Hail to the Chef
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Northwest
# # # 1/2
($$$)
Dahlia Lounge
2001 Fourth Ave., Seattle
Reservations: 206-682-4142
Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, dinner 5:30 p.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 5:30 p.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday.
Prices: Lunch starters $4-$14, entrees $9-$22; dinner starters $7-$16, entrees $15-$28
Full bar / Major credit cards / No obstacles to access / No smoking / Parking: pay lots nearby
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Former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice settles into a booth at the Dahlia Lounge. "Are you sure you want to sit with your back to the door?" asks his lunch date. "Why not?" he answers, "I'm no longer a public entity." That can never be said of the unofficial mayor of Seattle's culinary scene, Tom Douglas, whose fish-foisting neon likeness now hangs at Fourth and Virginia above the new Dahlia Lounge.
Douglas celebrated 10 years at the original Dahlia before foundering lease negotiations led to a recent relocation. From its inception, his restaurant's internationally inspired menu, dramatic presentations, superb seasonal ingredients and creative accompaniments came to define Northwest cuisine. That success was replicated in 1995 when the chef and his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross, opened Etta's Seafood, swiftly followed by the popular, bar-scenic Palace Kitchen.
Today, Douglas is everywhere: goofing and grilling on TV, grinning from cookbooks and magazines, or putting his signature on (and signature recipes into) jars of gourmet spice rubs. That's Tom, dishing out eats at charity events and lending advice to proteges intent on striking out on their own. There he is, wearing his trademark T-shirt and jeans, dining in the name of "research" at Asian holes-in-the-wall locally, swanky restaurants nationwide and bistros and trattorias abroad.
How does this guy manage to be everywhere at once yet keep a foot in the door and finger in the pot at three of Seattle's favorite restaurants? If you could be a fly on the wall at Tom Douglas Central, the subterranean office at the Palace Kitchen, you'd likely find him huddling with his team of right-hand men and women - chefs, bakers, managers and a quality-control freak among them. And therein lies his secret: Hire talented help, train them right, treat them well and let them do your thing.
Tom Douglas' thing gets better all the time. Witness the new Dahlia Lounge, whose funky-Chinese-restaurant-goes-glamorama decor - with its crimson walls and paper fish lamps - distinctly maintains the feel of the old. New is an open kitchen, a bar and a large (potentially) private dining area opening onto a potentially cacophonic main dining room.
Douglas' chief interpreter here is chef Matt Costello, a longtime veteran of the boss' kitchens whose menu is equally rustic and refined, eye-catching and tongue-tantalizing. New are "Little Tastes from the Sea Bar," available individually ($2-$2.50) or in combination. Housemade breadsticks come poised like chopsticks above the sampler ($13-$14), a mouth-mesmerizing array of seafood featuring Alaskan scallop ceviche in a sweet shock of ruby grapefruit juice; mussels with bell-pepper confetti; flash-seared albacore tuna graced with shiso; and smoked salmon with sesame seeds and mustard - a Chinese-styled take on squaw candy.
The daily changing menu may include such Dahlia classics as a magnificent, crisp-skinned, spice-rubbed duck ($21), an exceptional Tuscan bread salad ($8 appetizer, $12 lunch-entree) and what easily qualifies as the city's best potstickers. Shrimp-filled and sparked with ginger, these pockets of pleasure are expensive ($13 for five) - and worth it. Douglas' much-vaunted Dungeness crab cakes get an unusual twist when offered over an onion- and pancetta-accented potato hash basking in a sunny lemon aioli. For breakfast, yes. At lunch ($12) and dinner ($22), well . . .
Careful crafting is evident in the bread basket, whose wondrous loaves are hand-formed in the kitchen's adjoining bakery. That bakery is slated as the future home of a retail outlet, where goods-for-sale are destined to include the Dahlia's deservedly "World Famous" coconut cream pie.
A new wood-fired grill and rotisserie give attitude to seafood as well as organic meats and poultry, including an herbed chicken breast with fava beans, wild leeks and porcini mushrooms ($18), and a chicken Cobb salad ($12, lunch), a refresher whose high-class ingredients include blue cheese, baby lettuces and a tangy lemon vinaigrette. Balsamico and cherries sauce pork loin, a hunk of love from California's Niman Ranch ($22), while blue cheese butter, picture-perfect wax beans and a pair of silky tomato "bread puddings" complement a juicy, Oregon-raised, "flat iron" steak ($21).
The Dahlia's wine list, like its menu, is Northwest-oriented, yet never hesitates to borrow from elsewhere to round out its appeal. The same can be said for Tom Douglas, who has long been making Seattle a great place to live and eat. If he ever runs for mayor, he's got my vote.