Wright Eats

Are you planning some local travel this summer? Maybe you’re heading north across the border, or over to Lummi Island, as we recently did. Or you might be a Canuck heading down our way. Either way you’ll find yourself passing by Bellingham en route, hungry after being on the road or stuck at a border crossing for a couple hours.

Bellingham is an easy stop-off for I-5 travelers, and it’s not hard to find great bites to eat. On our three recent visits, we wandered downtown for lunch, where you’ll find all of the places mentioned here.

Rocket doughnuts; artwork inside Pel’Meni Russian Dumplings; a mint espresso doughnut.

Rocket Donuts was our first stop in December (well, Eric’s, as I shopped for pretty papers at Stampadoodle). We still had donuts on the brain after we’d stopped at Countryside Donut House on our way out of Seattle and sadly found them closed for the holidays. But once we’d arrived in B’ham, we realized there was still an entire half hour before lunch. Plenty of time for second breakfast!

Eric picked up my favorite, a plain cruller, along with an apple fritter and their donut of the month, mint espresso. The fritter had more apples than any I’ve eaten, and would have been a contender in our doughnut taste-off. The cruller was eggy and delicious, but the two of us fought most over the last bite of that mint espresso doughnut. The combo worked perfectly, and it may have been the moistest cake doughnut I’ve tasted. Oh, and they serve a pretty respectable espresso here, too.

Locals hanging out inside Old World Deli; pel’meni dumplings; waiting for the dumplings to boil.

Half an hour later, we were ordering Russian dumplings for lunch at Pel’meni. The colorfully painted restaurant has exactly two choices at the counter: potato or beef dumplings. We ordered one of each then watched the owner fiddle with the vintage turntable to fix a broken needle while our dumplings boiled. It wasn’t long before the vinyl was playing again and our dumplings were done. They were finished with a healthy dusting of yellow curry powder, some sour cream, cilantro, and the critical squirts of rice vinegar and hot sauce that transform the dumplings from good into the absolute perfect lunch. The beef version was by far my favorite.

Why can’t we have this in Seattle, I thought then. But wait. Not a month after our visit, they opened a location right here in Fremont. Swing by for your dumpling fix 5 pm until late in the night.

We loved the dumplings so much that we went back on our return trip the next day for an appetizer-sized reprise of the meat pel’meni. Not knowing the future, we figured this was our last opportunity to try them again for a while. It was tempting to have more, but we still wanted to try Old World Deli across the street.

The deli imports meats and cheeses, available hand-sliced or served inside one of their deli sandwiches served on Breadfarm bread.  My parma cotta (ham and mozzarella) panino was melty and delicious, particularly with the house-made mustard. It’s a comfortable hangout for the locals, with artwork pinned to the walls and casual chairs where you might kick back and read the paper one morning. I might do that sometime, since the breakfast panini menu looked worth trying.

Pretzel sticks are one of over a dozen forms of pretzels at Ralf’s Bavarian Bakery; truffles at Chocolate Necessities; farm fresh eggs at the Bellingham Farmers Market.

It was a frigid December day outside, and ice cream should have been far from our minds, but we’d heard that Mallard Ice Cream serves up some creative flavors. While they certainly have the standards, like strawberry, chocolate, or cookies and cream, you can also choose avocado, yerba mate, or White Russian.  After waffling over the extensive list, we settled on two: vanilla black pepper, and cider cheesecake. While it’s nice that they’re always experimenting and rotating through seasonal flavors, I am sad that I’ll need to wait months for another cold winter day to have that cider cheesecake ice cream again. It was heavenly.

Chocolate Necessities was our last stop on this visit. Almost an institution in Bellingham now, they have been making handcrafted truffles and chocolates for over 20 years. The location we stopped in also serves gelato, which we eyed with interest but there was no way we could fit in another bit of ice cream. Instead, we opted for a couple of truffles. The white chocolate peppermint truffle was a creamy version my favorite holiday treat (peppermint bark, of course!), and the scotch truffle was rich and boozy.

Mulunesh serving up her Ethiopian stew; 30 flavors to choose from at Mallard Ice Cream; the Bellingham Farmers Market.

