cava—we need some cava here,” murmured Carolin to the barkeep. One table over, Mr. Uptight Accountant—glasses off, tie now AWOL—had traded his New Yorker for a sumptuous companion, her tattoo advancing and receding every time she reached for a bite.
And I saw it all through the bottom of my glass of pitilingorri, red wine with orange soda, a San Sebastian favorite that mimics sangria in a poor-man’s kind of way—more or less so depending on the hour of the evening—and which was conspiring with the ambient vitality to make me sated and tipsy. When Ms. Ponytails came over with my check—a mere $38—I burst out laughing.
READ MORE RESTAURANT REVIEWS.
Published: July 2008
