S&M Dining

A re you ready to submit?

Three of Seattle’s top chefs—at the Corson Building,
Spinasse, and Poppy—want to dominate you.

They want you to give up control, to surrender to their will, in
order (they hope) to please you in exponentially greater ways. They get
vicarious pleasure (they hope) through what they impose on you:
dictating what you’re going to put in your mouth, who you’re going to
do it with, and/or how much you’re going to pay for the privilege. In
return for your submission (of your will, of the contents of your
wallet), they promise things your average vanilla restaurant won’t
do.

Dinner at the Corson Building is officially known as “Evening at the
Corson Building,” which is a promise and a warning: You give Matthew
Dillon your night, and he has his way with you. There’s one seating per
evening, no host stand, no menu, no tables for two; for your $90 a
person (plus $30 for selected-for-you wine pairings), you sit cheek by
jowl with whoever else happens to be there, eating course after course
of Dillon and Emily Crawford’s choosing. (Wednesdays and Sundays bring
fewer courses and reduced prices.) Some of the obvious payoffs: weather
permitting, sparkling wine and appetizers in the beautiful garden of
the tiny estate, which is marooned in industrial Georgetown; the
instant-European-vacation aspect of the elegant but anti-fussy interior
of the 1910 Corson Building; the charming ministrations of handsome
co-owner Wylie Bush; the food of a nationally renowned chef. The
fetishization of the local and the seasonal that Dillon was inured to
in his training at the Herbfarm is absolutely in force here, to diners’
vast advantage—providing they’re sufficiently adventurous eaters
to enjoy what the local seasons have to offer. Dillon doesn’t pull
punches when it comes to meat, either, serving tongue, headcheese,
whatever he likes.

One thing you don’t get at the Corson is a
stare-into-each-other’s-eyes date, and unless you bring a crowd,
there’s no guarantee that the person next to you will be safely into
what you’re into. One couple who resolutely ignored the rest of their
communal table incurred wrath from a commenter on Chowhound.com: “Stay
home or… book a quiet table for two somewhere where your milquetoast
personalities won’t interfere with the dining enjoyment of others.”
(One of the accused milquetoasts responded that this electronic
dressing-down had “totally ruined the experience and my birthday.”) A
reviewer in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently described being
“sandwiched between” one party getting exercised about politics and
another speaking Hebrew (“awkward,” she wrote; “How about an
icebreaker… introducing yourself and naming your favorite season and
your favorite seasoning?”). The same reviewer upbraided Dillon for not
providing enough food, as some platters were emptied before making it
around the table. And everyone agrees: The seats at the Corson are
unusually close together—you’re practically in your neighbor’s
lap—and the benches are rock hard.

Dillon knows he’s making people uncomfortable, and he likes it.
“It’s my social experiment,” he says. It is indeed about who’s in
charge—he’s the lord of the manor, and you’re his guests, at his
feast. “It was a strategic move by me to take control away and to take
comfortability away. When people have too much of those two things,
their assumptions and preconceived notions come too much into play.” He
feels entirely justified: “I’m the one who put all the money up, and
I’m the one back there working.” In the interests of depriving diners
of what they’re used to, throwing them off balance, he has “stripped it
down—the restaurant became very naked. They either run, which is
fine, or their senses are heightened.” If you want control for your
$120, take it elsewhere.

Dillon mentions Zen Buddhist philosophy, saying that the style of
service is meant to create awareness of fellow diners, to underscore
that the world doesn’t revolve around you. “Everybody’s different,
that’s the beauty of it—all these experiences put in one room is
one big energy level.” The diners are invited to visit the kitchen,
too; Dillon sees it as an equalizer. “For us and the customer, we’re
all in the same boat here, we’re all in this together.” It’s to diners’
advantage, he maintains, that they’re all getting the same thing,
because it gives the kitchen more focus. “We’re all working on one
thing, which is dinner, not one plate at a time.” He hopes that people
would join in when it comes to dining-table political discussions, and
he says everyone’s told to police themselves, to have some
self-control—platters have to go all the way around the table.
Part of giving up responsibility brings new responsibilities with it,
rules that look a lot like those of life in general: Don’t be a drag
and don’t be a hog. The Corson is a luxury experience that seeks to
re-
define luxury, that refuses to go soft on you.

For the Corson, so far, so good. Online diners’ reviews tend toward
glowing—e.g., from www.thestranger.com: “Can’t stop thinking
about it… Matt Dillon’s kitchen quietly pockets the Herbfarm torch.
Honest and open to everyone, both humble and generous.” And the
romantic-daters and other-people-haters seem to be self-selecting out.
But are there enough deep-pocketed selectors-in to fill the tables at
premium prices? Will Dillon’s substantial reputation make—and
keep—the Corson enough of a destination, like the
long-established Herbfarm, to weather the long economic winter that’s
coming?

