It’s been a while since I first mentioned Old School BBQ, but it’s worth revisiting. We stopped for lunch on a recent trip over Stevens Pass, for possibly the dozenth time, and I really think this place is just getting better and better.

The barbecue is Texas-style, with a good smoke ring and wonderful tender meat. I usually get pulled pork and my husband likes brisket, but on this occasion he sprang for a combo with some ribs that turned out to be excellent. The coleslaw is, admittedly, a little bland, but the meat more than makes up for it.

I’ve always loved their beans, which are served very hot and soupy with big chunks of pork. I just discovered that if you order just beans and cornbread, you get a great big bowl of it for something ridiculous like $4, and a nice piece of sweet cornbread with butter and honey. For me this is a perfect lunch. Plus you get to eat on board an old school bus, minus the smell of gym socks and all the bullies sitting in the back, and how cool is that?

Geez. I had meant to run this post off several days ago, but first I got busy and then the phone company helpfully cut off my DSL connection at home. Thank goodness for public wifi…

Anyway. Last week we were in Seattle again and needed an early and not too involved dinner, so we decided to try out Tom Douglas’ new place in South Lake Union (well, one of them), the Brave Horse Tavern. We showed up a bit before six and the place was already packed with people who all seemed to have gotten off of work at the same time; many were still wearing their official lanyards. The music was incredibly loud, the crowd was louder, and a rowdy shuffleboard game was in progress in the corner. Long tables filled most of the space. We pushed and shoved our way into an empty spot with some difficulty and attempted to have a conversation over the uproar.

It was Fresh Hop week at the Brave Horse, and I ordered a Killer Green Fresh Hop Ale from Double Mountain. It was extraordinary – somewhat high in alcohol, although not as ferocious as some, but with a huge depth of flavor and a serious hop hit. Jon settled for his favorite Total Domination from Ninkasi. We really wanted to try some of the pub snacks (they have fried cheese curds, people!) but didn’t have time, so I settled for a basic pub burger and fries, and Jon got a steak salad.

I was impressed. The burger was very different from the Palace Kitchen version. It channelled a summer grill party, with iceberg lettuce, plenty of mayo and a barbecue-like sauce, and a soft and sweet bun that never quite disintegrated but got very close. I chose cheddar and grilled onions as my toppings, which were excellent with the sauce. Next time I might go for avocado. Or maybe the fried egg.

Then there were the fries, which were, let’s face it, perfect. Steaming hot, crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and heavily studded with salt. I hate fries that aren’t salty enough – these were incredible.

The steak salad was a success, too – a large piece of perfectly cooked steak, very tender, with a pile of mixed greens, stinky blue cheese, really ripe tomatoes, paper-thin radish slices, a chunk of grilled bread, and a dressing made with A-1 sauce. Brilliant.

We are totally coming back here. I need to try those fried cheese curds. And another burger.

When you’ve just spent a substantial amount of time quietly freaking out about something, getting unexpected good news may well send you straight to the nearest bar to try to process the emotional reversal. Last week, after spending the afternoon at Virginia Mason Hospital and being reassured by a reliable source that my husband would most likely NOT need a horrible sounding medical procedure, we headed right for Barrio and began consuming celebratory cocktails, including one made of extremely ferocious ghost-chile-infused tequila. Plus a lot of their most excellent guacamole.

Then we went to Volunteer Park and sat together, enjoying the view.

A friend and I were in Seattle for a lecture last week and wanted something interesting and affordable to eat ahead of time, so I did a little research and came up with a newish place called Satay in Wallingford. I adore Malaysian food, and have had very little of it since Mandalay Cafe unfortunately closed and was replaced by Tilth, just down the block on 45th. Satay isn’t nearly as fancy as Mandalay, but I appreciate that they’re keeping it simple: a few kinds of satay, two noodle dishes, curry, roti, and curry puffs. I’ve been twice so far, and I’ve already tried over half of the menu.

