Twas a year ago this month: a terrific lunch at Kevin Davis's Steelhead Diner that started with flash-fried cheese curds from Market neighbor Beecher's and a glass of Asian Pear from Windfall Winery. A match made in heaven, but not a universal dish. The curds have to be dead fresh or they lose their appealing squeak; a nearby cheesemaker is essential. Beecher's sells its curds by weight ($11.50 a pound), chef Davis plates them......

There they were last night, perched at the counter at Steelhead Diner, enjoying a glass of bubbly and gossiping with the chef: Jon Rowley and his wife, Kate McDermott, quietly celebrating their appearance in the new issue of Saveur. The least ostentatious of Seattle's food stars, Rowley is probably the most influential. He's the oyster guru, the peach guru, and above all the salmon guru. No one in town has done more to change the......

Was asked the other day to name the most under-rated restaurant in Belltown. In the sense of under-appreciated. Gotta be 94 Stewart. While across-the-street neighbor Steelhead Diner gets the buzz, newcomer Txori draws the avant-garde, and Tavolata attracts the trendy, 94 Stewart simply serves excellent food. Last night's cumin-rubbed lamb shank in a pinot noir reduction was just about perfect. And chef Cindy Nelson wasn't afraid to surround the meat with Brussels sprouts, either. Granted,......

When will they learn, those pretentious New Yawk snots? With the solemnity befitting the announcement of a cure for cancer, the NYTimes reports that three Gotham spots now serve Montreal's beloved junk food, poutine. Whazzat? Duh: french fries with cheese curds and gravy, dumbo. In Australia, where Canadian eating habits aren't automatically ridiculed, they've eaten poutine for decades. Aluminum to-go containers are filled to the brim with hot, glorious gravy so the fries stay......

What fun! Another restaurant promotion! This one's called New Urban Eats, and it features 20 relatively new places offering three-course dinners for thirty bucks. Sunday through Thursday, throughout May except (wonder why?) Mother's Day...the one day nobody should eat out but everybody does. Sure, there are plenty of perfectly lovely places that serve dinner for less than $30. But the NUE restaurants are kinda fancy, kinda pricey, kinda hot. In some cases, very fancy, very......

A dedicated, catch-and-release fisherman who ties his own flies, Kevin Davis promises you'll never find steelhead on the menu at his terrific new restaurant, Steelhead Diner. You'll find plenty of succulent seafood, though: a transcendant crabcake, a moist and flaky kazusake black cod, spice-rubbed Alaskan king salmon, beer-battered cod & chips, the sorts of dishes you'd expect from a guy who spent the last five years running the kitchen at Oceanaire. Then again, Davis......