I'm Going To Leave My Wife For A Bar(tender)

Those of you who read my various blogs have probably got the sense that I'm a guy who likes booze. I'd go so far as to say that I'm an Insufferable Alcohol Snob; I take great pleasure in the esoteric minutia of the mixologists' craft and cry into my 25 year old sherry wood aged scotch when I contemplate the damage that Applebee's has inflicted to the American palate. Last night, however, I met a man next to whom I'm a mere poseur.

That man is Chris Langston, and he runs 1022 South (formerly the Monsoon Room). The man has a liquor collection like I've never seen. When I go out I'm usually happy to find a gin or bourbon on the menu that I've never had the opportunity to sample, but the offerings at 1022 go well beyond that. Chris has a tremendous number of liqueurs that I've never even heard of, much less tasted. Even his mixers are unusual... "falernum", what's that? When I saw that on the menu my first thought was that it was somehow related to falernian, an archaic type of wine once produced in Rome. But no, turns out that falernum is a type of sugar syrup. All good all around.

But having interesting ingredients is only half the battle... you've got to do something cool with them as well. 1022 has a cocktail menu far beyond the boundaries of what is found in your typical bar. There's a whole stable of champagne-and-something drinks under the heading "Salutary Companions"; I'm particularly fond of the absinthe and champagne ("Death in the Afternoon" IIRC). The menu also has a sense of humor; the "Desultory Companions" section features beer-and-shot combos such as "Hilltop Uber Alles" (Rainer w/ a shot of well whiskey).

So yeah, coolest bar I've been to in awhile.

The Unbearable Lameness of Regional Fairs

We were looking for something to do this weekend, so on a whim my wife and I decided to visit the First Annual Pacific Northwest Mushroom Festival. Oh boy was it was lame. Lame lame lame lame lame. The had an antique fair, and an educational pavilion, and a bounce house and kettle korn and... hey... wait a minute... where's the mushrooms?

The mushrooms were almost an afterthought. They had a stage with a (lame) cooking demonstration, a place where you could buy (oh so exotic crimini and shitake) mushrooms, and a couple of booths in the educational pavilion dealing with mushrooms. And oh yeah... "The Humungous Mushroom Feast"... five booths serving up tastes of (ok to mediocre) mushroom-themed food. If you looked at a map of the grounds the actual mushroom-related space amounted to a small fraction of the whole. They keep that sort of quality up and they're not going to have a Second Annual fair.

Unfortunately, that's about what I've come to expect from regional fairs. When we were living in Rochester they had the Lilac Festival and the Park Ave. Festival and so on, all of which were primarily excuses to sell people gutter guards and magnetic bracelets. The ostensible reason for the fair is generally nowhere to be seen, which is just sad if the fair is free, and somewhat irritating if you have to pay for admission (as was the case with the mushroom festival).

Andaluca Winemaker Dinner Featuring McCrea Cellars

Sorry that posting has been basically non-existent recently. I've been graduating, writing for my other blogs and, to my dismay, not doing a whole lot of anything interesting foodwise. S'alright... the wife and I went to a wine dinner on Friday that merits the telling of the tale.

The dinner was held at Andaluca, a really good, Basque(-ish) restaurant in downtown Seattle. If you find yourself in the area or, heaven forbid, live in there area and haven't ever been, I recommend that you hie yourself there at the earliest opportunity. Wayne Johnson, Andaluca's executive chef, really went all out for this event, serving four (yes, that's right, four) entrees plus a dessert. The meal was accompanied by the generally excellent wine of McCrea Cellars, a winery specializing in Rhone varietals. For whatever reason I generally think of white wines when I think of the Rhone region, but McCrea does very respectable reds as well. Here's the menu:

• King Salmon Salad, 2005 Sirocco, 2007 Sirocco Blanc

  Chef Johnson set the salmon salad up as a test of which pairing works best with fish, white wine or red wine? The wifey and I agreed that the Sirocco Blanc went better with the fish but the Sirocco, though it clashed with the fish, was a better wine overall.

