Going West: Ten Years Ago
[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: August 18, 2008]
After a couple of weeks dawdling around Manhattan, I'm in the air again, and find myself more disconcerted by the time difference travelling to the West Coast than I ever do travelling back and forth between the East Coast and Europe.
Seattle - my first visit - and what a nice hotel the Four Seasons is. A business dinner, and the name of the restaurant went unrecorded, but it was a casual Italian-seafood joint, and we ate on a terrace overlooking Puget Sound. Various antipasti, I see, but my main course can't have been grilled escarole, as my diary tells me. Grilled escolar, I think, that meaty, waxy fish, with mashed potatoes. Pitchers of margaritas were the order of the evening.
Although I'd had a work purposes in Seattle on Friday, I stayed over the weekend to see something of the city. I spent Saturday exploring Pike Market, then walking over to the Belltown district. For dinner I chose a popular French bistro not far from the hotel, Campagne. Then as now, Campagne was divided between a simple café and restaurant - upstairs, I think. I made a reservation for the latter, and enjoyed several courses: coddled eggs with a dab of caviar; a little squid tartlet; asparagus salad with prosciutto; roast monkfish; cheeses. It was all neatly done, and a bottle of Bandol helped things along.
I was sufficiently pleased, at any rate, to return to the café for lunch the next day, after watching the remarkable whole-fish-throwing display which distinguishes service at Pike Market's premier fish stall. Lunch was a casse-croute, well stuffed with two kinds of dry sausage and a soft cheese.
More exercise followed: a walk along the street behind the piers; my first glance at the cheerful clutter of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, a century-old dried goods store, crammed with every kind of novelty, joke and souvenir. Refreshment in a saloon on Pioneer Square, where the term "Skid Row" originated, apparently from the custom of skidding timber down the street in the direction of a mill on the waterfront.
Uncharacteristically, I chose a chain restaurant for dinner: McCormick & Schick's. My fault, then, that the king salmon should have been served with...a raspberry butter sauce. Oh dear.
And back to New York, losing several hours on the way of course, reading Turgenev's Smoke.
Two restaurants visited over the next couple of days. Already a favorite standby, L'Absinthe on the Upper East Side. Whelks, of course, to begin, slathered with mayo. Then the truffled poularde, a very comforting dish, and some cheese. The 1988 Hermitage by E. Guigal must have been costly.
And then a trip to the remote west side to confirm the rumor that a little, plain French restaurant called La Lunchonette was serving brains. They were: sometimes they still do. Cervelles au beurre-noir, in fact, which I ate for lunch with a glass of Cahors.
Ramalama: the endlessly entertaining Fleshtones at the Lakeside Lounge. And so to bed.