In early April, we made a return trip to the Willows Inn, and found ourselves in Bellingham again on a Saturday morning, this time coinciding with the second week of their seasonal farmers market. What a lovely market! Larger than most in Seattle, the Bellingham Farmers Market sits under a series of permanent open-air structures, rather than tents. There’s a great mix of farmers of all sorts, crafters, and ready-to-eat food, with lots of open space, so while it’s lively, it doesn’t feel elbow-your-neighbor crowded. Street performers drew crowds, who were munching on soft pretzels from Ralf’s Bavarian Bakery and drinking homemade Chai from India Grill.

For lunch, we grabbed plates from one of the vendors, Ambo Ethiopian Cuisine. The owner, Mulunesh, was serving either chicken or lentil stew with beets, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage, along with the spongy slightly sour Injera bread to sop it all up. Delicious, and in itself worth a stop.

So what’s next on the list for Bellingham? I’d like to try La Fiamma Wood Fire Pizza, or maybe we’ll check out one of the breweries like Chuckanut or Boundary Bay. But what I’d really like to know is, what are your favorite bites in Bellingham?

Rocket Doughnuts
306 W Holly St, Bellingham
(360) 671-6111

Pel’Meni Russian Dumplings
1211 N State St, Bellingham
(360) 715-8324

3516 Fremont Place, Seattle
(206) 387-1702

Old World Deli
1228 N State St, Bellingham
(360) 738-2090

Mallard Ice Cream
1323 Railroad Ave, Bellingham
(360) 734-3884

Chocolate Necessities and Gelato
1426 Cornwall Ave, Bellingham
(360) 733-6666

Ralf’s Bavarian Bakery
207 E Maple St, Bellingham
(360) 733-3066

Ambo Ethiopian Cuisine
Bellingham Farmer’s Market
(360) 756-1627

I was gleeful when I found out this weekend that my favorite gelato is now available in my neighborhood (Ravenna), at Casa d’Italia. And this reminded me that I neglected to tell you the results of our pistachio gelato taste-off.

Clockwise from top-left: Bottega Italiana, D’Ambrosio, Fainting Goat, vanilla gelato from Gelatiamo (we were unable to obtain pistachio from them this weekend, so didn’t rank this one), and Talenti.

After we’d stuffed ourselves with bánh mì at our January taste-off, we moved on to gelato. For an even playing field, we stuck with just one flavor, pistachio. With the same set of judges and ranking method as our sandwich taste-off, and only four gelati (hm – gelati, gelatos, gelatoes – nothing looks correct in an English sentence…), the best possible score was 9 and the worst was 36.

	4th place: This high-end grocery store gelato was a bright, almost fake green sitting next to the others. Talenti gelato tasted a bit artificial, too, and the texture was icy. While it had the biggest chunks of pistachio of the bunch, which initially seemed like an advantage, the nuts were soft and mealy. More than half ranked this at the bottom, giving it an overall score of 30.
	3rd place: Bottega Italiana’s gelato was creamy in texture but sweeter than our ultimate favorite. The primary complaint here was that it doesn’t taste much like pistachio. Instead, it’s more like brown sugar in flavor and color. Yummy, but pistachio should taste like pistachio. Score: 26.
	2nd place: It was basically a toss-up between the middle two gelati, with Fainting Goat Gelato garnering just one point more than our 3rd place choice. Fainting Goat’s version was not nutty and not particularly distinct, and some felt they’d be hard-pressed to identify it as pistachio in a line-up.
	1st place: The title of D’Ambrosio Gelato’s web site says “Seattle’s Best Italian Gelato” and we agree. Unanimously. It’s a rare occasion when nine of us agree on a winner (9 points!), so we can definitively say this is the best of the bunch we tried. Intense nutty pistachio flavor, with a great texture and tiny pieces of nuts throughout. Some detected a hint of salt that enhanced the flavor of the pistachio. I personally would recommend any of the flavors at D’Ambrosio and highly recommend a trip over to Ballard (or Casa d’Italia!) for a sampling.

