The U.S. Issue | Choice Tables
EVERY weekend, my husband, children and I trundle off to the “red bakery” — our unofficial moniker for the Columbia City Bakery, named for its south Seattle neighborhood — and sit down near people in eccentric hats, cyclists, dog walkers and other families with small children who share our scone-and-coffee routine.
It’s all very neighborly, except that we’re not actually neighbors. We live five miles north, and drive past several alternatives along the way. We’re drawn to the bakery for its excellent morning treats, but we linger in the sunny space filled with pastry-induced bonhomie.
Perhaps it’s the slog through the dark winter months that makes Seattle-area residents crave sweets: a little extra sunshine, even if it’s only from butter and sugar. No matter the cause, this area has an impressive collection of sweet shops with strong ties to neighborhood residents.
COLUMBIA CITY BAKERY
Columbia City is owned by a serious bread maker, Evan Andres, but his impeccable loaves of pain de campagne and walnut levain share the spotlight with the sweets of his pastry kitchen, which is overseen by Karra Wise.
Her morning pastries are classics with extra textural intrigue like danishes with darkly burnished crusts, filled with lustrous hunks of rhubarb, or later in the season, plums or nectarines. Coffeecake here is not an aged and indifferent hunk of sweet bread, but a serious creation, often still warm and exuding tender sighs of cardamom.
And in the refrigerated case are the more potent sweets: fine and slinky chocolate pudding, delicate lemon bars and pretty — but not too pretty — cakes. A layered green and ivory pistachio cake is stout in form, but sprightly and charged with lemon on the tongue.
Columbia City Bakery, 4865 Rainier Avenue South; (206) 723-6023; columbiacitybakery.com. Prices: pastries range from $2.25 for a plain croissant to $4.25 for an individual fruit tart.
CAFE BESALU
A decade ago this October, James Miller sought to open a bakery off the beaten path, much like the European bakeries he remembers discovering by tracking flour footprints. He set up shop off the main drag in the Ballard neighborhood. But if Cafe Besalu was ever under the radar, its cover has long been blown. Even on a recent Wednesday, the line stretched from door to counter amid the scent of yeast, a quiet bebop melody and palpable anticipation.
Besalu is not the kind of place that relies on novelty for its appeal. Instead, you can order the most ordinary of options like a plain croissant and then chuckle at your luck: butter, flour and yeast have become airy pockets and a honey-gold crust, just for you. Mr. Miller creates those laminated layers himself, and I have yet to visit the bakery when he is not in his modest open kitchen, kindly greeting regulars, but rarely halting his work.
There’s no way to order poorly at Besalu: there’s the pain au chocolat, almost savory with its bitter chocolate core; a spiraling Danish with sliced strawberries tucked into its folds; or the hazelnut twist, plush sweet dough corkscrewing around dark toasted nut paste.
Cafe Besalu, 5909 24th Avenue NW; (206) 789-1463. Prices: from $1.85 for a cardamom pretzel to $4 for a fruit tart.
PANAMA HOTEL TEA AND COFFEE HOUSE
Chika Tokara’s medium is wagashi, a form of a Japanese confection: steamed sweets of rice and bean paste that are essentially small edible sculptures. Some are bracingly naturalistic, others abstract. Though she learned her arcane craft as a hobby in Japan, Ms. Tokara now fills orders for sweets from her office and is a wholesale supplier to a few local shops, including the Panama Hotel.
Forms of wagashi change with the seasons and are meant to accompany tea — or, more specifically, to immediately precede it. For this reason, I sought Ms. Tokara’s work at the Panama, which functions, improbably, as both a serene teahouse and a memorial to pre-internment Japanese-American life in Seattle.
My toddler clutched her trompe l’oeil cherry blossom — made of white bean paste — like a new toy, admiring its rosiness and intermittently sucking off little morsels. I sipped tea and nibbled at a natane-kinton, an ivory and green haystack-shaped creation that hid a cinnamon-colored orb of adzuki bean paste. The snacks, not unlike soft marzipan in texture, were much milder and less sweet.
Panama Hotel Tea and Coffee House, 607 South Main Street; (206) 515-4000; panamahotelseattle.com. Prices: $3.25 a piece. (Call to make sure that Ms. Tokara’s sweets are in stock; check tokaragashi.com for other outlets.)
