Do Not Be Fooled By the False Calm of a Summer Brunch
Do Not Be Fooled By the False Calm of a Summer Brunch
Za’atar Bagels in Seattle
Yes, there’s a preciousness to the menu: Seattle’s Westward & Little Gull Grocery fully embraces the excesses of brunch culture. Hence the $8 “Nibbles” like Local Radishes with Goat Butter and Smoked Salt. Hence my bagel, flanked by garnet shreds of rich salmon, topped with a particularly expressive za’atar of blackened seeds and roasted herbs.
But the menu isn’t the unnerving part. The sun is. Westward is an indoor-outdoor waterfront cafe on Lake Union, and in late August, bright sunlight is blasting the rows of Adirondack chairs on its gravel beach. It’s already the fourth month of summer, as if the sun had simply started shining sometime in April and never stopped. It’s hot. Sailboats drift aimlessly over still waters in the distance; my glass of orange juice won’t stop sweating on the table.
All of that would be a faultless summer scene, except that I know this lake. I lived on Lake Union for five years back in the late 90s, and I don’t remember my drink ever sweating once. The first year my girlfriend and I moved to Seattle, we were subjected to 100 consecutive days of drizzle. In the years to come, true summer—the kind with bathing suits and sunglasses—often lasted only a fortnight. The third year we were there, summer never arrived at all: the city slouched from spring rain to autumn gusts with no break of any kind. And the gunmetal waters of Lake Union were the cool, clouded heart of the city.
I hated it, but I loved it. We kept kayaks under our apartment and slipped past the Ballard Locks to look for whales in the sound. I wrote rueful little articles for the Stranger, smoked drugs, and was forever tightening the hood on my rain jacket. That was my Seattle.
The Seattle of this summer is alien to me. On the descent into SeaTac the pilot had told passengers not to worry; the smell of smoke in the cabin was from the wildfires, not from any malfunction on the plane. A few days after that, three young firefighters died in the town of Twisp when a firestorm suddenly backed up on them. In all, it has been the hottest summer ever recorded in Seattle. The headlines are of the Northwest’s glacial melt, of a “blob” lurking offshore and trapping heat on land, of a Godzilla El Nino coming from the ocean.
Don’t get me wrong: I love true northwestern smoked salmon. I love Middle Eastern za’atar on a hot day. It’s just that when the two combine under perfect skies in Seattle, it all feels less like brunch and a bit more like the blithe beginning of a disaster movie.