Opinions of Three

It’s just not the same anymore. Were we the only family to have dinner at Sunflower Bakery on a regular basis? One of the perks of moving to 65th Street was going to be our proximity to Sunflower and their burger, crab cake sandwich, pie, spinach salad and thoughtful dinner specials. But alas, Sunflower seems to be in a slow decline. The lunch menu is the same as always but I fear for the future of my favorites.

Sunflower was always the place we could go for comfort food in the evening until, many months ago, they stopped serving dinner. Sunflower was at its best a few years back in the hands of a previous partner/owner who was also a wine aficianado. When the lanky, red bearded gentleman was creating the dinner menu, the specials and their wine pairings were not to be missed. Sean and I always felt a little young frequenting this quiet, genteel cafe; it drew an older neighborhood crowd. But we were looking for the same thing the older crowd was looking for: tasty food, better than we could make at home, nice presentation in a casual atmosphere. Sometimes a single classical guitar player with a long gray ponytail would be preforming in the corner and we felt like true Seattle insiders. Sunflower was a place a visitor to the area would never find.

We frequented Sunflower for breakfast too for many years. To our annoyance we noticed the weekends getting busier and busier, as if our hidden cafe’s breakfasts had been published in a “Best of Seattle” guide book. We didn’t notice the decline in evening diners but that may have been because we loved never having to wait, how quiet the room was in the evening, how personal the service. Apparently the restaurant books reflected a growing disparity between the cost of serving dinner and the number of us showing up to take our usual seat and order. Clearly, the breakfast eaters were the bread and butter.

Just the other day Sean and I had a craving for a crab cake sandwich (see August issue of Gourmet Magazine) and we decided to head up to Sunflower to have lunch before they close at 3pm. When we got there I noticed with dismay that “due to increased heat in the summer” Sunflower Bakery will now be closing at 2pm. What does increased summer heat have to do with eating lunch? I can’t help but see this as the writing on the wall for the Sunflower savory standards. The Carmelized Peach and Berry French toast will probably last, as will the Smoked Salmon Eggs Benedict, but then, it is hard not to make a good breakfast.

Snowden does not like riding in the car. Depending upon her mood, her reaction to the car seat ranges from quiet dissapointment to full display of arch-backed, screaming anger. The latter is the norm when she is tired. Without fail we can turn on the cd player and as the first strains of “Night Owl” flow from the back speakers Snowden quiets down and sometimes falls asleep.What is it about this song? We can not figure it out.

Thankfully, E an I also like Dan’s music. Simple arrangements of singable original songs and skillful renditions of standards and folk music make this a tolerable cd to listen to multiple times. The inclusion of Father Goose (Rankin’ Don) and his Dance Hall rhyming, along with a bunch of other guest artists, only add to the odd and appealing pastiche.

The greatest thing about Dan Zanes is that he really seems to be interested in exposing kids to music and not just selling cd’s. He has a pretty cool website where you can download copies of chords and lyrics to all his songs. Now we can play and sing this wonderful music live.

Go Dan !

From the street it is a hole-in-the wall restaurant that looks more like a little take out deli than a place for lingering over a meal. It looks like it would feel crowded, there are only a handful of small tables inside. But, with the nice weather a sign appeared on the sidewalk advertising that the patio was open, which piqued my interest. If I get to dine outside, I care far less about the food. Unfortunately most Seattle restaurants seem to know this. The next time Sean and I walked by, we read the posted wine list. They have an extensive selection of wines by the glass all for around $5. I peered through the dark interior to try and glimpse the patio out back. I noticed that it was covered with a white tent and looked like a well kept secret.

A few weeks after we had poked around the restaurant, Patti and Terry called us to meet for dinner upon their return from Wisconsin. Snowden had been in the car a lot that day so we didn’t want to drive her anywhere. It was a warm evening, threatening thunder showers. It seemed like a good time to try Casa D’Italia and sit outside under the tent. The patio was perfect, like a backyard full of lanterns and little garden tables. The plants were thick and fragrant around the perimeter and the white tent roof, grimy on close inspection, felt cozy and quaint when a heavy rain was let loose from the glowering clouds. I dipped a slice of sourdough baguette into the olive oil. The olive oil was so fruity and fresh tasting that I felt like stating some maxim I’ve never actually heard before: “you can trust the food to be as good as the olive oil served with the bread”.

The specials presented on a chalk board were amazingly exotic and varied to come out of such a small kitchen, yet familiar and inviting enough to want to try (and thankfully not read out to us in an exaggerated Italian accent by a young person you just know chose the name “Gino”, little immortal one, as if working in an Italian restaurant is like joining foreign language club in high school). I felt no anxiety about what to order. When the specials were read I did not mentally reject any dish, nor did I feel torn that there were too many options that sounded too good to be true. Rather, at Casa D’Italia I felt that anything I ordered would taste delicious but not come to the table so adorned and belabored that I felt that I must somehow live up to the dish myself. Sean chose Antelope and Boar sausage with peas and a pasta side. I decided on Pasta a la Vodka because I love it and Casa D’Italia seemed, by this point, a place that could really do a classic right.