• Pork Medallion with Bacon Wrap, 2007 NV Rose, Ciel du Cheval Vineyards

  The pork was especially well-executed. Any time I try to do bacon-wrapped anything the bacon ends up soggy, but the bacon around the filet was nicely crispy. It was also dressed inventively using rehydrated craisins (gotta remember that for home) and cranberry gastrique¹. Unfortunately, the accompanying rose was just plain boring.

• Duck Confit, 2007 Grenache, Red Mountain

  The presentation of the duck was interesting. Any time I've had confit in the past it's been served on the bone, but Chef Johnson pulled his confit off the bone and shredded it. To his credit the confit was not overly greasy and went well with the Grenache, but the accompanying potatoes were a little bit underdone.

• Lamb Chops with Creamy Morel Sauce, 2005 Syrah, Ciel du Cheval Vineyard

  There's not much to say about the lamb chops other than they were fine and morels are overrated. The syrah, on the other hand, was definitely a keeper.

• Liquid Chocolate Cake, 2007 Roussanne

  This was the only disappointing part of the meal. Chef Johnson had talked up the cake and the accompanying pear compote when he was making his pre-dinner round, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The pears were fine, but they weren't anything special; I've made better at home. The chocolate cake was mediocre; there wasn't much to distinguish it from other incarnations of the same I've had at various restaurants. The Roussanne didn't work well either; it was sweeter than the other wines we had during dinner, but really didn't seem appropriate for dessert.

If I were to make an overall critique of the dinner it would be that it was a little like drinking from a firehose. Four entree-sized portions plus a dessert, even over the space of three hours, bordered on overwhelming. And it was just meat... meat meat meat meat meat... there's nothing wrong with meat per se, but there's plenty of other things to eat as well. The dinner could have been improved by mixing things up a little, maybe tossing in a cheese plate or some amuse bouche instead of one of the entrees.

Also, I feel like the McCrea Cellars crew present at the dinner really missed a sales opportunity. My wife and I wanted to snag bottles of the 2005 Sirocco and the 2005 Syrah, but there wasn't any wine for sale. What's up with that? Did someone decree that selling wine at a wine dinner is declasse?

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1 I had to look up "gastrique" in my copy of Larousse after the fact; it's a hot sauce made from a reduction of sugar and vineagar seasoned as appropriate for the subject matter.

Gari Of Sushi: Tacoma's Best Sushi Joint

Tell me, where do you go when you want

1. High-quality, interesting sushi
2. Decent booze
3. A hip(-ish) atmosphere
4. Somewhere family friendly

Were you to have asked me a couple of days ago I would have told you that such a thing doesn't exist or that, if it did, it was in some crunchy, hippy nirvana like Eugene. Well, it turns out that such a place exists, and in Tacoma, no less.

The wifey and I had heard good things about Gari Of Sushi by word of mouth, but didn't know exactly what to expect. Thinking that a sushi restaurant on 38th couldn't be all that formal¹ we packaged up the wee one and went out to investigate. The parking lot was full when we got there, and with good reason. The sushi was superlative, the atmosphere was great, and they had a pretty good (though somewhat overpriced) booze selection.

Unless they want to continue being a "word of mouth" place these guys need to work on their exterior; you'd hardly have any idea of what's going on inside to look at the place. It looks like your basic, dumpy, not-too-interesting suchi/teriyaki restaurant. They also need a website with some pictures, but I'll try to do justice to the inside. It was bright, but not painfully so, and had lots of random glass art panels hanging on the walls. The booths are large, like they're used to accomodating groups of people out to have a good time, and when we were there they had the TVs tuned to some kind of Japanse obstacle course game show. Comfortable and interesting, but not formal; people hardly even noticed we had a kid with us

But the most important things about a sushi restaurant is, obviously, the food. The had some nice looking bento boxes and the people across the aisle from us got some pretty good looking tonkatsu; so even if you've got non-raw-fish type people with you there's a wide variety of items for them to choose from. I myself stuck with the sushi because they've got one of the most exciting selections I've seen in who knows how long.

