Seattle's Essential Dishes: Assiette de Anything at Le Pichet

Any of the Daily Assiette plates from Le Pichet:

The crowds at Le Pichet are crazy. At 2pm. On a friggin' Monday.

On a day and at an hour when many other restaurateurs would be perfectly willing to dance around naked on the street wearing only a sandwich board advertising their daily specials, Le Pichet (which took home this year' Best of Seattle award for Best French Restaurant) is just jamming--moving the customers on and off the miniscule patio and in and out of the small-ish dining room at a breakneck pace.

And yet, once you get yourself one of those seats, you can just camp there--spend an hour or two or three (well, maybe not three) just picking your way through the menu le déjeuner, drinking uncommon bottles of crisp Belgian beer and generally just eating yourself into a sausage-induced food coma.

I love the dinner menu at Le Pichet as much as the next guy. Hell, I love it as much as the next three guys--the poulet roti and mijoté d'agneau aux pois-chiches et aux abricots secs figuring heavily into some of my more disturbing culinary wet dreams and forming the apex of my personal bell curve assessment of French restaurants in this city.

But the thing at Le Pichet that's essential? The thing that not only matters more than a hundred poulets, but will stand as the one (or two) things that I will weep for when, eventually, I leave this town again? That would be the assiette. Any kind of assiette, eaten during lunch on a gray day and washed down with three short glasses of Belgian ale while while I sat and listened to the beautiful whistling sound made by hours, responsibilities and deadlines as they went slipping past me.

The assiettes are kind of like Le Pichet's greatest hits mix tapes--combinations of all their best meats or all their best cheeses, all slapped together on a single large plate and served with nothing more than a bit of bread, a scattering of cornichons and a touch of mustard from the cool little pot on every table. Rillete du porc, 16-month prosciutto, beef tongue, blood sausage, unusual forcemeats rarely seen outside the poverty-stricken regions of their invention--these all feature on the assiette de charcuterie. And the assiette de fromage is almost as good, matching a half-dozen fantastic cow, goat and sheep's-milk cheeses on one plate and serving them absolutely naked of all garniture, clad in nothing but their own awesomeness.

My suggestion? Just get both--one of each and enough beer to see you through. And if you do, I promise that you will understand something about the tastes of a city that can not only support a restaurant like this, but make it so popular that I can sometimes have trouble getting a seat on a weekday afternoon.