Above us towered the wine spiral, huge iron candelabras lit the ceiling, and all the waiters wore black. I felt like we should be listening to Bauhaus. Instead they were playing covers of 80s one-hit wonders.

We started glancing through the menu. The first page listed starters (3-5$), the second had cheese, then there were small plates, large plates, sandwiches, and pizzas. Not to mention dessert. And all dishes suggested a wine. Then there was the wine menu, with 5 different wine flights. Oh and there were specials.

It was a bit much. We had so many questions.

Perhaps the waiter could answer our questions? Sadly our waiter had a shaved head, a spiky tattoo on his wrist, and looked like he just stepped off a skateboard.

“Wine flights are the way to go, man. You get the most booze.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask for his advice.

We decided to go small: 2 wine flights, some cheese, some small plates.

Our first stumble came with the wine. The pinot noir flight was nearly undrinkable. I liked the Angeline (from Santa Cruz). The rest were forgettable, almost watery. Where was the long lingering finish? The touch of cherries and violets? I love pinot. I could talk about them for days. I was heartbroken.

The “dirty birds” flight was the complete opposite, funky and charming. Very drastic counterpoints to eachother, but all wonderful, all great with the cheese. I was a big fan of the Carmenere, with its musky edge. And the Monte dos Cabacos from portugal was intriguing, an entirely original varietal.

We picked a selection of spanish cheeses which just made these wines sing. Particularly the spanish cheese with paprika (idizabel?) and the bella sorella. The fig jam and sliced apple went well, a little sweetness.

Our small plates were sadly disappointing. The prosciutto with figs and orange zest felt overcooked, the prosciutto limp and lifeless. And the orange zest masked that sumptious figginess.

Peppadews with salmon mousse were fine, but not an inspired pairing. The peppadews were sharp and sweet, the mousse creamy and light. Each overwhelmed the other.

The carpaccio was incredibly disappointing, particularly as it is one of my favorite dishes. The meat tasted almost bad and it was sprinkled with such a small amount of flavorless arugula, you’d think it was imported from Italy rather than something that grows in our own backyard. We couldn’t finish it.

Our one savior was the ceviche–fresh, light and mixed with yellow and green peppers.

I have been to Purple once before, but it was a bachelorete party, a drunken haze. We were wearing cowboy hats. We rode a bull. I do remember the flatbreads being quite tasty though.

Purple fits a certain niche. It is big. A big menu, big wine list, big napkin holders. And I am always happy for a new wine bar.

But next time? I’ll stick with somewhere the waitstaff is picked for their wine knowledge rather than their ability to wear black. Or I’ll just sit at the bar.

………………………………………………..
The Puple Cafe and Wine Bar
http://www.thepurplecafe.com
1225 4th Ave
Seattle, WA 98101
(206) 829-2281

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I worked all weekend, 40 hours in 3 days and now I am spent. But I have promised myself I will review Txori tonight, the new tapas restaurant from Joseba Jimenez de Jimenez of the Harvest Vine, so I manage to pull myself up off the couch and drive to Belltown.

I don’t particularly like going to restaurants solo, but a certain kind of restaurant can make you feel it is almost better to be alone. You can eat what you like, drink what you like, without having to cater to someone else’s tastes.

Txori is one of those places. Each dish is so small (pintxos) that you can still try 10 different things. Especially if all you ate for lunch was an omelette.

I started with the chocolate chorizo toast and the cold duck confit. The chorizo was rich and smoky but I struggled with the long slices, flinging chocolate everywhere like a mad donut eater. And I remembered after the first bite of duck confit that I don’t really like confit. It always feels like survival food.

But then the octopus arrived.

One bite and I was in a whole different world. It wasn’t just tender, it was juicy, like a piece of pork. And flavored with smoky paprika and spicy olive oil. Cobe and I were in New York a few weeks ago and had octopus at this wonderful new greek restaurant in the upper east side, but this just blew that away.

After that came the grilled pear with valdeon and walnuts, a nice blend of flavors.

Then one of the specials of the night, lamb with beets. The lamb was a bit salty for my taste, but it went well with the beets, and the presentation was beautiful.

The waitress had steered me right with the octopus, so I polled her for more suggestions.

“The pork” she said, “or the oxtail. Those are my favorites.”

I went with the pork and the carmelized onion tart. The pork was wonderful, amazingly juicy. I swear it sprayed the table when I bit into it. It was offset by a roasted pepper and smoky paprika drenched oil.