We had no idea when we held our January bánh mì taste-off that this would become the most talked about sandwich in Seattle come February. While delicious and cheap, these nondescript Vietnamese sandwiches are so commonplace here that they don’t typically get a lot of attention. But after the New York Times’ piece two weeks ago covering their picks for best bánh mì in America, including two from Seattle, people started prodding me, “Hello? When are you going to post your taste-off results?”

As with all of our taste-offs, we don’t provide any particular criteria for the judging, yet when we discussed the results afterwards, we found we had pretty similar ideas of what makes a great bánh mì.

It turned out that a well-balanced bite of jalapeño often nudged a sandwich forward in an individual’s rankings. What we discovered, however, was that the “spiciest sandwich” varied wildly depending on which bite of each sandwich you took. The bánh mì that I found to have the most heat was deemed bland by another, who found that the spiciest sandwich in their ranking contained no jalapeño’s on someone else’s plate.

But a great bánh mì is clearly not just about the heat. Bread is key. A traditional bánh mì is served on a light crisp baguette, where the bread and exterior crunch are well-balanced with the filling inside.

In a good sandwich, that filling is often pork (our choice for this tasting) with a nice balance of acid from crunchy pickled carrots, daikon, and cucumber, along with some fresh sprigs of cilantro, and a swipe of mayo.

For those not familiar with our rating system, this was a blind taste-off, with an arbitrary letter assigned to each sandwich for identification. Each person independently stack ranked them, from their most to least favorite.

One point was given when a sandwich was the top of someone’s list, a second choice sandwich received two points, all the way on down the list. So with nine tasters for our five sandwiches, the best possible score is 9 (when everyone ranks it top on their list) and the worst possible score is 45 (all nine people rank it 5th on their list).

So without further ado, here are the results.

	5th place: The cheapest of our sandwiches was the $2.50 bánh mì from Seattle Deli. It ranked as high as 2nd on a couple of lists, but it also had the most last place rankings, garnering a score of 35. While it got points for tender meat, several had complaints about the bread: too much of it vs. the filling, and no crunch to the crust. And most of our test sandwiches were bland, without much mayo or pickling in the veggies.
	4th place: A gentrified interpretation of bánh mì, this $9 sandwich was from Madison Park Conservatory. We were curious how a high end version from a restaurant would rank against the more traditional deli sandwich, and it turned out to be difficult to stack rank since it’s not apples to apples. Several said that in a general sandwich ranking, it might have placed higher, but it was lacking the elements considered critical for a good bánh mì. Here, the bread was soft potato bread instead of a crunchy baguette, the veggies were soft and not very pickled, and there wasn’t enough overall heat. But the pork belly! This is what brought rankings as high as 2 on a couple people’s lists. Juicy, rich, and oh-so-porky, this is what the sandwich was all about. Score: 31.
	3rd place: Only one point ahead of Madison Park Conservatory, the Saigon Deli sandwich got the whole range of rankings, 1-5. This $2.75 bánh mì had the crunchiest roll, which several people liked, and the pork flavor was good. But the distribution of jalapeño was uneven, making this the spiciest on one list and the blandest on another. By far the biggest complaint was too much mayo, pulling it down to a score of 30.
	2nd place: A number of tasters gave big points to Yeh Yeh’s Sandwiches for the bread, which was crunchy and crackly outside and soft inside. The pickled veggies were tasty alongside the meat, but they weren’t very well-balanced, since whoever made the sandwich had a heavy hand with the pickles. This was the biggest factor pulling it out of a first place ranking, giving it a final score of 22. Price tag: $3.50.
	1st place: With two-thirds of us ranking this as their favorite, the bánh mì from Pho Cyclo Café sat clearly above the rest with a score of 15. It had a great pickled crunch with a nice amount of fresh cilantro, and the sweetest meat of all the sandwiches we tried. Most felt it had the best overall balance of flavor and just the right amount of heat, making it a huge value at $3.