On my first visit, my friend and I split an order of the chicken satay and a bowl of laksa, plus one roti with curry sauce. The chicken was fantastic, with great grill taste and plenty of lemongrass. The accompanying slaw was flavored with herbs and coconut, and there was a large pile of rice to help sop up any leftovers. Despite all that, the real star was the roasted peanut sauce, which was the best and most interesting peanut sauce I have ever eaten in my life. I wanted to spoon it on everything.

The laksa was very good as well: a deep bowl of egg noodles in rich broth, it was nicely decorated with fried tofu (a favorite of mine) and large prawns, with some bean sprouts and cilantro for garnish. I would have liked more vegetables, but the flavors were excellent. The roti was like a flat croissant, dripping with fat and incredibly flaky – I loved it but I’m going to make sure I’m good and starving before I order another one. The dipping sauce it came with was, oddly, a ladleful of vegetable curry, complete with potato chunks. Strange but tasty.

Yesterday my husband and I went again, as we wanted a quick lunch before a medical appointment, and we tried both the beef and tofu satays, plus a curry puff, all of which lived up to my hype from the first visit. The beef was flavorful with tamarind, but sadly did not come with peanut sauce. Fortunately the tofu did. I thought the tofu was really interesting, it was deeply marinated with hard-to-identify seasonings and was nicely crispy around the edges. The curry puff was good, too – basically a deep-fried samosa stuffed with vegetable curry, dangerously thermal.

The place is run by extremely nice young men, and the general ambience is comfortable and casual. It’s quick and cheap, and they have Tiger Beer in the fridge, for which I have a strange fondness. I look forward to trying the rest of the menu very soon.

It’s not often we have the chance to eat breakfast in Vancouver, since we usually just get up there for lunch and dinner, then head home – but last week we went up with some friends and spent the night. The hotel breakfast looked more than a little dour, so we walked to a place I’d read about – Seb’s Market Cafe on Broadway.

A very pleasant spot out on the wastelands of Broadway, Seb’s is a combination market/deli/bakery/restaurant/catering business. Their menu offers a strange melange of options, from a simple plate of toast and scrambled eggs (with or without caribou meat), to elk medallion eggs benedict, to lamb shanks with apricots. I’m pretty sure it’s the only place I’ve been that listed elk steak as a side dish. For breakfast.

I had fried eggs with spinach, grilled tomato, potatoes and toast. I adore eggs with tomato and spinach, so I was quite ready to appreciate this, but I was a little sad that the spinach seemed to be plain, reheated frozen spinach with no seasoning, and the tomato was barely heated, let alone grilled. The eggs were perfect, though, and the toast was a really nice flaxseed bread. We had overindulged a bit at Vij’s the previous night, so the vegetables were welcome no matter how they were done. By the same token, one of our party got the fruit plate with yogurt, which she was very pleased with, as well as a carrot-ginger-celery juice (she asked the waitress about the yogurt, as it was so tasty, and the response was “It’s just good, pure yogurt, eh?” – I love Canada). The other two split an eggs benedict with crab and havarti sauce, plus a glass of cucumber-spinach juice. They reported that the biscuit was excellent and the cheese sauce extremely good with the crab. The coffee was good, too.

It was a fine place for breakfast, especially for the slightly-hung-over. I’d love to come back and try more of their menu sometime when I’m really hungry.

We’ve just begun to recover from our week-long road trip to Santa Cruz to visit my brother-in-law. We spent two days driving south, a few days there, then three days coming back. We hit an astounding number of brewpubs along the way. Here’s a (rather long) photo essay of some of the week’s eats and drinks.

We left Mount Vernon bright and early, with our first stop at Hopworks in Portland. It was pouring down rain (my feet got soaked just going the short distance from the car to the door), but the brewpub was bright and cozy and the Women’s World Cup was just starting. We could happily have stayed there all day, but we dragged ourselves away at halftime.

The sandwiches were excellent, especially the chicken ancho, and the salad had chunks of Rogue Creamery blue cheese almost too big to eat. Plus their beer is amazing – I had a pint of Evelyn’s Sunshine Imperial IPA, which was badly needed after our drive through the storm.

