Dining Deals
Comfort food with a twist? Aloha!

By Kathryn Robinson
Special to The Seattle Times

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The talk of Wallingford is this brand-spankin'-new kitchen in the heart of the 45th Street strip, which offers comfort food as the specialty of the house. Think fat meatloaf sandwiches, moist roast pork, big bowls of warming seafood stew.

Now think of those fine comestibles prepared by chef-owner Wayne Ikeda, who brings his Japanese heritage and Hawaiian upbringing to the table. (The titular Clara is his mother.) Thence you have meatloaf made with, among other things, panko crumbs and a fruity, uniquely Hawaiian ingredient Ikeda understandably is not keen to share. (And organic beef, God bless him.) Seafood stew combining fresh fish, clams, mussels and bay scallops with taro and wakame seaweed in a coconut-milk broth. Pork slow-cooked in banana leaves, tossed with cabbage, and served with a mountain of rice and a healthy scoop of peppery macaroni salad. (See if this dish doesn't take you directly back to that little wayside stand on the road to Hana.)

Clara's Food for the Soul 1913 N. 45th St., Seattle; 206-633-2700 Hawaiian/Japanese $$ Hours: noon-9 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, noon-10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Beer, wine and sake / credit cards: MC, V / no smoking / no obstacles to access. Rating: recommended.

The menu is brief and ever-changing, its widely varying items a benefit for varying appetites. For the moment, anyway, vegetarians can dine on a veggie-stuffed tofu pouch or a savory miso stew; for omnivores, there are, besides the items previously mentioned, three other starters, a pan-fried chicken cutlet served with mashed potatoes and gravy, and a hunk of grilled salmon with a cucumber vinaigrette salad. If it all seems a dollar or so too expensive when you first survey the menu, you'll see why as soon as your heaping plate arrives — much of which is filled with organic items.

It's all served in a streamlined storefront that achieves the right balance between aesthetically ambitious — with its refined interior of scarlet walls and rotating art installations — and come-as-you-are comfortable.

You can perch at the counter if dining solo or sit at one of the 10 tables in the L-shaped room — either way the open kitchen is front and center, forefronting Ikeda's homespun cuisine and adding to the sense that you're eating at Wallingford's very kitchen table.

Check please:

Kalua pork: Talk about comfort. Pieces of the moistest imaginable pork (cooked slow in a banana leaf) are tossed with bits of glistening cabbage and heaped on a big plate. Alongside comes that starchfest that makes any homely entree into what Hawaiians call "plate lunch" — macaroni salad and rice. Here it's unremarkable, and so like the real Hawaiian deal you'll feel the warm seafoam licking at your ankles.

Grilled salmon: A beautiful fillet of fresh salmon is carefully grilled, then draped in a sweet miso sauce for a lovely variation on the more common teriyaki salmon. With it comes a refreshing cucumber vinaigrette salad and yaki onigiri — two balls of toasted sticky rice. A satisfying feast that turns out to be a deal at $10.

Cheesecake: The cheesecake's-all-the-dessert-choice-I-need crowd will be most pleased at Clara's — where cheesecake's all the dessert choice you get. They serve a beautiful exemplar, lightly lemony on a graham-cracker crust, made by Hiroki's up the street on 56th.

Itemized bill, meal for two

Kalua pork $8.50

Grilled salmon $10.00

Cheesecake $3.50

Tax $1.93

Total $23.93

Kathryn Robinson: kathrynrobinson@speakeasy.net

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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