Gleaming the Qube
I took my wife out for Valentine’s Day tonight, finally, after I came home from a business trip on V-Day proper and she felt somewhat sick on Friday. So after a bit of last-minute shifting, I decided to treat my wife to dinner at a new place in town: Qube. And no, we didn’t watch Gleaming the Cube after dinner.
I found Qube through Opentable.com, although the review at Gayot.com sealed it for me. As an aside, I highly recommend Gayot.com as a site for good, thorough reviews of restaurants. If they give a place a high score, you know it’s a good restaurant. Qube got 14/20, which is a respectable score…particularly when you consider that Canlis gets a 15/20 and the Herbfarm gets 17/20 (the highest score I’ve seen at that Web site).
Qube is located on the corner of 2nd and Stewart in downtown Seattle. This location is billed as Belltown, and while that might be technically true it’s a little misleading. Belltown is a hip, trendy portion of downtown Seattle full of expensive restaurants, bars, and bitchy people. 2nd and Stewart is the closest thing that Seattle has to Baltimore, which is to say it’s still really nice but you’re more likely to see street crime at 2nd and Stewart than anywhere else in Belltown. We saw two separate police incidents while eating dinner, which makes everything more like dinner theater. I enjoy that for the most part, although I still have flashbacks sometimes to the time we had dinner downtown and somebody at the next table died. But that’s a different story.
The aesthetic at Qube is Los Angeles meets Japan as seen through the eyes of a Los Angeles resident who has never been to Japan. I like the decor but the place is drafty as hell, which isn’t too smart if you want to attract lots of trendy people wearing skimpy clothing. The space itself is a little small: There is one huge community table plus a small number of individual tables crammed on top of each other like no other place I’ve seen. We had to turn sideways to get through to our table. That’s a little annoying.
The menu is impressive, particularly the tasting menu where you can get either 3 or 5 courses. Wine pairings are also strongly suggested, but at $45 for the 5-course wine pairing I felt it was a little ambitious for the average diner. The wine list is decent, if a bit befuddling. I had a glass of 2006 Crios de Susana Balbo Torrontes, a lovely white that tastes shockingly similar to Viognier. The information on the Web site actually draws the same comparison, which made me feel good about myself. I like Torrontes and Albarino wines quite a lot, and this one was decent:
- Aroma: Lemon rind, honeydew, green apple, and a faint musky bouquet that captures your attention.
- Flavor: Melon and peach with a slight perfume overtone reminiscent of Viognier, or green Dots (but in a good way).
- General impression: A decent white wine, but at $10 for about 4 ounces it was overpriced.
For dinner, we had the following foods:
- Naan bread with dipping sauces
- Butternut squash soup with sesame-encrusted goat cheese; my wife had a lox “tapenade” with greens
- Braised pork shoulder in a hot pot with crispy yakisoba noodles; my wife had sea scallops with edamame puree and an onion tart that I ate and enjoyed
- Cinnamon cake with balsamic cherry sauce; my wife had a ginger apple crisp and ice cream
So, what’s my prognosis on Qube? Take a look at my new summary system for reviewing a restaurant and see what you think:
- The Good: Good service, extremely good food; very intriguing presentations.
- The Bad: Cramped, drafty space; no half bottles of wine on the wine list; no easy/free parking nearby; video camera staring at me the entire evening.
- The Ugly: They need to learn how to steep green tea so as not to make the tea taste like bitter stems.
“The Ugly” came about when they brought some green tea, which was delicious at first and well presented, and then left the leaves in to steep in the hot water. Big mistake with green tea. It tasted bitter as hell after a few minutes, which was a shame. We had no way to remove the strainer and we couldn’t get any service until it was too late. A minor point? Definitely. But in a place that pays this much attention to detail, this experience seemed odd to me.
There was also a wall-mounted video camera watching me throughout the meal. Now that’s a little off-putting. I don’t know why they were recording the patrons, but it was like eating in an interrogation room at times except the food was delicious.
So was Qube worth it? I’d say yes, if only once. I can’t imagine going back. The whole place felt a little too sterile and cramped for my taste. I don’t know how you make a cramped place feel this distant and cold, but they have done a commanding job of it. Then again, I don’t like the Los Angeles dining aesthetic. I think the movie L.A. Story captured the essence quite well when Steve Martin goes out to dinner and remarks that he ate his food without really noticing that he had eaten anything at all. Qube isn’t quite that much of a cliché, but it comes dangerously close.