Joshua Huston

The patio at Poquitos

​The spare, referential dining room that's lately taken hold in Seattle is costly and loud, but leading Seattle restaurateurs say they wouldn't have it any other way.

In a panel discussion last night hosted by the Seattle Architecture Foundation, Ethan Stowell (Ethan Stowell Restaurants); Chad Dale (Revel; The Walrus and The Carpenter); Deming Maclise and James Weimann (Bastille, Poquitos) explored the intimate relationship between successful restaurants and design. All four participants ultimately sided with simplicity, history and good lighting.

Even in dives, Maclise said, "I'm usually wishing they had spent a few bucks for a dimmers switch. That place could have been way cooler."

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​Tea has been a popular beverage for thousands of years, but pastry chef David Booth says cooks are just beginning to fully appreciate tea as an ingredient.

"Tea is a unique flavor," says Booth, who's leading a program on tea-infused pastries at next weekend's Victoria Tea Festival. Billed as the continent's biggest tea exhibition, the festival features 45 exhibitors and presentations covering tea cocktails; tea etiquette; tea tasting; tea blending and the medicinal properties of tea.

Booth, owner of Terrible Truffles in Victoria, is preparing jasmine shortbread and strawberry-chamomile custard for the event. He's also contemplating a new truffle. "Maybe something smoky," he says. "I'm always flying by the seat of my pants."

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​There's an old joke about a man who meets a farmer on the road. The farmer's carrying a bag marked "chickens." "If I guess how many chickens are in the bag, can I have one?," the man asks. "Shoot," the farmer says. "If you guess right, you can have both of them."

That joke might not work if the farmers were women. According to Margaret Viebrock, chair of WSU Extension's upcoming Women in Agriculture conference, farming women don't play guessing games. They're eager to share their knowledge with other women trying to farm successfully.

"They like to cooperate and do things together," says Viebrock, WSU Douglas County Extension director. "They don't think twice about sharing parts of their business plan."

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​Upon learning that salmon barbecue is a non-starter in Seattle, I was beginning to worry about Washington's low and slow scene. But having spent Saturday at the judges' table for the Pacific Northwest Barbecue Association's Winter Burn-Off in Snohomish, I'm inclined to think the state of regional barbecue is growing stronger.

Best as I could tell, the Burn-Off was arranged by a very talented pit master who was in the mood to win a contest: He and four other cook teams prepared chicken and pork ribs for a panel of judges headed by the inevitable winner's wife (To be fair, she didn't vote: He would have out-smoked the competition without her involvement.) I learned of the event while exploring the Pacific Northwest Barbecue Association's website; Since the unsanctioned contest didn't require official PNBWA credentials, my Memphis in May judging certification made me a viable volunteer.

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​When the BlogHerFood conference opens in Seattle this June, the annual event will be celebrating its fourth anniversary, which means many attendees have already learned how to shoot video, correctly attribute recipes and use their blogs as a political platform. That's why this year's programming is organized in three different tracks.

"We're really acknowledging the growth of food blogs, so we're targeting beginning, intermediate and advanced bloggers," BlogHer co-founder and chief operating officer Elisa Page says. "It doesn't mean you're going to be stuck in a track, but we're focusing on levels."

The Seattle agenda, announced this week, includes a beginners' session on food literacy, in which participants will learn the meaning of buzzwords such as "natural" and "organic" that pop up in press releases; an intermediate session on trends in food photography and a session for advanced bloggers on "pushing boundaries." There's also a session on humor.

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​For readers of Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, there aren't any surprises in the Burke Museum's new exhibit of the same name, featuring large-scale images from the popular book documenting dietary practices around the globe. Here are the Melanders of northern Germany, posed with piles of rosy red cold cuts and dark beer; the Ukitas of Japan, kneeling around an array of handsomely-labeled boxes, bottles and foil packages and the Casaleses of Cuernavaca, sharing their kitchen with stacks of tortillas and bushels of fruit.