THEO CHOCOLATE
There is nothing fleeting about the flavors at Theo Chocolate, the local upstart chocolate factory, which makes organic, fair-trade chocolate from the bean up. A bite of a 91 percent cacao bar made of Costa Rican beans lingers on the palate, tannic and lush. The bonbons and bars here are punched up with chili, salt, fennel or even single-malt Scotch.
The factory, in the Fremont neighborhood, occupies a building that was once a trolley barn and later a brewery. Tours of its production line are conducted several times a day. With frequent samples to keep us focused, we were instructed at length by our guide, a pipe-thin woman dressed in funky hand-sewn clothes, on the origins of chocolate, its cultivation and, naturally, the virtues of Theo’s environmentally conscious method.
It is hard to deny the cleverness of the machines on the production line: a potbellied roaster tumbling cacao beans, a scrolling conveyer belt longer than a football field that gently cools new-minted bars. Not surprisingly, the scent of hot cocoa was intoxicating.
Theo Chocolate, 3400 Phinney Avenue North; (206) 632-5100; theochocolate.com. Prices: from $1.25 for a peanut-butter buddy to $70.40 for a 32-piece box of confections.
BAKERY NOUVEAU
William Leaman, the chef and owner at Bakery Nouveau, led a team to victory at the 2005 Coup du Monde de la Boulangerie, and high on a shelf in his Valrhona-brown shop sits the enormous shiny trophy.
It seems that the polymath Mr. Leaman has never stopped competing, at least with himself, and the selection at Bakery Nouveau borders on overwhelming. There are thick slices of pizza (more like cheese-topped focaccia, but a favorite of my cheese-loving 5-year-old son); macarons in neon shades of pink, lilac and azure; and ham sandwiches on wee house-made baguettes.
Mr. Leaman and his crew also make other pastries: the bakery is celebrated for its twice-baked almond croissant, wildly sweet and craggy with baked almond cream, almond slivers and a blizzard of confectioners’ sugar (a cup of strong coffee is its appropriate partner).
But one gets the impression that Mr. Leaman’s greatest creative pleasures aren’t these casual treats, but the geometric cakes and mousse confections that shimmer in the refrigerated case.
These are stealthy desserts: the chocolate praline, for instance, smuggles crispy shards of feuilletine wafers inside its tawny mousse; wedges of chocolate cake in an armor of thin tiles of chocolate gleam darkly like Darth Vader, while golden cylinders of Phoenix cake hide pear mousse and pecan dacquoise beneath a caramel glaze.
Bakery Nouveau, 4737 California Avenue SW; (206) 923-0534; bakerynouveau.com. Prices: from $1.50 for a macaroon to $5.50 for a slice of Phoenix.
FULL TILT ICE CREAM
You might find more exquisite fare scooped from the roving Parfait Ice Cream truck — check Twitter for its latest location (twitter.com/ParfaitIceCream), and if you catch it, order the garden-fresh mint stracciatella — but Full Tilt delivers a funky atmosphere that keeps you hanging around long after that salted caramel ice cream has been slurped.
In White Center, the ethnic hodge-podge of a neighborhood in an unincorporated area just south of Seattle, Justin Cline and his wife, Ann Magyar, have established an unofficial community center that dishes out a powerful combination of ice cream, vintage arcade games and occasional live music. (There’s also Belgian Tripel ale from the brewery around the corner.)
Mr. Cline is a tinkerer inspired by the ethnic grocery stores around him: there’s cinnamon-scented Mexican chocolate or ube, which is infused with the purple-red Filipino yam and tastes mildly of butterscotch. (There’s also a tub of vanilla littered with sprinkles and bashed-up store-bought birthday cake — a punk gesture that is not quite as tasty as it is funny.)
On a recent visit, I was a little disappointed that Mr. Cline was not yet making his Mexican-style popsicles in flavors like mango-chili and sweet tea. I soothed myself with a bowl of toasted coconut ice cream.
And then, while my son played Blasteroids in the back, a youth soccer team, with parents in tow, joyfully overtook the shop, with someone plunking down a box of trophies on a nearby table. Politically, sweets might be a loaded issue, but it’s hard to deny their neighborly power.
