Vagabond and One Pot, Not-So Underground Restaurants, Keep Diners Talking

My friend and I had checked in with the organizers and slipped into our seats. Now we were trying to figure out what the menu was, let alone which of Portalis Wine Shop's hundreds of wines we should drink with it. "Any interest in splitting a bottle with us?" the pair seated next to us asked. We had just learned their names.

That's the point of Vagabond, one of the recent crop of "underground" Seattle restaurants—invitation-only events that may be legal or illegal, depending on the venue, but are never about just the food.

Last October, the media received e-mail press releases stating that the founders of Gypsy, Seattle's most well-known illegal restaurant, were joining forces with Michael Hebberoy, who had parlayed a nationally recognized underground restaurant in Portland into three legal bistros before leaving it all behind in a divorce and quitting Portland for Seattle. These two august unrestaurateurs, the statements read, were going to start Vagabond, a Monday-night communal dinner at Ballard's Portalis Wine Shop. Vagabond wouldn't require Gypsy's three-step application process, and would create a more down-to-earth, affordable experience. But as soon as we in the media had printed word of the launch, we got a blast e-mail from Hebberoy saying that he was not, in fact, associated with Vagabond. He was starting his own underground restaurant, One Pot, holding events several times a month. Its theme, identical to Vagabond's, was that all the diners would eat from the same communal pot.

Since I was as curious about Vagabond and One Pot as I was confused over their origins, I decided to wait a while to see how things panned out. The buzz that filtered back to me over the following months suggested that both "restaurants" had settled into their respective grooves. Eventually, I signed up (anonymously) for each event's e-mail mailing list and waited...and waited...until a space opened up.

The invitation to Vagabond came through first a few months back. On a Monday night, when the wine shop was closed, the owners pushed together the tables in the front. Once we were all seated, "Head Vagabond" Gabriel Claycamp, owner of the cooking school Culinary Communion, came out and introduced the night's chef, Tyler Hefford-Anderson, who just opened Opal on Queen Anne. Hefford-Anderson recited the menu: perhaps a little foie gras to start, then his take on vichyssoise, pork belly with potatoes à la Joël Robuchon, and grilled French toast to finish. T and I let our tablemates, who'd been talking with the Portalis staff before we arrived, pick wines to match. Then the feeding began.

Though I smelled seared foie fat coming out of the kitchen, the chefs evidently decided that they needed it more than we did, so we started out with a potato-leek zvichyssoise that had been pureed with yellow bell pepper, a shock of summer sunlight to light up the cream, counteracted with a few crumbles of aged Humboldt Fog goat cheese. A while later, the waiters dropped off decadence-on-a-platter: Braised pork belly, sweet-glazed and then roasted, with a second platter of mashed potatoes. "The traditional ratio of potatoes to butter and cream in Potatoes Robuchon is 50-50," explained Hefford-Anderson before the meal, eliciting a few moans—whether of pleasure or horror wasn't clear. The potatoes had the consistency of ice cream, and let me tell you, you could taste every ounce of the fat. Both offerings were so rich that I only needed a few bites.

We drank, and ate, and talked, and drank some more, ordering a second bottle of wine to match the pork. Almost all the people sitting around me had some connection to the restaurant industry or had graduated to advanced levels of foodiedom (the kind where you collect four-star menus like 10-year-olds collect baseball cards). By the time the dessert came around, everyone's face was flushed with wine. Which turned out to be a good thing. Prior to the meal, the chef had told us all, "Ever wondered why no one grills French toast?" Because that would taste awful, I thought to myself, and the scorched, slightly sodden egg-dipped bread proved me right. But one of the women at our table bought us all a couple of bottles of port to share, and that proved dessert enough.

It took me another two months to score an available slot at One Pot, since Hebberoy only holds five or so a month. Unlike Claycamp, who organizes the meals around a chef or chefs, Hebberoy organizes around a concept or a person. His dinners hop from place to place, most often a bar or a restaurant, and Hebberoy has the star power to attract documentary makers, authors, and celebrity chefs. Most sell out weeks in advance.