The Man Who Ate Everything (42 page)

September 1993

The pilot guided our little seaplane slowly across Lake Union in Seattle, aimed us at Vancouver Island eighty miles away, revvedf the engines, and off we went. Soon we were floating over the city and Puget Sound beyond. It was that rare event in the Pacific Northwest—a brilliantly sunny day. The pilot handed me a pair of bright green earplugs to block the roar of the engines as I tried to figure out why the heater was melting my sneakers.

I peered down at the rocky coastal beaches and at the islands dotting the Sound. A friend back in New York once told me that the most wonderful oysters he had ever tasted were gathered at low tide on one of these beaches. His guide foraged for wild onions in the nearby forest, built a driftwood fire, roasted the oysters, and, when their shells opened, tossed in the onions.

This is why I had traveled to Seattle. All the way from New York I could taste the chubby oysters poached in their own sea-salt liquor, rich with woody smoke and the grassy sweetness of wild onions.

I searched the islands below for any trace of a roasting oyster, but there was none. Wild Pacific oysters are nearly extinct now, and most of the prized bivalves of the region are cultivated; the productive beaches in Washington State are leased to commercial oyster farms. And except for today’s sunny interlude, it rained or snowed incessantly during my trip to the Northwest, a discouraging ambience for a beach adventure. I would return to New York no closer to my goal than when I had left. But in the meantime I feasted for ten days on what is without doubt the finest fish and seafood in North America.

In half an hour our seaplane was over open water, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which, my historical research discloses, was named for Juan de Fuca. Juan was a Greek seaman, sailing under both the Spanish flag and a Spanish pseudonym, who in 1592 may or may not have discovered the strait separating Vancouver Island in Canada from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. We dipped low and glided toward the seaplane terminal in the city of Victoria.

It was no coincidence that at precisely the same moment, thirty miles along the Vancouver Island coast, a Canadian diver named Francis hastily pulled on a wet suit and mask and jumped into the choppy gray waters of Sooke Bay off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Recent storms had stirred up the bottom, and Francis could see only three feet around him instead of the usual fifty as he searched for long-spined sea urchins, purple-hinged rock scallops, acorn and gooseneck barnacles, sea cucumbers, and orange crab. He bagged some urchins and sea cucumbers, but the crabs were elusive, and when he swam along the edge of the bay with his knife unsheathed to pry off the purple scallops, fierce currents threatened to drag him against the rocks. Not realizing the importance I place upon lunch, Francis thought of his own personal safety and pulled himself from the water.

When I reached Sooke Harbour House later that morning, Francis apologized that my table would not swarm with as much local seafood as he had hoped. To Sinclair and Fredrica Philip, who own the inn, “local” means seafood taken from the waters outside their dining room window an hour or two before lunch or dinner. Divers using scuba gear and air tanks go deeper than Francis; they bring up giant sea urchins, pink singing scallops, sea whelks, octopi, clams, and geoducks (which look like a cross between a giant clam and an elephant), abalone, cockles, and ten
kinds of sea snails. Fifty-pound salmon are caught from boats in the same waters; only prawns, oysters, and ocean fish like black cod are bought from commercial fishermen who dock at the government wharf next door.

Sinclair and Fredrica are economists (they married while in graduate school at the University of Grenoble) turned naturalists-innkeepers-restaurateurs, and their dedication to the freshness and seasonality of local ingredients is monomaniacal. The neat white clapboard buildings of Sooke Harbour House are surrounded by astonishing terraced gardens where, with the help of Byron Cook, they grow four hundred varieties of edible plants, including flowers and weeds—sea rockets and nodding onions; wild sorrel, cress, and chrysanthemums; garlic chives in white, mauve, and yellow; all the cabbages and six varieties of leeks; five kinds of rosemary, six types of lavender, fifteen of mint, thirty lettuces, and forty other salad greens. Kid, rabbit, goose, and lamb are raised organically by farmers a few miles away. Local foragers gather wild berries, fifty types of mushrooms, ten varieties of seaweed.

