It is strange to see a restaurant open at three in the morning. I don't care where you've lived, what you've seen, or the level of your insomnia, there is just something in the human psyche—some conditioned reflex, pure as circadian rhythms—which revolts slightly at the wrong-side-of-the-clock sense of light puddled on a dark sidewalk, bodies behind glass at rest and in motion, and the hot neon of an OPEN sign at an hour when most such noble gases are cold.
Joshua Huston
Much nicer than a late-night diner.
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The Night Kitchen 216 Stewart St., 448-8810, nightkitchenseattle.com. 6 p.m.–9 a.m. daily; closed Mon. night/Tues. morning.
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Diners are different, as are certain coffee shops and bars which have a somewhat flexible relationship with legal and temporal dynamics. There are expectations, in any civilized quarter of the world, that those with broken internal wristwatches might still score bourbon, pancakes, or a scorched, tarry drip without too much difficulty in hours when only cats, killers, and working girls are supposed to be up.
But a restaurant—that's another story. Tables, silver, corked bottles, servers dressed in some approximation of house livery (black-on-black, eyes bagged with exhaustion and dull with a certain sense of having already seen enough), and a menu offering options that seem belied by the hour, the kitchen, and the crew. It's almost too much to accept at first blush, simply because such a thing is almost fantastical—like walking down the street and bumping into a unicorn trying to cadge smokes on the corner of Second & Stewart.
Which is why, if you sit in the front room of The Night Kitchen at any wrong hour—which are, almost invariably, the right hours—and watch the door, you can see nearly every person who comes inside doing the same tiny dance. They will hang outside the door for an instant—a stutter-step, as though the ballistic course of their progress through the night has been altered by strange gravities—and touch the door lightly. They will pause, cutting their eyes at the OPEN sign burning and the bodies behind the windows, then walk carefully across the threshold, dip a shoulder, and look around suspiciously as though they can't quite believe the door has opened for them.
Because The Night Kitchen is still relatively new (it opened last Dec. 31), some still ask whether the place is actually open, serving food. But almost all of them, upon first washing up on these rare shores, have a look on their faces like Maurice Sendak's Mickey falling naked into his own Night Kitchen. They're wondering, for lack of a more elegant phrase, just what this place's deal is.
I ate the best fried cheese curds I've had in Seattle one night at The Night Kitchen. They were off the Late Night Snacks menu, which is not the same as the Dinner menu, which is not the same as the Late Night Breakfast menu, which is not the same as the plain old Breakfast menu.
The Night Kitchen opens at 6 p.m. most days. It then remains open until nine the next morning, at which point it shuts its door, goes dark, and more or less disappears into the neighborhood like some kind of culinary Brigadoon. The four different menus cover four different phases of the night and bloody morning, serving as cushions for the differing circumstances that might lure people to this room at hours they're unaccustomed to dining.
I ate my cheese curds at midnight on a Sunday—dead in the middle of my Saturday night—and they were so blissfully simple, dumb, and perfect that I ate a second helping at about 12:15 just because I was so pleased with the way the small order of beer- battered, crisp, melty and golden-brown curds had come out the first time around. They arrived, with no sauce (needing none) or garnish beyond a cursory sprinkling of chopped parsley, in a white soufflé dish on a white plate, and were exactly what I wanted (fried anything, delivered hot, after drinks elsewhere and an argument of pointless severity with a friend), like guilty desires read with laser precision. Hot cheese and cold beer (Old Scratch, off a list filled with American craft brews) at midnight—the only thing that could've made it better would've been if the banh mi at the bottom of the curled, water-stained, and roughly-used paper menu hadn't been made with seitan.
Still, a man can't ask for everything. Or rather, he can ask, but no one will listen. So I sat happy at my annoyingly sticky glass-topped table (never a good idea, no matter how much it saves on the linen bill) under the wine-colored walls and black-and-white snaps of skulls in gas masks, ate my cheese, and shut up about it.
The Night Kitchen has a dinner menu that seems doomed to failure in every rational way. Opening at 6 p.m. puts the place in direct competition with every other restaurant in the city, planting it smack in the middle of the prime-time sweet spot, up against everything from Canlis to Mickey D's.
And nothing—nothing—on this short, strange, and jumbled board would make anyone flipping through menus or paging through websites go more than 11 steps out of their way to go there: a cheese plate, chicken wings, fries with custom sauces, three salads, tomato soup and a mini-grilled cheese sandwich, two burgers, mac and cheese. There's nothing here that's not done elsewhere more creatively, by chefs who bracket the comforting and classical core of any menu with all manner of baiting diversions to get the money through the door.