Full Tilt Ice Cream, 9629 16th Avenue SW (and two other locations); (206) 767-4811; fulltilticecream.com. Prices: from $2.75 to $3.50.
It’s all very neighborly, except that we’re not actually neighbors. We live five miles north, and drive past several alternatives along the way. We’re drawn to the bakery for its excellent morning treats, but we linger in the sunny space filled with pastry-induced bonhomie.
Perhaps it’s the slog through the dark winter months that makes Seattle-area residents crave sweets: a little extra sunshine, even if it’s only from butter and sugar. No matter the cause, this area has an impressive collection of sweet shops with strong ties to neighborhood residents.
COLUMBIA CITY BAKERY
Columbia City is owned by a serious bread maker, Evan Andres, but his impeccable loaves of pain de campagne and walnut levain share the spotlight with the sweets of his pastry kitchen, which is overseen by Karra Wise.
Her morning pastries are classics with extra textural intrigue like danishes with darkly burnished crusts, filled with lustrous hunks of rhubarb, or later in the season, plums or nectarines. Coffeecake here is not an aged and indifferent hunk of sweet bread, but a serious creation, often still warm and exuding tender sighs of cardamom.
And in the refrigerated case are the more potent sweets: fine and slinky chocolate pudding, delicate lemon bars and pretty — but not too pretty — cakes. A layered green and ivory pistachio cake is stout in form, but sprightly and charged with lemon on the tongue.
Columbia City Bakery, 4865 Rainier Avenue South; (206) 723-6023; columbiacitybakery.com. Prices: pastries range from $2.25 for a plain croissant to $4.25 for an individual fruit tart.
CAFE BESALU
A decade ago this October, James Miller sought to open a bakery off the beaten path, much like the European bakeries he remembers discovering by tracking flour footprints. He set up shop off the main drag in the Ballard neighborhood. But if Cafe Besalu was ever under the radar, its cover has long been blown. Even on a recent Wednesday, the line stretched from door to counter amid the scent of yeast, a quiet bebop melody and palpable anticipation.
Besalu is not the kind of place that relies on novelty for its appeal. Instead, you can order the most ordinary of options like a plain croissant and then chuckle at your luck: butter, flour and yeast have become airy pockets and a honey-gold crust, just for you. Mr. Miller creates those laminated layers himself, and I have yet to visit the bakery when he is not in his modest open kitchen, kindly greeting regulars, but rarely halting his work.
There’s no way to order poorly at Besalu: there’s the pain au chocolat, almost savory with its bitter chocolate core; a spiraling Danish with sliced strawberries tucked into its folds; or the hazelnut twist, plush sweet dough corkscrewing around dark toasted nut paste.
Cafe Besalu, 5909 24th Avenue NW; (206) 789-1463. Prices: from $1.85 for a cardamom pretzel to $4 for a fruit tart.
PANAMA HOTEL TEA AND COFFEE HOUSE
Chika Tokara’s medium is wagashi, a form of a Japanese confection: steamed sweets of rice and bean paste that are essentially small edible sculptures. Some are bracingly naturalistic, others abstract. Though she learned her arcane craft as a hobby in Japan, Ms. Tokara now fills orders for sweets from her office and is a wholesale supplier to a few local shops, including the Panama Hotel.
Forms of wagashi change with the seasons and are meant to accompany tea — or, more specifically, to immediately precede it. For this reason, I sought Ms. Tokara’s work at the Panama, which functions, improbably, as both a serene teahouse and a memorial to pre-internment Japanese-American life in Seattle.
My toddler clutched her trompe l’oeil cherry blossom — made of white bean paste — like a new toy, admiring its rosiness and intermittently sucking off little morsels. I sipped tea and nibbled at a natane-kinton, an ivory and green haystack-shaped creation that hid a cinnamon-colored orb of adzuki bean paste. The snacks, not unlike soft marzipan in texture, were much milder and less sweet.
Panama Hotel Tea and Coffee House, 607 South Main Street; (206) 515-4000; panamahotelseattle.com. Prices: $3.25 a piece. (Call to make sure that Ms. Tokara’s sweets are in stock; check tokaragashi.com for other outlets.)
