Tilth

She: I really liked the ambiance at Tilth. I liked the color of paint on the wall.

He: I didn’t like the paint, I always think green makes people’s skin look funny. But I loved the art.

She: It’s interesting that it’s wax art because it requires a certain level of temperature. Which means in the summertime…I don’t think they’ve worked that out yet.

He: I didn’t realize it’s only been open since September.

Anyway, overall I thought it was some of the best food I’ve had in Seattle, and I believe at the time you said that those duck burgers were the best food you’ve ever eaten.

She: Is that what I said? It was one of the best things ever. Delicious, perfectly cooked, perfectly seasoned with the fig preserves, those delicate fried potatoes on the side. Just perfect.

He. I liked all the food. The service was a little funny. So let’s set the stage here. We ordered a kir royale because it’s our anniversary, and you asked if you could get a cheese plate first, just a single piece to give us something to eat with the kir. And then he totally forgot the cheese plate.

She. After we had a whole conversation about it.

He. Meanwhile, there’s no bread so we’re drinking on an empty stomach. Then, we’re about a third-done with our kir, and he brings the wine, and opens it, and expects me to taste it while I’m still drinking the kir royale. There’s still no bread so I have to drink water to clear the cassis out of my mouth, but it’s a good wine, it can breathe a little bit.

I have to say, the wine list was great, not too many expensive bottles, good range. They had four Oregon pinots, and the waiter was able to explain all of them to me adequately and we got a great bottle and great value.

But anyway, we’re sitting there with half-finished cocktails, a glass of wine, no bread, and then he brings the amuse, which is also some kind of drink. What was it, some vanilla bean passion fruit drink?

She: I don’t remember because it wasn’t good. It tasted flat, it didn’t taste fresh, it tasted like it’d been sitting there for a while. I thought it was a really bad way to start off the meal, with a bad amuse and the thoughtlessness of the waiter.

He: That was the problem we had at Earth and Ocean too, remember that horrible waitress who brought the wrong bottle of wine out to my dad and then tried to get him to order it even though it was more expensive than the one he ordered, and she didn’t know anything about the menu, and she tried to upsell us on dessert? [Tilth founder and chef Maria Hines was the executive chef at Earth and Ocean from 2003 to 2006.] But enough about the service, the food was perfect.

She: The beet salad was delightful.

He: The cheese was delicious and salty, it almost tasted like there was bacon in there but there wasn’t.

She: It was a blue, and they made it into an emulsion, which is why the flavor was so concentrated.

Apart from the amuse, I didn’t like the salmon. Sockeye generally has a very fishy taste, and it’s not exactly in season right now, so I thought if it was on the menu it’d be a very special dish. But it wasn’t all that special. When you overcook salmon it tastes overly fishy, sort of like jerky.

He: I guess I liked the sides with the salmon, the polenta and artichoke. The fish itself was uneventful. Now the halibut!

She: With fresh fennel and a nicoise tapenade. Very simple, but perfect.

He: And the gnocchi, that was great. You didn’t like the fact that it was pan fried.

She: I think that’s the trend now, I’m just out of the loop on that particular trend. But it had a complex set of flavors, he used both preserved lemon and fresh lemon juice. The preserved lemon’s what gave it that dense round flavor. And that kale is our favorite, dinosaur kale, lacinato.

But let’s talk about dessert. That was the only thing you didn’t like.

He: True. You read the dessert menu and your comment was “this looks like a dessert menu put together by a chef, not a pastry chef.” Every dessert saved well, you were running down the menu saying “this would last for a week in the fridge, this would last for a week in the fridge…” So being a chocolate fiend, I order the one chocolate thing on the menu, chocolate cardamom crème brulee.

She: I didn’t taste the cardamom.

He: So it didn’t taste like chocolate, it didn’t taste like cardamom, it tasted like some sweet stuff and then they put some sea salt on it. And it was chilled.

She: It should have been room temp. I think it was a good effort for a crème brulee, but I forgot it was a cardamom chocolate because it didn’t taste like cardamom at all. It was a milk chocolate, which you don’t like. So that was sort of a disappointment. But it wasn’t the only chocolate on the menu like you say: they did have truffles. That was actually an interesting dessert piece because every chef and pastry chef in the world does not offer truffles as a dessert, it’s usually the after dessert. So she’s doing something different.

He: Now that Coco la ti ta is out of business, maybe she could hire that pastry chef [Sue McCown, also famous from Earth and Ocean].