Justin Neidermeyer’s experiment in family-style communal dining on
Capitol Hill, Spinasse, is less expensive than the Corson, less
sweeping in scope, and has already been adjusted to better suit your
desires. Much has been made of Spinasse’s rustic charms: the white lace
curtains, the candles picturesquely dripping wax on the long shared
tables, both Neidermeyer’s pasta-cutting tools and his kitchen on
display as portraits in craft. The simple, wonderful Piedmontese
cuisine has been the subject of the kind of labyrinthine analysis and
elaborate praise that would make actual people in Piedmont laugh
uproariously while they poured another glass of wine. (One reviewer
compared a bowl of Neidermeyer’s pasta to Edith Piaf, later bringing in
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and authenticity versus simulacra.)
What is uppermost in all minds right now is value: Is a $20 bowl of
pasta, eaten in close quarters with unknown-quantity humans, worth
it?

Spinasse served exclusively family-style set menus when it opened,
requiring each party to reach consensus on what dishes to order: two
courses for $32 per person, four for $47, or everything for $75. But
people walked in wanting to have—expecting to be able to
have—pasta and a glass of wine. The pushback was strong enough
that Neidermeyer immediately and seriously reconsidered the value of
his concept versus the value of giving people what they want. After
only four days, he gave up: Spinasse began also offering everything on
the menu à la carte. He had envisioned a quiet little place with
customers obediently enjoying his European vision of service, but, he
says, “The reality is we had to adjust really quickly. We don’t live in
a place where that’s normal, and I don’t want to be the cowboy that
tries to make it normal…. It’s how the culture eats…. In a perfect
world, I’d love for all of us to be able to do these ideas and have it
work. But in America, people are used to getting whatever they fucking
want all the time.”

But Neidermeyer is not giving up on communal seating, nor is he
doing it because it’s in vogue; with him, it’s not a pretension. “I
just like big giant tables,” he says. “I think it’s cool, and it’s the
best way to maximize the space, and it fits the style well. I’m not
trying to push politics on people.” When you can see and smell what
other people are eating, he says, “You get more dinner out of it.” He
reckons that approximately 50 percent of customers agree. Spinasse is
crowded and loud for a pricier place—Neidermeyer says he hears a
fair number of complaints along the lines of “I’m from Madrona, and I
pay a lot of money to eat here, and I can’t have a conversation with my
husband.” But again, it’s 50-50. “Half the people are like, ‘You should
do something about the noise,’ and the other half love it.” He’s with
the other half: “It’s healthy, it’s packed and smelly and loud, like a
real trattoria.” (Seats at the bar, with the prime view of the pasta
counter and kitchen, fill up at 5:00 p.m., even on Sunday.)

Half is apparently enough. Spinasse is
crazy-busy, and its
praises are sung online with very few exceptions. Even those for whom
it’s a splurge happily sit next to strangers to eat Neidermeyer’s food.
The noise and turnover make the big tables feel natural—you’re
not lodged next to the same people all night, and the bustle can create
bubbles of privacy. No one’s focused on their neighbors.

It’s true that all of this is nothing new in culinary culture. Prix
fixe or tasting menus are as old as eating out itself, and no novelty
locally: The Herbfarm, with its single seating nightly, has been

doing it (and charging an arm and a leg for it) forever. After
more than a decade as the only world-famous chef in these parts, Jerry
Traunfeld left the Herbfarm’s rarified Eastside confines to open his
own restaurant, Poppy, at the north end of Broadway. (During Matthew
Dillon’s formative years cooking at the Herbfarm, Traunfeld was his
mentor. And Dillon and Neidermeyer run with the same avant-garde
young-chef crowd, making parties out of slaughterings, sharing
purveyors, and pushing one another in new directions, including
questioning the most basic assumptions about the restaurant as an
institution.)

Traunfeld did not go the controversial communal-table route at
Poppy, but long before the first dinner was served, speculation
commenced about the viability of its menu concept: dinner served on a
thali, a tray with many small-sized dishes meant for one person. In the
Indian tradition, a thali is an all-you-can-eat affair, a sort of
mini–Indian buffet with free refills; at Poppy, it’s $30-plus per
person, and you get what Traunfeld wants to give you, in amounts as he
sees fit.