And our conclusion? A second taste-off of pistachio gelato for dessert. We found a rare unanimous winner. Stay tuned…

Revel certainly has something going for it, considering that I’ve already eaten there four times since it opened last month.  It’s not just that it’s down the street from where I work in Fremont, though that’s certainly a bonus.  What has me coming back each time is knowing that I’ll soon be digging into a comforting Korean dumpling or noodle dish, and that there’s always something new to try.

Housemade condiments: prik nam pla (fish sauce with lime juice and Korean chilies), garlic soy ginger, sweet bean, chili sauce; restaurant interior; delicata squash, Early Grey ricotta, and pecan dumpling.

Revel is the second restaurant from husband-and-wife team Seif Chirchi and Rachel Yang.  They somehow managed to keep their highly-praised first restaurant Joule running, give birth to their child last summer, and open Revel just a few months later.

The new restaurant space is completely open, with a full view of the kitchen from every table, and a long shared bar and kitchen work area.  I really like the casual atmosphere, which makes it easy to bring along my 1-year-old and watch him devour pork belly pancakes and delicata squash dumplings.  Plus, there’s a sizeable deck in the back that I’m looking forward to hanging out on as much as possible this summer.

Clockwise from top-left: Five-spiced duck balls, lacinato kale, smoke chili noodles, with fried shallots on top; ice cream sandwiches: coconut macaroon, Kaffir lime, with cherry compote, and vanilla pound cake, coffee, with milk jam; short rib, sambal daikon, mustard green rice with egg yolk.

The menu is just the right size: the lunch/dinner offering is one page with three dishes per category, including salad, (savory) pancakes, dumplings, rice, noodles, and ice cream sandwiches.  The staff recommends that your table shares several dishes, which I’ve done on each visit, but you could easily go it alone if that’s your preference.  My favorite plates so far are the corned lamb, arugula, and nuoc cham salad (with just the right amount of spicy kick in the nuoc cham), the short rib, shallot, and scallion dumplings (perfect for dipping in some prik nom pla or other condiments), and the five-spiced duck balls with noodles and fried shallots.  You might see the menu described as offering “Korean street food,” but our Korean friend Kye assures us it is not.  You’re better off thinking of Revel as serving inventive, Korean-influenced fare.  And then there’s dessert: how can you go wrong with a place that focuses solely on ice cream sandwiches?  Dawn and I both give a thumbs-up to the coconut macaroon sandwich with cherry compote. 

Brunch is a new, welcome addition as of this past weekend.  The categories read similarly (eggs, pancakes, sandwiches, porridge, and soup) with a couple of choices for each.  The Kalbi burger (made from marinated beef short ribs) with bacon and shallot pickle is diminutive in size, but was dripping with juicy goodness and may in fact be our favorite burger in Seattle now.  We were split on other dishes.  Dawn loved the andouille, shrimp, and ginger-scallion porridge, noting that the ginger gave the dish a subtle sweetness throughout.  I preferred the kimchi ramen, pork belly, and egg soup; the ramen might have been slightly undercooked, but the spicy kimchi was the perfect contrast to the richness of the soup.

Revel
403 N 36th St, Seattle, WA
(206) 547-2040

Vacations are time for dreaming.  While vacationing in a particularly idyllic spot, I like to imagine myself as a local.  “See that house way up on the bluff?  Wouldn’t that be a beautiful place to live?”  “Or what about this cabin on the waterfront?  I would take a beach walk here every morning.”  Of course vacation makes everything romantic, and these wistful reveries ignore the reality of life, but isn’t it fun to dream?

The marina and reef net salmon fishing area; rocks we collected on the beach.

Lummi Island, Washington is one of these places that brings your mind to wander.  A five minute ride on a tiny county-owned ferry takes you away from Bellingham to a rural island.  From the east side of the island are breathtaking views of Mt. Baker, and the west side has views of the sun setting behind the rest of the San Juan archipelago.  It’s the perfect stage for meditation and daydreaming.  And at only two hours from Seattle, it’s possibly the most accessible of the San Juan islands, making it an ideal location for a quick getaway.

