There is a certain kind of home cook who believes the best way to get children to eat something other than pizza and chicken nuggets is to arrange food into facial portraits. A noodle nose, a pair of meatball eyes, and a big tomato-sauce smile might strike these kitchen artists as enchanting, but most kids aren't buying it: Even eaters too young to be trusted with steak knives know better than to play with their food, as meals and games almost never mix at American tables.
Joshua Huston
These people have no idea what kind of wine they're drinking.
Location Info
Details
MARCHE 86 Pine St., 728-2800, marcheseattle.com. 4:30 p.m.–midnight daily.
A hearty sis-boom-bah, then, for Daisley Gordon's Marché, the reimagined Campagne that opened this fall after a months-long hiatus. Play has a permanent spot on the menu at this lovely Pike Place Market bistro, which has jettisoned its white tablecloths and toppled the wall that stood between the bar and the dining room—and once signaled where fun ended and serious gourmandity began.
For $14, wine drinkers with a gambling bent can purchase what Marché calls an "extreme journey." Here, three wines are served in smoky, opaque glasses—as dark inside as out, so it's impossible to distinguish a red from white by sight. The wines are accompanied by an identification card that should be slid immediately beneath a plate for safekeeping, or relinquished to a teetotaling companion who feels like refereeing.
On some nights, a staffer told me, there's a set of extreme-journey glasses on nearly every table. The gag's popularity isn't surprising: Opportunities for public gaming are awfully rare in the Angry Birds era of tuned-out solidarity. If old-time Westerns have it right, a cowboy couldn't walk down a boomtown gangway without being hit up to risk his wages on an impromptu horse race or a hand of seven-card stud. Nowadays, a guy's lucky to be drawn into a road-trip round of "What number am I thinking of?"
Marché plays fair in its extreme-journey selections. The lineup typically includes two giveaway varietals and a wild card. The night I took the drinking test, I was stumped by an oak-aged López de Heredia viura, which I mistook for a French picpoul that should have been served sooner. I wasn't crazy about the wine, but I swirled, sniffed, and sipped with far more gusto than I might have had I randomly chosen it from a short list of affordable whites.
If you prefer your supper free of riddles, however, Marché has a few frisky diversions for wine drinkers: luxury wines served in thimble-sized portions ($8 buys an ounce-and-a-half of a 2006 Quilceda Creek Red, a bottle of which typically commands three figures in decent restaurants), a couple of Pacific Northwest wines poured directly from their barrels, and—for diners who can stand a touch of mystery, if not wit-matching—a bar-curated flight of three reds or three whites showcasing contrasting styles.
Marché is not a funhouse. There isn't any danger of taking a wrong turn on the way to the restroom and running into a Skee-Ball machine. But the restaurant's merry willingness to fiddle with the standard bottle-and-glass approach to wine service is infectious, and a welcome distraction when food sometimes falters. Marché is primed to educate and excite its guests about wine, just as so many local cocktail bars already serve as envoys for spirits—and at approximately the same price point.
Wine director Cyril Frechier, who filled that role at Rover's for 17 years, has assembled a terrific list for non-millionaires. All but eight of the restaurant's three dozen wines cost $50 or less, and the house red and white (French, bien sûr) sell for $5 a glass. Few wine bars are so admirably dedicated to keeping their lists from floating into the big-spending stratosphere, and fewer still offer such a graceful setting in which to scrutinize them.
When summer returns, Marché will no doubt appear sun-burnished and sprightly, but right now the dining room feels custom-made for winter. The wooden floor, the red leather banquette that occupies most of the room's perimeter, the mirrors and framed Franch prints tacked to the walls, the cluster of gigantic Edison bulbs that functions as a chandelier, and the striking view of the market and Puget Sound beyond add up to a very warm, casually Old World space. When the restaurant is crackling with sophisticated conversation, it seems like a scene from a Whit Stillman film.
Between the ambience and the wine, Marché should be a petri dish for magical moments, but the spell is too often broken by lackluster food and service that inexplicably grows more neglectful as the night unfolds. It's possible to be well-fed and -served at Marché, yet—perhaps appropriately for a restaurant that stages guessing games for oenophiles—it's all a bit of a crapshoot.
When Gordon opened Marché after helming Campagne for 16 years, he said he wanted to simultaneously shorten and broaden the progenitor's menu, incorporating different cuts of meat and reaching deeper into far-southern France and the Mediterranean, as well as swooping into north Africa for sassy flavors that don't exist in regions ruled by root cellars. "This menu is sort of odd and peculiar in spurts, because I also had the freedom to use different influences," he said. "I'm from Jamaica, so I like a little spice. I take whatever liberty I can to sprinkle that stuff in."
