Long Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant, Seattle

The food in Seattle is sublime. Especially if you like Pacific Rim fusion food, with an emphasis on the Asian side of the rim. One excellent spot we ate on a recent visit was this restaurant. They had wonderful cocktails. The one that I had read about was the Watermelon Chili Martini, but what ended up being the table favorite was the Basil Lemon Drop--minced basil added to the traditional vodka, triple sec, and lemon juice mixture.
The meal was remarkable from start (the cocktails) to finish. our waitress let us know when we were getting into too much food, and she stopped us right at the edge of the junction between sated and stuffed.

The appetizer that you cannot skip is the squid sate--it is grilled to perfection, it is plentiful (easy to share, even with a big table) and full of flavor senasations. The meatball sate is good, and the prawns were as well, but the squid won, hands down.
The Vietnames crepe (as they call it--you may have had it as a 'pancake' in the past) is also exceptionally good--ask for a second plate of herbs and lettuce, because there isn't nearly enough to properly balance the crepe contents with the mint, basil, and then wrap it in a lettuce leaf. The Asian emphasis on salty, sweet, tart, and spicy is well represented in this dish. So next time you are in Seattle, give this place a whirl--it is downtown, near the convention center, at 1901 2nd Ave.

Seattle Art Deco

I admit it. I was sensitized to architecture after my trip to Tulsa. I discovered a love of buildings of a certain age, and once you know what you are looking for, you start to see evidence of your new found love around every corner. But Seattle is not my discovery. The National Park Service has a tour on their web site for 37 historically interesting buildings in Seattle (link provided), and many of them are in the downtown area. I was in Seattle for the American Cheese Society annual meeting, and managed to spend enough time outside walking to fall in love with the architecture of the city.

Where to start. Well, as is almost always the case, where you are is as good a place as any, and I bet within a block of where you are you will find a building that will touch your fancy.
What is deco? Here are a few ideas of others about what to look for. What it is and what it is not.
Whether curvy or angular, 1920s or 1930s, certain overall principles can be identified in art deco design:
• This was the art of the machine age and all that this implied: It was about power, about speed, and about the (then) new. It was a style that adapted to machine-made production as well, giving the common man access to mass-produced facsimiles of more expensive handcrafted goods.

• This was the style of popular glamour. Hollywood broadcast this style to the world, and the world bought it. And loved it. And wanted more.
• It expressed a certain optimism and excitement about the modern age. This optimism even held through the depression years of the 1930s when streamline styling began experimenting with “futurism.” Futuristic-deco promised even better things to come (think Flash Gordon or the 1939 New York World’s Fair).
• It explored a fascination with geometry. Gone were the strict architectural interpretations of classic Greco-Roman forms. Gone too were any designs directly depicting nature. These were replaced by often richly layered repetitions of geometric forms. Any figural forms that did find their way onto the sides of buildings were usually flattened to their geometric essence, much like cubist paintings. Geometric designs of native peoples were also common motifs in this period. In the 1930s, architects began experimenting with eliminating ornament altogether, relying on the geometrical shapes of the building’s construction to speak for the inherent beauty of the structure. These “modern” and “international style” buildings were the bridge from deco to the more austere modern style, which developed after World War II.

Dale Chihuly

One of the most magical man-made places I have been that is outdoors is the Bridge of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. It is an open outdoor walk over the highway from the Museum of Glass on one side to the Tacoma Art Museum and the train station on the other lined with Dale Chihuly's work. Even on a cloudy day, of which there appear to be many, this is a magical place. The first time I was here was about 5 years ago, and I was on a mission to see the places in the Northwest that I had missed on numerous previous trips. My husband was at a meeting where he got up before dawn and could barely squeeze in a late evening dinner before collapsing exhausted at the end of the day.

I rented a car and the day I drove into the outskirts of Tacoma I was unexpectedly stunned. In an industrial part of town sit two museums, a train station, and a bridge between them that are all spectacular. There are numerous Dale Chihuly's work on display in this small improbable spot (40 in the Tacoma Art Museum, 6 in the train station, and dozens on the bridge), but my favorite is the overhead seascape of glass. I watch this, sometimes lying on the ground, looking at the dozens and dozens of undersea creatures rendered in colorful glass, and marvel.

I love this place on many levels. The thing I like best is that someone could see the sea and transfix that myriad of delicate texture, color, and movement into something so different and yet so remeniscent of the place it came from. I spend my professional time immersed in dirty work. I am fiercely practical. I do not sit still all that well. I don't have many magical bones in my body. But for me, this is it. A temple of glass. A place to dream. To think big thoughts. And to feel that man can do marvelous things.

Pike's Place Market

I am in Seattle, a city that I like, but somehow a little bit less than everybody else seems to like it. I am not sure why--it is gorgeous, mountains in abundance, and spectacular views galore. It just is not a place that I have fallen in love with. We are just friends. It does have one favorite spot for me. I love to walk and I love to cook, and a am perhaps a little overly fond of eating, so Pike's Place Market is someplace that I love to visit. There are crowds of people milling about, the market itself is packed with seafood, vegetables, crafts, and fruits, and it is a full sensory experience to be there. It smells like the ocean, the visual array of fruits and vegetables piled beautifully and neatly in stall after stall is a feat for the eyes, there is a constant crush of people, and the whole place is essentially indoors, so there is a dim that is overwhelming--you really can't talk to anyone while walking so it is a strangely crowded and solitary experience.

One thing that I really miss about where I live is that there is not "local seafood". We have amazing possiblities for grass fed, locavore, free range land animals of any sort, and the quality and affordability of these options is something to be thankful for. But the stacks and stacks of fish that you walk past at the market are a thing of beauty.