After a long drive through Oregon, we stopped in Grants Pass, where a friend of ours is in the midst of an internship. We didn’t have any particularly good leads on food here, so we checked out the Wild River Brewpub. The beer was decent, especially the IPA, and they had the best coaster wall I’ve ever seen. The food was so-so: my fish tacos were only redeemed from fatal mediocrity by the vast quantities of fresh guacamole piled next to them. I’ll put up with a lot if it comes with guacamole.

We spent the night in Medford, had a very dull breakfast in the motel office accompanied by FOX news, then headed off through the rain across the Siskiyous. We had an early enough start that we managed to get to Chico by lunchtime, so as to try out the Sierra Nevada Brewery taproom.

It was large. And fancy. We tried some of the few beers not available at our grocery store at home, ate some really good onion rings, then got a lamb pita and a barbecue beef sandwich.

The pita, which had been advertised as “petite” on the menu, was so big that the waiter asked me how I planned to fit any part of it into my mouth. I ate half of it and took the other half away to eat in the motel the next morning. We continued on to Santa Cruz.

When we’re in Santa Cruz one of our favorite places to go is Kelly’s French Bakery. One morning we walked down to the ocean and back, then stopped at the bakery and got polenta with poached eggs, plus a bowl of perfectly roasted potatoes with more eggs on the side. Another morning we had croissant sandwiches. If this place was just down the street from our house I’d be in big trouble.

One day my brother-in-law’s partner took me to lunch at a favorite Mexican place. We sat on a sunporch overlooking a creek, and I ordered machaca, something I’ve never seen before. It was a tasty pile of shredded beef, scrambled eggs, peppers and fresh jalapenos, with rice, tortillas and beans on the side, for under $7. I ate maybe half of it and took the rest back for breakfast. When I ordered it the waiter became very concerned that I should be warned about the jalapenos, and I had to reassure him that I did actually want to eat them. They were excellent.

After lunch we stopped by Penny Ice Cream to pick up a pint or two for that evening. This is a pretty amazing place – I tried the basil ice cream and the strawberry-pink peppercorn, and both were wonderful. Robert tasted the bourbon-bacon-chocolate which I was distrustful of, but he seemed to like it. We got the strawberry-pepper and some chocolate sorbet for the rest of the family, both of which went over very well indeed.

On another day we went to lunch at Cafe Cruz in Soquel. It’s a very nice place, known for its rotisserie chicken. My husband and his brother intelligently ordered salads, which looked amazing, but I of course had to get the chicken and green chile sandwich which turned out to be as big as my head and was buried in onion rings. I would have regretted it deeply if it hadn’t been so goddamn tasty.

Our order was a little slow coming, as there was a food photographer in the courtyard doing a shoot for the restaurant website, and the kitchen seemed preoccupied with taking him gorgeous plates of food. One of these plates included a pile of fresh homemade potato chips that was driving me mad to look at – I kept wondering who was going to get to eat them.

When we left Santa Cruz on Friday it was foggy and a bit chilly. By the time we were well up into the Sacramento Valley it was 98 degrees. We had bought a salad at Kelly’s and were keeping an eye out for a nice place to pull out and eat it, when we happened to stop in Winters. Much to our surprise and pleasure, it’s a really nice little town. We ate our salad in a green park under shade trees, then walked across the street to a charming little place called Steady Eddy’s where they refilled our water bottle with ice and made us really excellent iced lattes. Their pastries were good, they had a nice selection of beer and a panini menu that looked really promising. We were also enticed by the tapas place next door and the wine place on the other side, but it was the wrong time of day. Alas. If we ever get the chance to stop in Winters again you bet we will.

We stopped in Weed, CA for the night. Partly just to break up the trip, but also because my great-grandparents lived here back in the 1940s and I was curious what it was like. We ended up spending the evening in the Weed Alehouse, drinking remarkably good beer from the Mount Shasta Brewing Company and listening to live music.

Of the beers we tried, I liked the Mountain High IPA best, but the Golden Ale was really pleasant and the jalapeno beer had an intense green chile flavor and kick. The food menu looked pretty basic, but we didn’t try anything as we had just had Sichuan leftovers in our motel room.

