Iris doesn’t have any real sense of what Harry Potter is, but she’s not immune to the phenomenon, either. When _Half-Blood Prince_ came out, she pointed to the cover and demanded to know who these people were, and then she announced, “Potter! Dumble! Buddies.” Which is a pretty good book review.

Last night, Laurie and I went to a new restaurant called [Fork](http://www.forkseattle.com/), which is just down the street from us. This was exciting for two reasons: First, the chef at Fork is Scott Simpson, an old friend of ours who had been out of the kitchen for far too long. Second, we’ve lived in the same part of Seattle for ten years, and this is the first upscale restaurant in our part of the neighborhood. We’ve long wondered whether one could survive. Fork seems to be doing well so far.

Scott used to be the chef at the Blue Onion Bistro, a goofy restaurant run out of a former gas station near the University of Washington. The magic of the BOB is that while the food was simple and hearty (mac and cheese and tuna casserole were big sellers), it always exceeded expectations. One of the most agonizing things I’ve done as a restaurant critic was going back last year to review the BOB, long after Scott sold the place, and finding that the new owners were very well-meaning people serving terrible food.

Fork is nothing like the BOB. It’s in an intimate space on Capitol Hill, right across from one of Seattle’s best old movie theaters (the Harvard Exit). The location has been a restaurant since the 20s, I believe, and it has a historic mural that Scott wasn’t allowed to alter in the slightest, so he adopted it and stuck a detail from it on his website.

Enough review-speak. Let me get back to the Potter analogy. I’ve seen all four of the Potter movies, and I have a problem with the two most recent ones. The problem is named Michael Gambon, who replaced the late Richard Harris as Dumbledore. Gambon looks the part, and he has a good voice, but I don’t think he understands what Dumbledore is all about. You see, Dumbledore commands respect because he’s equal parts serious wizard and funny wizard. (Yes, presumably he is modeled directly on Gandalf in this respect.) A funny wizard with weak wand skills is a clown, and nobody likes a clown. A serious wizard who can’t tell a joke may command his own kind of respect, but he’s never going to connect with a room full of English boarding school pupils, or with me. Gambon understands the serious wizard part, but he can’t tell a joke.

Scott Simpson is equal parts serious chef and funny chef. He’s serious in the sense that he can really cook: every mouthful at Fork was delicious and well thought out. But he also has an irrepressible sense of humor: there are lobster corn dogs on the menu. We had a duck confit gelee with foie gras and granny smith apples on toast points; “pot au feu” of prawns with savoy cabbage and lobster-prawn broth; “fish and chips” featuring sous vide cooked striped bass over celeriac puree and duck fat-fried potatoes. For dessert Laurie had an individual pineapple upside-down cake with pineapple sorbet, and I had one of those molten chocolate cakes, but served with chocolate-chipotle ice cream.

The best restaurants recognize that going out to eat is supposed to be fun. That doesn’t mean the menu has to make jokes or the waiters should wear costumes. It means serving great food with a mix of pride, humility, and humor. I’ve wasted too many evenings in Serious Wizard restaurants where the food is good but the pomposity is stomach-churning. But Fork is poised to conquer evil, with the lobster corn dog as its lightsaber. Okay, I haven’t actually tried the lobster corn dog yet, but how could it not be good?

**Fork**
806 E Roy
Seattle WA 98112
(206) 325-7400

You know the story about Pavlov and his dog? If I remember right, it went something like this. This guy Pavlov had a dog, and every time a bell rang, the dog got its wings. Wait, that’s not it.

This guy Pavlov had a dog, and every time he rang the bell, he’d give the dog a donut, or possibly a slice of The Edge pizza from Pizza Hut. After a while, he could just ring the bell, and the dog would start drooling. I’m not sure what the experiment was, since dogs drool all the time. Anyway, Pavlov also found that if he only *sometimes* gave the dog a donut after ringing the bell, this would make the dog drool even more. “Inconsistent reinforcement,” he called it. (“He” meaning Pavlov, not the dog, who called it “bullshit.”)

Naturally, I don’t care about dogs who eat donuts, unless they eat my donuts. The preceding was an allegory. The dog is me, and Pavlov is Nasai Teriyaki, a restaurant I’ve been to dozens of times, but not in the last couple of years. I decided to have lunch there today, though, because I was in the neighborhood and wanted something quick.

