Editor's Note

New and Improved Seattle Met

Wed, 22 May 2013 09:00:00 -0700

This month, Seattle Met’s City Guides, the pages devoted to restaurant and event listings, have a new look.

The Dining Out section begins as always with a review of a new and talked-about restaurant written by Kathryn Robinson, one of the very few remaining critics in town who dines anonymously, visits unannounced, and pays for her meals. In addition to our frequent features Dish Deconstructed (a chef’s explanation of ingredients and methods in a signature entree) and Pour (trends; profiles of Seattle distillers, brewers, and vintners; anything drinkable), food and drink editor Allecia Vermillion will contribute to a menu of bar reviews, bargain eats, infographics, and a column called News Feed. The food team has a well-deserved reputation for breaking news on our Nosh Pit blog, so News Feed will capitalize on its most popular posts with a roundup of openings, restaurant news, and culinary events. (Even the competition refers to our bloggers as “scoopsters.”) Lastly, in place of rotating capsule reviews, we’ll draw from the hundreds of restaurant recommendations at seattlemet.com to provide seasonal and themed lists—for June there are restaurants with views and outdoor patios (fingers crossed for sun!).

As of this issue, On the Town introduces more ways to take part in Seattle’s rich abundance of arts and entertainment. Arts editor Laura Dannen, with the help of assistant editor Seth Sommerfeld, will still highlight the top events in Met Picks, and now, Culture Calendar will deliver an essential guide to getting an arts fix every single day of the month. We’ll be tracking shows that are sure to sell out, one-night-only concerts, breakout performances, theater and dance festivals, movies and TV shows tied to Seattle. The section will be salted with web favorites such as interviews with local performers, artists’ tools of the trade, events under $25, sports, and more. And of course, a comprehensive calendar of event listings will be available online, updated daily.

As further demonstration of our commitment to Seattle’s cultural life, Greenroom will continue to appear every month carrying profiles of artists and behind-the-scenes stories, and in Mudroom our reporters will check in with prominent performers passing through town— don’t miss the chat with 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan, who’s coming to the Neptune on June 14. We’re also beefing up our arts coverage with an increased emphasis on features: This month it’s an oral history of Almost Live, the sketch comedy show that birthed Bill Nye the Science Guy, outshone Saturday Night Live, and defined Seattle’s sense of humor for 15 years.

One more thing. The end of June marks one year since Seattle Met joined forces with the political website PubliCola. It was a precarious time for its editors, Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett, and even though the magazine’s desire for more substantial political coverage and their need for a home seemed the basis for a no-brainer partnership, I’m not sure any of us could have predicted how well things would work out. Today, their relentless reporting on the mayor’s race, the legislature, and civic issues from aPodments to the arena has grown our web traffic exponentially with a vocal, engaged readership and made Seattle Met the city’s most significant source for civic life, while acquainting PubliCola’s loyal following of political nerds with wider swaths of the city. Case in point: We’ve scheduled a mini festival of political films selected and introduced by the mayoral candidates at the Northwest Film Forum in July. Happy anniversary, PubliCola at Seattle Met.

Published: June 2013

Nature and the City of Seattle

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Image: Jane Sherman

The view out my office window perfectly captures Seattle’s split personality. At eye level, the moss-splotched concrete of the viaduct’s upper deck. Beneath the elevated roadway, a tantalizing, woefully narrow sliver of choppy waters on Elliott Bay, the mid-deck of an Argosy cruise ship, and a few treetops screening the upper midsections of Elliott’s Oyster House and Pier 54. Looming above the highway against a cloud-swept blue sky, the half circle of the Great Wheel makes its lazy rotation up and over toward the horizon. The viaduct stands between any glimpse of ferries crossing to Bainbridge or the Olympic peaks beyond, but I know they’re there, and I’m forever mentally knocking down the viaduct, imagining an unencumbered panorama.

This collision of vital urban activity and glorious natural beauty is exactly what inspires James Corner, whose New York–based firm snagged the contract to redesign Seattle’s one-and-three-quarter-mile downtown waterfront. He embraces the challenge to honor Seattle’s industrial history while drawing connections to the water and mountains and environment. That juxtaposition is also what drew Lawrence W. Cheek to trace the city’s waterfront on foot over three days, beginning in Burien and winding north all the way to Carkeek Park. Assuming it’s extremely unlikely that many people will undertake such a walk—better to just read about it here—Allison Williams has collected up a whole bunch of ways to eat, shop, play, and stay for a waterfront fix here.

