A note to our city's bar owners and restaurateurs: Are you aware that Seattle has a major league baseball team? It's true! They're called the Mariners, and each of their games are televised for the pleasure of your dining and drinking clientele.
A note to our city's bar owners and restaurateurs: Are you aware that Seattle has a major league baseball team? It's true! They're called the Mariners, and each of their games are televised for the pleasure of your dining and drinking clientele.
Faithful Seattlest readers will recognize Rachael Coyle, connoisseur of pho, lover of steel-cut oats and pastry chef extraordinaire. Since April of 2007 she's been employed by Seattle's frenchiest café, Le Pichet, and last night--at the first Beaujolais Nouveau party of the weekend--we had the pleasure of tasting her masterpiece, a coconut cream éclair with chocolate glaze.
BASTILLE DAY AT THE MARKET: Seattle's French restaurants are in Francophile overdrive tonight in celebration of French independence. Le Pichet (1933 First Ave.) starts its annual party at 6 p.m. and features Gypsy jazz until 11 p.m., when the d.j. takes over. Maximilien (81A Pike St.) has a special three-course dinner tonight for $35 and an accordion player. And Cafe Campagne (86 Pine St.) tops them all: a street fair is happening in Post Alley starting at 3 p.m. including wine and hors d'oeuvres. For those seeking more sustenance, they're offering an extravagant five-course dinner for around $80 per person.
Stairwell Sisters have joined the slowly growing community of all-girl old-timey bands, and recently released their third album, Get Off Your Money. They do much better when they tackle the traditional fiddle tunes, but their originals do the genre plenty of justice. They’ll be joined at the Tractor tonight by local old-timey heroes the Tallboys.
Sidewalk table for lunch at Le Pichet: Salade verte, the café's signature green salad with hazelnuts, goat-cheese tartine (on country bread from Tall Grass Bakery) with cornichons on the side, a glass or two of Muscadet. Feels like France, even more so because I've brought along the new memoir by Patricia and Walter Wells, We've Always Had Paris...and Provence.
One hour.
They buzz, they flit, they fly. They dart, they dash, they zip.
We would like to point out that it is our firm desire that there be less militancy in the driver/biker debate. Obviously there are a few asshole drivers, and there are a few asshole bikers. The vast majority of both groups, however, are cool, and the few bad apples shouldn't make us want to nuke the whole barrel. That said...
Jesus, this is embarrassing. Bastille Day celebrates the liberation of a particularly pungent batch of cheese from the dungeons of the old prison in 1789 (along with seven prisoners) on the 14th of July (le Quatorze). Except here -- where as usual we're a day late and a euro short -- the Seattle Bastille Day festivities are being held on Sunday the 15th at the Seattle Center. What fun is that? The ideal would be to get loaded to the gills on Saturday and roll out for a late, late brunch on Sunday.
We'd just polished off the Poulet rôti à votre commande, potage aux légumes de printemps (“Chicken roasted to order, on a celery-scallion-sultana ragout and salt-roasted fingerling potatoes”) at Le Pichet ($34, serves two, allow an hour for the roasting) and life seemed particularly pleasant, generous, abundant.
It's SIFF's last bleary-eyed, numb-assed, popcorn-butter-fingered weekend, so if you haven't stopped in for some film-festy fun, you gotta act fast. We held Audrey upside-down and shook her until she gave us some selections -- no, no, you deserve the best. There's no telling how far we'd go to make you happy.
Air France 046 touched down right on schedule Monday--the first-ever nonstop flight from CDG to SEA, water cannons spraying the Airbus A330 in a festive salute, the pilot waving French and American flags from his cockpit window. Champagne toasts and official speeches followed, blessing this long-overdue of the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle.
People make a lot of excuses when it comes to deep frying. “I don’t have a deep fryer.” “It’s bad for you.” “I’m still missing a patch of hair on my arm where I burned myself with hot oil in 1985.”
Our treasure known as Pike Place Market serves as the setting for an ideal progressive eating party by day. Work from one end to the other, and you can enjoy salmon, fruits, vegetables, nuts, candies, cheese, tea and more – and that’s without even opening your wallet! Spend some money and your feast continues.
We're serving Bastille Day cold, apparently, this Sunday at Seattle Center. In Paris, a brigade of activist clowns is parading after the usual militaristic tomtommery. No word on whether there will headbutting.
Seattle, specifically Belltown, is now the country's official epicenter of restaurant wine service. As if we needed another reminder.
In which Seattlest contributors divulge their weekend plans and disclose their favorite things to BBQ.
To be fair, you didn't expect the Ray Harryhausen talk at the Science Fiction Museum last night to sell out either, did you? But it did, and even though we hinted that we were from a globe-spanning blog empire, they refused to let us in. "You know, Mr. Seattlest golfs with Mr. Allen frequently," we lied pathetically. But no soap.
Bernard-Henri Levy occupies a position in France roughly comparable to...well, we don't have anyone like him. Rock star Bono comes close. Jon Stewart, maybe, except that BHL writes his own material. Sporting an unruly haircut, clad in the requisite uniform (black shirt, black blazer), he's a familiar figure on French TV, the embodiment of the Public Intellectual. Atlantic Monthly sent him on a year-long assignment to retrace the intellectual journey taken by de Tocqueville; the resulting tome, American Vertigo, has just been published, and BHL came to Seattle as part of the book tour.