The caramelized onion tart was also carefully prepared, with thin pastry and a topping of frisee.

Finally I was spent. So many pintxos, such a small stomach. I decided I could squeeze in some flan. I neglected to photograph it, but it was beautiful, perhaps my second favorite dish of the night (nothing could top the octopus). It was gently flavored with coffee, layered on a thin bit of chocolate and topped with gran marnier. I nearly licked the plate.

It is tempting to compare Txori to Ocho, if only because they opened within a few months of eachother and both feature tapas. But really they are so different. Ocho is at its heart american, like a neighborhood bistro. Txori transports you to spain. They both serve wonderful food.

Sitting in Txori, listening to the music, I almost felt I could step outside into the Barcelona market place. Did you see those red doors in the picture above? They open into a small courtyard, where someone has hung a string of lights.

I can’t wait till summer.

…………………………………………………………….
Txori
http://www.txoribar.com
2207 2nd Avenue
Seattle, WA
206.204.9771

Note:
This review is part of “Seattle Restaurant Review 360,” the brainchild of Michael Natkin of Herbivoracious. He asked a whole slew of bloggers to review the same restaurant and all post reviews on the same day. You can link to the other reviews here.

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“Should we get something?” I asked, eyeing the hanger steak and lamb kebabs. Their menu is organized into little bites, all less than 10$, all sounding yummy. Cumin pork tenderloin with frisee. Chicken laab gai. Grilled portobello with butter bean salad.

I ordered a glass of wine, the waitress steering me towards a rioja. It was perfect: round and rich with toasty undertones.

There were a lot of older couples there, for such a swank place. Exposed brick, suspended bare bulbs—in New York this place would be mobbed. You wouldn’t get a table without jumping down the hostess’s neck. Here we just walked in. At 5:30 on a friday.

We ended up ordering the lamb kebabs with sumac hummus, spicy shrimp, and a smoked chicken and dried cherry flatbread. The shrimp came first, a nice mix of spices but a bit hard to peel strangely. They also fried up the heads. “Do people eat the heads?” I asked Cobe, pushing them to the side.

Next came the flatbread and oh my god was it good. I usually write off flatbread. It always seems to be kind of a filler, but this was perfect. Caramelized onions with shreds of smoked chicken and cheese and the most perfect dried cherries. An amazing combination of flavors– smoky and sweet and creamy. With this hidden depth. We fought over the last piece.

Then came the lamb, and I have to say I was disappointed.They were wrapped with roasted peppers which was a nice foil, but mostly just took away from the meatiness. And they didn’t have that beautiful crisp meaty crust. It’s not really fair to judge lamb kebabs when you’ve recently had them at Lola. Those were life changing. Everything else falls flat.

The hummus alongside was not bad. Cobe actually ate it, which means something as he turns his nose up at grocery store hummus. But compared to Ephesus? Not even close. I won’t even mention the baba ganoush which we left in a near perfect ball on the side.

So much more to try here though. I badly wanted to try the pear sorbetto with candied lavender but decided my stomach couldn’t handle it.

Next time.

*******************************************************
Black Bottle
2600 1st Avenue
Seattle, WA
(206) 441-1500
http://blackbottleseattle.com/

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Cobe’s been here a few times for lunch and has raved about the kebabs so we finally made it there for dinner.

It was 9:30 by the time we got there and as we stepped in we smelled grilling meat. Lola is inviting, high ceilings and dramatic stained glass lamps. The waitress walked us to a cozy booth with a rack at the end to hold our coats.

The menu has an array of options, from small plates like spreads and kebabs, to larger entrees like hanger steak and a variety of tagines. It straddles that greek-moroccan-turkish line, settling for vaguely mediterranean. And despite the tempting meatiness of the mediterranean grill, there are also plentiful vegetarian options: mushroom kebabs, red pepper spreads, delicata squash. I was eyeing the goat and rabbit, but that was a bit beyond Cobe’s taste so we settled for tamer fare.

We started with their barrel aged feta spread which came with house made pita squares and was not too salty, flavored with mint. Then we moved onto a pork and harissa kebab layered over onions and doused with ouzo. The pork was perfectly cooked, heightened by the peppers and paprika of the harissa. And the onions were to die for, caramelized where they’d touched the hot grill, and flavored with the ouzo. I scraped that platter clean, trying to place the taste.

The greens that followed (called “horta” in Greek, a mix of chard and escarole) were horrible. The smell alone turned me off, but the taste was worse. The kitchen had tried to fix them, adding lemon and salt and they had become a sour bitter mess.

