Wright Eats

We’ve enjoyed many dinners at our neighborhood restaurant Pair over the past few years.  Owners Sarah and Felix Penn opened their second restaurant Frank’s this month, just a few blocks away from Pair, so we stopped in for dinner on their first Friday night to see what the new place is all about.

Dark wood paneling, soft lighting, and high-backed booths give a relaxed, low-key vibe to the restaurant.  We were seated on the Oyster House side of the restaurant, opposite the tall doorway that leads to the Parlor and bar.  I’m glad I made a reservation, because they were full by 7PM and turning people away.  We had a hard time deciding between all of the tasty-sounding options on the cocktail and dinner menus, but we finally agreed on a few things to share.  Dawn sampled an Air Mail cocktail (lime, honey, rum, champagne) while I went for the Pear & Cardamom Sidecar (a nice twist on the classic drink).

Our plate of buttery and flaky cheddar biscuits with ham arrived first, with a small ramekin of Calvados apple butter on the side.  It was a tasty, homey dish, and I’d buy jars of that apple butter to go if they were for sale.  Next up were two mini lobster rolls, served on house-made hot dog buns, with a butter lettuce leaf tucked in.  As Sarah explained, the lobster is served Cape Cod style (mixed simply with mayonnaise), sans celery as you might find in some parts of Maine.  These definitely felt like fancy lobster rolls, with a subtle grill flavor in the slightly crunchy bread, more haute than what you’d find on the roadside in Maine.  Quite tasty, but also quite pricey at $9 a roll.

Dawn tried the chard and ricotta pansotti (a triangular-shaped stuffed pasta), and it was nice and rich – a decent vegetarian option.  I loved my filet mignon with horseradish parsley butter.  The steak was cooked to a perfect medium rare, melt-in-your-mouth tender, with deep flavor.  Easily one of the best steaks I’ve had in the past few years, and a great value compared to any of the pricey steakhouses around town.  With a side of creamed kale to go with it, I was in heaven.

For dessert, we shared caramelized bananas with three ice creams.  The presentation was interesting, with the ice creams served in a single stack of round discs, but when I took a bite with all three, they just didn’t go together.  Each had a different consistency (one was soft, two were hard), and the chocolate ice cream didn’t have a smooth texture (slightly crystallized, like it didn’t freeze properly).  The bananas were good, but overall this dish didn’t impress me.

As to be expected during opening week, there were a few hiccups during the evening.  It was a full twenty minutes before our waitress came over to our table to even say hello (we were starting to think about leaving), and when she arrived, she apologetically told us that she had forgotten about us.  While I’m sure that’s the honest truth, it’s not the greatest thing to hear as a customer.  It also felt like we were re-forgotten after every course during the evening, with long waits the norm.  Our favorite moment was when our waitress came by and asked, “Has anyone dessert’d you yet?”  Well, no, no one has taken our dessert order, but yes we have been deserted!  It looked like the staff was in the weeds on this first busy evening, so I’m sure they’ll straighten things out.  I’m eager to go back to try some oysters, the razor clam fritters, and another one of those steaks!

Frank’s Oyster House & Champagne Parlor
2616 NE 55th St, Seattle
206-525-0220

For some reason, I always thought tamales would be hard to make, but they turn out to be easy work with a group of friends over margaritas.  We first met Kathy around the holidays a number of years ago, and she promised that one year she’d share her recipes and show us how.  It’s been part of her annual Christmas tradition for years.

This was the year for our tamalada (tamale making party).  After one raincheck (snowcheck?) on account of Seattle’s crazy winter weather, we finally gathered at Kathy’s house just after Christmas.  Joining us and Kathy (our tamalera, or tamale expert) were a group of dedicated foodies:  Kathy’s husband Patrick (retired and part-time “volunteer” at Salumi), along with our friends Catherine (Queso y Vino owner, and food blogger extraordinaire), her husband Ken (wine distributor and chef), and Eric and Kye (IMO, the couple most qualified to write a food blog who don’t actually have one).

Everyone brought something to contribute, and when you have eight people this dedicated to food in one room, it turns out to make for some awesome tamale fixin’s.  Not only were we stuffed after dinner, but we each went home with ten kinds of tamales, plus sweet dessert tamales.