She: No, she’s done that already. Plus, those desserts are over the top, Tilth is too casual for them. Anyway, I think Maria Hines has done a wonderful job. I loved the casual craftsman house, I was expecting it to be very pretentious because of the all-organic menu, but it reminded me of Berkeley, of Chez Panisse.

 

RATINGS: Both of us gave Tilth a 9.

WHAT THEY HAD:

We split a collection of small plates as follows:

1. Local pink beet salad with blue cheese emulsion.
2. Seared wild Alaskan halibut with fennel, nicoise olive, and extra virgin olive oil
3. Pete Knutson’s wild sockeye salmon with an artichoke barigoule (a word neither of us had ever seen before), spring onion, polenta cake
4. Mini wild duck burgers with fingerling chips, housemade ketchup, fig puree
5. Yukon Gold potato gnocchi with fried caper, parmesan, lacinato kale
6. Chocolate cardamom creme brulee with Theo’s chocolate and fleur de sel.

Wine:

A 2003 Pinot Noir from the Williamette valley, Hamacher I think. Shame we didn’t write it down, because it was glorious and not ridiculously expensive (about $60).

 

 

 

Rover’s

She: The amuse was a snooze.

He: When you’re gonna do a mussel soup, you’ve either got to do it hot or do it cold, but not in between. And mussels kind of suck anyway. But that sole and sea urchin and beets, that was one of the most creative dishes I’ve had in a long time. Sort of stark.

She: It was bright, earthy, the textures were interconnected. I loved it, and I’m not an urchin girl. But my favorite thing was the lamb. Cooked perfectly, seasoned perfectly. It was earthy and delicious and winter.

He: It was a very wintery meal. I’d like to come back there in spring or summer or fall.

She: It was very wintery, but in the menu he honored the tropical fruits that are in season now. That was a nice touch because so many restaurants in Seattle tend to stick so close to home, and that can get very boring. He did hearts of palm, he did mango. And grapefruit. I have to tell you, one of my favorite things I ate was the little fennel salad with the grapefruit.

He: And I really liked the quail fois gras, it was a heavy earthy KABOOM kind of thing. The last dish, the pheasant, it was hearty. But you know, it’s just butter. Just butter. Your lamb was the same way, just gravy and butter.

She: Fall back on the French.

He: It’s always gonna taste really good, but it doesn’t have a lot of character.

She: Well I think as a whole, his menu ideas were very inventive. Even if the main course was a little conservative.

He: He took you on a journey. One of my favorite places in Seattle, for sure.

She: Absolutely.

He: And they had a really good wine list, but it was really fucking expensive. The pinots were a decent deal, but totally inappropriate for the food, which is why I shouldn’t have ordered a pinot.

She: It was totally appropriate for my food.

He: It was good for you because you had more fish. But it was mostly Bordeaux and Burgundies starting at a hundred bucks and going up from there. There were a couple inexpensive Loires, but most of them were a hundred or two hundred dollars. And a bunch of Washington two hundred dollar wines. Fuck that, I’m not spending 200 bucks on a Washington wine.

She: Something I really liked: he used really traditional garnishes. You had that potato chip with a waffle cut.

He: It was a Chex.

She: Or also known as Chex mix.

He: It wasn’t Chex mix, it was just a Chex. A single Chex.

She: So a check. But it was really a tiny waffle-cut potato. And I had those crispy slivers of phyllo on my lamb. Then on my seabass he did a very old fashioned parsley herb garnish which I thought was perfect because he used it only on the fish, not all over the plate or in the sauce. It was a nice little remark and homage back to the 50s, which I thought was lovely. Homage, because it was a very modern meal. Anyway, the sea bass with brussels sprouts and bacon–perfect. So the middle of the meal was the highlight of the meal, then he brought you down at the end. A really remarkable journey.

He: He doesn’t quite have that sense of flavor where each bite is a series of notes. Like the guy at Cascadia whose name I can’t remember.

She: Jonathan Sundstrom.

He: Where it’s almost time-sensitive, you get this, then you get this, then you get this.

She: I saw that punctuation of flavors in that that little tiny fennel salad and graprefuit at the very beginning, and the ginger chocolate at the very end. I was mid-chocolate and I had not tasted the ginger, had not tasted the ginger, then ginger! And the chocolate napoleon should not go without discussion because it was truly lovely.

He: What’s a chcoolate napoleon?

She: That little chocolate dsesert with the trio.

