table for hate.

Fantastic upscale neighborhood place fucked up and got successful and now is sometimes busy. The suited old dudes at the bar sipping malbec have been there forever and get stored in the closet at night and the Queen Anne yuppies keep to themselves. Delicious food sometimes with clever names. Creative and interesting desserts give plenty of choices to people who are sick of the boilerplate, caramel sauce drenched, flourless-molten-chocolate-cake-creme-brulee-i’m-a-fucking-mouth-breather shit that most place churn out.

Opal’s doing the $30 pre fixe thing right now and their rock star bartender came up with drink pairings for everything on the pre fixe menu. After three-courses of awesome food paired with three great cocktails, you’ll be full, happy and a little drunk. I’ve blown $50 on stupider shit before.

But don’t order coffee. The coffee cups are retarded.

Stupid name, stupid food.

Why do vegetarians hate vegetables? I find myself asking it every time I eat at a vegetarian restaurant. Modern vegetarians destroy the basic beauty of vegetables by steaming the shit out of them, or by mashing too many of them together and creating a bizarre cacophony of mismatched flavors. They actually hate vegetables, so they try to cover up the taste or mix so much crap together that you can’t tell what any of it tastes like. The same people subsist in private by eating huge quantities of peanut butter and cheese. They’ve become the pseudo-liberal equivalent of the closeted gay Republican that’s banging transvestite prostitutes on the side. Veggies have become self-loathing mass of humanity, not content unless they continuously deny themselves the things they want most and pronounce haughty moral judgments on those who publicly embrace their deepest inner desires.

Carmelita is another exercise in vegetarian self-loathing. On a Tuesday it was quieter than a funeral mass. Though there were maybe 20 diners scattered throughout, no conversation reached a pitch audible to the human ear. The odd silence added to the overall feel that eating vegetarian fare is a chore instead of a treat.

A few of the appetizers have some flavor. The beet tartare is interesting, comes in a large portion, and is nicely presented. But the waiting room for hell is filled with people who laugh at puns. The chilled cream of asparagus soup respected the flavor of asparagus, but does asparagus soup need to come with asparagus salad? These are the kinds of decisions you make when your body is deprived of animal protein for too long. I’m glad they took the “Campbell’s” label off of the tomato and piquillo pepper soup before they heated it up. The gnocchi isn’t made with potato I guess because potatoes are a meat product or something. The soufflé may have been alright, but the sadistic fascination with asparagus was beginning to wear thin. The shaved artichoke in the side salad was awful, rubbery and flavorless - without the aid of the menu, none of the three people at our table were even able to identify if it was a fruit or a vegetable. The menu also offers a vegan risotto. Instead of trying to enjoy a risotto made without butter or cream, I just decided to drink more.

The wine was good, reasonably priced, and ostensibly meat-free.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. I mean, Carmelita is fine, if you’re into that kind of thing. But vegetarians would be better off if they stopped torturing themselves, came out of the closet and tried a nice veal osso bucco. Just ask Rep. Mark Foley – indulging in a little under-aged meat will make you feel a lot better.

I saw an article today about The Oceanaire that bore the subheader: “where big fish meets small town.”  Um, excuse me?  The Oceanaire is a CHAIN.  I guarantee that joint has at least 60 tables, not including the bar.  It’s where bourgeoius surbanites bring the out-of-towners to show them some class and where girls who couldn’t get jobs as receptionists at Gene Juarez hold court at the hostess stand.  The Waterfront Jr., if you will. The multitude of choices on the menu is daunting (sole or crab? tower of seafood or oysters on the half-shell?), but if you’re daring enough to ask for a lobster done up in a pretty pink dress the entire staff will be more than happy to oblige.  Granted, this may only be because our table had to have been the most “quirky” and “indie” of the night- nay, the weekend. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact the server lit the tablecloth on fire in lieu of a Baked Alaska.  It had to have been that, and not that our tablemate was fucking him with her eyes. I’m sure the women’s *powder room*, with that enormous stall enveloping its own washbasin and mirror, has seen more than its share of key bumps.

