Elf Sternberg

Omaha and I had a chance to go out for the evening since Kouryou-chan was doing an overnight and Storm was at her mother's. We chose to hit Mashiko's, the "sustainable sushi" place in West Seattle. We were feeling moderately adventurous, so we got the "moderately adventurous" five-course dinner for two.

It started the traditional miso soup and an appetizer of rainbow trout sashimi in ponzu oil and mirin, with shredded daikon and English cucumber. Then poke' salad (Hawaiian seaweed salad) with sashimi.

The next course was sushi of wild coho, raw scallop, albacore tuna and black cod w/spicy mayo. Then rice rolls of steamed asparagus with tuna on top, and pickled tsukemono (a purple cucumber native to Japan) with broiled sardines, topped with a dressing of miso and scallions.

Dessert was jasmine creme brulee garnished with a sprig of mint.

I also had the Yoegahi Dry Sake, which was fabulous. I can taste the difference between cheap sake and good sake, and this was pretty damned good sake, for a hot sake.

Mashiko's is different every time we go there. It's always fabulous... fun, low-key, but it always manages to feel special and the food is entirely awesome.

Yum!

Omaha and I went out to one of our favorite restaurants, Mashiko, also known as SushiWhore, and the sole proprietorship of dedicated chef Hajime Sato. Although it's one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, Omaha and I love it for its challenging "chef's choice" menus and for its dedication to using only sustainable fishery products.

In the evening, after an exquisite meal of sushi, sashimi, fried fish, and delicate seaweed salad, Omaha and I were on our way out to pay the bill when I happened to notice something. Hajime-san includes with every receipt a copy of the Monterey Bay Guide, a color-coded guide to the fishes that are currently sustainable, in categories of "best," "good," and "avoid." The very first item on the "avoid" is ankimo, also known as monkfish.

I asked the waitress about that, because right above my head, on the chalkboard above the sushi chef bay, was "New! We have ankimo!" and a price per serving for this delicacy. She said that Hajime-san went out of his way to only buy from sustainable fisheries, so the Monterey guide was only a general one.

Just as Omaha and I were finishing up paying for the meal, Hajime-san himself came out from behind the sushi bar and gave us a 20 minute and rather impassioned about how he had personally found a fishery off the coast of Georgia that did not use trawling lines for monkfish, worked in one area, and was working with biologists to make sure that he wasn't getting fish from a declining source.

He then went on to explain how the big sustainability groups were being co-opted by big buisinesses, and how it was becoming impossible to get certified as sustainable or organic unless you were the size of McDonalds or Whole Foods, both of which had recently received certification for practices he felt weren't entirely legitimate. Those groups had, however, the cash necessary to throw at unspecified certification groups and could buy a lot of good will from those groups. The same issue arises with land farming. Hajime-san said that he went out of his way to purchase only from sustainable sources, that he personally visited as many small-scale fisheries as he could to ensure he was buying only from sustainable outlets, and that he did so even if those fisheries were too small to make the necessary donations

It was surprising that he took that much time out from behind the kitchen to make his case that he was doing the best he can, and if he didn't always abide by the sustainibility certification rules, it was because the rules were blunt instruments that could sometimes be corrupted by money, influence, and the appearance but not the substance of doing good. It was a pretty solid case.

Omaha and I can't afford to eat at Mashiko's often, and to the best of my knowledge there are exactly two steakhouses that bill themselves as sustainable: one in Sydney, Australia, and the other in Oregon, USA, so tacking other dining experiences with remotely similar expectations is probably unwise. But it was good to hear his case, I appreciated it, and it encourages me to eat with him more often.

The other day, we took Stormy out to dinner for her 14th birthday. I am so not ready for her to be 14. We went to her favorite restaurant, a Japanese hibachi steakhouse she loves, where we feasted and gave her gifts and had a good time.

As I was sitting there, I listened to the (sadly, too loud) radio playing overhead. Like most restaurants, I assumed they were commercial subscribers to XM or some other network that provides music for businesses. But the mix was bizarre: Lady Gaga, Bonnie Pink, Mariah Carey, and Ayumi Hamasaki, all in a row. It sounded a lot like the pop/jpop playlist on my iPod.

"The music, what channel is this?" I asked the waitress.

"It's one of the waitress's ipods," she told me.

Omaha and I stopped by the Racha Noodels and Thai Cuisine at Queen Anne, which used to be one of our favorite restaurants when I worked in that neighborhood. It's still fine, but I think our tastes have changed.