He: Eh, fair.

She: No, it was very well thought out, there was a wonderful texture to it. A triple texture with that crispy chocolatey chell on top, then mousse, then that crunchy cake on the bottom.

He. I’m a purist when it comes to chocolate. I liked the Meyer lemon tart the best and you know how much I love lemon. The only other thing I’d say is the ambiance really felt like a Silicon Valley hotel dining room.

She: Very new construction.

He: New construction and kind of weird curtains and weird art on the wall, the kind of place you dine when you’re away somewhere and you don’t know anyone. It looked like the perfect place to dine alone. If they redid it with some dark wood, a little more personality. And what’s up with the waiters in Seattle? Every fine dining waiter in Seattle has to treat you like it’s some sort of show or program. Like synchronized swimming or something. Very serious.

She: If you’re gonna go for this old-fashioned high-end service, then why not make it absoultely perfect? Because he went limp-dick when he didn’t offer us port or coffee prior to the dessert. Major faux pas.

He: See, a real confident fine dining server doesn’t need to be pretentious because he knows he’s got it under control.

She: But the chef coming out was perfect.

He: I know, and he has a hat. He’s the chef in a hat.

 

RATINGSShe: 8 (out of 10)

He: 9 (out of 10)

ADDENDUM (things discussed during the meal, but not on the drive home)

• Although the decor was a bit off-putting, the setting–a tiny house off a courtyard, removed from the street–was quiet and peaceful. A nice change from those Belltown places with a bunch of drunk party kids in the street
• The charcuterie, which came as the first course of his meal after the amuse, must be praised to the skies. Eight tiny pieces of different meat, each with a little pickled or jellied garnish. Soprasetta with pickled cabbage. German hunter’s sausage with apricot jelly. Gravlax with sweet preserved Meyer lemon. Smoked duck that almost made me cry it was so delicious. And the meats themselves were delicately spiced. Saffron? Cardamom?
• A marriage proposal made at the next table! Both were our age (late 30s) or older. She was not crying with joy or making a lot of noise about it. In fact, she called her dad on her cellphone during the meal and remarked it was a bit of a surprise. We felt a little bit sorry for the guy. Here’s hoping it all works out for the best…

 

 

WHAT THEY HAD

She:

1. Amuse: Fennel/Grapefuit Salad, Cheese Puff, Warm Mussel Soup
2. Hearts of Palm with Celeriac Remoulade and Meyer Lemon Confit
3. Diver’s Sea Scallop with Celeriac Puree, Lemon Confit, and Meyer Lemon Nage
4. Sea Bass with Smoked Bacon, Brussels Sprout, and Red Wine
5. Lamb Medallion with Mushroom, Potato Rissole, and Black Peppercorn Sauce
6. Symphony of Desserts

He:

1. Amuse: Fennel/Grapefuit Salad, Cheese Puff, Warm Mussel Soup
2. Rover’s Assorted Charcuterie Plate with Accoutrements
3. Quail and Foie Gras with Caramelized Turnip and Foie Gras soup.
4. Sole with Sea Urchin, Roasted Beet, and Saffron Lobster Sauce
5. Roasted Pheasant with Baby Carrot, Green Lentil, and Rosemary Sauce
6. Symphony of Desserts

Wine:

2000 Pinot Noir Estate, The Eyrie Vineyards, Oregon

Our mission: on-the-spot Seattle restaurant reviews

When you spend a lot of money to eat dinner, you deserve perfection. Or at least quality ingredients, attentive service, and an effort at creativity. Seattle, despite its aspirations to be a “world-class city,” seldom delivers when it comes to fine dining. Spoiled from our experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are often disappointed by overpriced and underspiced comfort food, or throwbacks to the early 1990s (or worse, the 1960s). We usually discuss these disappointments on the drive home, while the experience is still fresh in our mind. But we tend to forget the specifics by the next morning, unless the experience is so fantastic (Douglas fir sorbet at Cascadia) or so horrible (the dead fish in the pond at Palisade) as to be unforgettable.

So we bought a digital recorder. We’re going to record our conversations on the drive home. We’re going to post those conversations on this blog. And hopefully, as our collection grows, people will learn, the true innovators will be rewarded, and the uninspired drek pushers will be pushed out of this city once and for all.

Our goal is to have at least one nice meal out per month, on or around the 23rd. With any luck, we’ll be able to do more than that.

(If you’re wondering who the hell are we to judge other people’s hard work, check our “About” page.)