Italian food worth getting excited about

If you've been reading this blog for more than a month, you know that I am something of a fan of Italian food, and something of a critic of Italian-American food.  Italian food is about simple preparation of excellent ingredients.  Produce is grown on small farms, picked ripe and sold quickly and locally, often in markets by the farmers.  Meat is either cooked very quickly, often grilled, or braised all day in a fairly simple tomato sauce.  We had a terrific secondi in Rome that was simply chicken cutlets sauteed in butter and sage.  That was it -- the entire dish had three ingredients.  I've since recreated it, and the recipe is below, and even I had to add something (mostly garlic).

Italian-American food, and I mean the kind served in restaurants, not the kind made in people's homes following their parents and grandparents recipes, seems to be about volume.  Lots of pasta, lots of sauce, endless salad bowls and breadsticks (not that I'm picking on any chain in particular).  Meat and pasta are mixed together willy-nilly.  The most amazing thing is how they can start with ingredients that have flavor, and end with dishes with no flavor at all.  I believe most Italian-American restaurants in America come standard with some large flavor sucking machine.  Otherwise, I can't explain how garlic and cheese turn into what they serve.

The scene in Spokane has been pretty bleak.  The Italian Kitchen has a standard menu, and what I've had there has been competent, but it is so expensive.  Why would I spend twenty five dollars on a plate that I could make, better, at home, in twenty minutes with a dollar or two worth of ingredients?  Luigi's is worse.  I think many of their dishes have spent a considerable amount of their extended lives in a freezer.  I won't even bother discuss the big chains, and I've already expressed myself about Cassano's restaurant, Mission Bistro.  I had a lovely meal in Coeur D'Alene at Angelo's last year, but even that was safely Italian-American.

All of this is old news.  The new news is that Italia Trattoria, in the old Cafe Marron location in Brown's Addition, is actual Italian food. I've been dragging my feet about trying this place, because I had so little hope that it would be anything but more of the same, bleak Italian-American food.  I was wrong.  The first hint that Bethe and Anna, the owners, get it comes from the menu, which is split into Antipasti, Primi, Secondi, and Contorni (side dishes), although the secondi are much more complete plates than you would find in the vast majority of restaurants in Italy.  The second hint was the food itself.  Nothing about the secondi said "Italian" -- a few sun dried tomatoes, a couple of olives here and there.  What made them Italian, really Italian, was the preparation:  simple and careful, designed to enhance the ingredients rather than mask it.

We started with a charred polpo (octopus) salad.  We first had polpo in Rome, during our first trip last summer.  There, they sliced the octopus very thinly, marinated it in lemon and salt, and served it (I think) over a few greens.  I loved it; Jeremy found it a very intense engagement with octopus.  At Italia Trattoria, the octopus has been grilled and chopped, and is served with thin sliced potatoes, parsley, sun-dried tomatoes and red onion.  It was blissful, both in terms of flavor and texture.  The octopus was chewy and warm and flavorful; the potatoes were creamy and added just a touch of substance; the parsley was fresh and bright; the sun-dried tomatoes added a surprising touch of sweetness that supported the sweetness of the octopus.  Off to a good start.

I ordered the coho salmon special.  The very fact that they had a coho salmon special speaks to the spirit of their Italian cooking.  Salmon is not an Italian ingredient.  Atlantic salmon are a cold-water fish, and much more likely to be found in northern Europe, not in the Mediterranean. But, we have delicious salmon in the Northwest, so it is very Italian to use salmon here.  On any normal night, I would have been thrilled with my dish.  The salmon was beautifully, perfectly underdone, just as I had requested it.  It came with  rich, buttery lentils.  The richness was offset by a bitter, crisp endive salad.  Wonderful.  But Jeremy's secondi was so sublime I found myself jealous.  He ordered the lamb, which was lamby and gamy and beautifully grilled.  He too had a bed of lentils, but what made his dish sing was the lemony yogurt sauce which cut through the gaminess, and the balsamic onions, which intensified the meatiness.  Our meal was rounded out by a lovely bottle of Montefalco, a red wine typical of Umbria, and a decadent chocolate almond torte for dessert.  I even celebrated with a grappa as a digestivo.  Our service was on the casual, friendly side, but highly competent, and we had two chats with Bethe, the partner handling the front of the house.

