Carpatia Sausage House Is a Smoked-Meat Wonderland

Published 8:00 am Tuesday, January 8, 2008

While hunting down Russian delis and restaurants, I followed a recommendation to check out Carpatia Sausage House in Shoreline. Outside, the strip-mall shop looks like a down-at-the-heels shoe-repair store. Inside, though, it’s a smoked-meat wonderland. Owner Jan (he preferred not to give his last name), a Slovak by birth, makes what he calls “old-school” Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German, and Polish meats—some 50 kinds. Carpatia’s two refrigerated cases were filled with everything from plump, lavender blood-and-bread sausages to tubs of creamy white lard, which Jan rendered himself. But the cases provided nowhere near the necessary storage space the shop needs. From the ceiling were suspended racks of sausages—some square, some fat, some tiny and horseshoe-shaped—that sent out the unearthly scent of smoked pork. Several pork haunches on the hoof hung, curing, over the cash register.

Jan doesn’t just smoke meats, he prepares dishes like segedinksy gulas (pork and sauerkraut stew), jellied pig trotters, and blood pudding, which you have to dig down into the tiny freezer case to find. I picked up smoked Hungarian paprika sausage, fat weisswurst, and Krkovicka (smoked pork shoulder) for a big pot of sauerkraut for Christmas dinner, and on the drive home, I snacked on Carpatia’s Swiss landjager, flavored with cognac and juicier than the Bavarian “walking sausages” other local butchers make.

I later phoned Jan to ask about his sausage-themed decor. It’s all legit with Washington state, the meat geek explained, as long as he doesn’t ship out of state and thus come under USDA jurisdiction. “I can ship to other countries, however,” he added.