9 a.m.
Tim Schlecht
Location Info
Details
Café Presse 1117 12th Ave., 709-7674, www.cafepresseseattle.com. CAPITOL HILL. Open 7 a.m.–2 a.m. daily.
Price Check
Omelet with mushrooms $5
Salade niçoise $12
Arugula salad $4
Whole roast chicken $26
Hanger steak $16
Croque monsieur $5.50
Country ham $9
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Seattle's newest all-purpose hangout, Café Presse, looks great at breakfast. Morning light gushes through its wall of windows, giving the cognac bottles, wine glasses, and espresso getup at the bar an extra-shiny glow.
The three-month-old cafe's sister restaurant, Jim Drohman and Joanne Herron's Le Pichet, was born to look like a well-loved Parisian bistro, but the repurposed-warehouse look of Café Presse could only be contemporary American. The exposed-brick walls are girdled in an earthquake-mitigating steel frame, and all the paint and plaster have been scraped off the high ceiling to reveal chic raw wood. Even the Frenchity touches—pale-blue flocked wallpaper and a giant clock that looks as if it was heisted from a Lyon train station—emphasize the Seattle-ness of a cafe trying to be classic and modern, casual and upscale, all at once.
Nine in the morning may be the only time when the cafe feels empty. With the exception of the home-office crowd at the bar, who've walled in the barista with their laptops, only a couple of the olive-green tables along the brick wall are occupied. Café Presse may awaken at 7 a.m., but the rest of Capitol Hill does not.
Nine o'clock is the perfect time to read a magazine, drink an Americano, and order something light off the restaurant's all-in-one menu. I suppose I could get an entrée of poisson sauté à la meunière, but I'm really there for an omelet with mushrooms. It's a real two-egg omelet, not some IHOP cheese-stuffed behemoth, folded into a narrow oval just like the Julia Child diagrams show. I can taste the butter in the creamy eggs, and the button mushrooms have been sautéed to order. The omelet is the perfect complement to a hunk of baguette and my mood. Plus, the meal, with tip, costs less than $10.
Noon
It appears that everyone from Seattle University, Swedish Hospital, the local foodie community, and Capitol Hill's modeling talent has decided that Café Presse is the perfect lunch spot. Would I prefer to wait 30 minutes for a table or take a seat at the window? the host asks. I take the window, sip my teensy bottle of soda, and play with the orange mustard pot for a half-hour until the food arrives. What I've always liked about Le Pichet, and now Café Presse as well, is that Drohman loves the French for who they are and not for some ethereally classy people we imagine them to be. Americans have reinterpreted the salade niçoise as a bowl of gourmet greens with some seared ahi, green beans, and olives. But at Café Presse, it's a pile of top-notch, oil-canned tuna plopped on top of some boiled potatoes, with hard-boiled eggs, olives, chickpeas, and anchovies. It's a working man's lunch, the kind you'd expect to get at a dockside cafe in Nice. If I didn't have to go back to the office, I'd follow it up with a Ricard and a cigarette. Just seems like the thing to do.
7 p.m.
On Friday night, with the front room filled again, the host sends my friends and me to the back room, which is about half the size of the front and packed tight with banquettes and green tables. "Reserved" signs mark most of the other empty ones; dinner, in the back room, is apparently the only time and place you can make a reservation at Café Presse. The crowd that filters in over the next hour—prides of fortysomething gay men wearing expensive shirts, women who've had work done, people who probably ate at Lark the week (or night) before—has more money than the lunchtime clientele. But it's not all about money; while the conversation in the room thickens, the woman sitting next to us placidly reads a book while she muses on a croque monsieur and salad.
This time we plumb the highest end of the menu, starting with a chicken-liver terrine so moussed up with whipped cream that you wonder how the cooks even cut it into slices. An arugula salad with goat-cheese-smeared croutons is dressed perfectly: not so vinegary that my mouth puckers, not so light that it tastes like a pile of raw leaves.
Judged by price, the shining light at Café Presse, just as at Le Pichet, is the roast chicken (it serves two or, more realistically, three). "It takes an hour to prepare," the waitress tells us. "But if I put the order in now, by the time you finish with your appetizers and drinks, it'll be up." This turns out not to be true.
Eventually, after we've ordered a second salad and finished off a second basket of bread, the chicken comes, accompanied by mounds and mounds of crisp, skin-on fries. The roast chicken is a wonder: so damn juicy and tender, just pulled from the oven the moment the last bit of pink flesh went opaque, with a glorious, crackly exterior. Except there's one problem.
"It's too salty," notices my friend Anne when we attack the bird. We've just spent an hour talking about how much we all love chicken skin, and as we all verify her claim, the sense of loss is epic. The flesh underneath may be perfectly seasoned, but each time my bite includes the skin, I can barely taste the meat for the salt. We mention the problem to the waitress, who shrugs and says, "Oh, I like adding extra salt to my food." (So do I, lady, just not enough to cure my tongue.) The hanger steak, normally one of my favorite cuts of beef, also has a gorgeous crust and rare-to-medium-rare meat—but the cooks have sliced it too thick, and not quite against the grain, so the meat takes much more work to chew than it should.
