seattle

Allow me to raise a glass to SOMM, a new documentary in which four guys vie for a spot on the court.  I’m not talking Wimbledon here; I mean The Court of Master Sommeliers.

The quest to become a Master Sommelier, the highest distinction a professional in the fine wine and beverage industry can attain, requires the same commitment, perseverance and years of training as any professional sport. The final test requires candidates to prove their skills in Theory, Service and Tasting. It's the Ironman Triathlon of sommeliers. Very few succeed.

“The whole thing is really intense,” acknowledges Thomas Price, head sommelier at The Metropolitan Grill. “The athletic analogies get made constantly. But that’s the only thing I can compare it to. You put so much into it and you know going in that in all likelihood you may not pass.”

Price became a Master Sommelier in 2012, one of six in Washington.  That's  fewer than California, which has dozens, but more than New York (5) and Oregon (1). Of the 201 Master Sommeliers worldwide, 133 of them are in North America.

Filmmaker Jason Wise followed his subjects for two years, capturing the competitive all-night tastings with peers, the rigorous practice sessions with mentors, and the candid observations of the contenders, their wives and girlfriends.

Of the 50 who take the exam in the film, only six pass. I won’t reveal how the four stars fare, but you don’t have to be a wine geek to get caught up in the suspense and emotion as they pursue their goal.

It took Price just under nine years to advance through the four levels leading to the three-part final exam. He considers it the culmination of his whole career, he said in an interview last weekend on KIRO FM’s “Let’s Eat.” “The process is character building. It takes a lot of personal fortitude. Obviously the wine knowledge is an enormous component, but you really learn a lot about yourself on the journey.”

Though Price isn’t in the film, he knows the four somms featured very well and thinks the director did a good job capturing the friendships that develop.

“We seem crazy. I watch that movie and say man, I need my head examined. But when you’re in it, it’s the camaraderie that you build, and the nature of the quest. I think Brian McClintic in the film said it best. When people tell you about something impossible, some people say ‘wow that’s impressive,’ and some people say ‘wow I want to do that.’ For whatever reason, that became my attitude toward this thing.”

SOMM is showing June 21-27 at the SIFF Film Center and will also be available June 21 on iTunes.  Opening night screenings include a wine tasting at Ten Mercer.  During the run the restaurant is offering a Blind Tasting Contest. Purchase a mystery wine selection for $13 and if you correctly identify the varietals, you'll win a $13 gift card.

Listen to the complete interview with Price on “Let’s Eat” here: http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=574&p=1065&n=Let'sEat

Carmelita Vegetarian Restaurant and Bar, one of the first restaurants in Seattle to elevate vegetarian food to "dining out" status, will close its doors Sept. 29.

Kathryn Neumann and Michael Hughes opened the gracious Phinney-Greenwood bistro in 1996, overseeing it with a particular knack for hiring high-quality chefs who went on to omnivorous excellence in their own ventures. John Sundstrom of Lark cooked at Carmelita, as did Ericka Burke of Volunteer Park Cafe and Dan Braun of Oliver's Twist. Jonathan Fusell, a longtime sous chef, now heads the kitchen.

During Burke's tenure, at a time when veggie burgers and pasta were the eating-out norms, Nancy Leson wrote that Carmelita's food was "capable of changing the way so many of us feel about meatless diets in general, and vegetarian restaurants in particular." On its tenth anniversary, the verdict was this: "Date-night right, family friendly, perfect for gatherings large or small and home to a dreamy little garden patio, it remains, a decade later, one of the city's better neighborhood bistros."

The closure is bittersweet for the owners as well as customers. The recession hit the restaurant hard, as did rising costs and a rising workload, Neumann said. Adding a bar in 2009 helped -- but not enough. Consultants recommended adding meat to the menu or raising prices. "That just seemed like such a wrong idea."

But why make the final decision now, just when fine vegetarian fare is becoming mainstream?

