The Dinner: Soup, sandwich, and beer at Joe Bar (810 E Roy St., Capitol Hill).
The Movie: North Face, translated from the German Nordwand, a WWII-era mountaineering flick based on actual events, showing at the Harvard Exit (807 E Roy St., Capitol Hill).
The Screenplate: Barley soup: The soup of Bavarian mountaineers. Also the soup of Seattleite moviegoers watching potent thrillers about Bavarian mountaineers.
Barley soup is a minor running gag in North Face, the 2008 German-made thriller about an infamous ascent of the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps in 1936. As of yesterday it was also the soup of the day at Joe Bar, which is across Roy Street from Harvard Exit on Capitol Hill, where North Face is playing.
Coincidence? Definitely! But play along.
The European-style comfort food at Joe Bar reps the continent as well as the national climbing teams in North Face. Joe Bar is small and unassuming, simple and refined in its menu of crepes, salads, and sandwiches; brunchy and caffeinated throughout the day, singing on bottled beer and wine in the evening. Frequently rotating art–almost always good–hangs on the walls. Order at the counter and a smiling alt-server type delivers your meal minutes later. The room is bright and warm and reminiscent of a zillion quintessential cafes from Berlin to Bordeaux, except here you’ll hear Surfer Blood on the stereo and bump into Fleet Foxes or Past Lives at the counter.
Joe Bar’s piece de resistance is, reliably, its soup, prepared every couple days by a soupmistress named Megan, who also bakes the house granola and devises crepe specials like the smoked salmon, leek, and blue cheese. The soup is always a made-from-scratch winner, with fresh organic veggies and stocks and meats: minestrone, pozole, chicken noodle, something southwestern, matzoh ball, split pea with ham…
And so for dinner you have a proscuitto sandwich on a crusty roll with soft slabs of mozzarella and basil leaf, hot pressed, deftly balancing the salty-cheesy-herby quotient. On the side is a hot bowl of mushroom and barley soup, just like grandma used to get from the takeout deli, meaty slabs of mushroom and tender kernals of barley suspended in a gravy-colored broth, savory and rich but not exactly thick. And a Duvel, a sour Belgian ale, light and strong, to wash it down. Western Europe, Eastern, and the Lowlands, gathering round the base of the mountain to fuel up before the big ascent.
These items are ageless and easy to screw up; contradict the memory of the perfect proscuitto sandwich or grandma’s deli’s mushroom barley soup and the meal becomes an offense. Like the rest of its menu, Joe Bar does it right.
Watching North Face requires such fortification. The cinematic experience is exercise, in the best possible way: rapid breathing, white knuckles, vertigo. The story centers on a pair of young climbers, Toni (Benno Furmann) and Andi (Florian Lukas)–the former a stoic technical climber, the latter a daredevil–who take a leave from the Fuhrer’s army to lead the second-ever attempt to scale the perilous north face of the Eiger, some 5,900 vertical feet straight up. Their effort is egged on by a cagey newspaperman and his assistant, Louise (Johanna Wokalek), who grew up in the same village as our two heroes and has long and unrequitedly loved Toni. Toni and Andi are anointed by the press as agents of the Reich who must beat Italian, French, and Austrian climbing teams to the top of the Eiger. After establishing believable characters, basking in the golden age of newspaper journalism and mountaineering, the film’s second half is given to the intense, bloody, rope-dangly drama of getting up the mountain.
No surprise that the Eiger is the true star of North Face, portrayed, via dumbfounding aerial tracking shots, as sublime, maybe malicious–the name Eiger translates roughly to “ogre.” Period details–clothing and gear–are substantial, solid, and sumptuous: Wool shirts, iron pitons, hemp ropes, canvas packs, many pounds removed from the lightweight REI era. Though the climbers dress like Ballardites outfitted by the Field House.
No use detailing the narrative too much. Look it up–it’s all true. Just make sure when you see the movie you have something in your stomach for when it drops out during the traverse scene.
