Scrumptious – Salare

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They call Salare a chef-driven restaurant and a labor of love. Mr. and Mrs. Nutkin agreed to give it a try with me for one of our dinners. They recently returned from their honeymoon in Zion, and what better way to celebrate love, than dining in a restaurant that is a labor of love?  The reviews have been positive and Salare has made Ravenna somewhat of a hotspot. Salare has a bit of southern influence that you can see in the cornbread, grits, and okra, but you can also taste Europe in the lamb au jus and duck confit. It may be eclectic, but it’s thoughtfully curated and wonderfully prepared.

Salare - fried okra

Fried Okra – with pineapples and bacon. So no one likes okra, except for me, most of the South, and Mrs. Nutkin (thankfully), because it’s slimy and furry. Well, when you deep fry it in the most delicate and silk thin of batters, pair it with a hearty bacon and then punch it up with some pineapple, it’s not your average fried okra anymore. Granted, they probably should have cut the okra in half so some of the older ones weren’t so stringy, but overall, this is one of the best preparations of okra that I’ve eaten.

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Foodie Paradise – Eden Hill

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Eden Hill is a tiny, unassuming restaurant that seats 24 at the top of Queen Anne that has been receiving rave reviews for their avant garde dishes. The “Lick the Bowl” foie gras cake batter dessert caught my eye, so t0e and I decided to give it a try.

As the restaurant is tiny, and t0e was running really late due to some horrendous traffic (1 hour to cross the 520 bridge – I’m sure Seattle folks can sympathize), the restaurant let us know that we had to be done by 7:30 for the next reservation on the table. We would have only had an hour and fifteen minutes to enjoy our meal and they would be unable to offer us the tasting menu as that needed the full two hours. They offered to move us to the bar where we could take our sweet time and make some hard decisions.

Order from the standard menu to try the much lauded pig head candy bar OR try the five-course blind tasting menu? They wouldn’t tell us what was on the tasting menu, taking into account only dietary restrictions and strong preferences, and telling us that it had none of the dishes from the standard menu. We weren’t sure if we wanted to trust the chef just yet at place we had never been, without knowing what we were getting into, but we figured that we could order the items on the menu that we really wanted, if we still had any room left. So in the chef we trusted, knowing that this chef, Maximillian Petty, had concocted a way to serve foie gras for dessert…

Eden Hill - sweet pea soup with prosciutto

sweet pea soup with prosciutto – the amuse bouche, a chilled soup with a hint of mint to chase a succulent house-smoked prosciutto; thick sliced and cured to bring out the flavor of the meat – this bite set the tone for the rest of our dinner.

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Soaring – Lark

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J. Lo comes a long way from D.C. to visit us and he’s always looking for extraordinary dining experiences in Seattle. I’m happy to oblige, as conversation is always full of witty banter, worldly affairs analysis, and the allure of great food. I had a couple of options that I threw out, but the seared foie gras with huckleberries sealed the deal for Lark.  In a party of five, we were able to try quite a few dishes.

lark - chilled corn soup

chilled corn soup – with truffle mascarpone and chanterelle mushrooms; this dish was perfect with the sweetness of fresh corn, made creamy with the mascarpone, enhanced with a little texture from the chanterelles and punctuated by the truffles; we had a hard time figuring out who was going to get the last bite of this dish it was so good – definitely one of the highlights

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