I had the best restaurant food of 2004 last night. The restaurant is called Crow and I had been hearing great things about it for a while and wanted to check out.

It’s in a converted warehouse space a few blocks from the Seattle Opera Hall. The space is lively, noisy and minimally decorated, with the exception of pretty splashes of orange and red on one wall. When I walked in it felt like I had been transported to Portland; it seemed so stylish, yet still casual.

They were extremely busy, so we were glad that we had made reservations earlier in the day. The menu was very simple—just one page, with four or five items in each of three sections; soups/salads, plates to share and entrees.

My friend ordered an iceberg wedge with Roquefort cheese—which I think is a HIGHLY underrated salad. It was a nice, crisp wedge with a pungent dressing. The one they serve at Morton’s is better, but only because it comes with anchovies.

I ordered the Manchego cheese, which was wrapped in grape leaves, grilled and served with ratatouille. The melted cheese was delicious paired with the slightly charred and crunchy leaves, and the ratatouille was some of the best I’ve ever had.

Our waitress made an excellent wine suggestion of a 2002 Monterey Côtes du Crow’s. It was spicy and delicious and went down way too easily. I asked where I could get a bottle (or two) and she said they sell it at Pete’s – my favorite wine store! It was reasonably priced too, so I’m thinking stocking stuffers for a select, lucky few.

For dinner, my vegetarian friend ordered the vegetable cassoulet, which was amazingly flavorful considering it only had vegetables in it (she said this, not me—but I have to agree with her). It also had a great texture with soft vegetables, silky broth and crunchy, buttery croutons.

I ordered the short ribs with mashed potato puree, on the waitress’s recommendation. I’m always critical of short ribs, because I really love the ones I make, but these blew me away and I wasn’t even expecting it. First off, they were a gigantic portion of beautiful ribs. A Stonehenge of meat, if you will, on a glistening sauce island with a hillside of fluffy and smooth potato puree. I took my first bite and my eyes rolled back into my head. I heard distant giggling and when I floated back to reality my friend was laughing and said, “It must be amazing. You had the strangest look on your face.” Apparently I have an odd food bliss expression.

But the meat deserves its own paragraph. It was so tender that I didn’t even pick up my knife. It tasted like… uh. Heaven? The sauce was slightly sweet, slightly salty and just the right thickness; like an excellent and time-consuming (French) beef reduction. The best part was the flavor of the meat—it had a bright, exotic spiciness to it, which turned out to be star anise.

As we were leaving I asked the waitress if they were always this busy and she nodded emphatically, “Since the day we opened four months ago, and we haven’t even advertised!”. That’s very impressive, but then again, so is the food.

I have a dilemma. I want to write about all my food experiences as honestly as possible, but what do you do when a good friend treats you to a dinner out and it’s awful?

I guess you write about it. Maybe I’ll just leave out names and details to protect the innocent. That, and hope he doesn’t read my blog for the next few weeks…

My friend and I did some work for RUI a while back and they gave him a gift card as a thank you. He wanted to use it, so he asked me to join him for dinner at Palomino. I was really excited to see him, but I wasn’t as excited about the restaurant.

Palomino has always seemed schizophrenic to me. The decor is trying to be upscale, but it’s located in a shopping mall (granted Barney’s of New York is in same building, but it’s still a shopping mall) and the menu is all over the map in price range and style. So you can get deep fried poppers for $6 or a filet mignon for $32.

I think that our problem may have been in what we ordered. It seems like the best thing to order in places like this are the plain, non-fancy things, like the pizza or cheese fries. We decided to order more ‘upscale’ and ‘healthy’ things; the mushroom salad, crab & artichoke dip, rotisserie chicken and Dungeness crab stuffed prawns.

The mushroom salad was good, but certainly not healthy; it was the richest salad I’ve ever eaten. It was a warm salad with hedgehog mushrooms in a rich, gravy-like sauce over a smattering of leaves with cheese piled on top. The crap appetizer was probably my favorite—but then again I’ve never met a crab dip that I didn’t like. Which is weird because I have VERY strong feelings against cream cheese in dips, but I guess that’s what actually makes them good. The dip was appropriately cheesy and gooey and served with pizza chips that desperately needed salt.

My chicken was rotisseried to death and stuffed with a strange filling that was not what I pictured when I ordered it. The menu said something about ‘pancetta’, so I figured “How could I go wrong?”. I guess you can’t go wrong if it actually is pancetta, but I think the kitchen is using that term loosely.

The best thing I can say about my friends stuffed prawns is that they tasted like something you’d get at Skipper’s. When he offered me a bite I had a flash back of visiting my aunt when I was a kid and her taking us out for a ‘special treat’ at Skipper’s. I guess even back then I was a food snob.

So, when the bill came to over $100, I was a little surprised. If I was going to spend that much on a dinner for two, I know of about a hundred other places I’d go first. What I couldn’t figure out was why the restaurant was absolutely packed—just like the Cheesecake Factory.

Are the Cheesecake Factories of the world putting the Cassis’s of the world out of business? Or maybe this only happens in the states…

When I used to live in the North end I had a Christmas-time ritual of getting a steaming hot bowl of Pho at the Than Brothers’ on Aurora and then heading up the block to get a $5 tree at Chubby and Tubby. I’d always follow the footprints painted on the store floor that led to the Christmas tree lot, even though I’d been getting trees there since I was a kid and knew the path by heart. Then after purchasing the tree, the cashier would hand me a key and I’d head back into the store and follow a different set of footprints to see if my key would open the treasure chest packed with Chubby and Tubby merchandise.

Now that I live in the South end and Chubby and Tubby is no longer (sniff), I have found the need for a new ritual. I still like to go to the Chubby and Tubby lot, since they open once a year just to sell trees, but now I go to the one down South in Rainier Valley. And what could be a better food pairing for an event like this than Jones Barbeque, just a few blocks away on MLK?

Jones is a small B.B.Q. joint that is dive-y in a wholesome way and serves damned good barbeque—the best I’ve tasted in Seattle. They aren’t open late, so when we got there at 6:15 they had already closed up the dinning area and were out of everything but the ribs. But we didn’t need much else besides two orders of ribs to go.

Each order comes with a good coleslaw that has a nice, balanced blend of mayonnaise and vinegar. We also got an order of their baked beans; the really good, really thick, ketchup-laced, sweet kind. I ordered ribs with a mild sauce, because I’m a wimp, and Zach ordered the medium ones. His were hot (in my opinion) and the sauce was thin and tangy. Mine were also hot, but the sauce was sweeter and richer. The meat on both was smoky and falling off the bone. I love to put hunks of rib meat into the whiter-than-Wonder-Bread bread, add a spoonful of slaw and then run it through the sauce until the bread is falling apart and I can barely get it to my mouth before it disintegrates. It’s a perfect way to get into the holiday spirit.