We gave it our best. Over the next few happy weeks we savored a venerable chocolate cake, featherweight cookies of various buttery persuasions, crackly profiteroles oozing profoundly vanilla housemade ice cream, a spicy pumpkin cake drizzled with honey and festooned with pumpkin seeds.
And it wasn’t just the dessert list we explored. We devoured quiches in which pancetta, sun-dried tomatoes, and fontina combined into an improbably creamy filling inside more of that perfect crust; lunchtime sandwiches in which Essential Baking Company bread was packed with thick-sliced roast beef and soaked through with blue-cheese sauce and horseradish aioli.
And it was all exactly right. Okay, the sandwich was a little soggy. But I adored it anyway, all by myself over lunch one day. There was the sandwich—hugely generous for its $12 price tag—along with a heap of subtle, savory, refreshing cole slaw and a pretty flourish: a cornichon and a ruffle of sweet pepper on a toothpick. A meaningful embellishment, harmonizing as it did with the rest of the plate. No thoughtless garnishing here. This Ba Culbert is, above all else, careful.
Yes, she makes delish comfort food. Yes, they’re classics—tweaked. Yes, the food is buoyant with seasonal freshness. And no, it’s not always perfect, as the occasional overcooked joint or watery soup demonstrate. But what really stands out in this most comfortable cusp of Belltown is a chef who consistently takes the extra step to gratify her guests, in every area from complimentary bread (a dying convention, folks), to glorious housemade salad dressings, to waiters whose brows will knit in sympathetic focus while they troll the list to find you the perfect wine, to soups clearly conceived in the mind of a dessert maker—like the curried roast-cauliflower puree topped with caramelized apple and walnut praline.
And all that care—in this underpriced, underheralded, and most lived-in of cafes—is rare, getting rarer, and a genuine thrill to discover. Simple as that.
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Published: January 2010
good job Ba .Mitch
way to go Ba!