"Several people have said that to me," Neumann said. "When we opened so many years ago, Cafe Flora was really the only other vegetarian restaurant in town. Since then, so many have opened, and it's also become so mainstream for high-quality restaurants to have really good vegetarian choices -- like Maria Hines, her restaurants have awesome vegetarian and vegan choices. I think that actually is great for people that are vegetarians, but I also think in part it may be diluting our hardcore customer base."

Carmelita didn't seem the sort of restaurant someone else could take over. It's named for Michael's mother, after all, and Hughes and Neumann and their friends, who have fine arts backgrounds, created most of the artwork inside. (Neumann painted the mural.) Instead, they've sold the spot to local restaurateurs Chris Navarra, Chris Gerke, and Shannon Wilkinson, who they say will be as committed to the community as they have been, and are planning on a "neighborhood-friendly restaurant" that will not be vegetarian.

Neumann said that Hughes has been working as a photo editor at Nordstrom for the past few years, and she's looking forward to getting back to her own home studio. They want to spend more time with their 10-year-old son. Long-term, they're not sure about their plans, but for the short-term, they want to make the most of the restaurant's final summer, for long-term employees and customers as well as for themselves.

"I know it sounds really cliche, but the restaurant really has been like our family," Neumann said.

They'll post plans for celebration dinners and customer appreciation nights on their Facebook page, and gift certificates will be honored through the last day, Sept. 29. They're planning a self-published book of Carmelita cocktail recipes, among other ideas, with profits going to a severance fund for employees.

"It's going to be fun over the next couple of months. That was one of those things we really wanted to be able to do, not to just shutter our doors..." she said.

In the summertime weather, "our patio is so great, so glorious -- it's kind of perfect timing to say goodbye."

Jo Robinson’s revelations about food weren’t secrets, but they weren’t exactly common knowledge either: Purple carrots are more nutritious than orange ones. Tomatoes are better for you cooked than raw -- and blueberries are, too. Dandelions, “the plague of urban lawns,” have eight times more antioxidants in their leaves than spinach.

Robinson, a Vashon Island resident, shares hundreds of such practical tidbits in “Eating on the Wild Side,” her well-received and highly readable new book on selecting and preparing the healthiest foods possible. Arguing that agriculture – not just in recent years, but over human history – has stripped many modern plants of their nutrients, she’s distilled information from sources as varied as the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the 1935 California Avocado Association Yearbook, and a long-classified 1951 government report on the effects of an atomic bomb explosion on corn seeds.

Robinson, who previously founded the Eat Wild national guide to finding grass-fed meat and dairy products, grew up in Tacoma and “imprinted” on Puget Sound. At home, she now oversees “the most beautiful garden plot I’ve ever had” – planted, naturally, with many of the varieties of vegetables and fruits she’s found to be the best-tasting and the best for our bodies. (The book includes recommended varieties for gardeners and farmers-market shoppers, from the historic Ozette potato to new Wild Treasure thornless blackberry.) She will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, June 17, at Town Hall (Cost: $5). Check out her high-profile New York Times piece summarizing her research over here. Here’s an edited, condensed version of our phone conversation from earlier in her tour:

Q: I think of you as the person behind Eat Wild, which is such a useful resource for animal-based foods. What got you started on fruits and vegetables?

A: "I've been researching this for 10 years, and I haven't been sharing it at all, because I wanted to come out all at once. It's a continuation of my (earlier) research. I had an interest in what we ate as hunter-gatherers...I stayed with (meat) 10 years, and meanwhile I was researching fruits and vegetables because I wanted to move on to other foods on the plate. I wanted to cover everything we eat and compare it to wild foods."

Q: A lot of this information seems surprising and new. What were you trying to research and how did you go about your research?