Eric and I brought Mangalitsa carne picada filling with red mole, along with the sweet tamale filling: golden and black raisins stewed in rum.  Everyone else arrived with fillings too: duck with mole, roasted poblano rajas con queso, chicken and green chili, roasted yams and queso, spicy pastilla mushrooms, pork rib adobada, mushrooms with epazote y queso, and carnitas.

We made two types of tamale masa (plus the dessert masa, which was an adaptation of a recipe we found online).  Kathy started demonstrating with the sweet potato masa, showing us the secret she learned for keeping the tamale soft, fluffy and not too dense: at least 15 minutes beating in a stand mixer.

Next we made the lard version.  I had brought some homemade lard rendered from Mangalitsa fatback, which we mixed in with the fresh masa Kathy had purchased from the Pike Place Market outpost of La Mexicana Tortilla Factory.

Then we got to work wrapping the tamales, some with corn husks and others with banana leaves.  I thought there would be some kind of magic trick to wrapping them, but it wasn’t too difficult, and everyone seemed to develop their own technique and cute corn husk bows.

While we waited for the first batch to finish steaming (which requires almost an hour and a half), we noshed on homemade salsas, guacamole, and chips washed down with Kathy’s delicious blood orange margaritas.  Once the tamales were done, we sat down, enjoying them with red chili sauce on top and beans alongside.  They were among the best tamales I’ve eaten – I’m thinking that this might become a holiday tradition of our own.

For more photos of the evening, hop over to our Flickr stream.

Homemade Lard

Cut good quality leaf fat (preferred) or back fat into chunks.  Puree the chunks into a paste using a food processor.  Transfer to a Dutch oven or heavy pot, and leave it uncovered in a 250-degree oven for several hours, stirring periodically.  It’s done when you have a clear liquid with crisp brown cracklings on top.  Strain the liquid into containers and refrigerate up to three months or freeze up to a year.

Lard Tamale Masa
Adapted from Mexico: One Plate at a Time, by Rick Bayless

10 oz. lard or Crisco shortening
2 lb. fresh masa (4 cups) or 3½ cups dried masa harina for tamales mixed with 2¼ cups hot water (prep ahead of time and let sit for 20-30 minutes)
1½ teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
1½ cups chicken broth

With a stand mixer, beat lard or shortening with salt and baking powder until light in texture, about one minute.  Continue beating as you add the masa in three additions.  Reduce speed and add one cup of broth, continue beating 3-4 minutes, then add the last half cup of broth.  Total mixing time should be 15-20 minutes.

Sweet Potato Tamale Masa

Roast one sweet potato (baked or diced).  Follow instructions above, adding half the potato at a time with the broth.

Red Chili Sauce
From Elena’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking, by Elena Zelayeta

12 large dried red chilies. Using a few different varieties is best.
1 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon salt
4 cloves garlic
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce or 3 oz. can tomato paste
2 tablespoons canola oil

Remove the stems and seeds from the chiles and dry toast 3-4 minutes in a skillet to release the oils.  Add to blender jar and cover with 4-5 cups of water.  Soak for 30+ minutes.

Add the next four ingredients to the blender and blend on high for 3-4 minutes.  Strain.

Heat oil in a sauce pan or skillet.  Add chili mixture into the hot oil and cook for 4-5 minutes until the color deepens.  Taste for salt and/or sugar.  Simmer 15-20 minutes.

Italian.  It’s my favorite cuisine, but for years, I’d hate to eat it dining out in Seattle.  When I moved here, there were plenty of Italian-American restaurants.  You know the kind, where sauces are heavy and poured on top of too-soft pasta, and the kitschy Italian music is playing.  But Seattle was deprived of many places that even came close to what I could make at home with a few simple fresh ingredients – isn’t that the essence of what Italian cooking is about?

Recently, though, Italian restaurants have started coming into their own in Seattle, serving food that emphasizes our local ingredients while evoking the authenticity of the cooking of Italy, down to the handmade pasta.  Spinasse in particular has been the standout for me recently, but another new Italian place opening in a tiny corner of Wallingford took me by surprise.  Cantinetta welcomed its first guests tonight.