The thing about Nasai is that it is extraordinarily inconsistent. There are a lot of things on the menu, but what everyone gets is the special, which is chicken teriyaki and potstickers for $5. Several years ago some guy drew an anime-style ad for the special on their whiteboard, and it’s been worn down to a shadow of its former self, but it was still there today. Actually, I didn’t get the special, because Nasai’s potstickers are deep-fried and reliably bad.

The chicken, though, is sometimes the perfect gooey, juicy teriyaki you’re after, and sometimes a gristly mess, sauced by a sauce-miser (there is extra teriyaki sauce to be had at a sauce station, but somehow it’s different from the stuff that is served on the chicken). You also get a mound of rice (equally variable–sometimes it’s overcooked in the horrible clingy way that Japanese short-grain rice gets when overcooked) and some perfunctory iceberg salad.

I realize I’m not making Nasai sound very good, but when they’re on, it’s perfect student food, which is why I went there at least once a week when I was an employee and then a student at the University of Washington.

Today I got lucky. The chicken (grilled boneless thigh) was juicy and the sauce was free-flowing. The service was slow.

Anyway, I chose Nasai today over several places that are reliably good, such as Chipotle and A Burger Place. This just goes to show that Pavlov was right. Now, who ate my donuts?

**Nasai Teriyaki**
4305 University Way NE
Seattle WA 98105
(206) 632-3572

French toast was one of the biggest treats of my childhood in Portland, OR. My mom would make it from thick-sliced sandwich bread and cook it in an electric frying pan that looked liked it dated from the dawn of electricity.

There were two tricks to my mother’s French toast: putting half-and-half in the batter, and using thick-sliced white sandwich bread. When my parents moved to Seattle in 1998, I hoped the French toast of my youth would come along, but it turned out thick-sliced sandwich bread was impossible to find here. Soon I started making challah French toast, and it was good (I make it every Sunday), but there’s really no substitute for the breakfast foods you grew up on.

The other day Iris and I were at the bus stop and a bread delivery truck pulled up. The guy rolled up the door of the truck and my eye somehow alighted on a product called Franz Texas Toast. This was it! It turns out they sell it at the QFC three blocks from our house.

I brought a loaf over to my mom’s house, and she promised to make us some French toast soon, even though she’s on Atkins. That’s what parenting is all about, I think. She also gave me her recipe, which is (this is not a criticism) a little more memoir than recipe, and I’ll print as soon as I try it myself.

Yesterday, while I was stirring my fish stock, my mind embarked unexpectedly on one of those wide-ranging ambles through the past. Come along, but be forewarned that an amble is just a ramble with one letter burned out.

In 1998-99, Laurie was going to grad school at Teachers College of Columbia University, and we rented a student apartment at 121st and Amsterdam. Supposedly this is a dicey neighborhood, but that’s what they say about our present Seattle neighborhood, too. I think people see dicey neighborhoods where they want to. That said, I did once impress a guy who was boasting about living in “crackhead central,” by which he meant off Washington Square Park. “Really?” I said. “I used to live at 121st and Amsterdam,” letting him take home the implication that I was a street-smart Harlemite. But it’s probably not hard to impress a guy who thinks the West Village is a tough neighborhood.

Anyway, the whole New York experience seems like a dream now. It was just before the dot-com implosion, and I had three tech jobs over the course of the year with successively higher salaries and less work. At one point I was hired as a Windows NT Server administrator even though I had never once used Windows NT Server. “We’re not really worried about that,” said the guy who hired me. The office was infested with politics, but the other tech guy and I had an office downstairs where we could laugh at the backstabbing from a safe distance. We had those IKEA Poang chairs for when we needed to think hard about a technical problem or take a nap.

Once, two of the upstairs employees got into a fistfight, and the loser quit. They were both women. The boss was a total caricature, a raving bigot who seemed to have a problem with every ethnic group and sexual minority. This can’t have been much fun in New York. He also used to eat every week at the Old Homestead steakhouse (the one on 9th Avenue with the big plastic cow on the facade) on expense account. Eventually the CEO flew over from England and fired him. There wasn’t excitement like this every day, of course–mostly my fellow tech guy and I would sit around in the Poangs and eat Hunan Beef from the local Chinese place, which was called King Food. Hunan Beef, with a can of Coke and free delivery, was five bucks.

