LONG OVERDUE good news for disaster-wracked Pioneer Square comes in the form of a woman a lot of us already owe a big debt of gratitude. In 1977, before most Seattle locals had even heard of pulling coffee, Lois Pierris built the template for the Bohemian dessert house in this town: Capitol Hill’s B&O Espresso. Built on atmo, attitude, and killer desserts, the B&O was for years the place in Seattle to cap a date. There was just something about it.
Lulu’s Piano Bar & Restaurant 421 Second Ave Extension S, 342-9457 lunch Mon-Fri 11am-2:30pm; dinner Tue-Thu 5-10pm, Fri-Sat 5pm-midnight AE, MC, V; full bar
As the years passed, other parts of the city benefited from Pierris’ increasing interest in dinners. At the base of Queen Anne was Ristorante Pony (God rest its soul); I still remember licking heart-stopping stuffed eggplant off a spoon with some swain at this candlelit jewel box and concluding a more romantic spot could not possibly exist on the planet. Then with SoHo, a cafe-cum-clothing store, she presciently pioneered the wasteland not quite universally known as Belltown.
Then, obligingly proximate to my apartment at the time, came Serafina. Rustic Italian food, candlelight, live jazz, a breezy courtyard, broad-shouldered bartenders, and an actual crowd every night of the week—in Seattle— conspired to render the place irresistible. Serafina has always had many detractors (something or other about the food), but to my mind, these folks were missing the point: There was just something about it.
Which brings me to Second and Yesler, a blighted block in a beleaguered neighborhood and site of Pierris’ latest venture. Perhaps she is not the only person in this city who could tour a misbegotten old karaoke club and envision the swank piano bar within, but she may be the only one who could do it so sure-handedly.
Armed with vision and elbow grease, she and partner Rick Hubbard created a lofted room with a bar on one side and an open kitchen on the other. (They also restored the space next door, a men’s clothing store called LutherB.) When they were through with it, Lulu’s, brick-clad and wood-floored, exuded an effortless hipness. Evenings, exotic Cuban jazz shakes out of the speakers till a pianist takes to the ivories, and the place smolders like it’s been cookin’ for decades. Yeah, it’s the place of the year to bring a date, but you who’ve been reading attentively already figured that.
HOW’S THE FOOD? Off a concise menu of underpriced Mediterranean-influenced noshes you can sample a few tapas, a few salads, a few pastas, and a few entr饳. A plate of toasted bruschetta thickly spread with a throaty goat cheese and sun-dried tomato mixture ($4.95) was simple and fine, and pocked with good olives. The toasted bread, aglow with olive oil, actually tasted like something on its own. Potato zucchini cakes ($7.95) were splendidly flavorful—who knew these vegetables could sparkle?—but disappointingly undercooked within, like cookies concealing doughy centers. With them came a straightforward tzatziki, rather heavy on the dill.
I loved my bowl of root soup ($4.50), which spotlighted the verve of celeriac and featured a seductively gritty texture. The best appetizer by a mile, however, was something misleadingly called calamari confit ($6.95), a must-order for aficionados of the noble squid. How they got the calamari this tender is a secret for the ages; bits of it lolled picturesquely over a foundation of crispy Yukon gold slices dolloped with aioli and loaded with pancetta-flavored squid again. Flavor, flavor, flavor, and flavor, combined with a plateful of tender textures, made this the dish to fight over.
Salads were terrific: one a wilted spinach salad ($6.95) served warm with green onions, grilled apples, and blackened broccoli with a citrus vinaigrette; the other a bread salad ($6.95) with tomato, wilted red onions, cucumber, kalamatas, saut饤 croutons, and shaved Romano. Both were slightly overdressed, adding to their delectable lushness; both were highly flavorful and well complemented by charry quarters of pita bread.
Off the entr饠menu, we ordered rib eye steak ($14.95), which was chewy and hugely flavorful over parsnip-potato puree and saut饤 spinach. (It was billed with sweet potato fries.) We liked it as-was, particularly with a vivid madeira reduction boldly intensifying the whole.
Less intense but equally winning was a big warming bowl of penne pasta, sausage, and peppers ($10.95), all simple and sweet and saucy. Desserts kept up the momentum, mostly: Double chocolate mousse ($5) was studded with chocolate morsels and crowned with whipped cream; a homemade lemon pie ($5) was nicely tart and crusted goldenly, but gilded extraneously with a frozen layer.
It all adds up to a report card I recognize from Pierris’ other places: flavors large, textures lush, meals swoony and overripe. Nothing subtle about Pierris’ kitchen—”I like food,” she told me, “to be yummy.” Clearly she likes her restaurants that way too; nobody in town builds them yummier. Sensualists, it’s time to credit the woman who has labored for more than three decades to give your sex lives suitable stage sets. Here’s another one for you.