In the kitchen I met my lunch, a tub of dreadful giant red-and-purple sea urchins, each a foot across, and a nightmarish landscape of sea cucumbers, writhing and slithering over each other like tumescent, warty maroon worms, a foot long and three inches in diameter, glistening and slimy. I also met the young bearded chef, Ron Cherry, a shy and unassuming man who was classically trained in some of Canada’s best restaurants. Ron’s talents are tested at every meal—the day’s catch remains a mystery until a few hours beforehand, and it can include twenty species.

Lunch was served in the warm, windowed dining room before a huge stone fireplace, and it was delicious—a soup of oysters, pale orange sea urchin roe, and tiny clams; a saute of abalone and sea cucumber (just the thin strips of muscle that line the tubular body cavity) with Hubbard squash puree and celery leaves; rich slices of pink-roasted goose breast with one sauce of Oregon grape and another of rosemary-garlic cream; a salad of
chickweed, lamb’s-quarters, and Siberian lettuce; and salmon mousse wrapped in walking-stick cabbage (the woody stalk is used to make furniture on the Isle of Skye) and garnished with steelhead trout caviar, tuberous begonia, and horseradish butter.

I barely noticed the absence of purple-hinged rock scallops; besides, the best and freshest way to eat them is underwater, according to Sinclair, snipped from their shell before they have had time to clamp shut, and slipped between your lips. I did notice that lemon, lime, olive oil, and other culinary commonplaces were missing from Ron’s cooking. The Philips’ interest in local products rules out most plants and animals that don’t grow in the Northwest. To replace lemons and limes, Ron has developed other sources of acidity, such as rhubarb juice and apple cider, and the Philips have found a mill that cold-presses cooking oil from locally grown seeds and nuts. Common Asian spices like black peppercorns are suspect; I wondered about vanilla. At its best, the result is a rejection of all culinary cliches, a rediscovery of the natural world at every meal.

I am still wondering about vanilla because the seaplane schedule back to Seattle deprived me of dessert. I wish I had stayed overnight in every one of the inn’s thirteen lovely rooms, all with fireplaces and all facing the strait and the snowy Olympic Range on the U.S. side. But I had a dinner engagement to keep, and a week of lunches and dinners after that. The Pacific Northwest overflows with such good food that one grows frenzied trying to nibble and gnaw on it all.

My trip was planned for late winter because that’s when oysters are best. In the springtime, as the water grows warm, oysters prepare to spawn, and their flesh becomes milky and soft. After spawning, oysters, like men, are good for nothing until they rebuild their reserves of glycogen. But in winter (when, coincidentally, the names of the months contain an
r)
they are crisp and glistening and incomparable.

My culinary base camp was Seattle’s Pike Place Market and the Inn at the Market hotel, which overlooks it. Visiting at the
ideal time for oysters meant that I would forgo the wild blackberries and tree-ripened cherries of June, river crayfish trapped between April and October, the peaches and apricots of late summer, and the May debut of white and golden beets, sweet onions, red and white chard, white carrots, and twenty kinds of salad greens. But the local pears (unlike most fruit, pears improve after they are picked) were the best I’ve tasted. The Manila clams and the mussels from Race Lagoon and Penn Cove were a delight— sweet and creamy and mild—as were the fresh sturgeon and black cod. And the oysters! Every day I held a little contest among the Shoalwaters, Quilcenes, Hamma Hammas, Kumamotos, and Olympias. In the end, the tiny oceanic Olympias won, and I celebrated by eating seventy of them one evening just before dinner.

It seems incredible that Seattle was a culinary wasteland
fi
f
teen years ago,
but that’s what everybody says. Supermarkets sold frozen fish, and restaurants served it deep-fried. The oyster industry produced only shucked meat in gallon containers, and my exquisite little Olympias were just being nursed back from extinction. Pink singing scallops were an uneaten oddity, mussel cultivation was unknown, geoducks were spurned by everyone but a few fishermen, and the salmon caviar was shipped abroad. Fancy restaurants imported oysters, mussels, and lobsters from the East Coast.