I was feeling a little down last week.  The end of daylight savings time is not a good time for Spokane.  It's dark by five, and only getting worse.  The weather has turned cold and grey.  My beloved Sapphie has been having weeks of health problems, although I think she is stabilized again.  And, I'm not in Rome, where the air is warm and the light is soft and the pasta is the way the pasta is in Rome.  I became even more down as Jeremy and I were going through our restaurant options.  There are just so few places with food that is worth the money they charge, and you can only go to the same places so many times.  But the dinner we had at Italia Trattoria last night was special:  truly thoughtful food and no restaurant missteps.  I'm excited to see what Anna will prepare next, and I want to take risks with her.  I hope she stays true to her vision, and that Spokane will support her even if she doesn't put the usual Italian suspects on the menu.

As for those usual Italian suspects, there is a spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce on the menu.  Would that be found in any but the most touristy of restaurants in Italy?  Absolutely not.  But, as Bethe said to us, if we need to have spaghetti and meatballs so that people get what they want, then they will be the best possible spaghetti and meatballs.  Bethe and Anna, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm already looking forward to my next dinner with you.  Thank you for giving me a much needed lift, and reminding me that Spokane really is a beautiful place to live.

And now, my recipe for Petto di Pollo con Burre e Salvia:

Start with two boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Slice them on a long diagonal to form two cutlets (three if the breasts are huge).  Pound them lightly, so that they are a consistent thickness but not thin.  Dredge them lightly in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

In a small pan, melt half a stick of butter.  Add six or so fresh sage leaves and four cloves of garlic sliced thin.  Keep on medium heat until the butter is lightly browned and the garlic is well caramelized.  Turn off the heat.

In a different large, non-stick pan, heat olive oil until it is smoking hot.  Carefully add the chicken breasts.  After about two minutes, turn.  After two minutes more, both sides should be lightly golden, and the chicken should be cooked through -- if either of these things hasn't happened, leave them in for a minute or two longer.  Put them on a plate with a couple of spoonfuls of the brown butter sauce and serve.   Now, could anything be easier than that?

Pulled Pork Redux

You know you've reached a new low in terms of slacking off when your mother starts asking about your blog. Yes, the thing I set up as a diversion and procrastination aid has now become a public way for people to track my ability to not do things. Try to think of it this way, Mom: writing my blog really means I'm *not* doing important, career related things. You should start worrying when you see me post too much. That will be a sure sign of slacking and over-eating!

Seriously (which is clever code for "none of the previous paragraph is serious"), the beginning of the school year has cut down precipitously on how much of my brain I can devote to food, since now at least some of it has to be taken up by "how not to offend my colleagues or my freshman," "Milton," and "where am I supposed to be now?" But, I do have a brief pulled-pork update.

The faux-log truck on Division next to the White Elephant is in fact a BBQ truck called Smokies, and since none of you offered any insight on its qualities, I bravely sacrificed my own waistline. I had the beef brisket and tried the pulled pork sandwich, and the verdict is: pretty good. The texture is quite good, especially if you like your meat a little on the lean side (although not so lean as to be tough or dry). The flavor is acceptable. I could use more smoke, but I believe that both meats were in fact truly barbequed, which means long, slow, low cooking. The sauce is a cross between Memphis and North Carolina, so thin and with a strong vinegar component, as opposed to the think, sweet, Texas style. I like it, although it is sadly lacking in heat. My best recommendation, however, is to ask for extra sauce. I'm know: over-saucing is a sin. But so is under-saucing, and Smokies needs to do some penance for that one. Would that be three Hail Marys and one Our Father?

I also tried the pulled pork sandwich at Clinkerdagger's, off their lunch menu. I admit it. I like Clinkerdaggers. It is not haute cuisine, but it is haute above the river, and I find its old-fashionedness charming. I'm not sure they mean it in quite the ironic way I enjoy it, but these are the vagaries of interpretation. The sandwich was a perfectly adequate pulled pork, and about what you would expect from a place that doesn't say it has a smoker. I would put in on a par with the pulled pork at the Safari Room at the Davenport Towers, and they say they do have a smoker. Now, the sweet potato fries at Clinks -- those were crispy little works of art! And somehow, the twelve top of blue hairs all wearing red and purple hats sitting at the other end of the room made the whole experience a little sweeter.