A: "I read over 6000 scientific journals. The reason the information in the book is new is, I got it all from the original sources, from the studies themselves. I was specifically looking for information that had not been brought out to the public that I thought was important and that we should be able to use right now. The main thing I found with our fruits and vegetables was that we have bred out (nutrients), especially the antioxidants -- not just in the last 50 or 100 years, but in the entire history of agriculture, which is 10,000 years. So when we compare wild plants to what's in the supermarket, the ones in the supermarket are dramatically lower in these antioxidants that are proving to be so protective for our health."

Q: It's been hard enough to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables, period. Do you worry that people will throw up their hands at the idea of selecting particular ones and particular varieties for better health; that they'll think they have to grow their own broccoli instead of going to the supermarket?

A: "I have information on all levels, (but) I have really geared it toward what you can find in the supermarket and the farmers markets...It's pretty simple. Like, tomatoes, pick the smallest tomatoes you see because the smaller the tomato, the more lycopene that's in it. There are very simple rules with lettuce. Leafy greens are the most nutritious and ones that are red tinged or brown tinged are best of all."

Q: How did you screen out bad or inconclusive studies?

A: "These were all from peer-reviewed scientific journals, so that hurdle was crossed... but I had my own criteria, which was, 'Is this something the public can use right now?' ..I found this study about garlic that said if you take garlic and slice it or dice it, press it, and then immediately put it in hot oil, you have destroyed its cancer-fighting ability. I thought, the public needs to know this. We've been told that garlic is great for our health, but we didn't know we had to press it, chop it, slice it, and then keep it away from heat for 10 minutes and then cook with it."

Q: Were there any big questions that you hoped to answer but couldn't?

A: "The research into the nutritional differences between varieties of the same fruits or vegetables is pretty spotty. It's just now being done. I would have liked to be able to give people many more specific varieties than I was able to -- I have hundreds in the book, but I keep searching for more data, and I am finding it. Weekly, I'll find something new and important."

Q: Are there any specific varieties you recommend for Northwest gardeners?

A: "For apple growers, I highly recommend an apple that people haven't heard about much, it's called the Liberty Apple...it's not that super-sweet, plain kind of apple that fills the supermarkets. It's sweet and tart, so it's extremely refreshing, and it's five times more nutritious than what's in the supermarket. But the really cool thing about it is, it's incredibly disease resistant. It doesn't get black spot and apple scab, which are what makes it so difficult to grow apples here."

Like a proud papa, we constantly boast about our seafood bounty (oysters, salmon, etc.)  to out-of-towners.

But who here  has ever bragged about our native crayfish? It’s not a legend. They’re out there, lurking under rocks and logs in Lake Washington and other local bodies of water.

They’re bigger and meatier than those found in the waters of Louisiana. And they taste better too, I think. 

I’ve tasted both native crayfish and those harvested from Louisiana. I’ve even tasted native and the Louisiana crayfish  when both were caught in the same lake. I think the native Signal crayfish  taste sweeter, less pungent than the Louisiana crayfish or crawfish or whatever you want to call them.

Most crayfish sold in local  gourmet supermarkets come from Louisiana. Those crayfish served in etouffée and other Cajun dishes found in your local restaurants? Sorry, those are harvested in Louisiana also.

But you’re in luck. It’s prime crayfish-catching season. Here’s my crayfish story from last summer when I hung out with  Julian Olden, the state’ leading crayfish expert and a freshwater biologist at the University of Washington.

From our catch: The tail of the Louisiana crayfish was more like a pinkie, the native closer  in size to my thumb.

Later that afternoon, I cooked them in a butter-garlic sauce with corn on the cob and andouille sausage. Still the best crayfish boil I’ve ever had.

Talk about initialing a deal. Adam M. Doppelt, co-founder of restaurant review giant Urbanspoon, used to tweet as @AMD, using his initials as his Twitter handle.

But there's a giant semiconductor company of that name as well, and they wanted the @AMD account. Doppelt wasn't interested. "I mean, it's an important part of my identity. How can you put a price on that?" he said in an email. "On the other hand, I don't use the account that much so it seemed like there might be an opportunity for something creative."