But Seattleites loved to go fishing and clamming, foraging for berries and wild mushrooms. They knew what was fresh and seasonal even if their supermarkets and restaurants were slow to understand. In 1980, Jon Rowley—an Alaska fisherman for ten years after quitting Reed College—began working with fishermen, supermarkets, and restaurants to revolutionize the way Pacific fish were caught, handled, and delivered to the city. (Julia Child has named Jon the Fish Missionary, and his company—Fish Works!—is now active in ten other cities.)

Stylish American cooking arrived, by some accounts, when Karl Beckley opened his Green Lake Grill in 1979. The young chefs who followed him demanded fresher and more varied
ingredients. Small farmers, cheese makers, and fish smokers responded. By the mid-eighties, the culinary excitement here was reminiscent of the Bay Area ten years before. Inventive restaurants sprang up like wild mushrooms, with young chef-owners composing fanciful platters of the most impeccable and expensive regional products: restaurant goers breathlessly followed. Now nearly every restaurant menu lists the pedigree of its ingredients, even when there is none. At one place, I was served a tall parfait glass of good Dungeness crab under cups of red cocktail sauce, which the menu described as
“a
homemade sauce of Heinz ketchup, extra hot horseradish, and fresh lemon.” But where else can you find a waitress, like the one who took my order at Ray’s Boathouse, who can explain why she prefers Race Lagoon mussels to those from Penn Cove and why one method of catching salmon is superior to another?

The local food press is as active and alert as any in the nation and a pleasure to read. John Doerper, food editor of
Pacific Northwest
magazine and an encyclopedic guide to me during my stay in Seattle, tirelessly explores the coast from Oregon to British Columbia (he has been known to drive two hundred miles for lunch); his
Eating Well
(Pacific Search) is an essential appetizer for the foods of the Northwest. Schuyler Ingle is now at
Washington
magazine; his graceful essays in
Northwest Bounty
(Simon and Schuster) are models for us all. The
Seattle Weekly
offers the most ardent and informed food coverage of any city weekly I know, as well as a column by Tom Douglas, owner of Dahlia Lounge and one of the chefs who started it all eight years ago at Cafe Sport. And Alf Collins, restaurant reviewer for the
Seattle Times
until recently, now has his own business newsletter, with the most knowledgeable food news around.

The Pacific Northwest has everything a food lover could possibly desire—with two exceptions. The first is bread, and the second is cuisine.

Everybody in the Northwest serves home-baked bread, and everywhere it made me yearn for the factory-made version. The
bread is of two types: home-baked health-food-style bread (poorly leavened, crumbly, weak crusted, slightly sweet, speckled with carrots, herbs, olives, or nuts) and home-baked Parker House roll-style bread (traditional American, sweet, white, fluffy, fun on occasion but not three times a day and not with food).

Bad bread wrecks my outlook on life. The pathetic loaves at Seattle’s proudest French restaurant immediately made me paranoid about everything on the menu, everybody who had recommended the place in print or in person, and all the other customers. How could they sit there and smile and eat that bread-shaped impostor on the table?

But relief is on the way. Eight months ago the old Grand Central Bakery in Seattle—after a transfusion of talent and an oven from Italy—began turning out chewy, crusty, yeasty loaves of real bread, and within a few months it was operating at its full capacity of one thousand loaves a day. Others are sure to follow.

I had collected a year of restaurant reviews before coming to Seattle, and I visited plenty of restaurants after I arrived. I won’t tell you where to eat because I tried no restaurant more than once, I missed several leading contenders, and besides, I did not come to evaluate restaurants. I wanted to understand how Northwest chefs transform the incredible bounty of sea and sod into cuisine. I will reveal that my mouth still waters as it relives the smoked, steamed black cod at Ray’s Boathouse, the sweet Dungeness crab and Olympia oysters at Elliott’s, the Quilcene oysters at Emmett Watson’s, and much of Barbara Figueroa’s cooking at the Hunt Club. But only the last can be considered cuisine.

Does the Pacific Northwest have a distinctive style of cooking? The best culinary minds in the region worry about this question every day, write articles, and meet with each other every few months to disagree about it. But the answer is simple. Either there are a dozen distinctive Northwest cuisines, or there is a single Northwest cuisine, but nobody can tell which one it is.