uberculture

​With so much incredible food to be had in Seattle, it doesn't seem sporting to complain about the one measly food item not available here. But once an eater's smitten with a particular dish, it's impossible to persuade him there are other boiled whitefish with new potatoes in the sea.

Call it harassment, but we recently prompted our Voracious contributors to tell us about favorite foods they can't find in Seattle. Here, a sampling of their top out-of-reach dishes.

Food: New Mexico-style green chile
Contributor: Laura Onstot
Distance to a decent version: 1263 miles (Aztec, N.M.)
Closest local approximation: The Bang Bang burrito with green and red chile, eggs, beans, cheese, potato at Bang Bang Cafe
Why it's missed: "I miss it so, so much, " Onstot says. "Green chile add a kind of sweet/savory heat to things, as well as a whole lot of flavor. You can make a dish spicy with a healthy dose of crushed red pepper, sure. But green chile brings a whole new flavor of its own, a lotta heat, and still manages to avoid overwhelming the primary flavor of whatever you're eating. I'm going to pathetically and desperately attempt to grow Chimayo chiles myself in the planter box on my roof."

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​Veganism has been lauded by health experts, Oprah, and animal rights activists alike as a healthy lifestyle choice. Bringing up veganism, for some, conjures images of endless salads and raw tofu -- but sometimes, health be damned, you want to fill your body with trash while still staying inside the strict guidelines you've put forward for yourself. If you're not into veganism for environmental ethics or for your health (or you're just not in a place to care) you don't need to go to your local co-op to get your plant-based* snack on.

To vegans, plain potato chips are the french fries of the corner store: the thing you get when you're out with your friends because there is nothing else and you're hungry. Mix it up a little. Here's a list of slightly-more-interesting options for junk food that just happens to be vegan -- stuff that omnivores eat all the time. Plus a couple of old commercials, because they're fun.

10. Oreos
Soymilk's favorite cookie! Perhaps the junk food most commonly touted as as I-can't-believe-it's-vegan, the creamy centers of the ubiquitous sandwich cookies -- surprise! -- do not actually contain cream. This goes for Double Stuf, holiday color editions, and basically every variation besides Cakesters -- and who wants a Cakester, anyway?

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Victoria Holt

The Teapot's "Jewel Box": A nori-tofu purse filled with vegetables, almonds, and cashews.

​When I first moved to Seattle and began trolling for vegetarian restaurant recommendations, The Teapot was the first place recommended to me by the first person I asked. When I took up the suggestion, I fell in love with its dingy, lost-in-translation charm, casual atmosphere, and generous piles of fried tofu on nearly everything. Back then it was just a hole in the wall on 15th, but even after it relocated to a bigger space down the street above the bready fumes of a Subway, it remained my cozy little hideaway, a neighborhood treasure I could count on for a satisfying vegetarian meal.

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Photo by Leslie Kelly

Who doesn't love drinking a frosty beer outdoors on a frosty day? You can in Leavenworth.

​That's right, the state's faux Bavarian Village has got it going on. And I'm not even talking about its most obvious attributes: America's drunkest Oktoberfest, the town's semi-naughty mascot -- Woody Goomsba -- or the bitchin' putt-putt course just outside the city center.

No, this tourist magnet has got some culinary treasures SEA can only admire from afar. Or, up close, judging by the number of Seattle accents I heard in das beer garten last weekend.

I'm not just sending mad love to the 509 because I spent some of the happiest years of my dysfunctional childhood in L'town. (You can't swing a pair of lederhosen without hitting somebody I'm related to. Hell, my third cousin twice removed is mayor!) For me, Leavenworth's charm begins and ends with sausage.

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​Magnolia Bakery, the Greenwich Village corner bakeshop credited with jump-starting the cupcake craze, this week started shipping its cupcakes to customers who aren't within shopping distance of the store's locations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Dubai.

All cupcake sentiments aside, this seems like a spectacularly bad idea. I'm not such a stringent locavore that I'd oppose airlifting treats from one coast to the other: Before the recession forced us to reconsider how much money we were squandering on delivery charges, a friend and I had a monthly food exchange club in which we'd choose a theme, such as "mauve" or "1922," and find mailable edibles to fit it. I remember coming home to boxes of haddock filets and bags of masa flour.

But cupcakes - even those produced by Magnolia Bakery - don't fit any of the criteria for food worth sending. Here, a few guidelines for gauging whether an item merits its shipping cost. (Magnolia Bakery charges $18 for a set of six vanilla butter cream cupcakes, but tacks on an additional $51.82 overnight shipping fee for Seattle customers so the snacks don't arrive stale.)

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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:

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Safeco Field's fry scene improved considerably with the 2011 arrival of Ethan Stowell's frites in The 'Pen.

​Congress this year declined to scale back the amount of french fries served in school cafeterias, perhaps fearing they'd be accused of hypocrisy.

Adults eat a lot of fries, too: Per capita consumption stands at about 28 pounds. And restaurants are helping to keep that number high. French fries are an American menu staple that transcends cost and cuisine. This year, I encountered fries in Greek restaurants, steakhouses, fried fish shacks and French bistros. Many of them were excellent. Of the new crop of Seattle fries, the following are my favorites:

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​Lots of Seattleites ate their best meals in Seattle in 2011 -- but so did eaters headquartered in Mexico City, Vancouver, New York and Omaha. After the New York Times' dining section last week created the #bestmeal2011 hashtag, hundreds of enthusiastic eaters ran with it, squeezing their top dining experiences into tweet form. A few restaurants -- including Eleven Madison Park in New York, Alinea in Chicago and Franklin Barbecue in Austin -- were mentioned repeatedly, but Tweeters cited meals from Wellington, New Zealand to Grand Rapids, Mich. They also lavished plenty of love on the Puget Sound: Read on to discover which local restaurants made lasting impressions in 2011.

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When it comes to adult Halloween costumes, the line between sexy and skanky has been blurred to nonexistence. Bunnies and kittens that once made for innocent costumes have turned into cleavage-baring get-ups more appropriate for private than public use. But cute animals aren't the only ones getting sexed up. Here we present six food-service workers that have gotten the adult costume treatment.

​6. Ballpark concession stand worker

Nothing screams obvious like a girl slinging hot dogs wearing a shirt that declares "I heart wieners." While the concession stand workers at most stadiums tend to be rather surly, in the alternative universe of Halloween, they want to sell you a big sausage - and get yours in return.

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​When a server spills wine on a guest, botches the pronunciation of bouillabaisse, and leaves dishes languishing in the kitchen window, that's unarguably bad service. But what of the tiny annoyances that grate at frequent restaurant-goers? There's nothing classifiably wrong with a server asking "Have you dined with us before?" or a restaurant failing to install purse hooks beneath its bar, but--for guests who care--such bugbears are impossible to ignore.

These peeves have absolutely nothing to do with how well the restaurant operates: That's why complaints pertaining to hygiene, negligent hostessing, and malfunctioning websites belong in a different category. These problems are petty trifles, at best. And yet.

Here, a list of my most vexing Princess and the Pea situations:

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