Hello, eaters of Slog, and welcome to The Stranger's latest food column: Taste This, Seattle.
The theme here is to highlight individual dishes or beverages that really knocked my socks off over the past week. These aren’t full restaurant reviews, but they also aren’t mere “content.” The goal here is to provide you with an antidote to both via completely honest, unfiltered selections from my culinary wanderings. As a food writer, I probably eat out too much, but I frequently find myself discovering tastes that are so revelatory and wonderful I want everyone to know about them. Because after all, the best thing about food is sharing it with other people.
First stop: fish toast. Analog Coffee recently launched B-Side, a cafe that will soon inhabit the former Resto space below Analog. For now, you place your order at Analog, and go around the corner to wait at a small window for your food. B-Side offers three toast options—egg, fish, or sweet (all $6)—as well as meat/veg breakfast sandwiches ($7) and some sort of healthy bowl ($9). The breakfast sandwiches are quite good, but the thing you want is the fish toast.
The fish in question is delightfully flaky smoked trout, and they are quite generous with it. If you are one of those people who sneers at $6 toast, this cavalcade of protein will wipe that sneer off your face. Indeed, the whole affair begins with a small but intimidating mountain of trout. This is applied on top of a layer of tangy herbed yogurt, then topped with a lattice of pickled and fresh mandolined onions. The cold, zesty yogurt—it is the first thing that hits your tongue, after the toast itself—provides the perfect counterpoint to the pleasantly pliant mound of fish, and the acid of the onions is there to wrap the whole thing up for you with a nice, tidy bow. Flavorwise, I found it to be perfectly integrated.
This glorious symphony is all composed upon a slab of buttered rye with exactly the right amount of char. Yes, the toast is clearly insufficient to support the mountain of flaky goodness tamped down upon it, but that’s why they serve it in a paper boat and give you plenty of napkins. Anyone who claims they’ve never eaten the meat that falls out the back of an overloaded taco is lying to you. And for what reason? Shame should never factor into any dining experience (with the possible exception of Man vs. Food), and you should be similarly unashamed to to pinch the stray bits that accumulate in the boat between your fingertips and savor every single perfect bite.
Leave your sense of decorum elsewhere, take your toast and coffee down to the nearby Thomas St. Mini Park, and enjoy a quiet, personal moment with one of the finest eggless breakfast items our city has to offer. Just don’t forget those napkins.