One day I hopped the L train to Union Square during lunch and had a burger at the bar at Union Square Cafe, something I’d read about in a book. I wore a dress shirt, hoping I’d blend in, and everyone at work figured I had a job interview. I was too embarrassed to tell them the real reason.

My office was on West 14th Street, in the meatpacking district, which was just starting to gentrify. Our window literally overlooked a giant dumpster full of festering cow discards. But you could walk out the front of the building, take a right onto 14th and another right onto Hudson, and find yourself lost in the intricate street pattern of the West Village, stumbling across a surprise every time. There was the English shop, Myers of Keswick. Magnolia Bakery is down there somewhere, as is the White Horse Tavern, best known as the place where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death.

Right near the White Horse is Pepe Verde To Go. It’s part of a small chain of cheap Italian restaurants that includes other Pepes such as Rosso (the original), Giallo, and Viola. One night Laurie met me after work and we had dinner at Pepe Verde. I ordered the penne alla vodka, something I’d heard of but never had before, and it turned out to be one of the most spectacular pastas I’ve ever eaten: my favorite pasta shape in a tomato-cream sauce with lots of pancetta, served in a big white bowl. I love big bowls. It was $7. (The Amateur Gourmet blogged about it last year.)

“I could probably make this at home,” I mused to Laurie as I ate my pasta. This was not the first time I’d said this, but it was the first time I was right. I used my favorite jarred pasta sauce, a slug of cream, cheap vodka, and some pancetta purchased at Faicco’s Pork Store on Bleecker St. (I know you don’t care where I bought my pancetta, but I like saying “Pork Store.”) It came out almost exactly like Pepe’s, and we’ve been eating it at least once a month since then. I even sold an article about it to the Seattle Times. This was a great return on the $7 I spent on research.

Not only was Penne alla Vodka the best thing we made that year, it was, with one exception that I’m getting to, the only thing I can remember making. We had one of those New York kitchens with a fridge smaller than the beer cooler you had in your dorm room and an underpowered 24-inch gas stove, and no matter how many times I tried to convince myself that I was like one of those old Italian women who produce big rustic dinners from a San Marino-sized kitchen, the fact is that I’ve never been an old Italian woman. So we ate out almost all the time.

This didn’t stop us from spending plenty of money on groceries. Every Saturday morning, a charter bus would pull up in front of our building and drop us at Fairway’s uptown location, a store so remote that it’s not actually on a named street–it fronts on the Hudson at 132nd Street. It’s one of the world’s greatest supermarkets. I’ve forgotten most of what we bought at Fairway, but I know we’d usually start by grabbing a cheese danish from the bakery counter. They had Desert Pepper salsa, one of the best jarred salsas, at very low prices. The De Cecco pasta that I used in my penne alla vodka was about a dollar a box. I was surprised to see Red Hook ESB, the popular Seattle craft beer, for $4.50 per six pack, but it turned out they’d recently opened a brewery in New Hampshire. The produce was pretty pathetic, but that’s true almost everywhere in the city–the average supermarket in Seattle has better produce than most gourmet markets in New York, or at least it did in 1999.

What I really remember about Fairway is the cold room. You’d put on one of the supplied jackets and step into a giant refrigerator (10,000 square feet) that was the fish, meat, and dairy department. Meat trays were piled high on shelves in the middle of the room. The price of butter went up while we were in New York, but somehow the higher-fat Plugra brand stayed under $3/lb, so we’d buy a red brick of Plugra. I think I also started eating that Yo Crunch yogurt around this time. Their cheese section, which was not in the cold room, was christened the Cheese Cave, and Laurie and I made up a jingle that went, “Step into my cheese cave!” and we sing it to this day.

Finally, I’m coming to the punchline of this very long story. One of the things we noticed in the Fairway cold room one day was a big package of chicken wings that cost maybe $3. “These would be perfect for making chicken stock,” I said. And we did, in fact, buy some chicken wings and throw them into a stockpot with some vegetables and, for no other reason than that I had some around, sliced jalapeños. No surprise: jalapeños make a very spicy stock.

So, seven years later, I’m standing at the stove, skimming foam from the top of my fish stock and wondering: why did I make chicken stock in New York? Did I end up using it for something? Did someone on the Food Network put me up to it? It’s not like there was even room to put the stock in our fridge.

Maybe I never made the stock. Maybe the whole year was a dream, and there is no Pepe, no cold room, and–would it were so–no such thing as Windows NT.