There’s this restaurant in Seattle, Canlis. It has a reputation for excellent service and very good food. It is the only restaurant in Seattle with a dress code, which is fairly loose but don’t show up in a T-shirt. It is pricy – $185 a head for a six course tasting menu before you get into drinks – and it has a remarkable view of Lake Union. My in-laws kindly gave us a gift certificate for Christmas several years ago and it’s use it or lose it now that we’re moving, so we invited our dear friends Joe and Harli out to a big old blow out dinner. Here’s how it went.
For starters, because this is the information I badly wanted when I was thinking about what to wear, I went with a casual button down, black jeans, and a nice pair of silk suspenders with a tuxedo jacket on top of it all. I wanted to look good and a little bit off-beat. Worked well. For my past self and anyone else with hangups about formal wear, I saw people in polo shirts with no coat and people with tailored three piece suits. Put in a bit of effort and you’re fine.
The food was quite good. I didn’t have anything experimental or terribly challenging, and that’s not the vibe the restaurant is looking for. It was locally sourced for the most part – we didn’t do a deep dive on every dish, but they’re proud of their Pacific Northwest flavors – and very well made. I’ve had a couple of better meals in my life, and I’d been the kind of person who spent more time eating in Napa than I actually did (none) while living in the SF Bay Area, I think I’d have had more.
The service is what was really special. The valets don’t bother with tickets because they can remember who drove what car. The wait staff is attentive without hovering; they did a lovely job of making sure us first-timers knew how to navigate the tasting menu without making us feel like we didn’t belong. It felt amazingly comfortable. In another timeline, I can see wanting to go back every couple of months just to soak in the experience and relax for several hours while eating well.
In short, as I think Harli said, it was a very Seattle fine-dining experience, showing the best side of the city. And the company was outstanding.
OK, let’s do the food rundown, since I went to all the trouble of taking a bunch of iffy quality food photos and writing down some notes. This was a “fuck diet” night – I had drinks and I didn’t worry about blood sugar.
That’s a T. D. Burns: “salty and strong,” says the bar menu (PDF). It’s gin, pisco, a briny vermouth called Noilly Prat, and sherry. The oil floating on top is a pimento oil. It was in fact as advertised; I liked it although I wouldn’t drink it every day. Nicely mixed, though. I sampled everyone else’s drink and liked all of them. It’s also cool that there’s a section for non-alcoholic cocktails, helpfully labelled “Free Spirited.”
The meal proper started out with an amuse-bouche, a mix of tempura and hand-cut potato chips with, argh, I can’t remember what the sauce was. It was so good I forgot to take a picture. Auspicious start.
First course! “You’ll eat these with your hands,” noted our waiter. Boy did we. From left to right, that’s a shokupan bread, lightly toasted, with a tomato spread and half a cherry tomato on top; a cheese tartlet; and a crab cake. You can see what I mean about it being fairly normal nice food, yeah? This was a good way to start; my favorite was the tartlet, which was nicely complex. The crab cake was also great, and I have no complaints about the tomato toast except that tomatoes aren’t my heart’s joy.
The second course was the bread serving. The green spread to the top left is artichoke-spinach cheese dip, and then clockwise we have the bread itself, then an amazing miso honey raspberry sauce, then butter. Absolutely magical. The bread worked equally well as a base for both the sweet and the savory sauce, and both of the sauces were excellent. I could have eaten the entire loaf, which is not usual for my current appetite.
We decided to go extra and get the Canlis salad for the table, because one of Joe’s co-workers said you have to get it. This is the only dish that never ever leaves the menu. It’s a recipe from the founder’s Lebanese immigrant grandmother, it’s very simple, and it’s really good. They assemble it on a little cart next to your table, which is fun. I think the mint flavor is what elevates it, and of course putting bacon in is a cheat code. They give you a little recipe card for this at the end of the meal and it’s easy to find online.
Fourth course was the first one we’d had any choice in – they ask you to make three choices at the start of the meal. For reference, here’s the menu. As you can see, I got the sashimi. The pickled onions set off the salmon well. Not much to say about this course – once again, enjoyable but not epic.
The main course! I got beef; S. got the celeriac with leek which was excellent. The beef was… you know, this was kind of the “yeah, OK” course. I really liked the chickpea miso hummus you can see there but the beef wasn’t as tender as I wanted it to be. Well seasoned – those salt crystals worked out really well. Just not quite sublime. Certainly didn’t make me unhappy.
I got a glass of merlot with the beef. Once again our waiter did a great job of recommending something appropriate without burdening my non-wine knowledgeable self with questions I couldn’t answer. I am harping on this a bit but I was really impressed with how well the whole team clocked us and made sure we had the right experience for our relative level of fine-dining expertise.
Course six: dessert. I got the soufflé and loved it. That pitcher is full of crème anglaise; when they serve it, the waiter slices that hole in the top of the soufflé and pours in about half the pitcher. Don’t think I didn’t pour in the rest. I’d heard this was a must try and it really was.
Oh, and this is the only photo I took which captured the centerpiece. That fuzzy looking thing up in the top left of the photo is moss. It’s a very Pacific Northwest kind of a restaurant.
We closed out with a final sweet taste: the fruit jellies you see here and some very nice cream puffs. The jellies were fine; the cream puffs were like very high end donuts and I appreciated them immensely.
The whole thing paced out at a bit over three hours. We didn’t feel rushed at any point. When we made our way out to the car, they had the right car waiting for us. Definitely a high point of our slow farewell to Seattle.