I always feel lucky to be eating and drinking in Seattle (especially right now, when cherry season is under way and breweries are pouring a ton of light summer lagers and pilsners), but as I was looking over our Food & Drink calendar, I realized it's a particularly good week for special dinners, pop-ups, cooking classes, and whiskey tastings.
Tuesday, June 23
Tonight, chef Dustin Ronspies is hosting an Offal Dinner at his Fremont restaurant Le Petit Cochon. The menu includes trotter tots, English pea ravioli with smoked pig brains and clams, black cod with dilled beef heart ragout, and a dessert involving beef tendon. It's not a menu for everyone, but I have to applaud Ronspies’ effort to expose more people to the virtues of offal.
Wednesday, June 24
Before there was Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, there was Carl Sagan's series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Tonight, thanks to some beer-loving UW astronomy graduate students, you can watch the first episode, "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean," while drinking a beer at Ballard's Bad Jimmy's Brewing Co. The event, called Astronomy on Tap, will also feature trivia and a discussion by a guest speaker on the discoveries that have been made since the series first aired. I love this idea. Science!
At Osteria La Spiga on Capitol Hill, chef Sabrina Tinsley will teach a Gnochetti 101 class, where you'll learn to make gnochetti (little gnocchi) and get to eat food such as fried artichokes and strawberry panna cotta.
Thursday, June 25
At MOHAI, Westland Distillery founder Emerson Lamb will discuss local distilling history and recently passed legislation that has made Washington a very friendly state for craft distilling. Admission to the event, called History on the Rocks, includes one pour of Westland's excellent American Single Malt Whiskey.
Friday, June 26
Two great pop-ups are happening at Pike Place Market's Atrium Kitchen on this day: First, chef Hiro Tawara's Beauty of Kaiseki, exploring the Japanese tradition of coursed meals comprised of artfully plated, seasonal dishes. Tawara's menu includes grilled Copper River salmon with hydrangea-shaped squid sushi. (Speaking of kaiseki, Seattle is about to get its own kaiseki restaurant when chef Shota Nakajima, formerly of Sushi Kappo Tamura, opens his restaurant Naka, in the former Le Zinc space on Capitol Hill tomorrow.)
Then, on Friday evening, Filipina chef Yana Gilbuena will take over the space for her traveling pop-up Salo, which she's been bringing around the country with the goal of holding Filipino feasts in all 50 states. Gilbuena serves all of her meals in the traditional Filipino kamayan style, in which you eat with your hands. Food is served family-style on banana leaves for everyone to share.
Saturday, June 27
Tamale-making classes at Beacon Hill's El Centro de la Raza are very popular, in part because you get to learn how to make tamales from actual home cooks who use generations' old family recipes. There's no doubt lard in many of these recipes, but this Saturday's Vegetarian Tamale-Making Class is geared toward those who don't eat meat. There will be cheese tamales, but more importantly, you'll learn how to make make banana-leaf-steamed tamales stuffed with a vegan mole sauce.
Sunday, June 28
Burn off calories at the Fourth Annual Eat Run Hope 5K at Magnuson Park—or you can skip the 5K part and just eat and drink in the chef's tent, where there will be food from restaurants including Hitchcock, Mamnoon, Revel, Stateside, as well as ice cream from Molly Moon's. The event, put on by Ethan Stowell Restaurants, is a benefit for the national Fetal Health Foundation.
Monday, June 29
Bodegón, from Chez Panisse alum chef Chris Lally, has been popping up in Georgetown for the last few months, but tonight, Lally is brining his Spanish-inspired food north to Belltown.
Over at Delancey in Ballard, they're holding a dinner of Greek Wines and Wood Fires, with five courses of wood-oven-cooked food, including roasted lamb and, according to the restaurant, some of the season's first tomatoes(!).
Tuesday, June 30
This will be a particularly good night to check out the On the Line: Guest Chef dinner series at downtown's RN74. Ethan Stowell will be cooking, along with Portland chefs Gabrielle Quiñónez Denton and Greg Denton of Ox (don't click on this link to their beautiful, meat-centric menu if you're the slightest bit hungry), who were finalists this year for the James Beard Best Chef Northwest award.
