Yeah, I don’t have a clever title for this one. But that doesn’t mean that this post was not good.
So I was going through the Seattle magazine for the month of February where it talks about 100 best things to eat….for seafood. Those of you who have not read it yet, check it out (not sponsored)! But anyways, in the magazine, it lists many restaurants in the Seattle area. Some of which are small places but have actually been before. Many have caught my eye, so I made a list of where I might want to go. First one on the list was Samara.
Samara is a restaurant that I can’t even tell what kind of cuisine it specializes. All I can say is possibly European. Anyways, Samara is located in Sunset Hill, which I just learned existed near Seattle. It features a cozy dining and rather dark dining area with a counter where diners can sit and watch the chefs do their work (and you know I love me my restaurant counters). According to the server’s recommendations, it is best to get two of their snacks section (or their appetizers), two of their vegetables, two of their seafood, and one of their meats. So that is what we did.
For snacks, we ordered their bread service (I don’t know why it is a service) and chicken skin. The bread a variety of bread served with butter and pork fat. Yes that’s right, pork fat. The pork fat has a generous sprinkling of what I can only assume is paprika. I couldn’t taste much of the pork fat, but there was a kind of smoky, burnt flavor from what I think is paprika. Interesting enough, the pork fat was softer than the butter.
The chicken skin was flat and kind of looked like chips or really large crackers. They were kind of oily, because that is one of the only ways to cook chicken skins, I think. They kind were like chips….that tasted like chicken.
For vegetables, we got two things that I have never heard before, let alone tried. One was called sunchokes, which I think it might have been their signature vegetable. It was surrounded by a rather delicious sauce made with lemons and walnuts. The other one is salsify, which we got because it had black truffles on it. Salsify is a stalk like thing and firm. It kinda had a buttery kind of taste with of hint of sourness.
For our seafood, I had one oyster. Juuuust one. Just one oyster. The oyster was grilled (looked raw to me to be honest) soaked with watermelon juice, which sweetened the oyster and masked any sea flavor. It still smelled though.
We also got the octopus and the main reason we came here: the dungeness crab. The crab is said to be buttered and it is resting on a bed of rice cake. The rice cake has been hardened. I liked how the softness of the crab and the hardness of the rice coupled with the natural sauce of the crab complemented each other. The octopus was okay.
We finally got our meat dish, which is a duck confit with duck sausage, beans, and pork belly, which I didn’t see any. Going to be honest, not a big fan of duck confit, but the duck is rather tender and fell off the bone really easily. The beans were EXTREMELY salty, so we had to remove the duck.
For dessert, we had the crepe layer cake that actually has been sitting in front of us the whole time we were there. The cake itself didn’t taste like anything except a little bit of olive oil, so most of the sweetness was from the apple jam on the bottom. The layers were kind of hard, I was expecting it to be soft. It was an okay cake.
Samara is a small corner restaurant in a rather quaint area of Seattle. The food was delicious, especially the crab, which I definitely would recommend. If I were to come back, there are some other things on the menu that I was eyeing but didn’t order.
Seattle's/Taiwan's food lover 