The husband-and-wife team of Menzel and D'Alusio, a photographer and travel writer, traveled to 24 countries to document families surrounded by what they consumed over the course of the week. The pair has since reapplied its approach to individuals, recently issuing What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets, but the family portraits from the 2005 book are the ones edging toward iconic status.

Relentless press coverage has sapped the images of novelty, but they remain provocative - especially when printed in an oversized format. Exhibition dimensions allow for unprecedented dissection of detail and conversation. Many schoolchildren will no doubt tromp through this gallery before the exhibit closes in June, tasked with finding recognizable foods in a portrait from Mali, but the images raise more interesting questions than "Where's the Coke?"

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​Julia Harrison, an artist and anthropologist whose interests coalesce around confection, likes mochi ice cream - and most other sugary snacks. But she was sympathetic to arguments that the 20-year old dessert didn't deserve a spot in the pantheon of traditional Japanese sweets.

"I didn't think it was very interesting," Harrison says. "Then, when I started poking around its history, I realized it was just a modern version of the processes that fascinate me. I've gotten in conversations about authenticity, and that's not even worth trying to apply."

According to Harrison, who this week is lecturing on mochi at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, mochi ice cream was developed by a woman who was born in an internment camp. Frances Hashimoto is the youngest daughter of two Japanese pastry artists who in 1925 purchased a Los Angeles mochi shop from an uncle; When Hashimoto took over Mikawaya in 1970, she expanded its retail operations. The bakery released its first batch of mochi ice cream in 1994.

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Chinese Restaurant Awards

Sea Harbour Seafood Restaurant's award-winning prawns

​Even after Conde Nast Traveler declared that "Vancouver is home to the best Chinese food in the world," many Western-born eaters remained leery about wandering into the city's unapologetically authentic dumpling houses and dim sum joints. "If you're a foodie, you understand and get it," says Craig Stowe, founder of the Chinese Restaurant Awards. "For the average American, it would be a bit of a shock."

Yet Stowe's annual awards competition has helped lure the half of Vancouver's population without Asian roots into the region's 600 Chinese restaurants by providing them with a trusty guide to dishes worth seeking out. Since the awards were created four years ago, many diners have developed the habit of printing out the winners' list and using it as an eight-treasures map.

"For some restaurants, they've had a 20 percent increase in sales, all Westerners," Stowe says.

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​Few residents of Seattle proper have backyard barns worth saving, but a Washington Trust for Historic Preservation field director says they still stand to benefit from the state's Heritage Barn Initiative.

The program, launched in 2007, awards rehabilitation grants to farms trying to maintain their aging barns. Barns listed on the Heritage Barn registry, an honorary roll of barns that are at least 50-years old and "retain a significant degree of historic and architectural integrity," are eligible for funding. According to field director Chris Moore, $1 million has thus far been distributed, helping to rebuild 36 barns across the state.

"We're supporting not only the postcard vista, but family farms as they try to survive," says Moore, who will discuss the initiative tonight in a presentation sponsored by the Queen Anne Historical Society. "We like to think this program is returning barns to active agriculture use."

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​Chefs representing the 32 cities with NFL teams at "Taste of the NFL," a hunger relief fundraiser that annually precedes the Super Bowl, typically follow a few rules when they develop their bite-size contributions to the event.

In deference to attendees' fancy dresses and fine suits, they keep saucing tidy. Since most of the 4000 eaters will be juggling a wine glass, they avoid concoctions that require knives and forks. And they tend to feature ingredients which reference their hometowns.

At next month's "Taste of the NFL" in Indianapolis, a Buffalo chef will distribute beef on weck sandwiches; a Charlotte chef will offer pecan biscotti with grilled peach preserves and a Miami chef will ladle out stone crab chowder. John Howie, representing Seattle for the ninth consecutive year, is taking a slightly different approach: He's planning to serve "Ancho Chili Applewood Scented King Salmon on Southwestern Roasted Corn Mashed Potatoes with Sweet Chili Hollandaise and Lime Cream."

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