That something? A $50,000 donation to charity. After two years of negotiations, as Geekwire reported, AMD made a $25,000 to a charity of Doppelt's choice -- he picked FareStart, the culinary job training program for people who are homeless or otherwise in need. They also gave $25,000 to a charity of their choice, the Bellevue Boys and Girls Club. Doppelt, who left Urbanspoon after its sale to IAC, now tweets as @adamdoppelt.

Why FareStart? "Urbanspoon has a pretty close relationship with FareStart," and he was happy to guide the money there even though he's moved on to found a non-food-related company, Dwellable.

"It's easy to love a cause that gets people off the streets and into jobs. I know that they run a tight ship and the money would be spent wisely."

And why $50,000 for the, so to speak, initial investment? "I made that number up after consulting with some friends. What's reasonable? What's achievable? In business transactions I've found that it's easy to get fixated on dollar amounts, but this was totally different. It wasn't a negotiation in the traditional sense. I made up a number, and it took them two years to come around." Selling the name outright would have violated Twitter's terms of service, but a donation apparently passed muster.

It's an "incredibly generous" move that could, for instance, cover the costs of job placement for 25 FareStart graduates, or housing costs for 10 students over the 16-week program, said FareStart spokeswoman Christina Starr. "A donation of this size has an extraordinary impact on our programs."

@AMD has some 20,000 followers to @adamdoppelt's 350 and @FareStart's 3,300, but everyone came out ahead on good feelings.

For years, local bookseller Peter Miller had only an epistolary relationship with Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, two women behind the beloved Canal House cookbook series.

"They had someone send their book to us four years ago and asked if we would carry [their books]," explained Miller, as he prepped lunch for the staff of the architecture firm Suyama Peterson Deguchi. "We carried it for years, and they started sending us notes that said, 'Merry Christmas,' and we started sending them notes that said, 'Merry Christmas.'"

As the friendship developed, the Canal House series steadily gained popularity all over the country. "It turns out they have an army of people who love what they do," said Miller.

The three met in person only last December when Hirsheimer and Hamilton came to town for an event. By that time, Miller himself was working on a cookbook, based around the lunches he makes for his staff. For the book, fittingly titled "Lunches at the Shop," Miller asked Hamilton and Hersheimer to help out with the visuals. So, in their Lambertiville, N.J., studio, the duo made and photographed all of the 40-odd recipes in the book, and in the course of it, really got a sense of Miller's approach.

"We felt like there was this kinship," said Hamilton. "We've been living with Peter Miller for weeks." After the project concluded, the three decided Hersheimer and Hamilton would make trip to Seattle, to see Miller's lunch skills in action, and do a signing of their James Beard Award-winning book, "Canal House Cooks Every Day" (which will be today from 3  to 6 p.m. at Peter Miller Books, 2326 Second Ave., Seattle).

Miller, who was busy prepping food for 12 people, not long ago moved from his location of 25 years, on First and Virginia, into the space at the front of the Suyama offices on Second and Battery. He had developed the habit of making lunch for his staff, but now with the architects at Suyama to feed, he faces a considerably less leisurely task.

"Normally, lunch at the shop is for three or four," he laughed. "I'm going to have to get out of it. I'm gonna need help!"

Farmers markets. A spoofy plotline. Local guest stars. Could this be our Portlandia?

At the least, it’s ‘Locally Grown,' a comedy web show based on a fictional farmers market, shot partly at the Ballard Farmers Market and Shoreline Community College. Familiar faces from Seattle’s theatrical community and celebrity scene show up as characters or in guest cameos, including Dave Dederer, formerly of The Presidents of the United States of America, John Curley, and Cynthia Lauren Tewes of Love Boat fame, who later (this is real life, not a satirical plot twist), became a Seattle-based cheese steward as well as acting on local stages.

