Destination Good

First, some context:
Cafe Vignole—a two-year-old Italian restaurant in the South Lake
area of Rainier Beach, near the Seattle border—is on a block that
could generously be described as inauspicious. Part of a
forlorn-looking stretch of what must have once been a thriving little
business district, the cafe sits next to a nail salon and a real-estate
office that abuts an overgrown vacant lot. A late-night barbershop and
an auto-repair place anchor the other, mostly vacant, side of the
street. The number 7 bus terminates two stops beyond the restaurant; as
we waited for the bus back, the driver initially passed us, exclaiming
apologetically, “I’ve never seen anyone at that stop before!”

It’s been written recently in this space [“Newly Beloved,” Bethany
Jean Clement, Feb 19] that Seattle has more than enough Italian
restaurants, and that may be true. However, Cafe Vignole is the kind of
neighborhood gem that Southeast Seattle—particularly Rainier
Beach, which has suffered more than most parts of the city from the
economic downturn—desperately needs. It’s cozy, adorable,
affordable, and friendly. More importantly, it’s good—not
graded-on-a-curve good, not
thank-God-it’s-not-another-Tutta-Bella-or-Via-Tribunali good, but
extraordinarily good. Literally dream-about-it-that-very-night good.
Destination good. And since it’s practically in Renton, that’s saying
something.

We started a recent
Saturday-night meal with the chicken-liver
terrine ($8) and the special salad ($13), a grilled-romaine-and-shrimp
concoction that sounded too good to resist. The terrine—served on
charmingly mismatched tableware with cornichons and a generous pile of
grilled bruschetta—had a more pronounced liver
flavor than
the cream-and-butter-enriched pâtés so popular on
overpriced charcuterie platters. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good
thing; my dining partner, on the other hand, found that a little went a
long way.

However, we fought over the salad, a small miracle that demonstrated
how the right technique can make ordinary ingredients—lettuce,
egg yolks, lime juice, prawns—taste extraordinary. Romaine hearts
were very lightly grilled, then chilled and topped with a lime-scented
Caesar dressing; the prawns, arranged in an attentive-looking circle
around the lettuce, were perfectly juicy, slightly spicy, and still
blazing hot from the grill.

Will you believe me if I tell you that the plain cheese ravioli
($12) outmatched its chichi counterparts at places like La Spiga and
Tavolàta? It did. The two-toned pasta pillows—white pasta
on top with a surprise of green pasta underneath—were ethereal,
almost overstuffed with fluffy herbed ricotta and cooked just until
they still had a little bite. The sauce—a standard red, on the
thin rather than chunky side—was subtle, but then anything more
aggressive would have been overkill.

The baby back ribs—highly recommended in The Stranger‘s
reader reviews, and an
insane bargain at $16—is the kind of
dish I’d eat if I were going into battle. Pungently flavored with
rosemary and kalamata olives, meltingly soft, and big enough to feed a
small family, the four ribs topped two creamy slabs of baked
polenta—nothing fussy, just simple food, flawlessly executed. Two
juicy baked pork cutlets ($16), each as big as a tea saucer, came
topped with a spicy tomato sauce and just the right amount of sliced
mozzarella—enough to enjoy a little with each bite without
feeling like you’re eating a pile of cheese. Slightly al dente
sautéed green beans were a refreshing counterpoint in what was
otherwise a pretty meat- and starch-heavy meal.

Cafe Vignole started in 2006 as an odd
Italian-Southern hybrid
serving polenta and pasta alongside shrimp and grits. In its current
incarnation, however, the only hint of a Southern accent is on the
dessert menu, whose red-velvet and black-eyed-pea cakes Stranger reader-reviewers swear by, and on the restaurant’s answering machine,
where a woman’s voice informs callers that the restaurant’s name is
pronounced veen-yo-lay.

Too many Seattle residents’ notion of Southeast Seattle doesn’t
extend past Columbia City, which is a shame. While that trendy,
bustling neighborhood has its culinary charms—the shrimp po’boy
at Columbia City Ale House, the jerk ribs at Island Soul—they’re
few and far between enough to make a new destination restaurant (just a
half-hour bus ride from downtown) very welcome news.