On food message boards prior to Poppy’s opening, gourmands and
restaurant insiders wondered many, many things—like how much of
the contents of a thali would be premade each day and how much cooked
to order, how the kitchen would deal with the challenge of not only
putting the thalis out but making them pretty. Other concerns came from
the gut: “What if there are really only one or two things on the Poppy
menu that I like? At best I’m going to have to plod through eight or
nine other things to get a couple bites of them.” A couple months in,
the master Traunfeld says it’s about trust, flipping this equation
around: “It’s this idea that you’re trusting that we’re cooking what’s
best that day. And there are 10 things on there, so if you don’t like
one, you’re still going to have a lot of things to enjoy.”

Traunfeld says the thalis are, in fact, more labor-intensive than a
conventional menu, as is making significant changes to the offerings
every week (a goal of his, for customers who might come in that often).
“We’re trying to provide a great value, and I think it is,” he says.
“The amount of work we’re doing in the kitchen….” His voice trails
off. “And we’re still using the ingredients we were using at the
Herbfarm,” meaning local and organic. (The most local of it all comes
from the garden he created in back, quite a change from the rear exit
of the former tenant, the gay bar the Elite.) “Some people expect
Indian food, and that’s not what I’m doing. It’s Northwest food, with a
little more spices.”

Poppy’s prototypically urban-contemporary space—exposed brick
walls, simple furnishings, close-set tables, poppy-orange dots as
whimsical woodwork and menu accents—is full every night,
Traunfeld says. He’s getting “lots of great feedback in the dining
room” and seeing repeat customers there. “If I never read any of the
online stuff…” he says, chagrined; diners’ reviews online are
decidedly mixed. “Obviously, some people want a menu with full
choices—we’re trying to accommodate them,” he says. The two meat
items on the thalis can be swapped out for vegetarian options, and
there’s also a list of bar snacks and a few more plates. But it’s not
the concept that the negative reviewers seem to have a problem
with—it’s that they’re not loving very much of what they’re
getting on their thalis. An early review in the P-I recounted two
positive experiences and one “completely underwhelming one,” citing
underseasoning and problems with cooking, and suggesting Traunfeld
reapply himself to his tasting spoon—a serious call-out,
especially for a chef of his stature.

The buzz around Poppy is prodigious, but for some customers, the
concept isn’t deconstructing expectations as much confounding them.
Would the kitchen fare better executing a regular-style menu—one
that would also give diners a better chance of selecting dishes they’ll
like? Traunfeld discounts naysayers: “It seems to be working for us.”
Poppy is still in its honeymoon phase, however—everyone wants to
see what Traunfeld is up to. Is he concerned about a risk-taking
concept—one that a significant proportion of online reviewers so
far have failed to fall in love with—staying popular in a
faltering consumer climate? He says, “Every restaurant owner has a
concern about the economy now, so again, you just have to see how
business is doing. And it’s doing fine right now.” But Traunfeld
recently asked Neidermeyer how his switch to à la carte is
working for him.

My father, a notably liberal man in almost every regard, reacted
nearly violently when I told him about the restaurants in this piece:
“NO,” he said, then amended that with a curse. He’s not alone. Many
people are loath to relinquish control of their eating experience. You
know them (and you may even be one): They hate shared plates, large or
small; they do not think it’s interesting or forward-thinking to eat
with strangers; and when it’s suppertime, they want it on their terms
as much as possible. If it comes with a bill, there’s no room for
negotiation.

Then there are those who like being dominated at the table, who
actively want it, who can’t get enough. A woman I know (a very
opinionated woman, a champion of critical thinking, of argument, of
choice in all areas of life) loves it. She’s happy to be released from
decision-making at dinner, and the attendant helplessness—the
idea that someone is going to anticipate and provide for her needs
without her even having to select a seat or look at a menu—is a
balm, an ecstasy. Elemental@Gasworks—where
owner/waitperson/sommelier Phred Westfall has made domineering an art
form—is her all-time favorite restaurant. “I want to be told what
to do,” she said. She’s not yet been to the Corson or Spinasse or
Poppy, but she’s thrilled at the idea of more places that carry out her
fantasy.

Most people, as usual, occupy the middle ground—they might
like something other than eating out vanilla-style, but it’s going to
have to be really, really good (and not too scary) to lure them away
from their familiar position. If you’re going to take control away from
people and require them to pay for the privilege, you’ve got to make
them like it—you’ve got to shock them with how intensely good it
can be. Even then, some will only want to try it once, especially when
their dining dollars are fewer and farther between. Between the rock of
people’s natural resistance to change and the hard place the economy is
going, Poppy and the Corson may well be doing some Spinasse-style
reevaluation in the not too distant future.