Eight Months of Eating, 10 Outstanding Dishes

Culture shock? Here's the last meal I reviewed in Dallas.

Year-end lists are always agonizing. It's not easy pitting a burger against octopus crudo when bestowing "best of" status, or whittling down the candidate list to five, 10 or some other arbitrary number. But the task is especially hard when you didn't show up in Seattle until April.

For the purposes of my retrospective, I'm working off an eight-month calendar. I'm sure if I spent more time on Google, I could find an ancient tribe that did the same.

And here's a photo I shot on my first day in Seattle.

So rather than declare the best dishes of the year - while I've had incredible food since April, I have no idea what Seattleites were eating in February - I've put together a list of 10 outstanding dishes that I'll still be contemplating come 2012:

***

Ham cracklings, The Coterie Room
"The Coterie Room's Overabundance of Richness", Nov. 16

It's best to nab a table even if you're just banking on bar snacks. And it's somewhat silly here to talk about snacks, plural, since there's only one snack you'll be wanting: ham cracklings...To make its bully cracklings, the kitchen first makes a ham stock. The stock's heated to 194 degrees and tossed in a blender with tapioca flour, then the whole hammy mess is rolled in plastic wrap. Once set, cooks shave off and fry bits of the stock/flour log. The resulting translucent wisps are extraordinary, their captivating lightness a worthy rejoinder to the old question about flying pigs.

Omelet, Marche
"Marche's Bottle Shock", Dec. 7

A peppery omelet, stuffed according to the season, for one. Made rich and yellow by organic eggs, the rolled omelet's joined by a poof of oiled butter-lettuce leaves that bring a surprising amount of razzmatazz to the most basic of bistro preparations. The quiet omelet is almost radically rustic, and--as Elizabeth David famously counseled--enormously enhanced by a glass or two of wine.

Chipotle Prawns, Poquitos
"Breaking the Rules at Poquitos", Jun. 29

There are sufficient enticements here to feed fantasies and spur multiple return trips. Take the shrimp, which I rationalized back to my table by pointing out that my second-round dining companions deserved the opportunity to try it. The half-pound of plump prawns are shrouded in a maroon-hued chipotle garlic sauce that stings the fingers. While the curlicued critters are no doubt designed to be swaddled in one of Poquitos' cushy, housemade corn tortillas, it's tempting to treat them like Mexican crawfish, alternating swigs of draft Pacifico with brave gulps of saucy shrimp.