Eating & Drinking

But In Her Dreams She is Far Away, Far Away in Oklahoma, U.S.A.



Seattle, Monday, November 9

Chang: First the Harford Whalers, then the Seattle Supersonics? Really? If life's for livin', then what's livin' for, especially with all the fucking billionaires in the Pacific Northwest? I am dumbfounded how the NBA let the Supersonics move to Oklahoma and that none of the rich guys up there stood up and changed that. When I think of Seattle, I don't think of Pike's Place Market or Sub Pop or Bill Gates—I think about Detlef Schrempf, Gary Payton, Dale Ellis, Nate McMillan, Shawn Kemp, and Sweet Sweet Sleepy Sam Perkins! Sick!!!

Anyway, the Supersonics are gone and I was in Seattle for like 48 hours.

Hit the Green Leaf for lunch, a ridiculously good hole in the wall Vietnamese restaurant in the "multicultural" part of town. Slapped me back into reality.

-Summer roll with crunchy bits. Completely nailed it.
-Rice crepe was perfect.
-Bun with pork.
-Shredded duck, shredded cabbage. Sesame. Orange and garnished with fried shallots. Sick.
-Grilled short ribs on bone, Korean-style cut, cut thinly against the grain so you have three sections of bone and then a piece of meat. Very tasty.

A woman named Kim Ricketts organized my trip to Seattle. She and her team took such good care of me that I was happy Meehan had gone back to New York to suck ass at the Piglet Party. Kim put me up in a swanky hotel—Hotel 1000—in a massive suite, too hi-tech for me, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the lights, use the TV, anything. Loved it.

After an hour on the California king, I headed to gym to sweat out the last of the San Francisco booze, and then it was off to Spring Hill. Spring Hill is a restaurant owned by chef Mark Fuller and his wife Marjorie; it's in a great spot in West Seattle.

I was tripping out a little when I got there: Fuller and his crew were in full prep mode to cook dinner the following night, except they were prepping their interpretation of a bunch of Momofuku dishes. Weird to see our food in their kitchen instead of their food in their kitchen. I got over that as soon as I saw the wood-burning grill on their hotline. Totally legal—all they needed was a separate hood system. You could never do that in New York. I was speechless with envy until this sassy cook started to talk shit to me about oyster shucking abilities. Then I went from being smitten with the grill to being smitten with her. This place is fucking great, I thought.

Then I actually had to do something to justify my presence there—speak to some local media folks and bloggers about the book and all that is Momofuku. It was like the Google speech but shorter and less rambling.

Spent a little bit more time in the kitchen at Spring Hill, got to be really happy to see them working—a good crew, tight-knit, trying to make it happen, wanting to throw down and cook. Always great to see that in a kitchen, the "dance."

But that was just a teaser to the fortnight's festivities with Fuller & Team. Rickets and crew had other plans for me for that night.

She whisked me away to what felt like that 7 ½th floor from Being John Malkovich—chef Matt Dillon's Corson Building. Matt's a free spirit and has an amazing thing going on in the middle of Industrial Park.

The place is designed so nobody will ever find it. It's situated under a massive concrete underpass and you have to reverse onto the railroad tracks to get to it—and, yes, there are also trains that zoom by not more than 50 feet from the restaurant.

I think the story goes that a couple years back, Matt saw this totally dilapidated building in Georgetown, the industrial area of Seattle, and decided he was going to make it magic. That's all I can really say. What an asshole—it's sort of the dream. He saw what no one else saw and made it happen, God bless him. (If you never get to see or taste the magic that is the Corson Building, check out Matt's other place, Sitka & Spruce. It's moving to a bigger location, but they're good people and they'll get it right.)

Kim invited all sorts of cooks and chefs to have a feast prepared by Matt and his crew and I signed some books. The dude from The Herbfarm was there. I didn't even realize he had opened his own restaurant.

The coolest thing was seeing the foragers and purveyors there, talking with the chefs about shrooms, fish, vegetables (in the middle of November!)—just a beautiful, intimate, honest, open relationship between the people picking the food and the people cooking it. Fuck them. We have a "local" FedEx guy who's great during the winter in NYC.

The night, predictably, turned into a drunken mess. They kept pouring beer and bourbon—Booker's Bourbon, which leaves bite marks. Things get hazy. Liver hurts. I try and keep my wits about me because I have to go out to Microsoft HQ the next day.

Meehan: I did skip out on Dave; headed back to the East Coast to my pregnant girlfriend and a chance to double down on the book push—me going to this party for an award called the Piglet (which we would not be winning) while Dave was pimping our shit in Seattle.

I'd flown home on the red eye and sleep stumbled through the day, I remember showering before going to the event was my biggest accomplishment. Got there and saw some of the folks who put it together. The story with the event was this: former Times-lady Amanda Hesser started this new crowd-sourced recipe site food52 this year. She and this girl Charlotte that I know from around arranged a bracketed cookbook competition called the Piglet. In this competition our book lost not once, but TWICE! Even for someone as used to losing as I am, it was an accomplishment. Regardless, Hesser wanted me to come and be on a panel at the award presentation party and Hesser gets what Hesser wants.

