Doing It for the People

Citizen is a minor miracle located on
the east flank of lower Queen Anne. The tiny new cafe and wine purveyor
and creperie may be found a block behind the mammoth new QFC on Mercer.
There’s not much else around: Laredos, a midrange Mexican place, is
marooned nearby (where mod-and-pale Veil failed to thrive), a Domino’s
and teriyaki are on the corner. It’s a pocket of the city that’s hard
by Aurora, close to Seattle Center, but it feels like nowhere. An
acronym has been forcibly applied to this area of late; it isn’t
sticking.

Next door to Citizen is a collision center, Werner’s Crash Shop. One
side of Werner’s reader board currently informs you that donations for
Northwest Harvest may be dropped off there; the other has a message
welcoming Citizen, reading in conclusion, “MMMMM!” While the latter may
arise from a vested interest—Werner’s Crash Shop is Citizen’s
landlord—it is still neighborly in the nicest way, much like
Citizen itself.

People sit at Citizen’s sidewalk picnic tables even when it’s not
warm enough to sit out there. (Maybe the mere fact that now there is
something, where before there was nothing, is magnetic.) The
soviet-style star-with-all-caps CITIZEN logo is stenciled on the
exterior, while the interior is a do-it-yourself triumph. Werner’s was
using it for offices and storage, but after looking at the building for
the 15 years she’s lived in the area, Suzana Olmos had another idea.
Inside, it’s taller than it is wide; any less determined imagination
would’ve faltered, but Olmos shoehorned in a miniature kitchen,
counter-style window seating, the world’s most compact wine shop, and
the world’s pleasantest loft. The shelves for the wine are cranberry
boxes requisitioned from the side of a country road; she also took
apart pieces of her own furniture to make parts of Citizen. Upstairs,
just a few tables and some repurposed lecture-hall seating roost under
weathered wooden beams and planks of ceiling and exposed brick. The
reclamation is genuine, rough around all the right edges. It’s not an
unfamiliar ethos; it’s one that’s currently often appropriated by those
with actual budgets. The copies never quite work, though, because they
don’t have heart.

Citizen’s ethos of crepe making is not what you’d call restrained.
The French tradition—just a few fillings, virtue in
simplicity—has been abandoned under the leadership of co-owner
Justin Taft (of Georgetown’s small but hugely popular Hangar Cafe). The
namesake crepe ($8.95) has avocado and roasted asparagus and spinach
and caramelized onions and goat cheese and bacon; the October special
($8.95) was andouille sausage, mozzarella, tomato, spinach, caramelized
onions, and crème fraîche. It’s crepes à la excess:
a crepe as something to stuff an entire salad into, or as a kind of
flattened neo-burrito. Even the selections with only three ingredients
are drizzled with maple syrup or balsamic dressing. People love all
this, raving in The Stranger‘s online reader-reviews and
elsewhere, but purists should know that the Citizens don’t get uptight
if you want to build your own, less complicated version. I recommend
ham, Swiss, and Citizen’s fine, light mushroom cream sauce (they
charged $7.95), with the crepe ordered on the browner side. (The
kitchen’s standard seems to be quite pale, which can be slightly
gummy.) The requisite sweet crepes ($7.25 each) are made with Nutella,
or caramelized apples and melted Brie (high viscosity), or homemade
lemon curd.

There are also sandwiches: a number of cold ones and grilled ones, a
couple pork specialties, and Vietnamese-banh-mi-style ($5.95–$7).
A random sampling did not turn up anything remarkable, but all were
entirely serviceable, especially at the price (they come with
kettle-type potato chips). However, soup at Citizen on a chilly day
falls into the category of humanitarian aid (at $3.50 a cup, $6.50 a
bowl). Recently, cream of broccoli was deliciously smoky-tasting, not
pureed too fine, and hinted that it might have cheese stirred in;
chicken noodle was peppery and bright, the white wine in the stock
still asserting itself in a good way.

Speaking of humanitarian aid and wine, Citizen’s doing it for the
people. A nothing-fancy but careful selection of bargains are all $5 a
glass, and bottles are absurdly low-priced and all available to go. How
absurdly low-priced? A bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers: $9.95. A Washington
merlot called, fittingly, Revelry: $12. Top of the line: a Sangiovese
for $18.95. For brunch, big, beautiful glowing pints of mimosa, made
with prosecco and your choice of orange or grapefruit juice (get half
and half), are $5.75. The markup on wine is about the same as at the
QFC: It’s a revolution!

If you’ve got about $20 and a similarly endowed friend or two, a
very satisfying time is waiting for you at Citizen. A note about
waiting, however: Going at an off-hour will give you a much better
chance at a table, as people are already onto Citizen’s charms. Also
note that these charms do not include speed—recall that the
kitchen is very small—and that while service isn’t impeccable,
it’s impeccably friendly. One server who’d forgotten to bring a glass
of wine (it did not appear on the bill) ran out onto the sidewalk
afterward to apologize. Nobody minded.