That's it for now, and that's probably it for pulled pork (although I have a tip that the pulled pork at Chick'n'More is worth trying). Next installment (unless a different fancy takes me): what to do with the bumper crop of green tomatoes my Spokane garden inevitably produces. I know. You'll be holding your breath.

Bad waiter

I ate at Cafe Marron over the weekend, and it wasn't the best experience I've had there. I like Cafe Marron, even if I do find the name unfortunate, since it seems like the only options for pronouncing it are either to make it sound like Cafe Moron or to sound pretentiously French. Even they seem to struggle with the name; when they opened, they had it spelled one way on their sign and another on their menus. Nonetheless, I like the casual atmosphere, I like the brunch food a lot (especially now that Bittersuite is gone and, from what I have heard, will be reopening prohibitively far from my house), and I have had really good meals there.

I remember one dinner, a little over a year ago, with particular fondness. The waiter not so subtly steered us toward the halibut and the top sirloin. It took no arm twisting to get me to order the halibut, a fish I adore. It arrived perfectly cooked, in that sublime nano-second when there is still a hint of translucency in the center, and in a light, citrusy cream sauce that complemented the fish without taking it over. The top sirloin was a harder sell. After all, that is no one's favorite steak, and badly done, it can be chewy, mealy, chalky, or any of the other bad beef dwarves. But, when a good waiter recommends something, you trust him (in this case, it was a him), so . . . The sirloin was also sublime: beefy and and almost meltingly tender, with a terrific sear. In fact, the beef was so good by itself that I have forgotten if it came with a sauce, and I can remember nearly every sauce I have ever tasted. Good food, good service, good atmosphere -- this was an experience to cement a restaurant in my firmament for a while.

Things were very different this weekend, and it wasn't that the food that made the difference. It was the service. Our waitress was a very nice woman on her second day, and I wish her well in her new job. I see no reason why she can't become a fine waitress. But, she wasn't for us. I want to be very clear here: I don't blame her. Service is an art form, and one so rarely practiced in Spokane that I wonder if most of the people trying to be good servers have actually experienced good service. Waiting tables, even at its most straightforward, requires an enormous amount of multi-tasking, organization, presence of mind, knowledge of the menu, of the wine list, of what the kitchen will and will not accommodate, plus tact and people skills. It is a hard, hard job, and one that takes a full apprenticeship to master.

No, I don't blame her. I blame the management. It was their decision to put a woman with little to no waiting experience on the floor on a weekend night. It was their decision not to give her a lesson in the menu with the chef, allowing her to taste all the plates on the menu. This is, by the way, standard practice in nearly all fine dining restaurants. It was their decision not to have her shadow an experienced waiter, who probably would have remembered to bring the salads before the entries. And let us remember, the management of Cafe Marron is the same as the management of Luna, so these are experienced restaurant people who ought to know better. They surely know standard industry practice in hiring and training wait staff, and they certainly ought to know the importance of service in a successful restaurant. This shows more than a momentary lapse on their part. This shows a failure of priorities.

I'll go farther than that. I think this is an ethical issue. Sure, it shows a complete lack of respect for the diners who are paying up to twenty dollars a plate and have, therefore, a reasonable expectation that what they asked to be on that plate will, in fact, be there. But, more than that, a waiting job is typically a minimum wage job, and therefore all servers rely on tips to earn a living income. Hiring a person and then not giving them the tools they need to earn the income you have told them they can expect is dirty pool, in my book. (Washington State, thankfully, both has the highest minimum wage in the country and does not have the exemption for tip earners that many states have, so the situation is not as dire here in Spokane as it is some places.)

