[Union](http://www.unionseattle.com/) is a downtown Seattle restaurant helmed by a freakishly talented young chef named Ethan Stowell. Most nights, Union serves delicious and expensive things like venison loin with brussels sprouts and bacon, or wild sturgeon with french lentils. Stowell is particularly brilliant with fish.

I had dinner at Union on Sunday. Dinner consisted of four bowls of chili.

You see, Stowell is not one of those chefs who believes that his high-end cooking is the end of the story. So on select Sunday nights, he collaborates with some of his regular customers to produce what he calls Sunday Dinners. The first one I attended was Oktoberfest-themed. I went in expecting Union’s refined take on traditional German favorites. What I got was huge platters of sausages, sauerkraut, wienerschnitzel, and pickled herring. Delicious, but nothing refined about it.

In the same vein, last Sunday was Union’s first annual chili cookoff. Professional chefs squared off against members of the public, including several of my friends. Unlimited beer and Fritos were included with dinner.

There were fourteen chilis to taste, and I got through most of them. I’d never been to a chili cookoff before, and it answered something I’ve long wondered: is there really much difference between good chili and great chili? I’ve been cooking chili since I was a kid, and I’ve learned that if you put some beef, tomato sauce, chili powder, and onions into a pot, it’s going to come out pretty tasty and pretty much like the last pot you made, whatever the recipe.

But at the cookoff, it was very easy to sort the chili into three tiers. Some of the chilis were bland. Some of them were quite good (many of these featured a lot of bacon). And one of them was simply awe-inspiring. I love chili, but this chili, #8, was better than I had believed a chili could taste. It was extremely simple, just chunks of beef in sauce, but the sauce was magic. It was spicy but with an unexpected and perfectly balanced acidity. It won by a landslide. (Ethan Stowell’s chili came in last.)

The magic chili was made by Steve Smrstik, the tattooed chef of 35th Street Bistro in Fremont. Yesterday I sent out some frantic emails trying to track down the recipe. That quest is still in progress. But I’m dying to make Smrstik’s chili my house special, and not just so I can say, “Who wants another bowl of Smrstik?”

Union’s Sunday Dinners strike me as savvy marketing, the equivalent of Amazon making money by turning a shopping site into a community site. Admittedly, I have no idea whether Amazon–or Union–is making a profit these days. But even though I can’t afford to eat at Union very often, the Sunday Dinners make me feel like a participant in the restaurant, not just a diner but part of an ongoing and occasionally goofy project.

Now, I have got to get my hands on some Smrstik.

**Update:** Hsiao-Ching Chou covers the cookoff in the P-I, and Smrstik isn’t talking. But he did say it was made with pork, not beef.

**Update 2 (3/17/06):** I just got email from Smrstik and he’s working on getting the recipe into publishable form. Stay tuned.

A few years ago, R.W. Apple reported in the New York Times about Nueske’s bacon, from Wisconsin. The article is long relegated to the Times Select ghetto, but here’s a tidbit:

> I don’t want to go whole hog here, but Nueske’s struck me as the beluga of bacon, the Rolls-Royce of rashers. It makes a memorable B.L.T., one of the supreme inventions of American short-order cookery, and its crunchiness provides an ideal counterpoint to the richness of calf’s liver or shad roe. It was invented, or might have been, for breakfast bacon and eggs, which my wife, Betsey, allows me (and herself) a morning or two a month.

I was sold. I went to the [Nueske web site](http://www.nuekse.com) and ordered two pounds of bacon. With shipping, this was almost $30. Apple was right, of course–it was the best bacon I’ve ever had, even though it’s astonishingly smoky.

Laurie and I ate a few slices ourselves, and then we had some out-of-town friends staying with us and served the rest of the Nueske’s with biscuits for breakfast. “Like this bacon?” I asked. “We bought it on the Internet!”

I get the “you are not normal” look from people all the time, but that one had unusual intensity.

We got the Nueske’s catalog for years after that, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay $30 for two pounds of bacon again. The only other time we tasted Nueske’s between about 2000 and 2003 was when we were in New York and had lunch at Artisanal restaurant, where Laurie ordered the grilled cheese sandwich. It’s made with Balthazar bread, Montgomery cheddar, granny smith apples, and strips of Nueske’s. If you’re in New York, please go have one of these now so I can eat it vicariously.

Other than that, we reminisced about the flavor of Nueske’s, which, to be honest, is smoky enough to linger on the palate for months. I would often declare that if they sold Nueske’s in Seattle, it would become our house bacon, and I would allow myself to eat it a lot more than a morning or two a month.

Flash forward to today. Larry’s Market in Queen Anne, a ten minute bus ride from my house, has been selling Nueske’s for over two years. I think I’ve bought it three times.

It turns out my relationship with Nueske’s is like Seth and Summer’s relationship on The OC. It’s two versions of the classic tale of gawky-and-Jewish seeks fleshy-and-delicious. Part of the thrill of Nueske’s was its unattainability. When I stood up on that coffee cart and declared my undying love for Nueske’s porky goodness, I didn’t realize I was actually going to get it.

Still, like Rachel Bilson, Nueske’s is just as good and smoky as ever. Last week Larry’s had a great sale on Parmigiano-Reggiono ($9/lb for well-cut chunks), and while I was standing at the checkout with my hunk of cheese, I realized, “Hey, Nueske’s.” So I went and grabbed some, and we had it for breakfast yesterday. It was Iris’s first Nueske experience, and she loved it. Next week I’ll probably go back to some cheap and tawdry bacon, but the memory of Nueske’s will smolder in my heart forever.

Would I have missed the new show Top Chef? I would not.

Despite obviously coming from the same factory that stamps out every other reality show, Top Chef rules. The premise, which you could probably figure out yourself just from the title of the show, is that they assemble a bunch of chefs and chef-wannabes and put them through various trials by fire. The hosts are Tom Colicchio of NYC’s Craft restaurant, and a couple of attractive women, one of whom is a food writer and the other Billy Joel’s wife, but they look like twins, so I have no idea which is which.

As on any of these shows, there was a villain, in the form of Ken Lee, from Dublin, who got himself ejected from the first challenge for tasting sauces with his finger. Unfortunately, he was the one sent home at the end of the show. This is nuts. It would be like killing off Alan Rickman at the beginning of _Die Hard_. At least they kept Andrea, the health-food chef, whose “signature dish” was a pile of vegetables, including steamed kale. There is no such thing as steamed kale, any more than there’s such a thing as raw pasta salad.

My personal favorite is Lee Anne Wong, who is poised to kick ass. And this is even before I learned from the web site that “her passion is pork, and she can do anything with a pig.” I’m not sure I would have said it that way, but I admire the sentiment.

Anyway, this is not just a TV review. I’m here to offer you a clever idea for your next dinner party. The idea came to me when I was watching the lovably foulmouthed Cynthia, who at one point said, “Who stole my fucking pomegranate?” This is not something you’ll hear on any other show. Later, when it came time to present her signature dish, she said, “It’s not finished. Someone stole my pomegranate, or I lost my pomegranate, or something.”

So here’s what you do, in honor of Cynthia. Invite some friends over for dinner. When you serve the food, explain that it would be much better, but *someone* stole your white truffles, your foie gras, and your fennel pollen. As you say this, look around accusingly. This should make your party much more exciting, and if the food’s no good, your friends will blame each other instead of you.

I bounced this idea off some people, and my friend Lucian said, “I’d be happy to come over and steal some stuff from your fridge if it would help.”

The first episode of Top Chef is available free on iTunes.