THEO CHOCOLATE
There is nothing fleeting about the flavors at Theo Chocolate, the local upstart chocolate factory, which makes organic, fair-trade chocolate from the bean up. A bite of a 91 percent cacao bar made of Costa Rican beans lingers on the palate, tannic and lush. The bonbons and bars here are punched up with chili, salt, fennel or even single-malt Scotch.
The factory, in the Fremont neighborhood, occupies a building that was once a trolley barn and later a brewery. Tours of its production line are conducted several times a day. With frequent samples to keep us focused, we were instructed at length by our guide, a pipe-thin woman dressed in funky hand-sewn clothes, on the origins of chocolate, its cultivation and, naturally, the virtues of Theo’s environmentally conscious method.
It is hard to deny the cleverness of the machines on the production line: a potbellied roaster tumbling cacao beans, a scrolling conveyer belt longer than a football field that gently cools new-minted bars. Not surprisingly, the scent of hot cocoa was intoxicating.
Theo Chocolate, 3400 Phinney Avenue North; (206) 632-5100; theochocolate.com. Prices: from $1.25 for a peanut-butter buddy to $70.40 for a 32-piece box of confections.
BAKERY NOUVEAU
William Leaman, the chef and owner at Bakery Nouveau, led a team to victory at the 2005 Coup du Monde de la Boulangerie, and high on a shelf in his Valrhona-brown shop sits the enormous shiny trophy.
It seems that the polymath Mr. Leaman has never stopped competing, at least with himself, and the selection at Bakery Nouveau borders on overwhelming. There are thick slices of pizza (more like cheese-topped focaccia, but a favorite of my cheese-loving 5-year-old son); macarons in neon shades of pink, lilac and azure; and ham sandwiches on wee house-made baguettes.
Mr. Leaman and his crew also make other pastries: the bakery is celebrated for its twice-baked almond croissant, wildly sweet and craggy with baked almond cream, almond slivers and a blizzard of confectioners’ sugar (a cup of strong coffee is its appropriate partner).
But one gets the impression that Mr. Leaman’s greatest creative pleasures aren’t these casual treats, but the geometric cakes and mousse confections that shimmer in the refrigerated case.
These are stealthy desserts: the chocolate praline, for instance, smuggles crispy shards of feuilletine wafers inside its tawny mousse; wedges of chocolate cake in an armor of thin tiles of chocolate gleam darkly like Darth Vader, while golden cylinders of Phoenix cake hide pear mousse and pecan dacquoise beneath a caramel glaze.
Bakery Nouveau, 4737 California Avenue SW; (206) 923-0534; bakerynouveau.com. Prices: from $1.50 for a macaroon to $5.50 for a slice of Phoenix.
FULL TILT ICE CREAM
You might find more exquisite fare scooped from the roving Parfait Ice Cream truck — check Twitter for its latest location (twitter.com/ParfaitIceCream), and if you catch it, order the garden-fresh mint stracciatella — but Full Tilt delivers a funky atmosphere that keeps you hanging around long after that salted caramel ice cream has been slurped.
In White Center, the ethnic hodge-podge of a neighborhood in an unincorporated area just south of Seattle, Justin Cline and his wife, Ann Magyar, have established an unofficial community center that dishes out a powerful combination of ice cream, vintage arcade games and occasional live music. (There’s also Belgian Tripel ale from the brewery around the corner.)
Mr. Cline is a tinkerer inspired by the ethnic grocery stores around him: there’s cinnamon-scented Mexican chocolate or ube, which is infused with the purple-red Filipino yam and tastes mildly of butterscotch. (There’s also a tub of vanilla littered with sprinkles and bashed-up store-bought birthday cake — a punk gesture that is not quite as tasty as it is funny.)
On a recent visit, I was a little disappointed that Mr. Cline was not yet making his Mexican-style popsicles in flavors like mango-chili and sweet tea. I soothed myself with a bowl of toasted coconut ice cream.
And then, while my son played Blasteroids in the back, a youth soccer team, with parents in tow, joyfully overtook the shop, with someone plunking down a box of trophies on a nearby table. Politically, sweets might be a loaded issue, but it’s hard to deny their neighborly power.
Full Tilt Ice Cream, 9629 16th Avenue SW (and two other locations); (206) 767-4811; fulltilticecream.com. Prices: from $2.75 to $3.50.
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