The single most beloved restaurant on Capitol Hill from 1997 to 2004 was the neighborhood Parisian bistro Cassis. It was the right place (casually elegant) in the right neighborhood (North Capitol Hill) at the right time (pre–bistro invasion), with a familiar menu of French classics precisely calibrated to match the needs—wine, third-place conviviality, steak frites—of its well-heeled base.
Buoyed by its success, owner Jef Fike launched a little lunch boite in the Smith Tower called Bandol in 2003. And here was the story of wrong place (upscale French) in the wrong neighborhood (preturnaround Pioneer Square) at the wrong time (about 10 years too early). Bandol tanked, and took Cassis down with it.
Will those lessons translate to West Seattle?
We’ll see. This year, Fike resurfaced with his reincarnation of Cassis housed in a locale that couldn’t be more dissimilar from its patrician original, across from the sands of Alki Beach. A former customer owns the building, and—still grieving the loss of Cassis—approached him about reviving it. Fike bit, eager to recreate the trademark warmth, the Gallic sensibility, and the bistro menu, with a chef (Andy Dekle) he knew from his days at the private supper club the Ruins. “What we did at Cassis was a good formula,” Fike says. “I didn’t see any reason to change it.”
And indeed, you walk into a T-shaped arrondissement of bechamel-yellow walls and black-and-white Paris streetscapes, with a bar and dark wood tables bearing Pastis water bottles and Nat King Cole crooning from the speakers, to find a most familiar menu of mussels mariniere and calf’s liver and frisee salad and steak frites.
But all these similar details add up to a very different place. Where Cassis pere offered intimate booths within a warmly historic building, Cassis fils features tables adrift in a modern open room. And Alki, with its motley Venice Beach parade of rollerblading pectorals and ice-cream-faced children, sets a rather incongruous context for a Parisian bistro. Mind you, this Cassis can roll up its garage doors, bringing diners into the breeze and the sea air and the breath-catching wide-angle sunset view—Space Needle to Vashon Island, complete with crowning Olympics and chugging ferries. If there are finer tables in West Seattle from which to enjoy the splendors of July, I don’t know them.
However, one wonders how well Fike’s old Cassis formula fits its new home.
The menu, a mix of steady favorites and changing specials, eats differently in 2014 than it did in the days before simple French food was everywhere. Here in the land of Luc and Le Zinc and Bastille and Cafe Presse, simple bistro fare must be really first rate to succeed.
In two dinners, a few dishes approached that. Both a tarragon-suffused bowl of mussels in a classic wine-butter broth and a sensational housemade chicken-liver mousse topped with fruity gelee were notable—particularly the latter, its fathomless velvet richness offset with citrus-bright mustard. A fat fist of a burger was nicely zesty, almost gamey, with the addition of herbs and garlic and Dijon, and arrived with a little exclamation of pickled leeks. Why don’t more chefs distinguish the ubiquitous burger with piquant stand-ins for the onion?
A black cod special posed the buttery hunk of finely crusted fish over a bacon-spangled fava bean succotash, making satisfying comfort eating. A couple of desserts—profiteroles poured over with chocolate at table, a swoony paper-thin tarte tatin—simply rocked.
But there was a ho-hum quality to much of the food, from bland fried fiddleheads to flavorless aioli. A halibut special served with parched fingerlings and wilty arugula tasted, literally—weirdly—of nothing but butter. A few dishes were outright bad, like calf’s liver—that rare and welcome sight in this town, only here breaded and sauteed so poorly it arrived as a plate of mush. (The fries were good.) Cinnamon-sugared beignets were fine, but served with cold caramelized bananas. Cold caramelized bananas?
Missing from both the front and the back of this house was consistent care in the details, from the aioli that arrived slopped all over its ramekin to the steak frites that was too bloody for its diner (who wasn’t consulted) to the dry bread one waiter brought out when we requested more for our pate. That was the waiter, genuinely charming guy, who nevertheless kept touching my husband. (C’mon dude…it’s my anniversary.)
Don’t misunderstand: Every staffer was deeply hospitable; they just stumbled on details. This positivity originates with Fike, a front man’s front man whose affable elegance has long made him one of the most effortlessly charming hosts in town. “Housewares! Children’s Department!” he cracked one night, mimicking an elevator operator as he rolled the garage doors down; it had grown chilly and a few customers had requested they be closed. This led to a bit of repartee with nearby tables, generating the kind of uniting goodwill that made the original Cassis such a Kumbaya sing-along. Still—the fact that he had to be asked to close the garage doors in the first place speaks to the detail orientation here. In a restaurant so invested in service, Fike and company need to nail those details. Then they can turn their attention to food, perhaps using the reboot (think Sitka and Spruce or Joule) to expand the culinary vision. Updating the menu beyond bistro war-horses seems an obvious move.
And then I remember the sad fate of Bandol. And that West Seattle restaurants have it uniquely tough, considered a bridge too far by many “mainland” diners but famously rejected by their own at the first whiff of pretension. What Cassis probably needs to do to be the right place for its neighborhood is play to its front-of-the-house strengths with its welcoming cocktail program and daily happy hour (you can order the mussels, the burger, that pate). That, and master its execution of the bistro basics. These days, fully 17 years after Cassis first stole Seattle’s heart, diners might find those basics too…basic. C’est la vie: Cassis, after all, always was the restaurant hospitality built.