My huge plate of penne was done al dente. Perfect. The sauce was smoky and herbal and not heavy with too much cream. Usually I loath giant portions because the pasta sticks together or is overly oily; I don’t want to eat the leftovers nor waste half of what is presented to me. At Casa D’Italia, my first bite and I was already looking forward to tomorrow’s lunch! Sean’s plate was beautiful: succulent sausages surrounded by plump bright peas on a dark plate, but I can’t speak to the flavor because he ate every last bite without offering me even a taste. I had a glass of Orvieto, a white wine I like because it is not as dry as a Pinot Grigio but still herbacous with a slightly bitter after taste, and not aged in oak (bitter, herbal flavors are a good thing in my book-right up there with the pairing of fruit and meat in a dish). Throughout the meal our water was filled but the wait staff didn’t feel the need to keep checking in on how we liked the food. We were eating in an enchanting backyard and the main dishes were far superior to anything I can make at home, I did not want to be interrupted and reminded that this was a restaurant, a place of business.

For desert I opted for the “don’t miss” ricotta cheese cake. It was delicate in texture, and flavorful, but more like a yellow cake from a Spanish bar that one would have for breakfast than a luscious desert. Sean and his parents opted for the daily special, an amaretto layer torte. The torte was the better choice. This time I did get a bite of Sean’s. The layers were distinct, the amaretto was not overpowering and the texture that of a mousse between ladyfingers.

I had almost revised my restaurant expectations based on the abundance of mediocre dining experiences I’ve had over the last few years but Casa D’Italia is serving the food and everything else I want in a restaurant, right up the street.

Winter on the Pacific Coast; drenching fogs cling to the craggy coast, swirling in offshore winds to occasionally reveal towering conifers or stolid sea stacks. Even as far south as Vancouver Island, snowstorms may unexpectedly blanket sandy beaches with an incongruous dusting of wet snow. Swells on the horizon look ripples of blown glass until they shatter with foaming ferocity on the broken coast. The thought of setting out in an open boat into this churling miasma of weather, water and rock is a sobering thought. It almost seems unreal that the tribes of the Coast would set out into these conditions without map or compass to hunt whales. It seems even more improbable that a trio of white men, unschooled in the ways of coastal canoe travel could make their way in this wilderness.
During the winter of 1852-53, a letter to the editor of the Oregon Weekly Times reports that oystermen at Shoalwater Bay (now known as Willapa Bay) encountered three men, “the perfect pictures of misery and despair”, who had completed an improbable canoe voyage down the Northwest coast. These three had paddled a cedar Tlinglit canoe from the Russian outpost of New Archangel to a muddy bay a few miles north of Astoria in order to escaped indentured servitude in the Russian colony. The details of this remarkable journey are not reported in this letter. We are left to speculate what these men experienced.
Wallace Stegner writes that, “Any good serious fiction is collected out of reality, and its parts ought to be vivid and true to fact and observation.” Good fiction starts with a core of truth and then crafts this truth to show a story. The incredible story of this canoe journey provides the requisite reality for Ivan Doig’s, The Sea Runners.
In The Sea Runners, Doig tells the story of an escape from the drizzle and mud of the Russian economic outpost of New Archangel in what is now southeast Alaska. The men of this colony, mostly Scandinavian sailors who grew up sailng the Baltic sea and North Atlantic, signed on to work as able sea men on Russian Steamers or to swing axes in the mythical forests of the North arrived to shifting economy.
The sea otter had been hunted to near extinction and Salmon canning had yet to emerge as the new cash cow. As a result these Scandinavian workers spent little time at sea, but instead at hard manual labor in the forests harvesting timber and along the coast collecting edible seaweed and shellfish. Some worked in fisheries, harvesting salmon and then salting it for later consumption. To deal with the difficult conditions and isolation many men turned to gambling and alcohol. These diversions were often pursued with money borrowed from the Russian American Company who ran the outpost and this debt kept many men working far past their initial contract.
Doig’s story follows the daring escape of four Swedes. The beauty of the story is that it does not dwell on the drama of the planning and execution of the escape, but on the character of the four men involved. None of these men are friends. In fact, it seems the hardship of life in New Archangel renders friendship a luxury few can afford. To survive one must be wholly self-interested. To succeed in the escape however, each of the four must trust one another. This simple trope elevates the story from being a wonderful adventure tale to a greater meditation on the nature of trust, friendship and risk.
Doig unobtrusively reveals the internal narratives of each character while maintaining a tone of spar silence. His writing sounds like the coast. Periods of beautiful and austere prose are punctuated by moments of decisive tragedy. The peace returns quickly without overwrought meditation on the tragedy.
I read this work after reading Winter Brothers Doig’s loving meditation on the writing of James Gilchrist Swan, a pioneer of the Washington coast. In Winter Brothers Doig reveals his kinship with those who came to the Pacific Northwest and became attached in some transcendent way to the pervasive damp and gray. I feel a similar sense of place and admiration and as a result am disposed to sort of romanticism of these stories. Knowing care and respect that Doig has for the stories of this region causes me to imbue them with a weightiness that someone less sentimental about the heroic struggles of the coastal people might not. In the hands of a more cynical reader, The Sea Runners is reduced a ripping good tale of adventure and brother hood.

The Sea Runners

Winter Brothers