They've got a comprehensive selection of sashimi and nigiri for those of you who are purists, but the real interesting bits are their selection of rolls and "speciality" sushi. For some reason or another what is otherwise a very respectable sushi restaurant has allowed many of their rolls to become infected with avocado; negative points for that. However, despite the avocado infestation, there are still plenty of good rolls to be had that show greater than average thought in terms of composition/flavor selection. Here's my assessment of the ones I tried:

• Gari-sama Maki: The name literally means "Mr. Gari's Roll" and, given the restaurant's name, could be intended as an homage to a (possibly mythical) proprietor. But, given that this roll features gari, the name could also be taken as an homage to the ingredient itself. It contains gari, shiso, and some sort of a mild fish (I forget the exact type) and is really quite tasty.
• Scorpion: Jalepeno and fish, well executed. I appreciate that they've this fairly spicy option on the menu.
• Step Family: This is another worthy flavor combination, spicy tuna and ikura (salmon roe).
• Volcano: Spicy scallop with mayonaise IIRC. Also good.

But the real prize is the specialty selection. I ordered two of them, one consisting of quail egg and lobster salad and the other with salmon, shiso, and a couple of other ingredients which escape me. Both were pretty tasty, but they totally could have played up the presentation. The specialty pieces are little works of art, but came on the same plate as the rolls and essentially got lost. If I were the gari folks I'd be serving the speciality pieces on their own little plate, before the rolls were presented, and maybe accompanied by a little palette cleanser of some kind.

Overall the meal was very well priced. My wife and I got booze, a bucket of sushi, some tempura and some fried tofu, for $72 or so. Not bad really though, as I alluded to earlier, their booze menu was a little pricey. They wanted $13 IIRC for a 300ml of Sho Chiku Bai; not horribly expensive, but no bargain either. Overall I definintely think its worth (multiple) repeat visits and highly recommend it to anyone who happens to be in the area.

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1 For those of you not from around Tacoma 38th isn't exactly a high-rent district. The closest restaurants are a couple of (really good, but grungy) burger places.

Booze On Parade: Rogue Spruce Gin

Rogue has been one of my favorite brewers for about as long as I've been a drinker. Not so long ago the wife and I took a trip down the Oregon coast and ended up at Rogue headquarters in Newport. It was definitely like being a kid in a candy store. A lot of the supermarkets where I lieve carry a decent sammpling of Rogue's product line, but they've got the whole shebang at headquarters, including a bunch that I don't believe I've ever seen anywhere else. Did you know that Rogue makes a malt liquor called Dad's Little Helper? It's quite good.

But the real joy of the visit was finding out that Rogue makes distilled spirits as well. We tasted some of the offerings at the House of Spirits and I have to say that I was quite pleased with the quality of the product. We ended up taking home two bottles, the Hazelnut Spice Rum and the Rogue Spruce Gin.

I'm not much of a rum drinker; I like a good rum, but it doesn't get me excited. The hazelnut rum was really too much on the "dessert-y" side for my taste (a lot like Frangelico actually) but my wife, who is a rum drinker, was quite taken by it. The gin, however... I feel quite secure in saying that Rogue Spruce Gin is one of the best gins that I've ever tasted. So let's compare it to a common baseline; I'll use Bombay Sapphire 'cause that's what I have on hand.

Bombay Sapphire is an archetypal gin. You can definitely taste and smell the juniper, but the overall focus is on creating a crisp spirit that does not linger overlong on the palate. In this regard I tend to think of Bombay as vodka's slightly-more-flavorful cousin.

The crew at Rogue don't appear to have been particularly focused on creating a classic gin along the lines of Sapphire. Rogue gin shares a lot with Bombay in both nose and taste, but the Rogue spirit has a richer, more complex flavor. It evokes (presumably spruce) wood rather than juniper berries, but not in a bad way. The taste also lingers on the palette longer than does Sapphire. It's not a "sipping gin" (if such a thing exists), but it does make a mighty fine gin-and-tonic. Grab a bottle if you happen to be in Oregon, otherwise you can get it online from Booze Bros.

Back

I decided that I'd much rather write about food than concentrate on my stupid waste of an MBA. So here I iz... the grand-unified-theory-of-ingredients may have to wait for awhile, since a lot of my free time is being sucked up by another project (and a new child). In the interim I will post about whatever suits my fancy, same as always.

On Indefinite Hiatus

With regrets I'm putting all of my blogs in mothballs for the time being. Between a new job and school I really have no time for them anymore. My hope is that I'll be able to return to them at some point in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Thank you all for your participation.