Tuesdays with Market

For this trip to our friendly Pike Place Market, the quirky culinary epicenter of the Emerald City, we visited Café Campagne for their incomparably affordable happy hour. I've always had an affection for French cuisine, starting back in my first kitchen class in culinary school, Skills Development. I'm sure my face took on a glazed look as the chef, Anthony Natale, began to talk about something called fond de veau. That was over ten years ago, and French cuisine is no less interesting to me today, in spite of the way it is sometimes disparaged as overly fussy or old-fashioned. If you go to France you realize it is the food (maybe not veal stock!) that ordinary citizens, working class folks, eat. One of my favorite stories to tell my students is how fascinated I was by reading the school lunch menus posted outside a grammar school in this or that nameless French city, during the two years I spent abroad in Europe after culinary school, chasing the ghostly dishes I was indoctrinated by in culinary school.. "What kind of food do French schoolchildren eat?" I always ask. The entire class always gets that faraway look that is or should be a message to the teacher that what they are saying is not readily apparent. "French food!" I exclaim, to only slightly more recognition. Oh well. It's still funny to me.

Anyways, Café Campagne's happy hour is the cheapest in town. $1 mini lamburgers exploding with juice and perfectly cooked- unlike the raw-in-the-middle burgers I forced my friends to eat last weekend after misreading their doneness while grilling them in the dark after a beer or two. There are also $1 pate sandwiches. Both are served on gougeres, which are the same thing as a cream puff, minus all the sweet stuff. Fantastic. There are also decent pommes frites served with garlicky aioli. Perhaps the highlight was the tarte flambee, which in this case is a flatbread smothered with a thick layer of melted onions, a dab of crème fraiche and a healthy smattering of crisp bacon strips.

Maybe the best part about this happy hour is that there is a selection of a dozen or so French wines of moderate quality offered for $2/3 oz pour! What a great way to sample several regional wines in one sitting for not much money. Granted these are not the prime examples of French wines, but they are tasty and pretty much as they should be. White Burgundy is a touch flinty and utterly lacking in oakiness. Bordeaux is grapey and tannic. There are also two sparkling wines offered.

Just to put things in perspective, when we went to Il Bistro two weeks ago, the happy hour bill came to $50. This time it was $30 and the food was better, the server infinitely more skilled. Campagne is a fancy, top-notch restaurant. Their happy hour is an absolute steal. Go for it.

Tuesdays with Market

Pike Place Bar & Grill - You don't come here for the food. If you are anything like us, you come here when the sausage shop is closed, when the soul food stand is closed, when all the cheaper stalls have locked up for the night and fine dining is not in this week's budget. You come here for happy hour, $3 microbrews and $4 bar food, in an atmosphere both divey and picturesque, looking out over the public market sign bedecked in Christmas finery, it's bright pink neon pigs ablaze. You order 2 Maritime hefeweizens that turn into four. You get the shrimp cocktail that involves a mound of surprisingly small shrimp, but before you can be disappointed you taste the cocktail sauce, redolent of horseradish, and smile. You get the mussels and clams steamed in white wine and butter and pay $1.75 extra for garlic bread to soak up the sauce. You make a rule never to order mussels and clams again if you can't fix a purveyor of the bivalves in your sites; You've been burned before. But not here. Not here staring directly down into Pure Fish, not here, right over Jack's Fish Spot. Here the shellfish are fresh and garlicky and you lap them up. You order mozzarella sticks, because you can. You know they come straight from a box in the freezer, but you don't care as you munch on their deep fried goodness and think of county fairs on the East Coast. You don't come here for the food, but it's still pretty good, and it only costs the two of you $25.

Tuesdays with Market

Jack's Fish Spot- Ever wonder what it feels like to stare out from behind the counter of a fish monger? At Jack's, the stainless steel seafood bar is tucked right in back, with a handy menu overhead. Grab a seat, peruse the multitude of fresh fish and shellfish, and order up some oysters and fish and chips. We went for the 3-piece salmon fish and chips and a dozen Penn Cove Oysters. Our server/shucker dude was nice enough to send us around the corner to buy ourselves two bottles of beer a piece (Pike Place Pale Ale), and the fryer was bubblin by the time we got back with them. He was not the most eloquent shucker, as he failed to severe the muscle that attaches the oysters to their shells, but he was long on heart. A great young guy who was more than friendly. He also tried to open our beers for us the tough guy way, using the corner of his chopping block, but that didn't work either. He settled for using a regular key out of his pocket, which impressed us plenty. Penn Cove oysters rock right now! Between the mussels and the oysters they raise up there, I think I know where I want to retire. The salmon was great, too. It was fried a little dark (as were the chips), but the flesh was so rich and moist it didn't matter. If you want the real deal seafood counter, no muss no fuss (or yuppies), then this is the spot alright.