Bastille Cafe & Bar, Ballard, Seattle

Bastille Cafe and Bar has been on the Snob radar for several years now.  Unfortunately, the two attempted visits were unsuccessful due to the throngs of people crowding the doorsteps.  This snob and her spouse simply do not tolerate overly-populated restaurants.  There are way too many amazing hole-in-the-wall eateries to justify waiting for what will most likely be an over-crowded experience.  No restaurant does well when busy, so we decided just to wait a few years.  In addition to the crowd-aversion, several of our friends had  less than stellar experiences there...so we put it on the back burner.

I am happy to report that it was WELL WORTH THE WAIT.

The years could have worked against Bastille.  The build-up and expectation is one of the worst things for any artistic endeavor and restaurants are no exception.

It happened just as any good restaurant experience should - with no hype and in total spontaneity.  It was a random Monday night when I picked up my husband from his work in Fremont.  I suggested we go to dinner and a movie nearby and when the 30-min "where do you want to go" black-hole question threatened to suck us in, I promptly suggested Bastille, even though I have a strong "no-Monday" opinion about eating out (if the establishment is open at all, the wait staff is usually secondary because all the primary staff is recovering from the weekend).  I had my doubts.

FOOD

I'll just say it.  There's no way around it.

Bastille has the best hamburger I've tasted in Seattle.

Yes. 

 I went to a great french bistro with so many distinctly french options on the menu (confession: I wasn't expecting the cuisine to be so authentic) and I ordered the hamburger. 

 Least you begin to judge, the hamburger is actually quite the french delicacy (Bifteck Hache a la Lyonnaise -ground beef with onion and herbs) AND the bartender recommended it over the french onion soup and the croque madame.  He wasn't kidding. It was the perfect size, small but not pretentiously-small, cooked to perfection, drizzled with harissa aioli, topped with the brightest arugula, and smothered in pickled onions.  I am getting all emotional just thinking about it.

DRINKS

My husband performed his whiskey test with the bartender which is to say he told him several ingredients he likes in cocktails (almost always rye whiskey and some sort of digestive/vermouth), and told the keep to surprise him.  Oh, fellow drinkers, this can go so terribly wrong. To our delight, it didn't.  Joel ordered the house-made rabbit pâté, which came with violet mustard and pickled young fennel. and swooned over it the entire time. 

Overall we were excited about how impressed we were.  

There is simply nothing worse than spending money on a less-than-fabulous meal out.

(Which reminds me.  Don't eat in Port Angeles, Wa. Ever.)

Bottom Line

"Off with their heads!" but let them eat cake at Bastille first.

le secret snob

Ray's Boathouse & Cafe, Ballard.

It's a gorgeous day in Seattle, and my friends and I head out to Ballard...to the famous Ray's Boathouse & Cafe to celebrate a birthday, sunshine, and food. We make reservations for the cafe, but arrived early enough to secure a wonderfully private corner of the deck.

Side note to the skin-cancer conscious: No umbrellas. Bring a big, BIG hat.

We sit down and are greeted sweetly by our meek server, who has informed us that the birthday girl's husband has a surprise for the table, and she would be back shortly with said surprise. We assumed it was a bottle of champagne, and though we were right, we had to wait for the grapes to be crushed, the champagne to be bottled, corked, and shipped from France before it came to our table.

So there we are, all young and beautiful and ready as hell to drop some cash once we'd had our introductory toast, but no...we are trapped to our table with the promise of a "surprise," (why didn't she just inform us that it was champagne? how were we supposed to know that it wasn't a stripper to jump out of a cake, because if that were about to happen, i needed to run and get some small bills!) and ABSOLUTELY.NO.HOOCH. Unacceptable.

Finally, after 10 years, our bottle arrives, and how it goes down easily. We hem and haw over the menu for probably about 15 minutes before we can even agree on an appetizer. We decided on the calamari, which comes rather quickly (or was that the effect of the champagne) but without marinara, which is totally fine. So...we wait and wait for our server to come back within the vicinity of requests, and I politely ask for marinara. At this point, the deck has filled up and our server has god knows how many tables...nice going, management, for whom I blame the rest of this review.

The marinara arrives after 90% of the calamari is gone. Again, really poor form for an upscale restaurant.

But we are easy, quickly ready to forgive and move on.

We order food and another round of cocktails.
The birthday girl orders a house mixed-drink specialty, but doesn't like it sweet, so asks for the sweetness factor to be decreased...and if this were possible? Is it?

Oh yes, no problem.

Only it was a problem. Perhaps the bartender should have known to either refuse to make the drink because it was going to be a serious disaster if the recipe were altered or to TASTE the cocktail before sending it out to the table. It was gross. Seriously gross.

We had to wait for our server to return before we could fix the situation by ordering something else...something less complicated. And friends, fellow snobs, this is just the kind of lack of drinking etiquette that pisses me right off...IF YOU MUST CHARGE $10 FOR A COCKTAIL, THEN YOU MUST KNOW HOW TO SERVE IT PROPERLY AND WITH PRIDE.

Sidenote: This is also yet another reason I despise corporate restaurants.

Well, our food comes. It's fine. It's tasty for a tuna melt and caesar salad. The other dishes were simple, but a bit messy...too many flavors covering up the fine taste of Seattle's seafood. My friend had to piece apart her fish and make a new little concoction with her bread in order to taste it. Again...if your entree is $15, you should not, I repeat NOT, have to recreate it in order to eat it.

At this point, we were done. Ready for our check. We still enjoyed each other, but it was SO distracting to be taking such unprofessional care of, and we managed to drop over $100...so I felt especially frustrated.

I will not return to Ray's Cafe for any other important meal...but I do hear the happy hour is amazing and NOTHING can beat that view of my puget sound. So if you find yourself in a wandering mood where you don't care how the evening goes, head on over to Ray's.

Bottom Line

It's the perfect place to expect nothing of.

Sidenote: This review is of the cafe, not the boathouse. I am eager to get back and waste more money giving the "upscale" section a chance.