Those of us lucky enough to live in Seattle, of course, celebrate the man-meets-nature ideal as a daily matter of course. No matter what neighborhood you call home, we’ve trained our binoculars on it—bringing you our most detailed annual real estate review ever.

Living here is beautiful—but how we coexist with this soggy, verdant ecosystem remains the essential question before us. In a wrenching glimpse of that tension, Matthew Halverson recounts the story of one particular tree on the Olympic Peninsula, a 340-year-old Douglas-fir that had survived two major fires and avoided loggers’ chain saws for the last 150 years only to meet its demise for all the wrong reasons. It’s a tragic tale of greed and loss, an inescapable reminder of how much we have to cherish in the place we live.

Published: May 2013

The Best New Bars Are Restaurants

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Image: Kyle Johnson

To think that one of the most interesting restaurant trends of the moment can be traced to a 65-year-old state liquor law. Before 1948, the only way to (legally) get a mixed drink in Washington was to join a private bottle club where you could bring your own hard liquor—provided it was purchased from a state liquor store. Enforcement was laughable. Then voters approved Initiative 171, which allowed any establishment serving full meals to serve liquor by the drink—the temperance--minded goal being that if you ate and drank, it’d promote moderation and reduce drunkenness. And so for years, including and well beyond the time I became old enough to imbibe, mixed drinks were served at hotels and restaurants where grownups sipped pricey cocktails in dark, men’s-clubby lounges—which goes a long way toward explaining why I guzzled beer and danced away my postcollege years at the Rainbow Tavern.

The state’s mandatory ratio of food sales to hard liquor sales went away in 1995, but today any restaurant that serves hard alcohol must meet these requirements: have at least eight complete meals served at least five hours of the day between 8am and 11pm at least three days a week. The menu has to include an entree and a side dish. Lucky us. Over the last decade, artisan cocktails, small plates, and culinary innovation have led to an explosion of a new kind of restaurant-slash-bar. (We’re still trying to figure out what to call these places.)

Our restaurant critic, Kathryn Robinson, has been onto this trend for a while, but when she and our food and drink editor, Allecia Vermillion, started making a list of bars with advanced cocktail programs, craft liquors, and sophisticated entrees and noshes, we found the phenomenon was even more widespread than we thought. At the very least—in part due to the vagaries of the state liquor laws, in part thanks to the city’s plethora of creative bartenders, distillers, and chefs—Seattle can claim to be at the forefront of the movement.

Also in this month’s magazine are dozens more innovators—in politics, the arts, technology, media, style—whose ideas and influence are propelling the city into the future. You’ll meet an author who makes us see ourselves in a new light, an attorney who drove the legalization of marijuana, chart-topping musicians who challenge the meaning of hip-hop, a corporate executive who prizes both profit and environmental conscience, a public health officer who designed flu protocols for the nation, and more. Just as with the, er…distillaurants, the list is rich and diverse and inspiring. A toast to all!

Published: April 2013

The Riot Stuff

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Erik Stuhaug

One hundred years ago, when the Ballets Russes debuted The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky’s dance of pagan ritual and sacrifice set to the unearthly noise of Igor Stravinsky’s score, the audience practically started throwing chairs at the first alien note of the bassoon.

Hard to imagine a similar riot breaking out today. But all spring, a centennial celebration of that revolutionary work at the University of Washington promises to challenge audiences and thrill us anew. In January, in sold out houses at Meany Theater, Compagnie Marie Chouinard danced a raw, primal reimagining of Rite of Spring accompanied by a stirring performance of the student musicians of the UW Symphony Orchestra. It’s that kind of excitement—and controversy—that arts editor Laura Dannen sought out for our survey of the spring season, with events that include UW’s young jazz trumpeter Cuong Vu, an art exhibit reflecting the experiences of East African girls wearing the hijab in Seattle schools, a Taming of the Shrew set in a trailer park.

You’ll find lots more coming up in Seattle’s cultural landscape to stir the passions and challenge cultural assumptions and in a guide to the season’s most festive parties and galas here.

If you’re hungering for a more far-flung cultural adventure, you’ll meet some notable locals who travel for work. The idea for our cover story was sparked by the launch (and sadly, for the moment, unlaunch) of Boeing’s Dreamliner and international airline companies adding Seattle to their flight plans in the past year. We started to wonder: Who’s on that flight to Dubai, anyway? And what does she do when she gets there? (Answer: food and beverage consultant Kathy Casey, who you might find in a luxury shopping mall bar sipping a “super weird” blended drink of avocado and date with rose on top.) The result is a tantalizing journey into the lives of jet-setting Seattleites—all of them shared their favorite sights and secret haunts in destinations that are just one direct flight away.