We did just that last week, taking advantage of the weekday dinner package offered from Labor Day to Memorial Day at the Willows Inn.  A discounted rate offers a gourmet breakfast and multi-course dinner with an overnight stay. And this was a dinner we were particularly curious about.

The buzz about the dining room started this summer, just before we headed out on our trip to Copenhagen and dinner at Noma.  Noma was voted best restaurant in the world last spring, and everyone was atwitter with the news that a sous chef from such an extraordinary restaurant would come to little Lummi Island.  Blaine Wetzel arrived fresh from an 18 month stint working with Noma’s famed chef René Redzepi to head up the kitchen at the Willows Inn.  Chef Redzepi himself introduced 24-year old Blaine as an “unusual and rare talent” at a Seattle reception we attended last fall.

Blaine was drawn to Lummi by inn proprietor Wiley Starks, who has established a reputation for his commitment to the Slow Food movement and serving local, sustainable foods at his inn.  Wiley himself is a commercial reef net fisherman, providing all of the salmon served at the restaurant.  And he owns, operates, and lives on nearby Nettles Farm, which provides fresh eggs and produce to the kitchen.  Blaine has two full-time farmers at his disposal.

Slow roasted beef cheek with grilled onions.

We arrived three days before the kitchen was to close for a six-week remodel.  Blaine excitedly told us that when they reopen in February, it will be a completely new experience, with a reinvented menu, updated dining room, and a modernized kitchen behind it all.  Since his arrival in August, he has been getting to know the foods of the area, working within the existing format of the restaurant, and visualizing next steps.

So the five-course one-seating menu we enjoyed exists no longer and may be only a hint of what’s around the corner.  While this is certainly no Noma, it is inventive food more than worth the short journey.

While everyone settled in at their tables, the kitchen sent out a couple small amuses, or “snacks” as they call them at Noma.  My favorite was the toast with turkey liver pate, house made capers, and dill, but I also savored the potato chip with house made sauerkraut and smoked black cod.

A round loaf of whole wheat bread still hot from the Wood Stone oven arrived with a simple slab of butter.  The bread was cut in wedges, exactly like the loaf served at Noma, but in a country bread basket from the inn.

In our first course, deliciously sweet Totten Inlet mussels were dotted on a plate with small rounds of potatoes and thick, vibrant green circles that turned out to be cucumbers.  Fluffy horseradish granita made the flavors pop.  Dots of green dill oil floated in a shallow broth, a visually engaging presentation.  I only wish the lighting at the tables was brighter than a single candle, since much of the visual appeal was lost in the darkness.  Hopefully lighting will improve in the remodel.

Then the decidedly not local Weathervane scallops arrived.  In a row down the plate, with cooked cabbages washing over them and mussel foam sauce lapping on one side, this dish looked and tasted like the sea, and was one of my favorites of the night.

The third course looked a lot like the first (more green dots), but flavor-wise was reminiscent of a dish I loved at Noma: potatoes, lovage, and whey.  Here, it was Nettles Farm potatoes with melted Havarti and buttermilk whey.  Every table around us was talking about how much they liked the flavors.

Crème brulée with toasted walnuts and homemade marshmallows; reading by a cozy fire in the inn’s common room.

Blaine and his sous chef were in and out of the dining room throughout the evening, delivering dishes from the kitchen alongside the wait staff.  This is trademark at Noma, where chefs, including Redzepi himself, visit tables.  Blaine says it’s important for the chefs to connect with diners, and they’re the ones best able to answer questions about what’s on the plate.

He delivered our main course, which was a medallion of slow roasted Skagit River Ranch beef cheek with grilled and pickled onions.  And just when we thought we were moving on to dessert, they brought out a bonus course of the tail braised and served with julienned kohlrabi.

Dessert, as read on the menu, was a puzzle to me: “crème brulée with toasted walnuts and homemade marshmallows.”  Why would an inventive chef serve crème brulée, a dessert that’s so standard on American menus?  And marshmallow doesn’t at all seem like something that should be paired with crème brulée.  Instead of a ramekin, it arrived in a tall glass, more crème than brulée.  And as soon as I took my first bite, I understood.  This was Girl Scout camp in a glass: marshmallow, campfire, and even hints of chocolate.  Delicious.

