Dining North by Northwest

By Mimi Sheraton

Had your fill of creole gumbo and Cajun blackened redfish? Fed up with Southwestern blue cornmeal tortillas, Tex-Mex refried beans and California's baby vegetables and grill-scarred swordfish? Then consider traveling north by northwest to Seattle, where yet another new American regional cuisine is bubbling along. Having simmered slowly over the past eight or nine years, this vibrant, young-spirited cooking is now beginning to achieve finish and form. Whether dubbed Northwestern (because of its almost religious dedication to local products) or Pacific Rim (because it draws inspiration from both Asian and West Coast shore communities), this cuisine is well sauced with pride and heavily seasoned with sincerity.

It is hard to believe that only ten or 15 years ago, Seattle natives knew little about their local products, opting for the meat-and-potatoes diet that was becoming obsolete in trendier cities. But inspired equally by nouvelle cuisine in France, innovative cooking in California, and the quality-wine industry developing in Washington and Oregon, a group of young Seattle chefs created a demand for indigenous herbs, seafood and game.

No one did more to bring about this flavorful revolution than Robert Rosellini, 42, a fourth-generation restaurateur who pioneered the new cuisine 14 years ago in the Other Place -- so named to differentiate it from his family's well-known Italian restaurant, Rosellini's Four-10. "I wanted to do as the French did," says Rosellini, "and apply their careful cooking techniques and sensibilities to our fresh, native products."

Last fall he moved to a new location with a stunning art deco interior, where he talks of trying to "exfoliate the levels of flavor." Whatever that may mean, on the plate it translates into several engaging combinations, such as Impromptu Salad, made with wild greens, herbs and even berries of the season; satiny poached sablefish sauced with white wine and leeks; and delicately moist salmon with julienne vegetables and herbed mustard butter.

Equally diligent is the latest star in town, Caprial Pence, 24, chef at the handsome, pricey Fullers in the Seattle Sheraton Hotel. After three years in training jobs, Pence took over as chef in 1987. Now she turns out dishes that are as delicious as they are pretty, among them a colorful spinach salad with warm duck and orange sections topped with a rosette of Japanese red pickled ginger, and mellow ravioli filled with crab meat and hazelnuts. Born in Pasco, Wash., and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Pence believes that Seattle is just the right size to support experimental restaurants. Says she: "It's a city that is small town enough but still not in the boonies."

But even in Seattle, not all culinary creativity meets with equal success. Take Le Gourmand, which despite its French name offers the local cuisine. Run for three years by Bruce Naftaly, 34, and Robin Sanders, 35, the restaurant produces lackluster food and some needless extra irritants. The tone of service is both chummy and didactic. An unsmilingly intent preppie waiter offers the "observation" that the regular coffee has far more flavor than the espresso. As for ice cream, one can have it "nestled" beside a poached pear, but in the waiter's opinion, "it is good enough to stand on its own," a promise not fulfilled by the bland dessert.

All these chefs rely on the same enviable sources. They may shop at the festive Pike Place Market or buy directly from free-lance foragers who search out wild weeds, berries and mushrooms in nearby fields and woods. Another source is the small boutique farms sponsored by the chefs for raising game birds and organically fed animals. For salads, shopping lists may include some attractive exotic entries: lovage, hyssop, yarrow, vetch, pansies, nasturtiums, fava bean blossoms and shepherd's purse.

From the sea surrounding Puget Sound comes a bounty of oysters such as Hamma Hamma, Penn Cove, Willapa Bay, Kumamoto, Shoalwater Bay and Olympia. Some varieties will be served raw with a raspberry peppercorn mignonette sauce -- a specialty at Fullers. At the sparkling Cafe Sport, Tom Douglas, 29, sautes oysters with chili spices and turns out fluffy Dungeness crab cakes and seductive broiled Japanese Kasu cod with an "ocean salad" of marinated seaweed.

Perhaps the most delectable oyster invention of all belongs to Karl Beckley, 34, who combines the mollusks with corn in airy pancakes topped with salmon caviar at his postmodern, pastel-spattered Green Lake Grill. Cream of nettle soup and roast rabbit with sweet peppers and glazed garlic cloves are some of Beckley's other triumphs.

Seattle's ocean feast is dazzling in its diversity. Coral-shelled "singing" scallops that send forth quiet popping noises when swimming and sweet Penn Cove mussels vie for places on seafood menus with assorted salmons (coho, chinook, silver, sockeye, king) and several types of rockfish and cod. The silken black cod also known as sablefish is especially enticing in the pomegranate sauce that glosses it at Le Tastevin. Then there is geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck), a giant clam that can be sauteed with the robust Mediterranean seasonings that befit what might be described as clam-flavored squid.

What all these chefs share with the thousands of young people who have migrated to Seattle is an appreciation of the city's livable pace and casual life-style and its nearness to sea and mountains. In exchange, they seem willing to endure weather reports that read, "Rain, followed by showers" (a prediction for six days in a row in March). But perhaps it is the cloudy skies that in the end attract visitors to the great indoors of Seattle's innovative restaurants. After all, if you can't walk around the waterfront or ferry to the outlying islands, you might as well eat.