Location: Seattle, Washington
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If there was ever a place to go in Seattle if you have a hankering for pickled fruits and veggies, Boat Street Café would be it. Even when not specifically interested in pickled fruits or vegetables you won’t be avoiding them. This is a great thing as you get to experience things
you typically won’t anywhere else, pickled fennel anyone? I am not the biggest pickling fan being the supertaster that I am. It adds a bit too much pickling flavor to the ingredient for my tastes, I don’t even like bleu cheeses because the taste is way too overpowering for my palette, but even I could appreciate the new flavors of the pickled veggies.
But pickled fruits and veggies is just the start at Boat Street Café. If you like, nay love, smoky bacon you need to try the bistro salad for your appetizer. Seriously, this bacon was so smoky that even I couldn’t finish all the bacon on the plate, and I love bacon! Continuing the pork theme, the pork belly is wonderfully oozy on the inside with alternating layers of meat and fat, with a superb crispy layer on top lending itself to the wonderful pork belly experience you might be expecting. Although I wasn’t so excited about the potatoes it was paired with. They weren’t bad or anything, they just weren’t anything amazing, unlike my wife’s entrée that night, the wild Alaskan True Cod. I almost wish I had ordered the True Cod, if I didn’t love pork so much. Wow, was that cod dish ever good. To round out the decadent dinner at Boat Street you really do need to treat yourself to the bread pudding for dessert, it’s tremendous.
The atmosphere at Boat Street is very interesting. I’m not sure how the Asian-inspired ceiling hangings blend with the French style bistro décor, but so be it, the food that come out of the kitchen is well worth your time. If you are familiar with another local French bistro Cremant, the décor is similar in many ways. Although Cremant lacks the very chic, window into the kitchen that was in the back at Boat Street.
The wine list is appropriately French as when we were there, they had an entire table in the corner stacked with enough Chateau Neuf de Pape to sink a battleship. I just had a glass of Beujolais to pair with my pork and it was wonderful. It was properly priced for a glass of wine and a nice balanced flavor to it.
I love that many restaurants nowadays are including the sources of their ingredients and Boat Street continues this trend for most of its dishes. If you’re looking for a restaurant with solid French bistro style offerings, you could easily do a lot worse than Boat Street Café.
In the interest of a quick lookup of the quality and value of a restaurant I am introducing the wine scale for my reviews. It’s basically a 5 wine glasses instead of stars review system with 5 wine glasses being perfect. Combining overall value for Boat Street Café I give it overall 4 wine glasses out of 5. Keep in mind, that there will be very few restaurants that get 5 wine glasses from me. After all, what is perfect?
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