Service tends to be bad in Spokane. We tend to accept friendly in lieu of skilled (not that the too are mutually exclusive). I had dinner at Gordy's a few weeks ago, and the our waitress knew the menu inside and out, and guided us toward ordering a great meal. But, she seemed to think that we wanted to spend our evening talking with her, when in fact I was with a group of people who did just fine creating conversation all by ourselves. It ranged from awkward to horribly uncomfortable. Wild Sage is a notable exception; I have never gotten anything but top notch service there. Luna is a, maybe the, prime culprit. There service would be great for a Denny's or a sandwich place, but not for a restaurant that charges thirty bucks a plate, a la carte. We will never have a real restaurant scene until service becomes a priority, both for restaurant owners and diners. The catch-22 is, we can't protest bad service without hurting innocent, individual servers. So, here's a call to owners and managers: train your servers. Send them to good restaurants in other cities to experience their craft. Teach them about the food they serve. (I know of one restaurant in Tacoma that sends their entire staff to Italy for a week each year to gain in knowledge and experience. Tacoma, people! Are they that much better than we are?) As for us, let's demand more than nice. We deserve it.

Hello and Sante!

I am a food lover, living in the Inland Empire, otherwise known as Spokane, Washington. Even though Spokane is surrounded by amazing agriculture, it does not have much of a foodie reputation. Nor does it particularly deserve one. But there is good food to be had in Spokane: some of it in restaurants, some of it from shops and markets around town, much of it being made in home kitchens. I am writing this blog to chronicle one foodies successes and failures, surprises and disappointments living in the inland Northwest.

I have no particular credentials as a food expert, unless one counts my great-grandmother on my father's side, who was a professional chef in Bar Harbor and Bermuda. I wish I had known her. My father is a pretty good cook of the french persuasion, and some of my most cherished childhood memories are of watching The French Chef with him. I am a good home cook, and I have eaten in some very good restaurants (I even worked in one, once, but only as a waitress). Mostly, I just like food. There is nearly nothing I won't eat (except Doritos, licorice, and any candy whose name begins with "gummy").

For my inaugural entry, I want to talk about the meal I just had at Sante, the new restaurant in the Aunties bookstore building. I like it. I think this is exactly the kind of restaurant that Spokane needs, and that those of us who like food should support. The menu is thoughtful if not adventurous Northwest fare: steak, pork, salmon. I had the wild boar roulade, which was sausage-like and meaty, served on a disc of mashed potatoes so rich they were almost too much, with a lovely demi-glace jus. I also tasted the pork chop and the chicken, both of which were perfectly cooked and juicy. And herein are the two reasons why I like this place: first, the food is carefully and respectfully prepared. A juicy porkchop can be sublime, but it takes good seasoning, better sourcing, and perfect timing. Second, everything else on the plate adds to the meal, rather than competing or detracting from it. The chicken came with a spring pea and morel risotto (which avoided all hints of mushiness). The entrees were the work of a chef who knows how to work with fresh, seasonal ingredients and put them together so that the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

I also like that Sante has charcuterie roots. The first and cold courses include duck confit, their own sausage (they called in salami, but it was really more of a tasty summer sausage), and house-cured duck prosciutto. These are not items that are typical of Spokane menus, and I am happy they are around. Indeed, my entire time in the restaurant said that these people like food, and like people who like food. The waitress encouraged us to ask questions, and seemed happy when we did. This attitude seemed to fit with their commitment to local farmers and produce, and well as their "slow food" orientation. The service was pleasant and enthusiastic, if not four-star polished.

A final word: the wine list is really interesting. Not in the "faint praise," I don't know what else to say way, but legitimately interesting. Our waitress said that because so many of their diners choose the three or seven course option with wine pairing, they don't feel as constrained to offer recognizable labels. We ordered a French varietal that I have never seen as a varietal (it's usually blended), but it was exactly what we said we wanted. None of the wines on the menu were above fifty dollars a bottle and all were available by the glass, although I believe there were more bottles available on request.

Sante began as a daytime lunch/snack place, and now offers dinner Wednesday through Saturdays. It's dinners are definitely going for fine dining. Meals are expensive by Spokane standards: twenty-five to thirty dollar entries, with tempting first and cold courses running around ten dollars. They offer a three and seven course menu, with wine pairings. Given my current respect for the kitchen, I would hazard that they are options worth exploring.

I wouldn't call Sante a world-class restaurant, but it does seem to be a place that is serious and sophisticated about food. At this point, I'm hoping Spokane can show itself to be the same.