Elliott Bay Cafe and the Gravity of Lunch

You may get sick of the endless repetition of cereal and milk or eggs and bacon, but to me breakfast is a ritual that stretches back to elementary school and is not to be messed with, even if I have brunch plans: toasted homemade bread, too much butter, and a thin veneer of jam, slowly eaten in the glow of my laptop screen.

Lunch, however, is a meal for gulping, one that always begins with the sorry ding of the microwave, the forlorn crinkling of the sack. After all, if you work in downtown Seattle, what are your options? A dreary ham and cheese from a deli, always with too much mustard and inbred tomatoes? A $30 sit-down meal that necessitates a few bumps afterward to get you through the afternoon? Pallid greens that drip dressing all over your keyboard? A few centuries ago, the meal we scarfed down in the fields to keep us from fainting was called nuncheon— which expresses onomatopoeically how I feel about lunch.

Tamara Murphy has been thinking about the meal best forgotten, too. As you read this, the chef and co-owner of Brasa—longtime chef of Campagne, winner of a Beard Award, profiled in dozens of publications—may be calling out sandwich orders in the basement of Elliott Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square. And the fact couldn't make me any happier.

With Elliott Bay Cafe, Murphy is diversifying her portfolio, so to speak: For almost a decade, Brasa has been a dinner destination, with the happy hour in its bars one of the best midpriced meals in Belltown. Now she's conquering the low end of the range, serving soups, salads, and sandwiches for $6–$9. (She's not the only restaurateur upgrading a bookstore cafe, by the way. Thomas Soukakis, the owner of Capitol Hill's Vios, has taken over the restaurant connected to Third Place Books in Ravenna, where you can now lunch on tzatziki and roasted squash or eat braised lamb with orzo for dinner.)

Tuna salad, to Murphy, means a baguette with flakes of St. Jude's albacore, topped with threads of shredded celery root anointed in creamy aioli, all for $7.75. Some tuna salads use mayonnaise to drown out any taste of the sea, but Murphy punctuates the sandwich with the fishy tang of pickled white anchovies. Shove a sandwich like that down your gullet and you're insulting your tongue. I felt the same about an "Argentinian" steak salad (really, it seems more pan-Latin): hunks of juice-beaded beef, tipped from the pan onto the greens, set at play against the bite of grapefruit and shaved tomatillos, salty white cotija cheese, and finely cut tortilla strips dusted with salt and smoked paprika. If Murphy served that at Brasa, I bet she'd be charging far more than $9.50.

The other radical change Murphy made was to create a space that people actually want to eat in. I made a pilgrimage to Elliott Bay Book Co. on a trip to Seattle years ago, and even then I remember feeling as if the dingy cafe with indifferent service was a wasted opportunity. I met people there for interviews a couple of times, but stopped because I felt like I was luring them there to steal Sauron's ring back.

It's amazing what a little light will do. To set off the exposed bricks and arched ceilings so central to the cafe's charm—but which also make it feel like a wine cellar—Murphy and her crew repainted the plastered walls and the poured-concrete floor a buttery cream, echoed in the blond wood tables and chairs they installed. They also doubled the number of track lights gleaming down from the ceiling, so that every corner feels clean and welcoming. The kitchen has a working hot line now, and above the old espresso station, Murphy has hung a vintage "COFFEE" neon sign, blazing white.

Now a place where you used to hurriedly down your thin latte and stale Top Pot is one of the best places to find a cheap lunch downtown. Word of the transformation has spread quickly, too; by noon the line can get 20 deep. But it moves relatively fast, and in all my visits I haven't seen anyone standing around glaring at packed tables, though you can see the toll the rush takes on the sweating, twitching cooks.

Is everything great? Does the universe owe me a 28-inch waist? Idealism says yes, reality has other priorities. A "classic" reuben came on rye that was barely toasted, and the fillings weren't anything to talk up, either. Brown stripes on a grilled-cheese sandwich filled with goat cheese, fontina, and cheddar suggested that it actually had been cooked on a grill, and not long enough—only half of the cheese had melted. Plus, the cooks had skimped on the tomato jam and Mama Lil's peppers listed on the menu. A bean-and-chard soup with the lilting fragrance of fennel was crowded with white beans whose centers hadn't quite hit the creamy point; there's only so much pleasure I can take in chewing my soup.

It also has been a while since I've gotten excited about a plate of scrambled eggs at a restaurant; fluffy and moist, the ones I ordered enrobed fat lumps of smoked trout and flecks of bacon, with scallions crunching here and there. And it's rare to find that the side dishes that come with every sandwich—your choice of mixed greens with a shallot-dense sherry vinaigrette, a bowl of kettle chips, or an orzo salad—aren't halfhearted gestures.