A Star is Reborn
Who needs paparazzi when the calamari is this good?
I took my seat at a table in the rounded room just off the bar, where I could spy the canal through swaying birch trees and an ancient rhododendron. Next to me the private partyers giddily dispatched a plate of the calamari I’d remembered from years back. Still trotting out the same calamari? Sigh. That’s when I noticed the menu was loaded with musty standards—grilled swordfish, linguine alla pomodoro, add a king crab leg to any dish for $30. I resigned myself to the calamari. Meaty, succulent, no breading in sight—these pieces of squid had been grilled to just tender, then tartly offset with an inspired, Mediterranean mess of picholine olives, tomatoes, garlic, watercress, and gremolata. It’s not hyperbole to call this the best calamari in the city. No chef in his right mind would take a stunner like that off his menu.
After that, I ordered with abandon. Seared scallops came on an arugula salad over a buttery ginger sauce, which the chef perfectly modulated. A chunk of grilled halibut on a mango-and-papaya soba noodle salad with green curry was mostly monochrome in hue and predictably flavored, but back-of-the-throat spicy and unassailably delicious. Thai curry penne, Ponti’s longtime signature, bore the polish of years of refinement: charry scallops and shreds of basil over pasta studded with big crab pieces and finished with two dollops of tomato-ginger chutney, the last a piquant spank and a swell contrast with the other fat flavors.
For a watery town, Seattle remains oddly shy of waterside restaurants, especially along the Ship Canal, the most underexploited scenic vista in town.
That sure-handedness, from the proportion of Point Reyes blue cheese to Pink Lady apples in the organic salad to the studied collaboration of sweet notes in the satiny lemon tart, spoke volumes about the steward in the kitchen, never mind his youth. (Chef Van der Bogert, it turns out, apprenticed at Ponti before returning in the big toque.) You can taste care in a kitchen, and this kitchen has it.
Alas, the front of the house needs it. Ever personable, one server nevertheless ground pepper onto a salad unbidden. Another sniffled liquidly through our entire meal (please, dear—that’s what sick days are for). And two others recited a Copper River salmon special without mentioning its price—an annoying omission in any case; a criminal one when the price is $45.
But, oh…that salmon! Briny and unctuous, tweaked with arugula and feisty, sweet Peppadew peppers, imaginatively strewn with Rainier cherries, and accompanied by Yukon Gold potatoes cooked in duck fat—this sumptuous, intelligent plate revealed Van der Bogert as much more than a steward.
As I savored the last molecules of my fish, I overheard that private group beside me gloating over having snagged the entire restaurant for the evening—great for them, irritating for us hoi polloi. Yet Malia’s private party trade, which accounts for some 40 percent of his business, has allowed Ponti to remain viable in the face of fickle public appraisal, sort of like Kathleen Turner taking off her clothes on Broadway.
As I eavesdropped I learned that the guest of honor that night was himself a restaurateur who had rejected his own establishment in order to host his friends at Ponti. Of course he did, I thought. The lady’s a classic.
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