Gaudí

Last week my friend John introduced me to Gaudí, a new Spanish restaurant in town that’s just opened in Bryant. Definitely worth a visit!

The restaurant is run by Jo and Joan Luna, veteran restauranteurs from Barcelona (so “Joan” is pronounced “zho-AHN” like Joan Miro, not Joan Rivers). They moved to Seattle a few years ago and have decided to recreate their homey little cafe here for us. They’ve only been up and running for a few weeks. The service was very friendly but the pacing was a little off, and it looks like they’re still moving in. Those little nitpicks aside, it’s clear they made sure everything was working right in the kitchen (where it counts) before opening.

We started with tapas. First up were garlic shrimp and Spanish tortilla. The shrimp were merely good, but the tortilla was amazing. Spanish tortilla has absolutely nothing in common with Doritos. It’s basically a glorious potato omelette, served in this case with red peppers and greens and a delicious aioli. Incidentally, Joan claims that the aioli (ai = garlic, oli = olive oil) actually originated in Catalunya. From what I tasted, that sounds credible to me!

Next came some skewered chorizo. Oh ho good. I’m not usually into sausage, but this stuff would make a believer out of committed vegan. Rich, spicy, slightly crispy but tender. We ordered a second helping. Then a plate of white anchovies – excellent.

For the main course we had ling cod with a romesco sauce (indisputably Catalunyan) and the wild boar. The cod was the one disappointment of the meal. It tasted a little undercooked, and set next to all of these other strong and wonderful flavors it was too mild to hold its own. The romesco was good, but served cold it was robbed of some of its flavor.

The wild boar, however, was splendid. It was sort of like a boar pot roast, served in a little miniature cast iron casserole, and by the time we were done we’d scraped the metal clean.

We could have stopped at this point, but the desserts looked tempting, so we ended the meal with a crema catalana and carajillos – rum-spiked coffee. All in all, an excellent and much enjoyed meal.

Joan with paella (we’ll have to try it next time)

Quiz Night

I’m usually not much of a bar guy, but I’m a total sucker for a trivia contest. Last week a group of us went to the Kangaroo and Kiwi Pub for the trivia, and lost. That colors my opinion of the place. A perfect trivia contest has a nice blend of categories: current events, history, sports, literature, geography, science, movies and pop culture, etc. Bad trivia is when the questions are too concentrated on one topic, or just too trivial. By this standard, the K & K gets a C.

Anyway, I was going to write a nice post about how hard it is to find quiz nights, since as of last Wednesday there was no good resource for finding them. But all that has changed. The Seattle Times scooped my post, and solved the problem. It would still be great if someone would actually rate the best and the worst quiz nights, but at least now you can see when and where to find them.

Le P…

Two French bistros, a few blocks apart, worlds different.

Le Pichet looks exactly like we dream a French bistro should – charming setting, adorable little pitchers of wine, a chalkboard. Le P’tit Bistro, on the other hand, is what you really get in France. It’s not a precious, pretty, perfect kind of place. It’s small, simple, a little sparse. It feels like someone forgot to tell them that they’re in Belltown. The food is the kind of thing you’d find in a hole in the wall in France, too. Delicious dressings and sauces, but then everything gets a little pile of canned corn and sliced tomatoes.

I’m not sure which of the two I like better, but by chance I got to eat at both of them in the past week.

We had a “business” lunch at Le Pichet with Anna from Citysearch. I had the (French) onion soup, Anna had a salad with quail and avocados, and Adam had a salad with eggs and a hard boiled egg. It looked more interesting than it sounds. My soup was good and solid, but on scale of French onion soup it fell a little short. The toast was a little insubstantial, the broth not quite salty enough, the onions not quite carmelized enough, and the cheese not quite rich enough. Good not great. The quail, on the other hand, was great. I didn’t try Adam’s food.

My soup

Anna’s quail

Adam’s apple (and egg) salad

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We went to Le P’tit Bistro for dinner. We started with chevre chaud – simple but tasty – and mussels. I had the duck in wonderful a green peppercorn sauce, with yams and apples. And more canned corn and tomatoes, of course, which doesn’t do much for me. The duck was succulent, the sauce wonderful. The apples were good but the yams undercooked.After we’d ordered, my wife noticed there was a whole side of the menu devoted to crepes, savory and sweet. This seems like the kind of place that would do crepes right. Worth a trip back to find out.

Chevre chaud

The mussels

The duck

Monsoon

It’s nice to walk away from a meal with unqualified happiness. We went to Monsoon the other night. Wow, what fun.

Two pieces of advice. First, order family-style. There are just too many flavors worth trying.

Second, order the catfish claypot. The thick gooey sauce that’s left over in the pot when you’ve eaten every scrap of solid food is so good you will burn your fingers scraping it out. On a table heaping with wonderful food, this was the standout.

We also had the dungeness crab and shrimp spring rolls (delicious), the drunken chicken (ditto), scallops (good), a salad with palmellos and candied walnuts in sesame oil (yum), snap peas with oyster mushrooms (crisp and tasty) and tofu with shiitake mushrooms (tofu ho hum, sauce exceptional). Incidentally, shiitakes are a particularly mushroom. And cultivators simulate thunder and lightning to make them grow properly.

Sadly my camera was at home collecting dust. Fortunately our friends had a camera phone. A different style of food photography – these shots look like they were taken through the warm, happy buzz of great food and wine.

That’s the catfish there on the left side of my plate.

Fantastic spring rolls – they tasted better than this looks.

A tasty salad.

Beantown

We’ve just launched Urbanspoon Boston! Coincidentally, I was in Boston and ate at a nice little Italian place, Piccolo Nido, almost exactly one year ago today.