Omaha noticed immediately that very few of the patrons were of Asian cast, which is always a warning: if a restaurant describes its ethnicity, but its patronage does not, reconsider eating there. Racha seems to cater to the upper-middle-class whites who live in Queen Anne, and not to, well, people who grew up eating Thai food.

That would explain the clash-of-cultures "New York Steak Curry" mash-up I had. Great steak doesn't need that much extra flavoring; it's supposed to be an experience on its own. This steak was pretty good, but it was disappearing under the massamun curry flavoring. There wasn't a whole lot of vegetable with it, either, which annoyed me.

Omaha reported that her yellow curry with chicken was fine, but otherwise unremarkable. Conversations from the tables around us indicated that the resataurant was full of people going either to the Seattle Men's Chorus event at the opera house, or to the Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," showing in the theater next door.

Omaha and I have now twice been to Mashiko's, better known as SushiWhore.com, the official restaurant of Hajime Sato, one of Seattle's premier Japanese chefs.

SushiWhore is in West Seattle, so it's clientele includes a lot of Alki Beach and Upper Peninsula types, so naturally the place is chock full of lesbian couples going on their tenth year, as well as adorably cute butch/femme types out on their first date. I mean, seriously, what is it about West Seattle that it's just crawling with the lesbian couples? Omaha and I counted at least five couples in the short walk we had while waiting for our reservation to come around.

SushiWhore is along the strip in West Seattle Junction, near Husky Deli, where I recently angsted about ogling those who may not ogle back, and across the street from Elliot Bay Brewery, where the SeaFair pirates hang out. It's a tiny little place, barely three tables wide, without much of the usual Japanese restaurant kitsch.

The chopstick wrapper informs you that the sticks are made out of a plastic derived from wheat by-products, and are "completely compostable, but not edible, so please don't try." I gnawed on one anyway, and Omaha said, "You had to try, didn't you?"

We ordered the "starter" meal for two. There are four of those, in increasing price and, apparently, sophistication.

This one started with a "snack" of cush yams in a savory soy and sesame sauce boiled down until just thick, with toothpicks for eating. After that, a salad of seaweed, julienned cabbage and cucumber, and diced kiwi, again with a savory vinagrette that was just subtle enough not to interfere with the amazing texture.

We then got a plate of sushi & sashimi, which was wonderful, although they noted that "native wasabi was extra," and I didn't have the heart to pony up for more. C'mon, we're mostly broke these days.

Before I go on, I should point out that one of the huge draws of SushiWhore is that they have sustainability as one of their big selling points. They abide by the Monterey Aquarium guide to sustainability, and therefore don't carry unagi and a great many other products for which provenance cannot be determined. They have books along the shelves that explain in excrutiating detail the state of world (circa 2009) with respect to determining the provenance of various fish species. You'd think that choice would be limiting: they view it as a challenge, and as one of the highest-end sushi restaurants in the city, I think they hit a high mark.

The waitress had to point out that many of the fish in the sashimi may have been unfamiliar to me, including one that may be "gamy," but in fact they were all delightfully different in texture, and the tastes were only subtly different from the commercially over-fished varieties one might find at Blue C or SushiLand. You paid more, but your liberal guilt also paid for the notion that maybe, just maybe, your kids might be able to enjoy this pleasure too someday.

Then we received clams in butter & miso broth. The richness was overwhelming, even if the actual protein volume was low. I was overwhelmed, at any rate, and had to fight mightily to control myself and ensure that Omaha received her fair portion.

Then we got the final course: grilled whitefish on a bed of mixed greens. This was wonderful, nicely dried out, and the greens a neat mix of bitters and sweet-pickled beets, cucumbers, and ginger that made a melange worth consuming. You know, normally the "bed" on which your meal arrives is meant to be discarded, but not in this case.

For dessert, we were treated to a creme brulee' blended with a bitter green tea. Of all the meal, that was the least interesting. I ate all of mine, because the creme was rich but not very sweet, which I liked, but the tea left a bitter aftertaste that wasn't to my liking.

Our meal was ruined by a loudmouthed guy in the next table over, who I swear was full of "you language" about his female partner across from him, about how she never remembered anything, or never accepted this about him or that about him, and he was VERY LOUD about the whole thing, and obnoxious about it to boot. I wanted to go up and slap him a few times. Eventually he left, and we were grateful for the quiet.