(It was ma po tofu and a-choy from O’mei in Santa Cruz. Really spicy and really, really good.)

We had intended to go by way of Crater Lake the next day, but a loud party next door combined with a truly atrocious AC unit kept us from sleeping much. We slept in later than we had planned, then consoled ourselves with breakfast at the Hi-Lo Cafe down the street before heading north towards Portland.

If I hadn’t been gathering rave reviews from all over the internet, I would never have gone into this place. But as it turned out, the food was fresh and well cooked, the coffee was…well…drinkable, and the orange juice was incredibly good (they had a weird orange robotic-looking juicer behind the counter). I had corned beef hash and Jon had biscuits and gravy, and both were excellent. The hashbrowns were a little disappointing, being cut a bit wide for my taste and not as crispy as I would like, but I was hardly in danger of starving.

We stopped off in Eugene to visit the Ninkasi Brewery. This may be our favorite beer in the world, so I was really excited to try their full line. The Quantum Pale, which they have not bottled, was very good and had the advantage of not being quite so alarmingly high in alcohol as most of their other beers.

They don’t have a kitchen at the brewpub, but they host various food carts in their patio and they keep a selection of locally made soups, pretzels and pasties on hand. We tried the pasties, made by Cousin Jack’s Pasty Company, in the Steak & Ale, Wild Mushroom, and Broccoli and Cheese flavors. Not bad at all, and excellent ballast for beer drinking.

We celebrated the final night of our trip with drinks and dinner at Beaker & Flask in Portland. I’ve been wanting to go here for ages, but it’s a little tricky to get to when we’re in town without a car. They have an exciting list of original cocktails and a beautiful, carefully planned menu of both small and large plates. We had an amazing dinner, starting with the smoked trout deviled eggs and ending with panna cotta and beignets with strawberry-basil sauce. I’m not sure I can even talk about everything else we had. Let’s just say, it was good.

We made it home the next day, tired of the car and happy to see our kitties again. But it was a good road trip.

Earlier this week we went to an AMAZING performance by guitarist Charlie Hunter at Jazz Alley in Seattle (Seriously. Amazing. Really!). Afterwards we had plans to have dinner with friends at the Palace Kitchen, but figured we’d better get a bite to eat ahead of time so as not to be completely knocked for a loop by Jazz Alley’s rather strong cocktails. We decided to try Ravish, a little place on Eastlake that a friend of ours had been highly recommending for some time.

(This was also my chance to really try out the camera on my fancy new phone instead of hauling along my old point-and-shoot that I usually use in restaurants – it was very exciting)

The place was cute, but not too cute, if you know what I mean. It looked like a cafe attached to a rather chic garden store, with bright green furniture and antique seltzer bottles and typewriters for decoration. It was quiet when we went in, except for a contingent of focused-looking young men gathered at the bar, but rapidly filled up with blond professional women meeting for wine after work.

We decided to take advantage of their happy hour deals, which seemed very generous. I had a pint of Stone IPA (they ran out of Racer 5 just minutes before we got there) and Jon tried a house cocktail called Three Strikes, with rye, lemon juice, cherry heering and sage syrup. Many of the cocktails seemed a little extra fruity or spritzy to me, as if they were trying to lure in Cosmopolitan drinkers who might be ready to move on to more complex flavors.

An order of beef satay was not disappointing. The meat was very tender, as though it had been marinated in citrus juice for several hours, and had plenty of flavor all by itself. A coconut-orange dipping sauce was a surprisingly good match. We got three fat skewers with the order, which seemed like a very good deal.

We had thought of stopping there, but then ordered a beet salad after seeing one go by. It was nicely built, with a good assortment of bitter greens, sweet roasted beets, crunchy candied walnuts, and Rogue Creamery blue cheese, and was plenty for two people to share.

I was impressed – this is a really nice place to come after work or before a show. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a chance to explore the menu a little more thoroughly.

Our fourth of July weekend was more than a little odd, which is why I haven’t quite pulled myself together enough to post on what we ate.

It all started with a birthday party…

My grandfather was turning 98, so of course we had a party. Strawberries have just come in like gangbusters in our area, so we brought a flat, and my mother made yogurt cake and a checkerboard layer cake. It was all very festive and tasty. There were many relatives.