I was intrigued when I heard that Morgan Brownlow would be its sous chef.  We first came across Morgan’s cooking in Portland, just before he left clarklewis in 2006.  We had an outstanding meal there, and were pleased to try his food again at Lark’s second Whole Beast Dinner a couple years ago.  There, Johnathan introduced Morgan as master of the pig:  he works with the whole animal, breaking it down and cooking with all of its parts.  That night we had his pork snouts alla Milanese, which is one of his specialty dishes, along with a pig ear salad, and lardo cracklings, all delicious.

We were pleased to see Morgan’s obvious hand on the menu tonight.  This time, trotters were there in his Milanese-style with a Salmoriglio sauce.  Garlicky and tangy, they were delicious.  Along with our antipasti, we also enjoyed speck with winter squash, billed as a side-dish on the menu.  We dredged the pork-wrapped squash in the sweet brown-butter agro-dolce sauce, grabbing some fried sage leaves along the way.  The three small morsels were gone too soon.  Balancing the rich dishes, we also chose a salad.  It, too, featured the pig, with bits of tesa (a type of pancetta) nestled among the chicory and walnuts.  It was well-balanced, with the perfect amount of cracked black pepper.

Trevor Greenwood came over before our meal started to recommend our wine.  He’s the owner of Cantinetta, wine steward, and an alumnus of the authentically Neapolitan Via Tribunali.  This was our second clue that Cantinetta might be something other than ordinary.

Next course was the pasta.  We ordered two pastas, both handmade, and both wonderful.  The dishes were a bit pricey for what you get (for example, only six ravioli), but on the other hand, where else are you going to get pasta this good?  Not Tavolata, maybe not even La Spiga.  I’d say that only Spinasse has an edge on the pasta, with a more tender and delicate bite.  But with hazelnut fed pork inside Cantinetta’s ravoili, and perfectly seasoned hedgehog mushrooms and chestnuts on the tagliarini, tonight’s was among the best pasta I’ve eaten in Seattle.

I wished we had some bread to sop up all the lovely sauces on every plate.  A chewy soft foccacia served when we ordered was gone before the food arrived.

For our secondo, we ordered the black cod.  We opted for the fish instead of the lamb sausage, to balance our meat-heavy meal.  We were pleased with our choice: the sizable piece of fish was perfectly tender and buttery, with sweet carrots and leeks served simply underneath.

We thought that three antipasti, two pasta, and one secondo would be enough for four people before we headed into dessert, but we were still feeling hungry.  So we ordered the house-made lamb sausage after all.  Served over polenta, with peppers and olives, it was a rich dish, slightly sweet from the peppers.  While we enjoyed it, the table was in agreement that it was our least-favorite of the night.

The executive chef Brian Cartenuto came around briefly to our table as our plates were getting cleared.  He was making the rounds while the kitchen got a slight breather after the first wave of tables.  He’s new to Seattle, arriving here in November (what a welcome, with our deluge of snow).  He previously worked at restaurants in the other Washington (DC), and then a cruise line before landing here.

He continued around the packed room, to visit with each table.  There seemed to be two types of parties in house:  the young hipsters at the bar, and families over by the windows, including one young family with an infant and another with a preschool-age child.  Kids seemed welcome here:  the front waiting area even has a tiny chair for the little ones, and the noise level was loud enough that parents didn’t have to worry about small outbursts (yet, amazingly, it wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t talk comfortably with your dining companions – a welcome change).

Immediately after our plates were cleared, our dessert arrived.  The waitress had warned us at the beginning that we should save room for their molten chocolate cake, and said that it would take 20 minutes to order.  Our friend made it clear to her that we definitely wanted it, so it arrived even before our dessert menus.  Molten, indeed, the cake was gooey and decadent – probably the best version I’ve had in a while.  We enjoyed it while selecting our second dessert, an olive oil polenta cake.  Light and airy, with a bit of crunch and hint of lemon, it was a lovely ending to the meal.  Cantinetta would make a good late-night stop for just dessert, perhaps at the bar with a limoncello.

Four of us paid a bill of $200, which included cocktails, a bottle of wine, and after-dinner drinks.  Not cheap, but honestly, pretty in-line with anything like it in Seattle.  We’ll be keeping an eye on Cantinetta and likely returning soon.

Cantinetta
3650 Wallingford Avenue N, Seattle
(206) 632-1000