Hit the Treadmill, Then Head Over to Quinn’s

Even before Scott and Heather Staples opened Quinn's Pub on East Pike and 10th Avenue East, the press identified it as Seattle's first "gastropub," a term the national food media have been touting for a while now as the next big trend.

If Quinn's is apparently Seattle's first, what exactly is a gastropub, other than something that sounds like a colon obstruction? The Jolly Roger Taproom at the Maritime Brewery has been on the creative-food-with-good- beer tip for years, and it's not considered a gastropub. Beer-focused places like Brouwer's, the Collins Pub, and Hale's Ales don't exactly sell stale tortilla chips with canned nacho cheese sauce. I asked a bunch of Seattle food geeks to define "gastropub" for me, and the only two responses I could evoke were "the Spotted Pig in New York" and "you know, the ones in England."

After two visits to Quinn's, I think the term can be summed up in one ingredient: bone marrow.

Blame neoclassic English gastronomy, championed by cooks like Fergus Henderson and food writers like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who are trying to revive England's love of offal. Scott Staples, Quinn's chef, doesn't embrace that particular trend whole hog (sorry), but he does take a perfectly decadent dish like potato gnocchi with blue-cheese cream sauce and braised oxtail meat, then adds a chunk of deep-fried bone marrow to push it over the edge. The dissolve-on-the-tongue gnocchi hold up to the meat and cream sauces. But that square of jiggly, crisply battered marrow on the side tastes kind of wrong—in a foie gras/butter-poached lobster/Krispy Kreme bread pudding kind of way.

When I talked to the chef after my visits, he called his food "unapologetically meat driven." Staples' food is rarely too rich to drown out the smarts put into it. In fact, it's the chef's finesse that separates his menu from that of the brewpubs. What distinguishes Quinn's from a bistro like the couple's first restaurant, Restaurant Zoë, is that the gastropub hits that sweet spot between hangout and full-on restaurant. There's no distinction between the high and the low ends of the menu. You can order bar snacks like three-for-$5 meatball sliders. You can get a grilled ham and cheese, fish and chips, or a braised lamb shoulder with polenta (one of only a few dishes on the menu to top $12). You can drink one of 12 beers on tap, which range from Belgian ales to PBR, as well as a rotating selection of craft beers by the bottle. (One complaint: I know it's a pub, but the wine list, which doesn't list year or region of any of the bottles, needs to be better marked.)

I walked past La Puerta, Quinn's predecessor, hundreds of times and never thought about entering. (The Mexican restaurant moved, by the way, to the second floor above the Broadway QFC.) Then the Stapleses pulled a Pygmalion, and in just a few months created a design showpiece. They replaced the two-story windows, banishing the decals that had hid the room from the street. They installed clusters of dim bulbs that cling to the ceiling like frog's eggs to the leaves of water lilies. Despite its gorgeousness, the room feels vaguely like a tavern, thanks to the stairs to the mezzanine—which are paneled with untreated boards—and a bar shaped like one from a 19th-century saloon, only stripped of its vines and turrets. The room gets loud when the bar gets slammed, but hey, it's a (gastro)pub.

I had two disparate experiences with the service. One waiter made us feel like he was personally escorting us through the meal. He divvied up our amorphous order into apps and entrées, asked about getting me another beer just when I had two sips left, and even relit the candle on our table without my tablemate noticing. On my second night, the waiter treated us like we had brought our pet rats. Among other fine moments, he dropped off every plate we'd ordered in one trip, so by the time we ate our salad and soup, the hanger steak was cold and the fries greasy. We spent so much time trying to catch his attention during the last hour we were there that I left smoldering. Because of my experience with the first waiter, and the ready welcome from the hosts and bartenders—who don't wait, in typical Seattle fashion, for strangers to make the move before greeting you and launching into chitchat—I felt like he was the anomaly. But it still sucked.