Many years ago, I was a young cook, still making my bones on the prep side of the line. I cut meat, ran my knife through hundreds of cases of mushrooms, babysat demis like a mother sitting up with a sick child, and stood there in front of my board, grooving along to the plastic-wrapped galley radio blaring the Ramones and Beastie Boys in eternal counterpoint to the smooth tocktocktock of blades tapping wood.
Joshua Huston
Looks good, less filling.
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Smith 332 15th Ave., 709-1900, smithseattle.com. 4 p.m.–2 a.m. daily, brunch Sat.–Sun.
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The best job in those days was chopping mushrooms. There was something totally sexy about the tug of the knife slipping through flesh— knocking buttons down by the flat, 10 pounds in 10 minutes. The worst job was stemming spinach. It came into the kitchen in big bags packed with tender leaves, still gritty with soil, and we would take the bags, split them open, dump five or 10 of them into a deep sink filled with icy water, and then start pulling the stems off each individual leaf—maybe a thousand of them, maybe 10 thousand. Suffice it to say it was a lot.
We stemmed the spinach because spinach tastes delicious, but spinach stems taste woody, bitter, and wrong. Because, when used for one of the composed salads coming off the garde manger station, the leaves were laid on, one or two or three at a time, with extraordinary care and attention to detail, and if, God forbid, the chef—an angry, pop-eyed, gin-blossomed Alsatian who'd missed his true calling as an Obersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and always announced his presence behind you by spitting on the back of your neck—ever found a plate headed out the door with an unstemmed leaf on it, he'd probably send you outside into the alley to stem the leaves off the fucking trees.
Flash-forward 10 years or so. I'm a chef now myself, and can't imagine the jokes my prep cooks make about me (and since most of them are Tamil and Puerto Rican, I can't understand half of them anyway). But some things haven't changed. The first thing I teach my new garde manger men is that nothing we do here, in this charming, rustic little neighborhood bistro, is slap-and-serve. It might look that way going out the door—tangles of greens on the plate, drizzles of oil and spatters of port-wine reduction—but making it look that way takes care.
Little details, things like stems and spatters, they all matter. Rusticity, at a certain level, is a style as fine and particular as haute cuisine. The trick is for the plate to look thrown together by some sweaty, grill-scarred thug in the back, but taste as if it had been lain down by an angel-genius with a direct line to the food gods. The power of the neighborhood bistro, the tavern, the pub-as-restaurant, is to be better than anyone thinks it ought to be, to stun with greatness when mere goodness is all that's expected.
Someone forgot to explain this to the cooks at Smith. Forgot to tell them—slowly and using small words—that ugly is not a valid style, that dull is not an appropriate seasoning.
The minute I step through Smith's doors, I like the space. It's dark and rough around the edges, sparsely decorated with taxidermied animals and portraits of garage-sale quality, and looks for all the world like a local pub in the English countryside which, through poor investment or maybe the owner's gambling problems, has been forced to sell off half the art and animal heads and some of the fixtures just to keep the lights on. A man dressed in wood paneling could disappear here utterly, and the faux gas lamps at every table sport mismatched shades. On the radio, Robert Plant is tearing his way through "The Battle of Evermore," lending the whole place an air of weird magic, as though you could look through the blank spaces on the walls and almost see back into an uncertain past where a gangly, pimple-faced teenager and his best friend, Jimmy, are standing on a rickety stage, leaning into those first hammer-of-the-gods power chords and shaking their hips around, scaring the locals.
Open the menu and the entire thrust of the place is laid plain: bowls of marinated olives, cheese plates with honeycomb, cured meat with pickled fennel, a Painted Hills burger, pork belly, sweetbreads, and hanger steak. The proteins are confined to a single expression of chicken, lamb, and a fish of the day. Smith is aiming straight for that rustic sweet spot—a target with a very small bull's-eye for all those reasons mentioned above, but one which is by no means impossible to hit. All it takes is care, thought, an easy hand, and a good eye.
I order poutine, a plate of sweetbreads, and a simple salad of local lettuces and almonds, and ease back into my booth behind a Rainier tallboy, anticipating good things.
Here's how tough it is to fuck up poutine. With only three base ingredients to deal with (french fries, gravy, and cheese curds), you have to be cheap, careless, and blind all at the same time. You have to be pretty much completely checked out not to get it right in your sleep. Poutine is the very definition of a lay-up: fry the fries, pour on the juice, top with curds, then blast it under the salamander for a minute to make everything all nice and melty.
