This is what a baked potato looks like on Whidbey Island.

​About a month ago, the Seattle Food Geek delighted Voracious readers with the tale of a 10-course meal at the Inn at Langley's restaurant. It turns out they take all kinds there, as our old buddy and erstwhile Voracious columnist, the Surly Gourmand, recently made the same Whidbey Island pilgrimage, writing about the experience as only he can on his blog.

His conclusion? "This gluttonous marathon punishes you, but the courses are so creatively fucked up, curiosity about what's coming next trumps the fact that your stomach feels as stuffed with food as your mom feels stuffed with cock."

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A Lecosho fan.

​The inimitable Surly Gourmand no longer writes a weekly column on Voracious anymore, much to everyone's chagrin. But he still contributes on occasion, and updates his personal blog irregularly with reviews like the one he filed yesterday on Lecosho.

As with any Surly review, there are some unforgettable turns of phrase. To some, they're going to be extremely offensive. To others, they will be brilliant and hilarious. To still others, they'll be all of the above. That's the power of The Surly Gourmand.

You should really read everything he wrote about Lecosho, but we've done you a Friday-afternoon favor and selected our three favorite excerpts:

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Get a job, hippie, so you can eat at Allium.

​Before venturing out to the San Juans to check out Allium, I'd repeatedly heard that Orcas Island is filled with cute hippie villages. When I arrived there, I had to disagree: There are zillion-dollar mansions all over the fucking place. A guy who occasionally listens to the Grateful Dead on the stereo of his BMW is not a hippie. A dude with eye boogers who trades vegan burritos of dubious provenance for LSD in the parking lot of a Phish concert--THAT motherfucker is a hippie.

Class warfare aside, Orcas Island, with its charming villages, quaint pastures, picket fences, sheep grazing contentedly on the hillside, and other Ansel Adams shit, is actually more like a really cute Battle Royale where old ladies compete to see who has the tastiest scone recipe. Allium, of course, fits right into the bucolic scene. It's located directly on the waterfront in Eastsound, which is the biggest town on the island and arguably the cutest. Hence, Allium is the cutest restaurant in the cutest town on the cutest island in Washington, which means it's approximately as cute as a lhasa apso with a ladybug riding on its ear. Unfortunately, my scenic view of the bay was blocked by a fat dude's head.

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The Very Special Episode about how the Judkins St. Cafe won the Great Chili Cookoff won several Emmy Awards in 1986.

​Did you ever wish you could bring your dead grandmother back to life, just so you could taste her home cooking one more time? Well, if you did wish for something like that, I hope you're prepared to burn in Hell, heretic, since the desire to resurrect the dead is clearly evil. On your way down to an eternity spent slow-roasting in the Inferno, be sure to stop off at the Judkins St. Café.

The menu is mainly comfort food designed to comfort you in a comforting manner. It's caloric as fuck, but that after all is the point. Tim's Chips, cookies, fresh apples and oranges, and Le Fournil croissants are available behind the counter. And there is also beer: A pint of PBR is $3, a price which neither shocks nor surprises me.

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Gentrifyingly delicious martinis can be yours at Company Bar!

​The Watering Hole: Company Bar, 9608 16th Ave. S.W., 257-1162, WHITE CENTER

The Atmosphere: Company Bar is the newest purveyor of intoxicating beverages in the Wild West Crazy Cuckoo Land, also known as White Center. There are tables and chairs, booths, a floor, a door, a bar, bartenders, and other things you'd usually find inside a bar. The numbers and letters in the address on the window outside are written in that distinctive curvy, yet somehow also blocky, Grand Theft Auto font. But Company Bar owner Jesse Lovell apparently didn't know that it was the GTA font, so Company Bar can kiss those cool points goodbye.

The Barkeep: Cleo Petra, a saucy lass whose punny stage name and abundant tattoos indicate her fondness for vaudeville. Cleo has been a producer of Burning Hearts Burlesque for nine years. She's also a bartender with a fondness for classic cocktails.

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A magnfiied view of shrimp shit, which when eaten leaves your breath shrimpy-fresh!

​I wish someone had run a spell-check when they were going to name Le Bon Ton Roule, because the proprietors spelled "temps" wrong. "Bon Ton" sounds like it should be the name of a French/Chinese fusion restaurant. "What's better than won ton soup? BON ton soup!" I'm full of brilliant ideas like this. If any nascent restaurateurs would like to hire me, my consulting fee is one million dollars per second.

