huevos con vino

One of my favorite restaurants in Seattle is The Metropolitan Grill.  The location is cool (downtown on Second, not all that close to everything but not too far from anything).  The decor is cool (dark wood and leather booths, a big bar area, secret rooms, and an underground wine cellar behind a slightly hidden door).  The servers are cool (the deep-throated man who looks like Britt Daniel, the slight fellow who knows more about wine than I ever will). 

The Met, as I call it, holds a lot of wonderful memories for me.  The Met is the site of my wine appreciation birth ritual (an amazing bottle of Harlan Estate).  The Met is where I went to celebrate two separate bachelor parties plus two anniversaries of bachelor parties.  The Met is the first restaurant I think of whenever I do someone a favor and, as a reward, I am offered a trip to any restaurant in town.  The Met is where I went with a friend for lunch when I pretended that his company could give my company some business leads: $85 and two Smoky Met martinis later, and I had no leads but one hell of a good time.

Yeah, I love The Met.  It can be stodgy, slow, and full of grumpy stuffed shirts eating $60 steaks.  But I love it anyway.  And tonight I’m heading back for a fun night on the town.  I sold some old stuff I had sitting around my apartment and managed to pull together $200 from out of thin air, essentially.  I love doing that.  I wish I could do it every hour, actually.

But in terms of wine, I won’t need to spend anything beyond the corkage fee.  I’m bringing out one of my big guns: the 2004 Sea Smoke Ten.  It’s time to drink my only bottle of this wine!  My friend is bringing something to the party as well, something along the lines of a 1999 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Fay or a 1997 Ridge Monte Bello.  We’ll see. 

So, this time tomorrow, expect to see some new tasting notes for some incredible wines!  And, of course, I’ll share what I had to eat at The Met.  I usually go for the Chateaubriand if I have an eating compatriot.  Hopefully my friend is up to the challenge tonight….

My wife and I had a lovely dinner last night at a place in downtown Seattle called The Fish Club.  The Fish Club is an interesting restaurant: They are located inside, or next to, a Marriott hotel near the waterfront, they seemingly have enough seating to house several NFL football teams, and they have nice interior design and decor that befits an upscale furniture showroom more than a restaurant.  I like TFC, as I’m going to call it for the sake of brevity.  They know how to cook seafood at TFC; their open kitchen sparked my interest throughout the night, actually, as I watched flames shoot several feet high on more than one occasion.  I love that in a restaurant.

We were at TFC with a couple of old friends and we decided to do it up right, so to speak.  Here’s what I had for dinner:

• Appetizer: Fish Club Caesar Salad (whole Romaine lettuce spears, garlicky croutons, Caesar dressing, and a single white anchovy curled at the top left of the plate)
• Entree: Grilled 1.5-pound Maine lobster with drawn butter, mashed potatoes, and a frisee salad thing
• Dessert: Warm chocolate pudding (more like a chocolate mousse) with molten flourless chocolate cake and chocolate malt ice cream

I started out the night with a Dark and Stormy, one of my favorite drinks: Gosling’s Black Seal dark rum, lime juice, and ginger beer.  It’s a fairly sweet drink that can be deceptively potent; apparently this drink heralds from Bermuda, along with the Rum Swizzle (another personal favorite).  Interestingly, the Gosling rum company has trademarked the phrase “Dark’N'Stormy.”  How American for a company based in Bermuda.

By the time my lobster showed up, I wanted to try a nice white wine.  I noticed that TFC was offering Isenhower “Snapdragon” by the glass, so I took the plunge.  Isenhower is a Walla Walla winery located, if you know your wine geography, in eastern Washington State. Isenhower is only 8 years old at this point, but their wines are fairly prevalent in the Seattle area.  The particular wine that I tried was, in all probability, the 2006 release of the “Snapdragon” white, which is a blend of Roussanne and Viognier.  Previous vintages of this wine were called the Columbia Valley Snapdragon, but for the 2006 vintage this wine is known as the Horse Heaven Hills Snapdragon.  This name change is probably due to the fact that Isenhower source their grapes from a wide variety of local growers, so perhaps their sources changed for the 2006 vintage.

A note about TFC: Two of us asked for glasses of white wine with our dinners.  It took altogether too long to receive the wine; the other person had nearly finished her dinner by the time her wine showed up.  I took things slow with my food instead to see when I’d get my wine.  I was non-plussed when I saw that, rather than bringing out a full glass of wine or simply bringing the bottles over to the table to fill our wine glasses, the waiter brought little decanters of white wine for each of us.  Now, that’s cute, I’ll admit.  But it’s wholly unnecessary to do that, especially when your food is getting cold and you just want to pair it with some white wine.  Just bring the damn bottles over and give me some wine! 

This practice raises a different question: What’s actually in those decanters?  TFC set the per glass price at $12 for the Isenhower, which is steep considering this wine costs $19/bottle direct from the winery.  That’s a hell of a profit per glass, although not unusual I’ll admit.  I guess this price justifies the tiny decanters from the perspective of the restaurant, but I’m suspicious by nature and I hate receiving wine from unknown sources.  I want to see the bottle from which the wine was poured.  And I do realize that a bottle can be refilled with something else.  Perhaps I’m paranoid.  I just think the ritual of pouring from the specific bottle is great and while I do like little decanters you can do all that at the table, or tableside if you like.

Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest that TFC did anything mischevious with my wine; I’m sure everything was exactly as promised.  I certainly had some Viognier, as my tasting notes indicate:

• Aroma: Lots of lush floral and tropical fruit notes in the bouquet, mostly honeysuckle and mango with some secondary notes of lesser flowers that I can’t identify.  There is definitely a strong Viognier perfume present in the bouquet, but its floral nature doesn’t quite integrate with the tropical fruits.
• Flavor: Some nice minerality with a bundle of confused Viognier flavors competing with the sharply acidic overtones of this white blend.  The flavors just don’t combine into a cohesive whole, which seems to be a theme with this wine.  Tasty at first, then overwhelmed by
• General impression: Needs to smooth out a bit, perhaps too young yet?  A confusing wine.

Overall, the Isenhower was not all that exciting to me.  It tasted okay but not amazing, and I don’t think that was the result of the food pairing.  Still, it was nice enough that I might buy a bottle for $19 at the store, but I don’t know anyone else who would enjoy this particular style of white wine.  I need more French friends, I guess.

A final thought: If you run a great restaurant, such as TFC, forget the thimble-sized decanters for your tableside service of white wine.  Just bring the filled glass over to the table or, better yet, bring the bottle(s) over as soon as people order wine and fill their glasses.  By wasting 5-10 minutes getting backed up at the bar waiting for the lone bartender to fill some tiny decanters, you lose revenue.  And I know that’s not the goal of the miniature decanters!

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.

Sea Saw is a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona, with very good food and an annoying Web site. 

On the last night of my trip to Phoenix (last night, in fact), I went to Sea Saw and tried a whole mess of different foods.  The place has an interesting concept: Japanese “tapas.”  Some call it “Tapanese.”  I call it “expensive as hell for what you get.”  But it is a really fun place.

Or it would be, if they could iron out a few of the details, such as providing timely and knowledgeable wine service, or including more than 2 tables in the entire restaurant (much of which is taken up by the grill and kitchen area), or recognizing how long it should take to eat all the little courses and then balancing that time requirement with the patrons’ need for a coveted table.  Anyway, it is hard to complain when the food makes it all worthwhile, so I will simply say that Sea Saw has pretty good food for the most part.

Sea Saw is one of a few restaurants in a little cluster right in downtown Scottsdale.  Each restaurant features a different cuisine and theme; the theme at Sea Saw is one of minimalist elegance, stainless steel, soft lights, and a gigantic open kitchen that dominates the space.  All of the restaurants in this quadrangle share the same immense wine cellar, which contains at least 2,900 bottles of wine.  But apparently it was 2,899 bottles of wine last night….

We ordered the following food and shared it all; refer to their menu for all the little tiny bits of flair they included with each dish (there were a lot; too many in some cases to make a cohesive tasting experience):

• Edamame soup (good soup, thick tapioca-like consistency turned off some people)
• Hamachi with about 8 other things on top and below it (this tasted way too confused to me)
• Soft shell shrimp fry (delicious!)
• Mushroom melange (also delicious)
• Seared tuna tataki in pureed beet (highlight of the evening for me)
• Steamed sea bass in broth (not all that great, way too watery and bland)
• Seared miso-marinated foie gras (my favorite but a little rich to serve at the end of the meal)
• I think I forgot a course in here, but overall the food was good…some hit or miss dishes, though

The real fun began when I had a question about the wine list.  The waiter at Sea Saw was quite good, but he was not a sommelier.  So I was handed this tome through which I flipped hungrily for several minutes.  Once I knew we were going to spend $40-$50 for a bottle of wine, I honed in on that section of the wine list since the wines are arranged by price.  First, I asked if they had anything like a Hirsch Pinot Noir but cheaper.  That drew a blank stare.  So I asked about a specific wine, which elicited this reply: “Uhh, I don’t know, I don’t get to try all of the wines.”

Now, at this point, I totally understood that the waiter was just that: a waiter.  Why did the establishment put him in this position?  Why didn’t he go and get the sommelier for all of the restaurants?  I don’t know, I probably wasn’t going to spend enough money to justify a sommelier’s time anyway.  But when I let the waiter ask the chef for a wine recommendation, he came back with a 2005 California Pinot Noir, a Melville from the Santa Rita Hills.  Seemed too young to me since we didn’t have time to decant the wine, but I went for it.

Only the waiter didn’t come back with that wine.  They were out.  Now that’s a funny situation: The restaurant recommends a specific wine only to tell you, no, we don’t actually have it.  But we recommend it.  I thought it was funny, anyway.

Instead, the waiter did something admirable: He returned with a taste of an Oyster Bay Pinot Noir (because I was asking for something outside of the US) and a bottle of 2003 Clos LaChance Santa Cruz Hills Pinot Noir.  I went with the Clos LaChance as the Oyster Bay tasted like confectioner’s sugar and kirsch, so it was a little too sweet.  At this point, we were already into our 3rd or 4th course out of 9 or so.  That’s entirely too long to wait for a bottle of wine, particularly when the restaurant wants to sell wine to its customers!

