One warm evening at Campagne, when I sat on the patio instead of mooning over the Market view from the marigold-walled dining room, I encountered a few off notes (an oddly bland guinea fowl, a meaty cousin to the pheasant, surrounded by a salt-sludge reduction sauce). But they were outweighed by pleasant surprises (a warm cucumber soup, the vegetable used more like an herb than a primary ingredient). On the whole, Gordon's food found a smart balance between clean and rich, and the waiters enacted all of the little fine-dining rituals, such as the between-course changing of the silverware and the post-entrée decrumbing of the table, that seem so fussy when you subject them to post-Marxist critique and so gracious when you don't.
Campagne
Rick Dahms
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86 Pine St., 206-728-2800, www.campagnerestaurant.com.
Rover's [1986]
Aspiring restaurateurs, here's your first lesson in how not to start up a classic restaurant: When Thierry Rautureau and a partner (who moved on in 1991) bought 15-month-old Rover's off its founding chef, who was eager to flee back to Los Angeles, the new chef didn't clean out the old one's fridge. Nor his menu. "We got the key on Sunday night and opened on Monday morning, serving his food," Rautureau laughs. It's hard to imagine one of the Northwest's most refined chefs putting out two to three meals a day of New American (roast chicken with herbs, warm spinach salad), but he did, for a year, until he realized he was burning out and not making enough money. "That's when I said, if we're going to be poor, I'm going to do what I want to do," he says.
What he wanted to do became, over the next 19 years, one of Seattle's most celebrated showcases for Pacific Northwest haute cuisine. To the public, Rautureau is "the chef in the hat," with a celeb-chef cookbook and a James Beard Award to boot. Yet he complains that diners think of his restaurant as a museum, something they anticipate visiting for 10 years instead of stopping in for a few plates and a glass of wine.
Is it the once-in-a-blue-moon cost, which Rautureau has tried to soften by offering the dishes in his famous prix-fixe meals à la carte? Is it the Madison Valley location, tucked so deep in a suite of grandma-cottage offices that you can get lost walking back from the street? Is it the ambience, designed so you don't waste time admiring anything but your tablemates and your plates? My initial reaction to the suburban-print burgundy carpet and the off-white walls, garnished only with a few Chagall-esque paintings and drapes, reminded me of my first impression of the French Laundry down in Napa. Waiting for the $90 five-course dinner (or $80 vegetarian or $125 eight-course meal, if you choose) to begin, I wondered: What's the hype about?
The food.
It's amazing how timeless, how fresh French technique is when it's used to glorify local, seasonal ingredients instead of Frenchitude itself. Rautureau nods to a number of current trends—salumi plates, Kobe beef—yet goes his own way, his cooks doing dozens of delicate little things with dozens of delicate ingredients. It's a meal whose every nuance is considered, down to the tiny dots of sauce that garnish the amuse-bouche, and so well prepared that a lover of good food doesn't have to waste time divining the cook's original intention from what actually ends up crossing his or her palate. Not to say that dishes like a silky roasted squab breast with cauliflower mushrooms or a scallop topped with a fat slice of seared foie gras don't go for the gut, but I found myself, as I rarely get to do, engaged with the dishes in the same way that I would be with a play or an abstract painting: studying the composition, meditating on what each bite told of the seasons and of my own sense of taste and smell.
I can see why the hushed-voice service (flawless), the doorstop wine list, and the swank food make people who don't go out to dinner as much as I do feel like they need to save up, both psychically and financially, for Rover's. But Rautureau swears that I can "pop in" his restaurant for a $60 meal, a dare I may take him up on some day.
Rover's
2808 E. Madison St., 206-325-7442, www.rovers-seattle.com.
jkauffman@seattleweekly.com