The show goes live online Wednesday, June 12, with a 12-minute pilot and assorted vignettes, including a 10-minute interview with Dederer on music and his city, in keeping with the “locally grown” theme. Dederer’s father was a founding board member of Pike Place Market, and he counts market buskers among his inspirations. (Sister Clare is the author of this bestselling yoga-themed memoir and a Betty MacDonald aficionado.)

A comedy about farmers markets seemed a natural to creator and co-writer Simon Hamlin, a local kid who remembers picking Pike Place Market for his seventh-grade school report on “my favorite spot in Seattle.”

“I’ve always loved the markets, and I think growing up in Seattle it’s kind of ingrained in us,” he said. (Maybe for him more than most; dad Larry Hamlin is a restaurant consultant who founded several notable Seattle spots, including the Brooklyn and Mel’s Market downtown.)

“Then, probably a year and a half ago, I was in a market and looking around and seeing all these beautiful, incredible fruits, vegetables, flowers – it’s visually very appealing,” Hamlin said. “Then you’ve got these buskers playing, so there’s the musical element. Then you’ve got eccentric (people), you’ve got families, dogs, people with cats on their shoulders, ferrets on their shoulders…I’m just looking around, thinking, ‘How has this world never been explored for a TV show?”

With colleagues Lorraine Montez and Lisa Roeser at the ‘Abundant Productions’ film company, Hamlin put together the idea of a show about a farming family (“Organic characters. Sustainable laughs”) at the fictional Ballmont market, theoretically located between Fremont and Ballard, that neighborhood otherwise known as Frelard. The pilot plot is a goofy drama where a third-generation farming family is accused of ‘profiling’ market-goers and deciding who will be offered a toothpick-speared sample of fruit. The storyline includes the farmers making an offering to the Godfather-like Market Master.

“They legitimately use the term Market Master, that’s not made up,” Hamlin said, hastening to add that the character was not based on actual Ballard Market Master Judy Kirkhuff. “All these characters are kinds of seeds of different people I might have interacted with,” he said.

A Kickstarter campaign raised more than $10,000 toward startup costs. The team’s backgrounds in marketing and sales as well as acting helped them bring in donors, while working with a budget allowed for professional production values and at least some pay.

“Coming at it as an actor, and having worked on a lot of different projects, a lot of times you are working for nothing,” Hamlin said. “We felt it was important, if it wasn’t going to be a lot of money, to at least acknowledge ‘You’re doing this well below your rate, but we recognize that and want to acknowledge you with something.’ People like Cindy, or Jeff Steitzer, who has performed on Broadway, or someone like Tony Doupé, our director, who seems to pop up in every movie that comes through here.”

Others, like Curley and like Dederer, lent a hand as a favor. “We wanted to create this synergy” between the fictional show and Seattle’s real characters, Hamlin said. The real-life backdrop also includes familiar market vendors and locations like Carnation’s Oxbow Farm. Vendors came out to the pilot’s premiere in Georgetown Saturday night.

Hopefully, Hamlin said, the pilot will be received warmly and the series will continue.

“My dream of dreams is that it becomes like Seattle’s answer to Portlandia, a show for Seattle that really celebrates our community and incorporates all those talented musicians and actors and all the creative folks in our community, but would have a national appeal.”

Like any good comedy, he said – (or any good farm) – “you take the seed of something” and go from there.

Oh boy, our neighbors in Portland are gonna be mad when they see the 2013 “Best Food Trucks in America” list. Seattle has a food truck ranked in the top ten as well as three other trucks  in the top 100.

Portland, the city that snickers at our modest food-truck pods, only has two trucks on the list. The Seattle truck that ranked no. 9 was...

Where Ya at Matt

Others who made the list:

16. Marination Mobile

37. El Camion

43. Maximus/Minimus

Many stellar trucks debuted around South Lake Union and other areas this spring, too late to be considered in the rankings.

Such lists, of course, are subjective and open to debate. Many folks, especially those in Portland, will certainly get riled up over who got shortchanged here.  Just don't shoot the messenger.  The Daily Meal compiled the list.

101 Best Food Trucks in America 2013