Then came a really swell noodle salad, followed by a long drive east. My father cooked Chinese egg noodles and grilled marinated thin-cut beef and tofu while I stir-fried cabbage and zucchini to toss with it. It was extremely good the first night, but the leftovers served an invaluable purpose, giving us something to eat while we sat in the park at Grand Coulee Dam the next evening waiting for our turn to play on the music stage for the Festival of America.

The mayor of Coulee Dam put us up in a hotel up on the hill. Many of the rooms had little balconies facing the dam, presumably so people could watch the nightly laser light show without leaving their rooms (or their beer). Our room faced the UFO-ish Crown Point viewpoint perched on top of the coulee, which on the whole I preferred. It was one of the stranger hotels I’ve stayed in.

The next morning (which was the 4th of July) we got breakfast at the R&A Cafe, a small diner set into our hotel, facing the Coulee Dam Casino. It wasn’t a bad little place, although the coffee was kind of spectacularly awful. The eggs and bacon were perfectly fine, though, and the biscuits and gravy surprisingly good.

We drove all the way home (the morning light on Banks Lake and the Grand Coulee was gorgeous), put together a dinner of beef kebabs, salad and flatbread, and watched our hometown fireworks display. We felt, perhaps, just a bit disoriented.

I uploaded these photos last week and somehow they’ve just been languishing over on Flickr, which is a shame. South remains our favorite restaurant in the Bavarian hamlet of Leavenworth, serving Oaxacan-style food and fabulous cocktails, and I just can’t say enough about how much I like their work. I might only mention them now and then, but believe me, we go back every chance we get. These pictures are from our most recent visit.

Sweet potato fries are a relatively recent addition (I love their roasted green beans so much it was a wrench not to order them). They’re white sweet potatoes, very dry, with an oven-fried texture. They come with garlic mayonnaise but are also good with salsa. I am a total sucker for the cute wooden bowls they’re served in.

Speaking of salsa, it’s a get-it-yourself affair. While we sat on the patio I watched a handful of customers (all men) attempt to carry up to five bowls of salsa back to their table without a plate, which was exciting (no accidents, alas). The habanero salsa is also pretty exciting, even for those of us with a high spice tolerance.

The patio gets a little better every time we visit. Now they have a canopy over the upper part, and large market umbrellas for the lower section, so palefaces like me don’t fry in the sun. Grapevines cover the walls, and the whole space gives a sense of privacy and of, well, not being in Leavenworth. It’s a great place to sit on a hot summer day and drink a Daisy, a Caipirinha, or (our favorite) a Stinger – muddled jalapeno and cilantro with tequila and lemon. A bit spicy, but astonishingly good.

As always, both the tacos and burritos are fantastic. Our favorite filling is probably the pork al pastor, but all of them have been good. The rice in the burritos is seasoned with lots of cilantro, so even the rice-heavy bites aren’t bland. And there’s NO CHEESE.

Seriously, I don’t want to drone on about this place, but I felt I should revisit it for a moment. Don’t eat bratwurst in Leavenworth, go here instead.

I seem incapable of writing a coherent post these days, but that hasn’t stopped us eating some amazing food. We went to dinner at the Chuckanut Manor with friends (inspired by a ferocious craving for clams) and were pleased and surprised at how good it was – normally we only eat at the Manor when we have a gift certificate from the auto glass shop. We ignored the Friday Seafood Buffet (previously known as the Smorgasbord and now known to us as Chum Night (thanks, Rich)) and ordered off the small plates menu.

Steak frites were perfectly done. Shellfish were ethereally good, the mussels in a lobster-saffron broth and the clams in a sweet onion and cider sauce. Halibut and chips looked perfectly fine (I didn’t taste them), and the cocktails were large and quite well mixed. Some of us threw caution to the winds and had chocolate martinis for dessert, while Jon took the sensible route and had a cheesecake made with Gothberg goat cheese and a large pile of fresh berries.

The view from our table did not suck.

Neither did the view from the parking lot, at sunset.