Small plates or NW tapas make me mass agitated. Either go to a nice haute cuisine establishment where they understand multi course dining or go to the Palace and order the pork belly and have a martini and be done with it. Places like Lark are stupid because they presume their diners are going to smart enough to handle the situation correctly. For starters this style of ordering is annoying. When you’re getting a bunch of thai food it’s easy to eat family style. You get some bullshit phad thai, a curry, a vegetable dish, and then some other random thing that probably involves basil and chicken and then you’re done with it. But at Lark, which is presumably “upscale northwest” you have to consult your fellow diners, and you’re forced to say stupid things  like “what’s saba?” and “is clabber cream like creme fraiche” and other systematically obtuse phrases all in effort for unnecessary clarification. The amount of time spent on the menu is tiresome-  and ultimately you will not care and grow to resent long titles like “Bluebird Grain Farms farro.”

Because there are no obvious choices- no obligatory picks to round out a meal- you’re stuck trying to piece together a dinner from a bunch of little plates that cannot be shared in any respectable manner. The result if something like 10 dishes for 4 people that come out to the table with no sense of order or purpose. Wine pairing is impossible, and the whole event lacks the usual crescendo that is predicated entirely upon the arrival of the entree. Lark is like going to the movies and only getting shown the trailers.

All hating aside, Larks’s individual plates are delicious. I’m not hating on the food itself, it’s just the manner in which they are presented and the tyranny of choices that are so troubling. On the other hand, if you have an eating disorder and are doing key bumps in the bathroom- this IS the place for you.  No one will notice that you haven’t touched a thing with all the chaos involved with rearranging tiny plate after plate onto tables that dreamed of better times, and the lighting and table cloths will look brilliant with your dior shoes and last season’s marc jacobs dress.

Best bfast in town- Imperial Mix up- Eggs, rice, and tempeh. Couple it with a mimosa and a coffee and you’re golden. Madrona is pretty cute despite all the waspy old mums and their fuck trophies drooling on themselves like little drunk retards, shoving buttery noodles in their mouthes and coloring things with horrid primary colored crayons.

In the summer I’ll be prattling away at my office, heavily engaged with a gigantic screen and so many spreadsheets, enduring blazing heat of which ceiling fans merely agitate. I’ll be cursing my birth and thinking of ways for the lazy to commit suicide when Cory will call or text me from Vons, likely in an all white outfit involving jeans and a v neck, all tan and hot and blond, perfect and drunk, at 12:30 pm on a Tuesday - because why the fuck not?

Upscale Red Robin for youngish men with loads of money and obligatory X5s, who flock reluctantly with clients,  saddened by table-side salads and flaming desserts, yet compelled like so many reticent girls on first dates.

Last time Gabe and I went to Morton’s I called ahead and ordered him a 3 pound lobster. He wanted the biggest one on the planet, but Morton’s tank was only so large, so we had to settle for the dwarfed version of his fantasy crustacean. The waiter suggested vodka for the tamale roe and Gabe refused and insisted upon only consuming cranberry juice (this was before Leonardo DiCaprio made this okay in the Departed) and so I was forced to drink for the both of us. I’m pretty sure I went for a gender appropriate meal (petite sirloin?) but I drank too much that night so can’t remember. We brought the leftovers to Bacon.

Best sushi in seattle unless your name is Santos. If your name is Santos and you sleep in bed with Al you’re most likely a cat and not really that into sushi despite cartoons depicting you and all your cat friends making high brow jokes over trays of spicy tuna rolls. If you’re a human, 9 out of 10 of you will go bonkers for this place. The big mouth roll is super as is the squid intestine (yum!). Last time we mixed ikura, uni, and tamago all on top of one nigiri piece just to defy Gabe’s rigorous sense of decorum. “It was a real triumph of the human spirit,” said Barack Obama, who was dining at the table next to ours. It’s important not to antagonize the gabes over dessert, as we regretfully learned last time when mixing shiro maguro in with his red bean icre cream.