8pm, 9 pans on the induc.
Peter Mumford
The crust on Belickis' pizzas is like Indian naan.
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Mistral Kitchen 2020 Westlake Ave., 623-1922, mistral-kitchen.com. 11 a.m.–2 p.m. lunch/brunch daily; 5–10 p.m. Sun.–Thurs.; 5 p.m.–midnight Fri.–Sat.
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It was after dark on a Friday, the floor three-quarters committed, and I was scribbling careful, blind notes along the seam of my blue jeans, my hand moving out of sight beneath the edge of the counter that runs the length of Mistral Kitchen's open center line. I was writing on my pants, timing out the night by the number of pans the sauté cook was juggling, because the cooks working in front of me had already seen the notes scribbled all over the back of my hand, and had asked why I had instructions for getting to a chicken restaurant in Everett doodled on myself.
"Because they serve chicken and waffles, man," I answered, grinning maniacally about having found a place that served one of the most brilliant innovations in American gastronomy.
"No way," said the cook, carefully quartering a side towel and glancing at the orders lining up on the slide in front of him.
No one seemed to notice my hand moving below the level of the counter—which was good, because I didn't want to know what they'd think I was doing if they had. I mean, I was excited to be there, but not that excited.
Along the back wall at 8 p.m., the girl standing sauté had nine pots and pans of various sizes sharing space on six stand-alone induction elements arranged on the stainless (hence my pants-notes shorthand). On the floor, the hostess was seating tables with a graceful equanimity, staggering the reservations and walk-ins to keep the pressure off the line. Everything was flowing smoothly as I looked over the daily menu on its clipboard and kept scratching away with my pen: tandoor, tiled pizza & roaster, the ramp.
The ramp: It was a big deal to chef and owner William Belickis that the ramp that led from the front door of his new restaurant down onto the floor had the feel of the archway, apple-lined and dramatic, that once led into chef David Bouley's eponymous restaurant in Manhattan—first, because Belickis had done time working with Bouley in New York, and second because he wanted the sensory experience of being at Mistral Kitchen to start as soon as a customer opened the door. So he had a ramp built, with a revealing turn built into the middle of it, and he now stacks crates of seasonal fruit and herbs (and lots of apples) along the brief walkway to differentiate it from the street outside and to season the air.
Yeah, season the air. There is something so regulated and so careful about the Mistral Kitchen experience—some sense of a wildly talented control freak on one of those rare jags where every fiercely managed element in the environment has suddenly come together just so—that even the air his customers breathe is under Belickis' command. Apples tonight. Maybe tomorrow, thyme and pears.
But it works. The room itself—all hard angles, brushed steel, chrome, and polished black lacquer—ought to be as cold and intimidating as a horror-show surgical theatre. But it's not, due to the perfectly placed touches of natural wood and soft, brown leather; because of an artful curve in an unexpected place, a delicate play of light across wineglasses on an unclothed table. The food should be precise and constrained in a room like this, twisted and tortured to fit the severe whims of a man who would serve dinner across welded steel. But it's not; modernist gadgetry and border-hopping fusions aside, it comes off all the more rustic and plain for the juxtaposition of eating cauliflower soup or simple bowls of Manila clams and chorizo in a white-wine beurre blanc on the bridge of Captain Nemo's Nautilus. Service in a place like this ought to be formal and stiff. But instead it's rather casual and amusing.
Like later in the evening, when my waitress, instead of asking me how I liked my dinner, simply shot me a look from the other end of the bar, raised a questioning eyebrow, and, when I smiled, barked out "I know, right!" and clapped her hands delightedly—a conversation had with the air.
8:40pm, 11p on induc.
The hamachi crudo had been lovely, laid before me on a plain white plate set with a salad of microgreens (shaved fennel and slivered radish), Nagel stripes of basil oil and mango purée, and four lozenges of tuna flesh that were set in precise arrangement like too many hands on an impressionist clock. Oddly, my favorite part of the plate had been the salad (unusual for me), simply because the hamachi had been left more or less alone, dressed only in a dash of oil, while the salad had been nicely composed and touched with an acidic dressing that served the same purpose as a nip of good balsamic vinegar before dinner: a goad to the appetite and a shock to the tastebuds.
I'd watched while one of the cooks assembled my charcuterie plate—a massive thing, about a foot long, laid with generous portions of La Quercia prosciutto (a domestic variety out of Iowa, of all places, that can easily stand up against the best Italian varieties), some peppered salami from San Francisco, and an excellent pile of paper-thin copa with just enough spice to set it apart from its fatty companions on the plate. I'd fallen in love with Mistral's rotary slicer in that moment: watching the cook work its handle, jigging the carrier back and forth across the gleaming blade, and snatching little bites of the meat for himself. It didn't bother me that he was eating, too. If I'd been him, customers would've had to jump me in the back alley just to get a bite of that prosciutto for themselves, tearing whole legs of the stuff out of my hands as I made a run for it.