For another whiff of the way we are lighting up the cultural map, the recently passed I-502, legalizing possession of marijuana, places Washington state on the cutting edge of a whole new industry. Public forums sponsored by the state liquor control board have been packed with growers, sellers, and users who want to help shape policy. And there are some mighty interesting opportunities: The liquor board has posted RFPs for expertise on “how marijuana is grown, cultivated, harvested, cured and processed. How marijuana is infused into food and beverages. How marijuana should be packaged, labeled, transported and sold at a retail level.” And the stuff needs to be tested for quality, ingredients, and safety, as senior editor Matthew Halverson learned in a harrowing firsthand experience. Yes, he inhaled.

Published: March 2013

Fish Tale

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Kyle Johnson

You’d think, given our gastronomic obsessions with local sourcing, organic produce, happy chickens, and sustainable everything, that it’d be easy to know when and whether to eat fish and shellfish. After all, we live surrounded by oceans and rivers, where salmon and crab and oysters shape the signature identity of Pacific Northwest cuisine.

But we also face the reality that ocean acidification is compromising our oysters’ ability to make their shells, which prompted one Willapa Bay grower to open a hatchery in Hawaii and inspired former governor Christine Gregoire to create a panel and launch an initiative to tackle acidification in Puget Sound. Uber restaurateur Tom Douglas has joined a movement to prevent the development of Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska. The site may be rich with copper, but it’s home to what Douglas calls “one of the last great remaining salmon fisheries on earth” and the livelihood of many a Seattle fisherman. Add to that reports of a killer virus discovered in BC salmon farms, depleted tuna stocks around the world, harmful fishing methods that scoop up everything in the oceangoing food chain, and the scandal that convoluted supply chains allow cheap, farm-raised tilapia to be mis-labeled as snapper. It’s enough to put you off your omega-3s.

So we were heartened, as we ate our way around town and researched sourcing to bring you this issue dedicated to the pleasures of eating seafood in all its varieties, that we found so many chefs and purveyors and advocates who insist on high-quality sustainable fish and shellfish.

Despite being the home of the historic Ivar’s Acres of Clams, Seattle doesn’t have the kind of classic fish house with lobster bibs and butcher paper–covered tables like Legal Seafoods in Boston or Fog Harbor Fish House in San Francisco. What we do have are myriad restaurants with extraordinary fish dishes on the menu, from high-end destinations to ethnic joints. And more on the way. Eric Donnelly, whose encyclopedic menu of seafood at Toulouse Petit made our list, plans to open a restaurant in Fremont this spring devoted to globally sourced sustainable seafood: RockCreek will feature local crab and mussels as well as underappreciated mackerel and sardines from lower in the food chain. Plus, we were pleasantly surprised to learn how tightly managed native Washington fish like salmon or steelhead are. Even farm-raised fish are getting an ecological makeover. There’s a new salmon operation in these parts, SweetSpring, which has earned a Super Green ranking from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch.

So, if you’re anything like me and have been slightly paralyzed by trying to dine and shop conscientiously, there’s plenty to celebrate—and eat.

Published: February 2013

Good Job Hunting

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0800

Image: The Good Girls Revolt Cover Jacket

The practices of the enlightened companies profiled in this issue make the ’60s and ’70s at Newsweek sound like a singularly dark age. A book that came out last summer, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of “Newsweek” Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, tells the story of a group of women fact-checkers who filed a class-action suit to obtain more equal employment. It’s almost inconceivable to imagine now, but at Newsweek in those days the editors—and most of the writers and reporters—were all men, and the researchers by and large were women.

The author, Lynn Povich, became the first woman to be promoted to senior editor there—but only after two lawsuits and five years. And even after that, the gender balance in the top jobs remained lopsided. I was hired there as an editorial secretary five years after that, and one of my duties was to deliver coffee every morning and afternoon and a Reuben sandwich once a week to the editor I worked for. To be fair, he’d told me that fetching his lunch would be part of the job, and, if I felt it was beneath me, I could decline the offer. I didn’t know then that the job would be the first step to an editorial career—I was just happy to be making a little more money.

The era Povich writes about was certainly a time of disruption in the workplace, and many of the women at Newsweek were “good girls” with English degrees who had no roadmap and few mentors or role models for forging a career path.

