I know this is the Fall Arts issue, but fun fact: Summer—the season we Seattleites long for all year—is not over yet. Stop saying this. I don’t know who taught us all that summer is restricted to June, July, and August (elementary school, I guess?), but the autumnal equinox isn’t until September 22. And as a visit to Pike Place will reveal, all the seafood, fruit, and veggie stalls are still popping off right now. Let us locally rebrand September as a culinary transitional period, where you can have your pristine PNW produce alongside your PSL.
Best-of lists can be problematic for a couple reasons, so here instead is a cheerful reminder about some of the summeriest Seattle foods that you still have full weeks left to eat. They’re not just summery, they’re Seattle-summery! And the key here, of course, is that elite combo of light and luxurious. The Big Dark is mostly in your head. Don’t let it affect your meals before you have to.
Burrata sandwich, Café Hitchcock
Seattle’s a sandwich city—specifically a bánh mì city, as Stranger columnist Michael Wong recently explained—but a late-summer sandwich is not a pairwise comparison to a winter sandwich. An all-season sandwich is a distinct concept, too. When it’s pushing 80 degrees, you want a cold sando full of vegetables, but you still want all that richness. You want delicacy. Briskness. Thoughtful sandwich engineering. It’s a tricky balance.
This time of year, it’s gotta be the burrata sandwich at Café Hitchcock. We’ve already spoken about Hitchcock’s flawless focaccia, at once light and hypersaturated with bright fruity olive oil, while somehow still retaining its integral form and structure. In the spring and summer, they stack it up with a big creamy ball of cold burrata, which bursts apart and then soaks into the fluffy, golden-crisped bread. It’s flanked by roasted zucchini, arugula, and pesto; they add tender little asparaguses when they’re in season. One bite and it all goes sploosh, in the most opulent and Babylonian way. Plus they make ’em ready to go in a little paper envelope, handy for waterfront stroll-chomping.
Very French salade niçoise, Mirabelle by Orphée
Folks are out there calling anything a salade niçoise these days. While potatoes and olives are optional and the veggies can be seasonal, the salad must have both tuna and anchovies, tomatoes are mandatory, you gotta learn how to boil an egg properly, and you can’t fuck up the vinaigrette. And why would you use American mustard in the world’s Frenchest salad?
No truer, more quintessential salade niçoise exists in this city than the one at Mirabelle by Orphée. I’ve been searching for this consummate paradigmatic version of Nice’s nicest salad for my whole life, et voilà, enfin. There are mesclun greens, roasted cherry tomatoes, tuna AND anchovies, and sliced boiled eggs with sunny yolks, and the dressing is simple and correct. At a restaurant where the owner imports his flour and butter directly from France, you know that mustard is from Dijon. Combined with the zing from the salty anchovies, the top-shelf albacore, the fresh herbs, the cracked black pepper… man, it just gives you the feeling. To say nothing of eating it alfresco in actual Pioneer Square, pergola-side, among the leafy maples. I wanna do it every weekend, even once it starts to rain again.
Persian Love cocktail, Oliver’s Twist
He may be new to neighborhoody cocktail lounge Oliver’s Twist, but Benjamin Wright has spent years building a rep for putting weird shit in cocktails—like shrimp-infused gin, barley tea, and acid-adjusted turnip juice. So, to see his current cocktail special up on the chalkboard was underwhelming, honestly. Pistachio, gin, rose, lemon, cardamom? Well, that’s not very weird at all.
Until Wright explained that he recently befriended a pastry chef, “and we’ve been influencing each other heavily.” Based on the fragrant Persian love cake, the Persian Love cocktail arrives ungarnished, straight up, the palest shade of green with a smooth, milky body. It’s a heavenly little masterwork. Wright bases the drink around Woodinville-based BroVo gin that he accents with cardamom bitters, lemon, rose liqueur, and orgeat—made in-house with toasted pistachios and damask rosewater. The addition of Combier Liqueur de Rose doubles up the rosiness you’d find in the cake, and all the commingling scents of rose, cardamom, and pistachio create a dreamy floral breeze that evokes Seattle’s summertime flower explosion. Clever and delicious, Benjamin, as usual.
Bourbon-caramel semifreddo, Carrello
At Broadway and Roy, Altura’s equally fancy little brother, Carrello, is concealing an obscenely fantastical ice cream sculpture at the very tail end of their menu.
Don’t get strung out by the way it looks, because it looks like a Claim Jumper–ass Kahlúa mudslide—but there is some real architecture happening within, beginning with a stratum of gorgeous, tan bourbon-caramel ice cream. The cream slab has been paved in chocolate, then drowned in luscious banana caramel sauce, which elicits a Filipino turon. On the summit are jagged meringue shards, scorched marshmallows infused with burnt bay leaves, and lightweight cacao-nib toffee brittle. There’s a choco-shortbread crust on the bottom, crunched pistachios are scattered, and it’s all dashed with roasted chicory powder.
This dessert is so many things. It’s got some Baked Alaska heritage and takes inspiration from the humble s’more, while halfheartedly LARPing a tiramisu. Its great-grandmother was a Viennetta. That sauce will send you on a tropical ayahuasca mind journey to expand the way you think about dessert and bananas for life. Plus the cacao brittle and the herbal toasted marshmallows! The whole thing just goes fucking crazy, and it’s surprising that there isn’t a person dancing around on the sidewalk in a banana costume to broadcast to the public that this voluptuary tour de force is inside.
Ahi tuna tostada, La Marea Marisquería
This is easily one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. Liz Dones and Bo Tarantine recently moved here from LA, and after hitting the ground running as Tacos Extranjeros with a giant labor-intensive trompo, they’ve revamped as La Marea (inside Fair Isle Brewing), serving Mexican-style mariscos with a touch of Michelin-y flair. Their ahi tuna tostada is deceptively simple: a crisp tortilla spread with salsa macha—that’s spicy Mexican chile oil—then heaped with ruby-red ahi tuna and drizzled with fishy XO sauce. The tostada’s piled to the edges with luminous ingots of ahi, as vivid and red as a Mormon Jell-O salad, and then anointed by all the shiny sauces. The gleaming ahi is immaculate all by itself, and all the umamescence and textures and nubbly fried-out bits of chile elevate everything to the point where you’re experiencing something like heartbreak with each bite. It’s confusing, this rush of emotions. This is just tuna and sauce on a tortilla? So why am I crying?