SushiWhore makes its reputation on being "all sustainable, all recyclable, all whatever," but the food is really excellent. I recommend it heartily.

Change is hard, especially when one of your favorite restaurants changes hands.

Daimonji is a Boeing institution, the sushi joint closest to the Seattle Georgtown manufacturing plant. It has been one of Omaha's and my favorite places for a long time. Omaha especially enjoys the donburi eel, while I've always bought the Boeing Special Sushi Plate.

There is no Boeing Sushi Special anymore, just as single sushi dinner. Edamame and miso used to be gratis parts of the meal, but now edamame is an add-on, tacked to the end, and delivered hot to your plate-- which is odd to me, because all the other sushi places I've been to serve it at room temperature.

The rice on Omaha's bento was prepared sushi rice, not traditional short-grain, and the vinegar flavor was off-putting. My sushi was excessively spicy; the sushi chef was highly apologetic (apparently, my reporter's notebook unnerved him) about the spicy mayonnaise mix he blended himself.

Omaha's favorite bento had also been taken off the menu.

The waitress who took care of us was highly defensive about the edamame when we expressed surprise. Later, Omaha put down her credit card, and when the waitress came back with it she handed it to me. I guess she assumed it was mine, which was highly unprofessional.

Sadly, this means that Daimonji has gone from being a great sushi restaurant to being an ordinary one, with little to recommend it. Like Miyabi's descent from a great place to eat sushi with the kids to yet another mall-rat oriented beer-and-sushi joint.

Down in Des Moines, in one of those "location might suck" kind of corners (everyone coming into the town can see the place, but figuring out how to get there, around triangles, traffic islands and even a roundabout, can be tricky) is an inconspicuous little place called the Thai Bistro. From this unassuming name with an unassuming front, you'd assume it was one of those gazillion or so Thai restaurants that dot the Puget Sound landscape.

You'd be half-right.

Inside, you quickly come into something different: a home that has been converted into a restaurant, but with the architecture intact. It feels nothing like a restaurant. Then the other details hit you: every table has a unique and beautiful tablecloth, and where there aren't 19th century wooden dining chairs, the ordinary black four-footed chairs that would have served you in any diner have been clothed in hand-sewn silk covers that not only hide their ordinariness but give the place a bright, cheerful sheen that will make you smile. Each placing is equally carefully chosen and assembled with exquisite care, ending with a seven-inch decorative... thing... of wrought iron that holds it all down while looking like a cross between godzilla's letter opener and the Kaiser's war helmet.

Omaha ordered the Ocean Surprise, with a Mango Lhassi that she later said was completely up to her standards. I ordered something called the Basket of the Sea. (Des Moines is an old fishing boat harbor, now turned over to wealthy people with enough money to buy yachts, but not enough intelligence to live with them sanely.)

The Ocean Surprise consisted of scallops, shrimp, wontons, leechee, avocado and mango in a green curry that was utterly delicious. Everything was cooked perfectly. The Basket of the Sea was a surprise: on oven-baked husk of aluminum foil, inside of which I found mussels, shrimp, scallops, squid, with basil leaves and spinach in a red curry paste so thick it was almost grainy, and so soft it melted to satin when it touched my tongue. With a side of jasmine rice, both meals were delightful. I haven't had red curry like that before, and I will definitely have it again.

There is a family altar along one wall, typical in Thai restaurants, and the kitschiness of it (plastic pumpkins from the recently passed Halloween flickered with LED's next to hand-blown glass vases with flowers) made the rest of the place seem elegant and delightful. The food was fabulous and the ambience extraordinary. It was a momentary transport to another world, and I recommend it.

Omaha and I decided to go to the Keg down in Renton, since the one in Burien had recently closed. The place is nestled between two casinos and across the street from the new movie multiplex, and it's far more "themed" than the Burien one. It looks like a former Claim Jumper, in a way. The inside is pure Keg.

The food was as good as always, but the service was awful. I don't know if the guy we had was new or what, but he was brusque, didn't offer many helpful suggestions, didn't offer any specials, and had to be goaded into bringing us things that are normally routine. He didn't try to connect with the customer at all. He forgot our steak knives, was slow with the appetizers, and brought the rest of the food out too quickly. At one point he dropped a few plates on the floor for another table, and later he dropped a steak knife into Omaha's lap. About the best that can be said for him is that he kept us well-hydrated.