Today, there are infinitely more ways to answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” High school students call Seattle Met to line up job shadows as part of their course work. College students attend career fairs and networking events like the mentor lunch I attended last fall for liberal arts majors at the University of Washington. And there’s the Internet. A young Seattle company called Inside Jobs, started by a former director of biz dev at Amazon, provides a kind of online career planning service and community. If I were looking for careers today, instead of accidently falling into a secretarial job at a magazine, I could select from a menu of favorite subjects in school, things I like to do in my spare time, the kind of hours I want to work, or the causes I care about, and voila, several pages of appropriate job descriptions would pop up.

And of course, there are internships and Seattle has some wonderfully surprising ones, as reported by our own team of interns. Imagine helping to develop technology for the Kinect or getting to take candid photos of giraffes at the zoo or being a beer taster for a local brewpub. Where do I apply?

Published: January 2013

Seattle Met’s Designing Men

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:00:00 -0800

At a magazine, the relationship between the words on the page and the photography, illustration, and typography has ultimate power to get a reader to start reading. Which means that on a magazine staff, the relationship between the word people and the art people is critical. And, because they speak two different languages, often fraught. Knowing that is what has made the past two years feel so charmed in the halls of Seattle Met.

At the beginning of 2011, we suddenly found ourselves without an art director (having lost him to pursue fame and fortune in New York City). André Mora, a freelance designer who’d returned to the Northwest (having already achieved fame and fortune in New York City), agreed to fill in while we rebuilt the art department.

Long story short: He never left. André’s elegant design aesthetic, deep knowledge of typography, and commitment to the city of Seattle would have been enough. But the best part is, as a designer with a BFA in writing, literature, and publishing, he eloquently transcends the word-picture divide. (Plus, he’s really fun to have around.)

But wait, there’s more. For his second in command, André hired Chris Skiles, a Houstonian who came to Seattle by way of Maui, where he’d single-handedly art directed the alternative newspaper, turning out witty, colorful issues every week. Chris too has been a dream colleague, and for over a year he infused the front-of-the-book Mudroom section with a vibrant sense of play and gave lively treatment to top entertainment events, as well as many arresting feature layouts. Sadly, Chris left us in the middle of putting together this issue of Seattle Met. We’ll really miss him and his work—but at least he’ll still be one of us. He’s heading up the design for a new publication inside the company and we can’t wait to see it when it launches next spring.

In the meantime, this year-end issue represents the lovely fruit of many collaborations between designer and editors, from the cover story decked out in the style of classic holiday film posters to the photograph of the many faces of Manny’s Pale Ale founder Manny Chao to the irreverent look back at 2012.

Shanik Serves Art on a Plate

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:23:00 -0700

We’ve been waiting for this.

Vij’s in Vancouver, BC, has been hailed by The New York Times as “easily among the finest Indian restaurants in the world.” My first time was a June evening three years ago when I went with our senior editor James Ross Gardner to Vancouver to serve on a magazine panel (scarily titled Grilled Editors). Vij’s doesn’t take reservations, and even though we arrived at 5:30 just as it opened, we were already way too late to get a table.

We perched outside next to a concrete pond with floating candles and sipped a fizzy, gingery drink with all the other slightly late comers, thinking grumpily: This better be worth it. But when a server threaded through the waiting diners with the first of several rounds of truly spectacular finger food, we forgot to be annoyed. Dinner, when we ordered at last, was off-the-charts memorable. A person could get a food high on the lamb “popsicles,” tiny lamb racks afloat in a heady curry of fenugreek leaves, turmeric, garlic, and cream.

When our Nosh Pit bloggers ask what restaurants Seattle needs, Vij’s dominates the list: “Whenever I am in Vancouver—which isn’t often enough—I wait hours to get my fix. Every time Vij comes around to each table to check on guests, I tell him personally that he MUST come to Seattle,” wrote one commenter. Who could be surprised to learn that on any given night one in 10 diners at Vij’s is a Seattleite?

So when Seattle Met food editor Allecia Vermillion broke the news online that Vij’s wife, kitchen manager, and recipe developer, Meeru Dhalwala, would be opening Shanik in South Lake Union, people went kind of nuts. One reader posted: “OMFG! Vij’s is my all-time favorite restaurant anywhere on the planet!” And others: “life-changing Indian food,” “cue Hallelujah chorus.” (They’re eager to help, too: “Meeru...if you need taste testers...”)

Here in Seattle, where we rightly revel in our foodscape of groundbreaking chefs, award-winning restaurants, and locally sourced ingredients, Shanik will catapult us into gustatory territory that puts us on the map in a whole new way.

