Still lamenting Seattle’s lack of quality xiao long bao, Seattlest picked up a copy of A World of Dumplings and decided we’d start making them on our own. (Refining the recipe will take time, so don’t hold your breath on a restaurant opening anytime soon.). While thumbing through the book, we stumbled upon a recipe for our old pal, pelmeni. We discovered these Eastern European dumplings a few years ago while traveling in Juneau.......

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of......

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he......

The Sounders "kick" (HA!) off their home schedule Saturday night, at Qwest Field, vs. the hated Portland Timbers. Why are they hated? We asked Sounders fan Eric Gilbertson to explain. When did the rivalry between Seattle and Portland get so heated? Probably a couple of years after they returned to the league (They were around from 1975-1982, then again briefly in the late 80's/early 90's, then returned finally in 2001). There were a number of......

Pete Wells, the guy who notoriously hates food bloggers, is now the Dining & Wine editor at the Noo Yawk Times. Seattlest, who wasn't indicted (in fact, escaped mention enitrely) is thus inclined to be charitable, despite, well, problems in several recent items. Wells's latest article, a melancholy piece about an underappreciated cocktail of his own invention, only serves to reinforce Seattle's place in the cocktail universe. (Leaving aside, for a moment, that NYT editors......

In all the annals of music, it's hard to imagine anymore specific a genre than "gypsy punk." But that's just the sort of cabaret-esque insanity that Gogol Bordello brings to their shows. The band's story is as strange as their music and stage shows. Frontman Eugene Hutz is a Ukrainian refugee displaced as a child in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. After bouncing through various European countries, he wound up in Vermont. As an......

When an athlete promotes a charitiable cause, clichè-happy commentators will often aver that the player is an "All-Star on and off the field." On the field, Mariner backup catcher Dan Wilson is not an All-Star. When he is on the field, which these days is rare, he's usually flying out to rightfield or grounding into a double play. This is why, for most of his career, Seattlest has referred to him as Dan "Rally-Killer"......