Description
Back when he waited tables, Peter Dow always thought he wanted to open a French restaurant, before he realized he was more of an Italian kind of guy. He opened his cafe in a house in Kirkland by Juanita Creek, serving no more than four or five entrées, which he priced affordably and changed every season, and making his own pasta. He got so popular, so quickly, that customers had a month's wait for a table. "It became a burden," he says, "because a couple who waited for a month could be divorced by the time they came, or were expecting too much out of their meal."
So, in 1979, he moved a block and a half away to a larger ranch-style house. The buzz eventually died down (at one point, in fact, he was three weeks away from closing until a rave review in the Argus saved the business), and Dow enjoyed a 20-year run, making the simple, seasonal Italian-inspired food that he loved, and more and more, making wine in his basement. One longtime food writer recalled that, at crush time, he could smell the grapes fermenting from the far end of the parking lot.
Eventually, Dow's wine business pushed out the restaurant business, and he sold the latter in 2000 to a bright young chef named Holly Smith. Smith turned the place inside out, and now entering the doors is like walking into a kiwi: From the dowdy exterior you'd have no idea how gorgeous the olive-hued restaurant is-straight out of a Dwell pictorial, sleek and cozily romantic at the same time. Smith has intensified Juanita's commitment to local ingredients, and her dishes read like odes to Seattle's seasons-right now a sonnet to game and huckleberries, mushrooms, and the last, spectacular, summer eggplants.
She's doing everything I love. Despite the fact that Smith has won every accolade imaginable, including a spot on the 2006 Gourmet list of best restaurants in America, her kitchen delivered one of the worst dishes I've eaten in months: rabbit with chanterelles and a chickpea-flour crepe. The roast loin was sublime, but the braised leg and sauce (made from the reduced braising liquid) was salted so heavily that it stung my tongue; I even shied away from my favorite mushrooms, which were saturated with sauce.
I felt so guilty for not having sent the dish back and given the kitchen another chance that I returned a few weeks later. On visit two, no one dish was so appalling, but again, all the meats were succulently roasted, and every sauce and risotto salted beyond reason, which means that someone in the kitchen is not tasting his or her food. Despite the perfection of a green bean salad dressed in crème fraîche and pastry chef Sara Novesky's sensual olive-oil gelato-one of the most memorable desserts I tried-I was left hoping that Smith would remedy the problem fast instead of letting Cafe Juanita coast on its reputation.
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