And the word of the year, in alcohol, appears to be "muddled." Damn the mojito. "Muddled" just means "mashed fruit or herbs." You'd think that a blender would be a perfectly acceptable tool, but no, now the poor bartender has to "muddle" everything by hand, and I mean everything: mojitos, margaritas, and other drinks all contained "muddled" this and "muddled" that. It's enough to drive someone to drink.

On the way out, I passed another waiter and said, "Weren't you at the Burien?"

"Yeah," he said, obviously pleased to be recognized. "I remember you guys. Yeah, there are a few lucky refugees down here." I remembered him clearly enough; with his good looks, bald head and goatee he seems like the sort of fellow who would pop out of a lamp if you rubbed it hard enough.

If you've lived in Seattle and have any associates at all who know the University District, then you know The Cedars restaurant. Cedars was an Indian restaurant where the fare was inexpensive, the portions generous, the food absolutely amazing, and the long line to get infuriating. In the winter, people would be packed into the waiting room like sardines, all waiting for their turn. One of the hallmarks of the Cedars was the bell, a desktop call bell that the kitchen manager rang loudly and furiously whenever hot food was cooling on the counter.

The owner, Muhammed Bhatti, recently sold Cedars. There's apparently a tale there, but I don't know and I'm not going to gossip on it. He has, however, opened up a new restaurant in the Northgate district called Saffron, and recently Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I trooped up there to see how it was.

The prices are a bit higher, the food just as good, and the ambiance much more laid back than before. Mr. Bhatti greeted us at the door and about a minute in I laughed when I heard a familiar sound from the kitchen. "You kept the bell," I said.

"Oh, you remember! Yes, yes. You see that?" He pointed to an unlit indicator on the wall. "That has lights to tell the waiters when food is ready. Nobody ever paid any attention to it. The bell, it works."

We had the Vegetarian Delight appetizer, Tandoori chicken meal, and the Royal Biryani with chicken, which we shared among the three of us. Kouryou-chan absolutely delighted in the mango lhassi, liked the Royal Biryani rice and the Tandoori chicken somewhat, and could pass on most of what came with the appetizer, although she declared the paneer pakora wonderful. I wished we hadn't had to come down to her level and could have put some spice into it, but really, it was all as wonderfully delicious as we recalled Cedars being, and I'm glad Mr. Bhatti still has a restaurant going with his name on it.

Desperate and unable to agree on anything to eat, we went with one of Elf's Rules: When you can't agree on where to eat, eat at the first place you see that you've never eat at before. This wound us up at "Famous Dave's BBQ," an overpriced middle-class camp restaurant chain.

I have been advised by wordsmith Richard Sher about the difference between "kitsch" and "camp": both describe a design aesthetic that is bathetic, over the top, and in bad taste, but the designer of camp knows it is in bad taste, whereas kitsch is created in all sincerity. Famous Dave's knows what it was aiming for when it hired its design team. The inside is garish, with bright yellow, red, and white signs with cartoons of pigs roasting other pigs, chickens slathering to get into roasters, and billboards proclaiming "If it walks or flies, we'll eat it," "We dig pig," and "Only the best pigs put Famous Dave's on their organ donor cards." (When Yamaraashi-chan asked me what that meant, I said, "It means that this place only buys genetically engineered cognitively modified organisms." Omaha said, "It does not!")

The food was okay. I mean, if you want a lot of mass-produced, fairly good meat, it's not a bad place to go, but I've made better at home. Omaha and I looked up the difference between barbecuing and grilling on her iPhone while we waited and determined that the menu didn't try too hard to confuse the issue for the guests. We had the "garbage can lid" of dinner for two: the meat was generally unremarkable, the five sauces on the table went from too sweet to insufficiently spicy-- this is not a place that can afford a bad hotsaurce experience with a customer, so their "Devil's Spit" sauces plays it way on the safer side. The coleslaw was good, I'll give them that.

I stopped eating well before my plate was clean. "It's a sign of my... responsible maturation," I told Omaha. "You mean getting old," she said. Maybe she's right: it was also too loud in there.

I noticed in the bathrooms that the walls are plastered with ads for men's products from pre-WW2 magazines. Which I thought was kinda funny, since I shave with some of the products on the walls: shaving soap and badger brush, double-sided single-edged blades, big steel razor. Nothing works better.

Anyway, take it or leave it. It's not my kind of place. (I'll tell you about Bennet's on Mercer Island, which is my kind of place, next time.)