Overlooking the Rosario Strait at sunset.

We definitely plan to return, perhaps after they’ve had a few months to get into a rhythm after the kitchen reopens.  Dinner will certainly be more magical when the earth tilts back and puts the sunset back into the dinner hour, since the dining room has a spectacular 180 degree view of the Rosario Strait.

And if we can’t make it in the spring, perhaps in the the summer, when they will continue the inn’s Sunday tradition of cooking up live spot prawns on the deck, served with margaritas and a sunset like none other.

The Willows Inn
Lummi Island, Washington
(888) 294-2620

We learned our lesson from our last taste-off.  Stick to the basics, and don’t overdo it.  So what could be more basic than a baguette?  A great one eaten warm out of the oven, even plain, can be nirvana.  And baguettes are best paired with simple ingredients: a thick smear of butter, a hunk of oozing cheese, or homemade jam.

So it was decided.  There would be a baguette taste-off.  Here were today’s contenders:

• Bakery Nouveau
• Columbia City Bakery
• The Essential Baking Company
• Grand Central Baking Company
• La Brea Bakery
• Macrina Bakery & Café
• Tall Grass Bakery

We considered others, too:  the newly opened Le Rêve Bakery (not selling baguettes yet), Dahlia Bakery (missed out due to morning-of technical difficulties), Boulangerie Nantaise, Le Panier, Le Fournil, and the list goes on.  But remember the “don’t overdo it” part?

Four couples joined our hosts Kye Soon Hong and Eric Vigessa today:  Catherine Reynolds and Ken O’Hara, Lorna Yee and Henry Lo, Rebekah Denn and David Dickey, along with Eric and me.

You may already be familiar with our rating system, but I’ll reiterate it here:

This was a blind taste-off, with an arbitrary letter assigned to each baguette for identification.  We ate them sans accoutrements for the taste-off, and each person independently stack ranked them, from their most to least favorite.

A baguette was given one point when it was the top of someone’s list, a second choice baguette received two points, all the way on down the list.  So with ten tasters for our seven baguettes, the best possible score is 10 (i.e. when everyone ranks it top on their list) and the worst possible score is 70 (all ten people rank it 7th on their list).

We wound up with three clusters of bakeries in our results:  5th, 6th, and 7th were very close, then we jump up to the 3rd and 4th place rankings, and finally, the 1st and 2nd place winners, which were only two points apart!

	7th place: Over half ranked the baguette from La Brea last, giving it an overall score of 61.  However, this grocery store baguette didn’t take the more unanimous last place of our croissant ringer, because a few felt that it had a better crunchy crust and soft interior than the worst of the bakery baguettes.
	6th place: Macrina didn’t have a good showing today.  Their baguette was the palest of the bunch, with a bubbly crust, and had very little textural contrast between the interior and exterior.  For the most part, it was in the bottom three on people’s lists, garnering a total score of 58.
	5th place: Essential got points for a caramelized crust, but many thought it was too dark, almost burnt in spots, and the baguette overall was tough.  The interior was the least traditional of the lot, with a darker wheat crumb, the sourest flavor, and none of the large airy holes inside that people favored in the higher ranking baguettes.  Its overall score was 50.
	4th place: Here we enter the next clustering of baguette scores.  Seven of the ten of us ranked Tall Grass’s baguette 3rd, but the others’ lower rankings pushed it down to a score of 37.  One of those who ranked it lower gave it a “low crumb rating” and several felt that it had a simple, uninteresting flavor.
	3rd place: Grand Central’s bread got higher accolades for the flavor and had a toasty brown crust, but the exterior was too hard for some.  With blunt ends, this wasn’t a traditional shaped pointy baguette like our top two finishers.  This one had the widest range of rankings, landing everywhere except last on people’s lists, giving it a final rating of 34.
	2nd place: There were opinionated discussions about the top two results, and it seemed to come down to either texture or flavor.  Many preferred the complex flavor of the 2nd place Nouveau’s baguette.  But while four felt that it was a winner across the board, others didn’t like th