The 2003 Clos LaChance Pinot Noir was quite a good wine; here are my notes:

• Aroma: Earthy, faint essence of mushroom, strong cherry and raspberry bouquet at first.  A very fruit-forward nose with occasional hints of kirsch and red plums.
• Flavor: Big ripe cherry flavor, extremely succulent and mouth-smackingly tasty.  Slightly sweet, slightly jammy, very smooth.  A definite crowd-pleaser.
• General impression: A delicious wine, one that left me wanting another bottle immediately.  Lots of great Pinot Noir essence with some nice character to boot.  Worth seeking out!

I finished off my portion of the bottle and I wanted something more.  So I got a 6-ounce pour of the 2004 Turley Zinfandel.  The menu didn’t say which Turley Zin I ordered, so I assume it’s their most basic release.  Here are my notes on that wine:

• Aroma: Blackberry and bramble with peppery spice.  A good Zinfandel bouquet.
• Flavor: Lots of smooth blackberry and black fruit flavor with some blackberry vine undertones.  Nice balance of fruit and tannins.
• General impression: A very lucid, well-balanced wine.  Smooth, but spicy; tannic, but drinkable.  Quite good, but for the price I think I’d keep looking for another wine (such as that Peter Franus Brandlin Zin I just tried).

In short, the restaurant was good but a little mixed up.  The wine was good but a little expensive.  The atmosphere was good but a little snobby and uptight.  Everything was good, but it’s a qualified “good” I suppose.  Ahh well, I love business trips….

“So, what types of wines do you like?”

“Well, we spent a lot of time in Spain and France, so we like big, spicy red wines for the most part.”

“Yeah, I definitely like the Rioja wines and a lot of those big, bold French wines too.”

“We don’t know much about US or Australian wines, I’m afraid.”

“Really?  Hmm…HOLY HELL!  We have to try this wine!”

“Ahhhh…okay.”

I’m the one who yelled “holy hell!” because I had just spotted the distinctive “PF” on the label of a bottle of wine.  I was at the Postino Winecafe in Phoenix last night with a few colleagues, and I was looking through the different bottles of wine stored in the racks near the front of the restaurant.  The Postino has a great system: You can either get a glass of wine from the main list, or you can look through the bottles and find one to drink at the table.  The wines by the glass are fairly inexpensive and while they looked good, I started getting very excited when I looked at the wines in the rack.

The first wine I saw was a 2005 Brewer-Clifton Pinot Noir, the “Ashley” release from the Santa Rita Hills.  I also saw a couple other interesting Pinot Noirs: Patz & Hall, a 2004 Pisoni Pinot Noir, and a couple of other wines that were pushing $100/bottle.  But then my colleague and I had the verbal exchange described, very briefly, at the start of this post.  So we started looking at other varietals until I stumbled across the wine I wanted to try.

Peter Franus.  The guy is a winemaking legend.  The 2003 Peter Franus Brandlin Vineyard Zinfandel is a wine that I have wanted to try for over a year now, but I had yet to see it on sale at any store.  The 2004 release (the current release) is already sold out through the winery.  Amazing.  And yet they had the 2003 at Postino; a quick Internet check tells me this wine is indeed available online starting at about $30-$35/bottle.  Not too bad.

I absolutely insisted that we try the 2003 Peter Franus Brandlin Vineyard Zinfandel.  It went over extremely well; we had all kinds of delicious food, including:

• Three types of cheese - a d’Affnois triple-cream Brie, Chimay Grande Reserve, and a delectable goat cheese.
• Four types of bruschetta
• A Margherita pizza with fresh basil
• A Tuscan-style salad with prosciutto, salami, and freshly-shaved Parmesan

I was excited to try this wine with food, but I also knew it would probably hold up well before the food arrived.  I was right, as it turned out…read on for my tasting notes.

• Aroma: Blackberry and clove up front, with some mild smokiness and baking spice (such as nutmeg) in the bouquet as well.  This wine is known for its bramble and baking spice aromas, and I can see why!
• Flavor: Big jammy blackberry with black pepper and other spices plus a nice, rich black cherry mid-palate fruitiness.  A wine that lingers a while on your tongue.  A dry finish before the food arrived, but once we started eating the triple-cream Brie on toast, this wine began to soar.
• General impression: Wow!  As delicious as I hoped it would be.  A knockout Zinfandel that goes really well with food, particularly margherita pizza.

I am officially a fan of Peter Franus’ Brandlin Zin now.  It’s a darn good wine and it reminds me why I need to keep drinking all types of wine rather than all Pinot Noir, all the time.

Postino is also a terrific restaurant and wine bar!  On Monday nights, their wines are less expensive; they remove the typical corkage fee so the Peter Franus went from $49/bottle to $40/bottle, which is about what you’d pay to buy a bottle and get it shipped to you.  Very, very nice.  The service was terrific and the food was outstanding.  I can’t wait to go back someday!