When I first came here, one of my responsibilities–handed down straight from my corporate bosses–was to find a way to get my head around the almost unquantifiable bounty of the Seattle restaurant scene.There are so many interesting restaurants there, I was told. So many chefs. The scene is so huge and booming. You’ve got to find a way to own that bitch.And okay, so maybe the suits didn’t use exactly those words, but my orders were clear: Discover, connect, report. Oh, and if there was some way that I could distill all of this wandering and eating down into a single, recurring blog feature? That would be just awesome…So now, three months in, that’s just exactly what I’m going to do. And while I can’t really go the traditional route (writing about my 100 Favorite Dishes in the city, the Ten Greatest Donuts or whatever), I think I can go one better by talking about Seattle’s most essential dishes–those single plates that truly define different aspects of this city.Of course, in order to do this properly, I’m gonna need some help. Which is why I’m turning to you–Seattle’s most dedicated eaters.Look, if you’re already sitting at home or at your desk and reading my rantings in the middle of a Monday afternoon, I’m guessing you have some fairly strong opinions on the Seattle food and restaurant scene. I’m guessing you have a few pretty good ideas about foods that you consider essential to the understanding of this city. And all I’m asking is for you to shout ’em out, loud and proud.If you had a friend who was moving here tomorrow, where’s the first place you’d take him so that he would know where he was and what he was getting into? What single plate would you tell him he just had to order?If you had only a day left to live and had to choose a last meal in this town, what would it be? Alternately, if you had unlimited funds, all the time in the world, and a driver at your disposal to haul your drunk and bloated carcass around town, where would you go and what would you eat?If you’re a chef, who do you think is at the forefront of cuisine in the Pacific Northwest? Who is moving the ball down the field and how are they doing it? If there was only one food truck in the city you could eat at every day for the rest of your life, which one would it be?If I had to see the entirety of the Vietnamese immigrant experience all wrapped up in a single bowl of bun bo Hue, where should I eat it? If I want to understand the history of Japanese influence on this city’s cuisine, where should I go and what should I order?Are you getting the gist now? The way this’ll work is, I’ll take your suggestions (and those of my friends here, my colleagues and co-workers, the cabbies I run into, the cops, the waitstaffs and the chefs), then I’ll go eat, snap a fast picture and come back home and write about it. Slowly (I hope…), a picture of the city will be formed, drawn in strokes of food, defined by the things that the people who live here truly love and find indispensable, colored by the experiences of many. If my little experiment works, what we’ll end up with is a kind of gastronomical proof of the old Brillat-Savarin line, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”–a city defined solely by what it eats.And if it fails?Well, at least I will have gone down doing my best to eat the heart of the newest city I’m calling home.