Boston looks pretty cool at night, check it out.

Oh, and if you (like me) wondered why Boston is called Beantown, look no further.

Oceanaire

I went to my first ever “media event” on Thursday night to enjoy the cooking of Oceanaire’s new executive chef, Eric Donnelly. It was a lot of fun — kind of like an enormous free sample.

We’ll get to the food, but first I want to explain my newbie perspective on the whole concept of a “media event”. As I understand it, the restaurant invites various important food writers (and me), pours vast quantities of wine, serves ludicrous amounts of food, and sends everyone home buzzed, stuffed and happy to write glowing articles. It seems like a good strategy for the restaurant.

With that in mind, here goes.

The restaurant has a titanic space — meaning both that the room is enormous and that the decor is reminiscent of a turn of the century cruise boat. The food started off beautifully. I like eating food that I wouldn’t or couldn’t make at home, and the heaping tray of Oysters Rockefeller, the clams topped with bacon, and the escargot hit an easy triple. Normally I hate oysters, don’t particularly like clams, and I’d never tried a snail. Amazingly, shockingly, all three of these were delicious. The escargot, for those who like me have been too squeamish to try, was in a little dish of butter and garlic and topped with a miniature puffed pastry. The texture was a little unusual, but it worked.

The same starter tray included prawns and crabs in the shell. These were a little bland, but seeing big crab legs sticking out of the ice added to the general sense of decadence.

Next came the salads. Everything was served “family style”, which is a code word meaning, “more than any table could possibly consume without rupture”. The caesar salad was nice, good anchovies, but unexceptional. The bibb lettuce with walnuts and pears was better.

I have a confession. Past this point in the meal, I’d had far too much wine to be able to give an accurate accounting of the food. The problem is that the attentive waiters never let the glass get less than half full. I had to rely on my own wine-soaked judgment to determine how much I’d already had. That’s asking too much of my judgment.

The striped Atlantic sea bass was simply prepared, as was the Oregon “Kobe” beef with mushrooms. In both cases the ingredients were fresh and good, but all in all nothing to write home about (though apparently worth blogging about). For an event expressly designed to showcase the chef’s unique artistic creations, I was left a little disappointed.

The meal concluded with an assortment of desserts and schmoozing, both very sweet.

My one regret is that like an idiot I forgot to bring my camera. I saw Ron of Cornichon happily clicking away, so I’m sure you can see great images on his blog.

Cities at Night

Sometimes you just blunder into a new feature. When we were setting up New York and Chicago, we thought it would be useful to have a visualization of all the restaurants in a city, divided by neighborhood. This was just to spot errors in our data.

Funny thing is, it looked really cool. At least to us. Kind of like flying over a city on a dark night, except only the restaurants have their lights on. In New York, for example, we have over 23,000 restaurants and it’s amazing how well the shape of the landscape and population density can be revealed with just restaurants.

So we decided to put it out there for you all to play with. Here’s the “night-time” view of Chicago, New York and Seattle.

What do you think?

Gotham and the Windy City

Happy New Year! I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday break, and that your resolutions are still intact a week into the year.

While there was plenty of eating and celebrating over the holiday, and while I haven’t written on the blog in far too long, we weren’t completely idle the past few weeks here at Urbanspoon.

We added New York City with its 23,602 restaurants and Chicago’s 7,894 restaurants to the site. Technically, that means we’re now nation-wide (if not nation-tall).

Check it out!

Oaxaca, finalmente

Ok, so it was just a few weeks ago that I bemoaned the fact that I’d never been to La Carta de Oaxaca. On Thursday night, while the winds howled and the rains fell, I had dinner at the near mythic Mexican in Ballard. The wretched weather and flooded streets served one good purpose – no line out the door.

I have to admit, I was disappointed. I mean, the food was good and I thoroughly enjoyed my meal, and I clicked “I like it” on Urbanspoon. But I think I’d built up a pitch of expectation that just couldn’t be satisfied by merely good, solid, tasty Mexican food. I used to live in Austin, and the fact is that whatever I may feel about the state’s political contributions, they do Mexican food (not to mention TexMex) better. So by all means go to Oaxaca, but leave your high hopes behind.

The highlight of the meal (apart from the tequila) was the Mole. Sweet, rich, dark and spicy. If I’d had a jar of the stuff I probably would have poured it over everything on the table.

The Chile Relleno was a bit less inspiring. The fried eggy jacket was a little soggy, but the sauce was very good.

The fish tacos were merely good. I know I’ll catch flack from true foodistas for saying it, but I prefer the happy hour fish tacos at Matador across the street.

Sitka & Spruce

Sitka & Spruce is a little oasis tucked improbably in an ugly mini-mall in Eastlake. Step inside and immediately you’re transported to a cozy, classy, tiny but comfortable cafe complete with a chalkboard menu and wine cork bar.

I live just a few blocks away so it’s ridiculous that it’s taken me so long to try it, but at long last I had lunch there with my friend Thomas (of cuisineazine) the other day. The food was delicious, but like the setting, very small. Normally I love “small plates” and “tasting menus”. When I’m famished, however, and the food is really good (and it was!), I hate to leave the table hungry. But that’s my only complaint.

Actually, this post is just an excuse to try my hand at food photography. I’ve seen mouth-watering pictures on so many food blogs I had to try it myself. It felt a little awkward dragging the camera out before we could eat, fiddling with the white balance and trying different angles while the food got colder, and lighting is a bit tricky, but I’m hooked. It was actually kind of nice taking a moment to admire the chef’s handiwork before digging in. In any case, here’s my freshman effort.

Thomas had the quail ragout over a tagliatelle. Tasty.

I had the black cod and beets. I love beets. I love black cod. Yum.