The many culinary enhancements to Safeco Field this year include new cheese steak sandwiches, more soft-serve ice cream and an oyster po-boy, barbecue sandwiches and sausages from Ethan Stowell. But the park has also tried to jazz up its most basic concessions. Here, a look at the current state of hamburgers, hot dogs and sushi (which, in Seattle, counts as a basic item.)

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Photo by Leslie Kelly

Gabriel Rucker from PDX gets diners fired up at Matt's In the Market's Planes, Trains and Traveling Chefs series.

More than a week later, I'm still dreaming about this magical meal at Matt's In The Market, a six-course feast featuring all sorts of amazing dishes cooked, tag-team-style, by chef Chet Gerl and Portland sensation Gabriel Rucker. But it was the fat, sweet scallop cooked sous vide in squid ink -- so it was dark on the outside, snowy white within -- all snuggled up to the most incredible crab-potato salad I've ever eaten, a flavor bomb topped with a raw egg yolk, bruleed with a blow torch before serving that made me want to sign up for a lifetime membership in the chef Gabe fan club. Holy smokes, that was brilliant!

What the heck is the guy from LePigeon and Little Bird, the winner of the James Beard Foundation's Best Young Chef in America doing at Matt's in the Market? He was the first in the restaurant's Plans, Trains and Traveling Chef series. And man, if he didn't set the bar awfully high.

These dinners -- held Mondays over the next month -- are a collaboration between Matt's chef Gerl and the featured guest chef, who trade off courses in these six-course menus. (Darn, you just missed the incomparable Vikram Vij from Vancouver, B.C., who was here this week.)

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Photo by Leslie Kelly

Get in my mouth, you beautiful halibut tostada!

No, fish fans, we're never going to be able to turn back the clock to the good old days when halibut was cheap. The price is reeedick, especially for the first-of-the-season stuff, caught locally around the San Juan Islands.

But, damnit, I don't care. I'm those fools willing to pay the sky-high prices because nothing says spring to my mouth like this sublime fish. This past week, after halibut first surfaced, I've swooned over an inspired preparation at Palace Kitchen (want to do shots of that intoxicating green garlic sauce) and won raves at home for a DIY dish I whipped up using hali I found on sale at QFC for only $20.

If you want to taste what all the fuss is about, head to Elliott's for the fan-freaking-tastic $12 tostadas, built on tortillas fried in duck fat, which I tried at a hosted lunch on Wednesday.

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Jade Seafood was supposed to be the highlight of my recent Richmond eat-around. And it very well might have been had I not found myself with an hour to kill before returning to the train station.

One of my dining companions, Fernando Medrano - a savvy civilian eater who generously posts his findings on the Wise Monkeys blog - suggested I use my extra time to visit Kam Do, a bakery renowned for its wife cakes.

A wife cake, sometimes called a sweetheart cake, is a traditional Cantonese pastry filled with winter melon paste. There are various stories explaining how the treat got its name, but the most popular one holds that a man was so poor he had to sell his wife into slavery; he bought her back with profits from his winter melon cakes. Or maybe a man couldn't find his wife after she was enslaved, but finally located her when he spied her signature winter melon cake in a tea house. In any case, it's life-changing pastry.

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A willingness to tweak traditions helped Richmond's Jade Seafood win top honors in this year's Chinese Restaurant Awards.

The Alexandra Road restaurant earned the "best dim sum" and "best overall restaurant" titles in the diners' choice division of the competition.

While voters weren't required to submit any justification with their selections, Jade Seafood's menu features a number of notable deviations from standard Cantonese preparations, as I discovered when I recently dropped by for a midday meal.

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Four months after the planned first firing of his new pizza oven, Al Calozzi's finally secured the permit to sell tomato pies at his eponymous Pioneer Square cheese steak joint.

"We had thought that we'd be starting sooner, but we're pumped up," says Calozzi, who started selling pizza last week. "We're having great reviews non-stop."

Calozzi makes his pies in the Trenton, N.J.-style, which means the hand-tossed crusts are thin and the cheese - sliced, not shredded - goes beneath the sauce.

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A poutine burger is not officially on the menu at The Pink Bicycle in Victoria, but I'd wager more customers have asked for it since A Hamburger Today last year added the concoction to its burger bucket list. I did.

Proactively combining foods that usually only commingle in the gut is typically a better deal for the digestive system than the palate, but The Pink Bicycle's nucleus of savory flavors is only slightly less satisfying than a burger with fries on the side. And since it's portioned for non-American appetites, it's a completely reasonable midday undertaking: My server and I had an earnest conversation about dessert after I'd polished off everything on my plate but a green olive garnish.

What makes the poutine burger great is its incredibly high-quality ingredients. The Pink Bicycle -- which has owned the city's best burger title since 2009 -- uses Natural Pastures cheese curds, Springford Farm beef and sturdy sesame buns baked next door at Bond's Bakery. The creamy Kennebec fries are hand-cut.

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The neighborhood vibe in Columbia City is especially pronounced because its restaurants and bars are designed so folks can talk instead of watch TV - which is infuriating when there's a very important game on.

When Alabama played LSU for the first time this season, my husband and I had evening plans in Columbia City, so figured we'd catch the game in the neighborhood beforehand. It took us five or six attempts to find a TV tuned to the game (we ended up at Jones Barbeque, which meant we had to make do with smoked chicken instead of beer. I liked the sauce.)

For the most recent Tigers-Tide match-up, we headed back to Columbia City to check out Rookies, a snazzy new sports bar on South Ferdinand Street.

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When the first floor of the German Heritage Society building functioned as an office, letters, pamphlets and spreadsheets presumably accumulated there. Now that the organization has transformed the space into a restaurant, it's shifted its collection focus from paperwork to the best in local Germanic eats.

The adorably sunny Kafe Berlin outsources much of its cooking: The heavy-lifting's done by Bavarian Meats, which supplies the sausages, and West Seattle's Little Prague Bakery, which keeps the pastry case in kolaches, strudels and sweet rolls. The bread's also baked off-site, although the staffer who took my order wasn't sure exactly where: "The owner just shows up with it," he told me. But it's impossible to begrudge the two-month old cafe for curating such an enjoyable edible exposition of German culture.

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Photo by Leslie Kelly

Eat your beets! Revel's ridiculously good Red Velvet cheesecake will turn haters into lovers.

That's right, those are diced beets on top of the adorable dessert from Revel's brilliant pastry chef Anna Ivers. Sounds strange, but tastes incredible.

What makes this such a treat, though, is that beets aren't just the garnish. They're the driving force that colors the swirly part of this crazy creative meal-ender. Instead of dumping a bottle of red food coloring into the velvety filling, it gets its blushing hue au naturel.

This dessert might finally be the thing to turn beet haters into lovers, the veggie's rooty earthiness tempered by a partnership with creamy cheese goodness.

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