So yes, we’ve been waiting. The project has been under way for months, and Allecia followed along as Dhalwala interviewed kitchen staff, directed the design, and developed recipes. Dhalwala brings an extraordinary artistry, even genius, to her cooking. At the risk of sounding like “a total food whacko,” she shared with Allecia an epiphany she’d had during her morning jog. The fading pink and blue flowers and dark green leaves of hydrangeas along her route inspired a colorful new curry dish on her fall menu. “It was just delicious with my spice combination and gorgeous to look at. My front managers were in shock.”

We’ll get in line for that.

Booked Up

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Ipatov/Shutterstock

As 40 million of you know, the soft-porny best seller Fifty Shades of Grey is set in Seattle. In its original incarnation, the story appeared on a fan fiction site for the panting followers of the Twilight series. In book form, the names have been changed to protect the copyrights, and instead of high schooler Bella being tortured by her attraction to Edward the vampire in Forks, it’s Anastasia the coed who’s all tied up in knots by Christian the sexy sadist in a penthouse at Escala. Conveniently, Seattle also happens to be home to Sharon Cumberland, a literature professor at Seattle U whom you’ll meet here. Her own forays into fan fiction (she has a thing for Antonio Banderas) led her on a scholarly exploration of why readers go crazy for this stuff.

The Fifty Shades series, by a British writer who sets foot in Seattle for the first time on a book tour this fall, hardly contributes to a Northwest literary tradition. But other current books, by people who actually live here, do. The sense of place in these novels directly acts on the characters, often with surprisingly comic results. Summer’s hot book, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the epistolary novel by a transplant from LA, wickedly skewers Seattle’s self-absorbed high-tech culture and our penchant for self-important indignation over the slightest of irritations. Just published is the second book of the Wildwood Chronicles, a darkly enjoyable children’s series by Colin Meloy of the Decemberists and illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis (see here). The settings will seem strikingly familiar to anyone who knows Portland’s Forest Park and that city’s network of underground tunnels. And coming in October is Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, reviewed here. Substance abuse, poverty, and death among Native Americans in the Northwest figure prominently—hardly cheerful subjects, but always leavened by Alexie’s sardonic touch.

If these books happen to inspire you with regional wanderlust, the cover story has some suggestions for, shall we say, a literary pilgrimage. In addition to our picks for top trips and tours, places to eat and sleep, and things to see and do, we’ve bestowed Seattle Met’s Northwest Travel Awards on five independent bookstores in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia. What better place to begin a journey.

Editor’s Note: Drinks on Us

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:40:52 -0700

This is the fifth year running that Seattle Met has celebrated 100 top wines produced in our region. If this year is like previous ones, we will be awash in comments from wine lovers who question our methods. Why are some highly respected wineries not even mentioned? How can the palate of one person, Sean P. Sullivan of the Washington Wine Report, be given so much authority to name the wines? Aren’t point systems worthless? Glad you asked.

In creating our top wine list, we took an approach of inclusion. In 2011, 739 Washington wineries produced 12 million cases of wine. All of the wineries, through the newsletter of the Washington State Wine Commission, were invited to submit wines for consideration. Participating wineries were self-selecting and paid no fees to enter: All told, we received 531 wines from 195 wineries.

As for the single taster vs. panel of experts debate, there are pros and cons to both. A tasting panel might guarantee that a winning wine has broader appeal, but broader appeal can also mean a more conventional wine. A single taster can be compared to your favorite movie or restaurant critics: You get to know their sensibilities. Whether you share Sean’s taste in wine or not, you can make your own informed choices based on his reviews.

When it comes to scoring, the widely used 100-point system is as loved by some as it is loathed by others. Yes, the difference between a 93-point and a 92-point wine may be minute and debatable, but the system allows the taster to set certain criteria and follow them, which means that each wine was treated as fairly as possible. What’s not debatable is that Washington is producing a lot of great wine and we’re here to tell you about some of the best.

In other drinking news, we’ve all been wondering: Wasn’t booze supposed to be cheaper now? The Power Lines piece on page 45 about the unexpected impact of the new liquor law marks the first appearance in these pages of our exciting new partnership with the editors of the political blog PubliCola, Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett. I’ve been a fan of PubliCola’s commitment to original
reporting and healthy civic debate since its beginnings in 2009, so I’m thrilled to welcome Josh and Erica into the Seattle Met family. You’ll be seeing their work in these pages every month, on the newly rechristened blog PubliCola at Seattle Met (publicola.com), and at regular events like the fizzy debate they hosted in July over the SoDo arena proposal.

Lastly, we’re more than a little excited around here. We have a new website! The all new supercharged seattlemet.com, now better, faster, and easier to use!

Why yes, that was the sound of champagne corks popping.