Panel was fine. Panels make me nervous as balls. I was on it with Christopher Hirschheimer; the sisters Hamilton, Gabrielle and Melissa, who are two tough fucking cookies; and Peter Kaminsky. Hirschheimer is the lady who made Saveur look so fucking good for all of its early years and who's definitely somebody I admire and was psyched to meet; Melissa Hamilton and she are putting out these quarterly cookbooks that I'm sure I'll end up collecting; Gabrielle runs Prune, one my favorite restaurants; Kaminsky has worked with everybody and done everything and is a grandmaster fly fisherman and he's got a grown daughter who loves him—if my life is 60% as good as his when I'm his age, I'll be insane with happiness.

Panel happens; my ability to be social declines rapidly. Though there's a post-Piglet dinner at Ssäm Bar—and no matter how many times I've been there, I still love eating at Ssäm—I ditch out; Hannah and I got to my favorite Punjabi cab stand. I get a hot little vegetarian dinner for less than $3 and off to bed. Good night book tour!

Chang: Seattle, Tuesday, November 10—The silver lining of the previous night's hangover is that this is the first day since we left the East Coast when I can sleep until 1 p.m. Perfect.

Judy, who works for Ricketts, picks me up at 3 and we head to Microsoft. Quite different than GoogleLand—more serious, more established. Whatever. There are 125 people assembled; I crush two diet Red Bulls and ramble for an hour, then sign a bunch of books. The highlight of the signing was meeting Eunjean Song's mom—Eunjean is the general manager of the Momoverse, the greatest, and her mom works at Microsoft. Her mom is so damn nice that I think she's the reason people showed up for the event at all.

After that, we speed back to Spring Hill for this big dinner Kim set up. Sold out and everyone is getting a dinner—Fuller and crew worked their asses off for 48 hours straight to get it together. Blew me away. They did dishes that weren't even in the cookbook, like our uni, tapioca dish with whipped tofu—shit like that. I was very impressed how they made it happen.

I've always said that New York has the best apples—Dave Arnold, my friend who knows the most about apples would disagree—but Fuller did a version of our Fuji Apple Kimchi salad and I have to say that their version was so much better than ours I couldn't believe it. The fucking apples were the best damn Fuji apples I've ever had—crisp, juicy, tart. I forgot that Washington State also grows apples, the fuckers. I felt like a total dickface for not cooking, so I put on an apron and tried to help, but I was just getting in the way. That was half the goal—kitchen = haven from social grace.

But my role was to go and make nice and mingle and socialize with the who's who of the Seattle dining scene. Tom Douglas, who's an impossibly great guy and a chef who makes it happen in Seattle, was there, which made it a little easier. I think there were 80 people at 16 tables and I had to go to each one and find something to talk about and then sign cookbooks. I was not liking it, but it's part of the job. I just felt weird when things happened like a guest—who was super cool—asked if I would say "fuck" in the book. Just weird to me—I am not only the "they took me out of context" guy but I'm also the clown who says "fuck" all the time.

I immediately thought of the Eddie Murphy joke from back when he was still funny, in Raw:

"…You couldn't give no curse show. Walk out, say, Hey, Felt Forum, motherfucker, dick, pussy, snot and shit. Good night. Good night. Suck my dick. Bye-bye.… I don't give a fuck. Whatever the fuck make the people laugh, say that shit."

So I do the entire room of meet-and-greets and all the while Mark's amazing wife Marjorie and Kim's girl Judy are bringing me plates of food to make sure that I eat. I swear I don't know why the hell it is, but everybody wants to be my mom.

Mark is making sure I'm flooded with Chang beer and bourbon and even though I feel like I shouldn't, I have a hard time with peer pressure. I barely get time to see my friends Eric and Lindsey who came to the thing.

The Spring Hill Crew made it happen like Momofuku was in Seattle, no shit. Fucking weird. Kudos to the whole team—seven courses and finished with a massive bo ssäm with oysters. Sick.

My memory fades at that point. One thing I remember is being in a heated conversation with a young cook and a chef named Chris Young. The cook was talking about making potatoes crispy and their starch content. He had no idea he was talking to The Dude Who Is Making the Cookbook to End All Cookbooks. It has no title at the moment, but he's working with billionaire and Microsoft genius Nathan Myhrvold, and it's going to be groundbreaking.

Chris is a biochemist and expert in all things food science—he's the former head of research and development at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck. The young cook doesn't realize how far out of his league he is trying to explain potato science to this guy—but I love Chris because he doesn't let anybody know he's the smartest guy in the room and doesn't bury the kid. I do. I'm sorry if you're reading this dude, but you've got to know who the elders are and you've got to respect them, especially when it's a guy at Chris's level.

Young and the entire Spring Hill crew took everybody out to Chinatown. We ordered a whole mess of food, none of which I really remember...I just remember the lazy susan and Kim Rickett's daughter driving me to the hotel at 3 a.m. to make it to the airport by 5 for a 6:30 a.m. departure. Back to NYC.

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