This is not, however, what makes food from Dish D'Lish a contradiction. It's more a matter of context, since you've bought these dishes from a gussied-up deli case in the Pike Place Market, devotional epicenter for dedicated home cooks. You might pretend you'd cook food like this yourself, but face it: You won't. All right, don't you feel better now that you've said it?
Anyway, cooking, as Laurie Colwin once wrote, is a combination of shopping and applying heat, knowing what to buy and what to cook. You can go ahead and virtuously poach your own salmon for dinner, but Dish D'Lish's tangy mushrooms with herbs ($7.99/lb.) are already done. (And it's open until 7:00 p.m., unlike the rest of the market, which closes around 5:00 p.m.)
Gourmet and takeout have always had an uneasy relationship, since much depends on freshness. Luckily, another part depends on deepening flavor through marinades, through proximity with other ingredients. This means the foods that successfully survive the deli case are ones that aren't sensitive to sitting around for a while, and might actually improve from it--such as a naturally sweet 'n' sour ruby cabbage dish with apples and cranberries ($4.99/lb.), pork tenderloin with pear chutney ($8.99/lb., and excellent cold), and balsamic-soaked cipolline onions ($8.99/lb.). A pot sticker and peanut salad ($5.99/lb.)--sticky, wilted, and confused by the time I ate it--was not as successful. (Some takeout advice: Pasta almost never does well over time.) Tomato and mozzarella caprese skewers ($1.99 each) were adorable, but rather bland (perhaps a more potent vinaigrette for tart winter tomatoes?).
Everything here is about two or three notches above how you would make it at home--double garlic bread, mac and cheese made with four cheeses--because Casey's signature is a surplus of ingredients, the more the better... sometimes. Sometimes excess is just excessive.
There are also plenty of other things to buy: cocktail mixes in bright pretty shades of pink and aqua, special salt blends, gingerbread houses. It's all a very pretty package, very sparkly, quite unlike the DIY vibe of the Pike Place Market. But perhaps (God help us) closer to who we actually are?
Dish D'Lish
1501 Pike Place (near the fish throwers), 223-1848.
Open Mon-Sat 10 am-7 pm, Sun 10 am-5 pm.