Beets were much better, perfectly roasted and served with a side of skordalia, their red juices spilling over the plate. And then our main course arrived, smoked lamb leg with preserved lemon. The center was perfectly pink and moist, but I kept wishing for that crusty char of the kebab. It needed something, a sweetness to counter that smokiness, and the parsley and preserved lemon weren’t enough. Grilled figs would have set it off wonderfully, or perhaps cherries.

By this point in the meal we had finished two small carafes of their house red, a blend of cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon and merlot, made for them by Chinoook winery. It was silky smooth and full of body, the perfect house wine. “Dessert?” the waitress asked, placing the menus on the table.

We decided on the pear tart with brown sugar ice cream, and in a few minutes the plate was nearly licked clean. The pears were moist and lush with the faintest hint of rosemary, the crust caramelized with a little sugar, and set off by the house made ice cream.

A nice meal, all in all, in a beautiful setting. But next time we’ll stick to the kebabs.

**********************************
Lola
2000 4th Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 441-1430
http://tomdouglas.com/lola/index.html

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Which is all really great, but sad for the blog. But every now and then we still make it out.

Last night I took the bus into town and met him at the Local Vine, a new wine bar slash small plates restaurant in Belltown. It was started by two female business grads from Harvard and they brought in Jason Wilson of Crush to do the food. How can you go wrong?

It wasn’t too crowded when I arrived at 6 pm on a friday. The seating was varied, several tables near gas fire places, a few cocktail-ish big leather covered blocks, very new york- esque. It’s a nice scene, relaxed. I opted for the bar.

The first thing that hit me was the wine list. They offer over 40 wines by the glass all arranged not just by red or white but by descriptives such as “spicy” or “statuesque.” At first this put me off in that wine-for-dummies way, but in the end I found it helpful. It’s a long list. Some wines of the same varietal were split between different categories–one shiraz/viognier was categorized under “bracing” while a different shiraz was “spicy.” And in a bit of an over-cutesy addition, there are little “keys” next to each wine, hearts for their favorites, pine trees for locals. They’re also happy to let you taste anything.

I chose a sangiovese which was quite good for a starting wine, “bracing” as it was described, light in body. Cobe walked in right about then, looking like he needed a drink (usual for a friday). He ordered a different sangiovese, we dug into the olives they’d set in front of us.

The bar staff was all drinking wine too, which was great as it meant they’d tasted most of the offerings. They all had their favorites and as our meal went on we bent to their recommendations. Cobe switched to an amazing shiraz (two hands gnarly dudes)– spicy with a buttered finish and tons of fruit in between. Much more fruit forward “in your face” kind of style. I chose a cab-merlot-syrah blend from Washington state, a bit more bite than the Sangiovese, the mushroomy syrah adding a nice depth.

And then the food. The menu is beautiful, simple fresh food, local tapas style. We started with a beet salad, purple beets and pink beets marinated in an orange dressing with golden raisins and watercress. The pink beets were amazing–the citrusy sweetness set off the beets perfectly, especially when mixed with the raisins. But the purple were overcooked. We still ate them all, the flavor was so great we couldn’t resist.

The arugula and braesola salad was also a hit. The dressing was a tad on the buttery side, we both like ours with a bit more bite, but the arugula was wonderfully light and young, rather than old and bitter. And mixed with thinly shaved braesola and reggiano… you really can’t go wrong.

Next we moved onto the meat. Pork tenderloin with polenta and roasted cherries. The pork was perfectly cooked, just the barest racy pink in the center and set off beautifully by the cherries. I only wish there were more of them. The pork almost begged for their sweetness. The polenta was a bit grainy, but had a great addition of fresh corn which gave it a spritely flavor rather than its usual heaviness.

And then we had the wagyu flank steak, again perfectly medium rare, set over blue cheese carmelized potatoes. The steak was well cooked but sadly not a flavorful meat, rare for a flank steak. The counterpoint of blue cheese worked well though, and the wines were well matched.

All in all, a wonderful meal, light and satisfying. And a great place to try out new wines. They have a wine storage system discreetly placed behind the bar to keep open bottles vacuum fresh.

As we were on our way out, the waitress tried to entrance us to come back for the two hands gnarly dudes wine maker dinner this tuesday, and we just might go. Hard to resist an excuse to go back. That wine was truly amazing.

**********************************
Local Vine

http://www.thelocalvine.com

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