Le Bon Ton (should be Temps) Roule is on Leary Way. Before giving way to the well-respected Treehouse Bar & Grill, there was a restaurant in the same buidling called Bourbon and Barbeque, which totally sucked. Like Le Bon Ton Roule, Bourbon and Barbeque served po'boys, but unlike Le Bon Ton Roule they didn't know what the fuck they were doing. It was at Bourbon and Barbeque that I encountered the now-infamous fried shrimp po'boy with green leaf lettuce, sunflower seeds, and, most heinous of all, ONLY TWO MOTHERFUCKING SHRIMP ON IT. I had so much vengeful wrath towards Bourbon and Barbeque's crimes against shrimp-manity, I was overjoyed when they went out of business. Then I invented a time machine so I could go back in time and make fun of the guy's great-great-great grandfather for eventually having a grandson whose restaurant sucked so bad. Needless to say, that caveman didn't understand what I was talking about.

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Tart hooch. The drink is also quite tangy.

​The Watering Hole: Room 38, 38 Front St, 425-392-3836, ISSAQUAH.

The Atmosphere: As Pac-Man would tell you, if he could actually form intelligible words with his razor-sharp beak, ghostbusting really works up an appetite. So after researching all of the spooky goings-on at the Rolling Log Tavern in Issaquah, I was hungry. We were directed to Room 38, which is just around the corner in historic downtown Issaquah. I was told that Room 38 serves legendary mini-burgers so delicious your tongue will explode in your mouth. That's because your tongue knows it will never taste anything more delicious than Room 38's mini-burgers and will become despondent, thus committing tongue suicide. True story!

Room 38 is a typical upscale bar, with a full menu and top-shelf liquor. It's small inside, with just a few little tables barely big enough to hold a mini-burger, and definitely incapable of holding a maxi-burger.

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"Now is the pizza of our discontent."

​ Big Mario's mascot, a life-size photo of a 1970s dude wearing a white three-piece suit with a maroon butterfly collar, who I presume is Big Mario himself, is the best restaurant mascot in Seattle. He looks like Ron Jeremy's stand-in.

But for what, exactly, would a porn star's stand-in stand in? Surely not the sex. That is, after all, what Ron Jeremy gets paid for. No, Ron Jeremy's stand-in, Big Mario, stands in for the dialogue. Whenever the sex scenes are done, Big Mario steps in and recites lines from Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part I. Big Mario plays Lord Talbot: "God and Saint George, Talbot and England's right," spake Big Mario, "Prosper our colours in this dangerous fight." Then Big Mario exits the stage to finish baking some killer 'za.

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"I'm such a Foodo Dirkschneider I just HAD to have the brushed copper Kitchenaid mixer!"

​Everyone knows that portmanteaus are so much fun. You can take any two words, surgically slice them in half, then magically reattach them together into a verbal Frankenstein! Portmanteau technology has brought us so many wonderful wonders--words that, if they were missing from your vocabulary, would make you a very sorry sucker indeed! Words like manwich and spork and sexcapade and liger. Without portmanteaus, Blaxploitation would go unchecked, pulsars would cease to shine in the sky, blogs would not have been invented, and no one would ever again be able to chillax. Indeed, portmanteaus make life fantabulous.

But as with all revolutionary technology, portmanteaus have a dark side: They can be twisted to mean extremely retarded things. Brangelina, funemployment, and fashionista are all terrible spelling experiments gone horribly wrong, the donor words cruelly vivisected and roughly stitched back together into a Human Centipede of literature.

The food world has not been exempt from the ravages of rogue portmantism. In fact, the gastronomic sphere has been hammered particularly hard, due mostly to the fact that the food media is staffed by many, many, many douchebags. Here is a list of the top five worst portmanteaus about food:

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Duck meatballs so good it'll make you stick your dick in here.

​Many things about Hawaii are beyond remarkable. Hawaii has shaved ice: like pussy, ice is better shaved. Hawaii is also the only state in the U.S. where lava isn't just a soap old people use. In Hawaii you can ACTUALLY SEE REAL LAVA. It flows down the street. It sometimes swallows dogs and cats and autistic children that step into its path. It rains lava. On foggy spring mornings, little drops of lava cling to blades of grass and coat the windshield of your car and bejewel spider webs. It comes out of the faucets: In Hawaii, if you want to make hot chocolate, you can make it REALLY goddamned hot. And as anyone who's ever tried to do it will tell you, lava is the best way to dissolve robots.

Still, Hawaii isn't the best thing in the known universe. Sometimes a restaurant is so awesome, it's better than Hawaii: good enough to make you take time off from your Hawaiian vacation to write about it. Revel is such a place. Not even the thought of seeing lava or, more importantly, THROWING STUFF into that lava, could keep me from writing about Revel.

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