It’s official. MistralKitchen is finally open. Stroll by the restaurant’s spanking-new South Lake Union digs and you find legions of food fanatics devouring the ambitious four-kitchen fare. What’s packing them in? The veggies, for one, says chef/owner William Belickis.

I really enjoy using a little bit of fresh juice in almost all of my vegetable preparations, the most obvious one being lemon juice. Though sometimes I like to add a little bit of lime juice, orange juice, or coconut water—or even passion fruit juice. We use squeeze bottles that are about the size of an eye dropper, and we just cht cht cht, a couple of little drops. That’s it. Or I’ll take a piece of a lemon and just squeeze some juice into the dish.

We get our fruits from Frank’s Produce . The fresh juices have these nice fruity flavors, but they also have acidity. I like to cook with a lot of olive oil, and sometimes a little bit of butter. It’s really easy to deaden the flavor when you add these fats because fats tend to coat the tongue. Then the flavor just goes by because the fat is already soaked into your taste buds. So those fresh, tart juices tend to break through the fat and wash it away.

There’s this really famous winemaker, Dr. Loosen, who describes a similar effect in his winemaking. You have these very, very, very, almost greasy flavors because some of his wines are so ripe. But he makes sure that they are very high in acid. He describes the acid as little daggers cutting through the greasy flavors and breaking them up into little shards, which makes the whole experience feel so much bigger, brighter, more luscious. So it’s not just something that’s sitting on your tongue that you’re tasting; it fills your whole head.


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Read more tips from Carlos Caula, Maria Hines, Holly Smith, Brian Parks, Eric Donnelly, and Tom Douglas.