A Little Bit More on Nettletown

​Earlier today, in Morning Food News, Erika Hobart talked about the opening of Nettletown (the really, really new restaurant just opened by Christina Choi and her partner, Matt Dillon, in Dillon's old Sitka & Spruce space at 2238 Eastlake Avenue). Personally, I've been watching the blog posts and reading the interviews with Choi for the past few weeks, and while most of them have had to do with salvaged wood bar tops, foraged produce, local ingredients and blah blah blah, what really caught my eye about Nettletown was the menu. Two things about the menu, really.

First, there's the fact that Choi--a first-time restaurateur but long-time cook, chef and supplier (she co-founded Foraged & Found Edibles along with chef Jeremy Faber)--decided to go the one-meal route at open. But rather than trying to compete on the dinner scene, she went in only for lunch service (plus weekend brunches), with a base menu buoyed up by lots of daily specials. That's smart. Very smart. And it allows her the liberty to expand into dinners at some later date when she, her space, her kitchen and her crew are ready for it.

The second thing that got me about the menu? The strange, competing directions of her influences.

In my time, I have watched chefs hop a lot of borders in pursuit of various, small muses. I've eaten my way through menus that spanned continents, had dishes that, all alone, owed allegiance to no less than a half-dozen different culinary traditions. Some of these mutt experiments in world food fusion have worked. French-Vietnamese? Brilliant, and with a solid historical backstory. Pakistani-British? Delicious and beautifully low-rent when done right. I've seen Indo-Caribbean work, have eaten at plenty of Japanese-French and Japanese-Thai and Chinese-Thai-Vietnamese and Vietnamese-French-Inland California restaurants that managed to stitch together a workable canon.

But I've also seen these kinds of experiments fail gloriously--self-destructing with loud, sad and hilarious results. There was the Mexican deli run by Chinese guys down the street from my old apartment in Albuquerque (only place I've ever seen wok-fried chimichangas with cabbage and glass noodles); the Amer-Asian wine bar in Denver that spent thousands of dollars on the stemware, but couldn't find a chef who could remember to cook the chicken, and the Pac Rim/sushi/noodles-and-fish-fry joint where everything tasted like wasabi, even dessert. Oh, and the World Burritos concept! I loved that one. And when I say "loved," what I mean is hated-like-poison. Curry seafood burritos? They were so bad that I couldn't even swallow a single bite...

And while it's way too early to make any guesses about the future of Nettletown (I haven't even had a sandwich there yet), in her new kitchen, Choi has gone in what looks to me like a truly original direction, mixing up her own roots (Chinese and Swiss) with hints of Japanese, Vietnamese and Pacific Northwest traditions. The result is a board that puts Swiss knoepfli (egg noodle dumplings) with cabbage, leeks and garlic alongside Chinese egg noodles (from Rose Noodle in Chinatown, natch) with greens, mushrooms, garlic and five-spice pork ribs. There's ginger shortbread beside "fancy trail mix," fried rice next to baked eggs and bread, fried egg sandwiches on the same board as ones made from lemongrass elk meatballs.

That's brave. That's different. And also, that's a menu I want to try, like, now. Good thing then that Nettletown opened the doors on March 10 (just a little bit past the promised opening date of February, which ain't bad at all for a first-time owner) and is just now starting to get their legs under them. The full lunch/brunch menu is now being served and I'm already making plans for dropping by to get my fix of Swiss/Chinese comfort food as soon as I find few free minutes.