Under the Table

What would it be like to grow up in a restaurant?

And I mean literally grow up in a restaurant, where your father is the chef, your mother is the pastry chef and all the servers give you maraschino cherries and bring you little plates of food as you sit in the dining room doing your homework.

I'm fascinated by restaurants and their culture.  Charlotte Silver's Charlotte au Chocolat:  Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood chronicles the years in which her parents and then her single mother (I'm not giving away any major plot points here, I promise) owned the restaurant Upstairs at the Pudding in Boston's Harvard Square.  The restaurant, in a crumbling, Harvard-owned building, is above the famous Hasty Pudding club, which every year crowns celebrities Man and Woman of the Year and puts on a famous annual show that always features men in drag.

It makes for a fascinating setting, but what is more interesting is how restaurant life is perceived through the eyes of a girl.  For many chapters, it seems that she is the Alice in Wonderland of the restaurant world, crawling under tables and scaring customers, sitting in prim little party dresses for the amusement of the same customers and eating the fabulous desserts that her mother makes.  School nights and normal bedtimes don't really come into consideration.

When Silver described the swagged dining room with its pink accents, I couldn't help but think of a certain class of restaurants from a bygone era.  For many chapters, I thought that the time frame was in the 1950s through the 1970s--up to the point where I realized that Silver was younger than me.  The restaurant closed in 2001 after a lease dispute with Harvard, although a version of it reopened elsewhere--minus the unique atmosphere of the original.

While Silver isn't a great writer--the book is repetitive in spots--I admit that I was fascinated by her childhood.  It lacked structure and was constantly chaotic, but I wanted to be that little girl hiding under tables, stealing bites of her mother's famed charlotte au chocolate dessert, after which was was named, and speaking Spanish with the revolving cast of waiters.  I wanted to be this version of Alice in Wonderland.

It's a short book, but an appropriately sweet one for anyone interested in a unique perspective on restaurant culture.

That's Amore

I ate my way across Seattle.  Or the Belltown portion of it, anyway.

David and I just returned from spending a long weekend in Seattle.  We ate a fantastic dinner with my friend Jimmy and his partner John at Sitka and Spruce, had goat tagine at Lola and ate perhaps the world's best English muffins at Dahlia Bakery.  Oh, yes, we also went to a play at the Seattle Rep, haunted Pike Place market and went to the Seattle and Frye art museums.  But back to the food.



Artisan English muffin with scrambled egg, goat cheese and spinach, aka Heaven.

But the best part of the trip:  pizza.  Specifically, the pizza at Serious Pie.  Reader, I went back more than once--and pizza is not one of my favorite foods. 

This pizza is thin-crusted, blistered in a wood-fired oven and topped with organic ingredients, some locally sourced.  I tried the pizza with buffalo mozzarella, crushed tomatoes and olive oil, pizza with hedgehog mushrooms, cheese and truffle salt and pizza with duck confit and braised leeks.  They were all brilliant.

The menu is small, just six pizzas, a few appetizers including house-cured salumi and a few desserts.  It also has a small wine and beer list, featuring mostly Italian wines and Pacific Northwest beers. 

Serious Pie is open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.;  it doesn't take reservations and depending on the hour may have a line going out the door.  Hit it near opening or after 1 p.m. on a weekday and just be prepared to wait on the weekends.  Seating is limited to 48 and is at six long communal tables.  The space is tight and noisy, but worth it for the food.

Details:  Serious Pie, 4th and Virginia in the Belltown neighborhood.