SAY WHAT YOU will about American food. Say it's a mishmash of other cuisines from other times and places. It's a hodgepodge of regional styles — Southern, Southwest, Northwest — a jarring juxtaposition of Down Home Country and Big City Swank. Say, as some others have said with conviction, that there is no such thing as American food.

I say hogwash. Consider cornbread, hickory-smoked bacon, sliced tomatoes and biscuits with white gravy. Reflect on grilled salmon or boiled crab, corn on the cob or strawberry shortcake. If none of that convinces you, I say barbecue.

When longtime Seattle restaurateur Robert Eickhof and Chef Paul Michael set out to reinvent the grungy Frontier Room in Seattle's restaurant-ridden Belltown this spring, they wanted to serve real American food, and barbecue was the theme.

Architect George Suyama cleaned the place up just enough to remove the grit, but not enough to remove its hard-earned character. "We relish the Frontier Room's raw past by playing on it, not glossing it over," says Eickhof, who earned his stripes at Rosellini's 410 and Il Terrazzo Carmine.

A Louisiana native, Chef Michael invested in a Southern Pride Barbecue pit. "We're talking Tennessee-style pork barbecue, cooked low and slow for 10 or 12 hours, and lean beef brisket cooked Texas-style for even longer." Michael uses all natural Niman Ranch pork, raised without antibiotics or hormones. I have a feeling Calvin Trillin would approve.

Trillin, whose books "American Fried," "Alice Let's Eat" and "Third Helpings" comprise "The Tummy Trilogy," traveled around America for 15 years eating and writing about food for The New Yorker and helped define what American food is all about. When he started out in the late '60s, American food was sharply divided between the real stuff we liked to eat and the stuff we wanted others to believe we liked to eat.

	'IT IS COMMON FOR AN AMERICAN CITY TO BE VAGUELY EMBARRASSED ABOUT ITS TRUE DELIGHTS.' Calvin Trillin

"It is common," wrote Trillin, "for an American city to be vaguely embarrassed about its true delights." Instead of steering a visitor toward a place offering the honest victuals of a regional cuisine, locals in those days were likely to send anyone who asked for a restaurant recommendation to one of those "purple palaces" that Trillin called "Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine." There, a hungry traveler would be subjected to something like "Frozen Duck à l'Orange Soda Pop."

These days, a new kind of conceit has invaded the American restaurant landscape. And anyone looking for honest American food is likely to be directed not to Maison de la Casa, but to Biff's Bistro. The hypothetical bistro is a state-of-the-art eatery where buttered grits have been transformed into a soufflé, and the grilled pork chop beside them has received a pedigree from its grower before getting slow-brined with raw sugar and kosher salt, with herbs harvested a few yards from the restaurant's back door. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for this kind of improvement, but I don't think it really defines American food.

American food can be defined in at least three ways: one, by the ingredients that are uniquely — or at least originally — ours; two, by the techniques we use; and three, by the way we serve our food and eat it. Overarching all of this is the sheer, unparalleled abundance that characterizes our culture.

As for the ingredients, certain basic foods are native to the New World: turkey, corn, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, chocolate and most beans. Unfortunately, anyone hoping to pinpoint what makes our food uniquely ours will have a hard time with the ingredients. Long before most of the people who eventually came to call this place home ever set foot here, European explorers picked up these indigenous foods and carted them all over the world. By the time our primary foodstuffs found their way back home, they were marching to the various beats of a thousand different drummers.

As for those techniques — well, let's just say that only an American could love certain methods of preparation. If anything set these United States apart during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was our dangerous affair with mass production, and the close affiliation of mass production and warfare. When our boys went "over there," we sent them packing with some of the most highly processed and ingeniously packaged food imaginable. When the boys came home, manufacturers were determined to keep their factories humming. With the help of some serious marketing, American entrepreneurs gave homemakers new ways to feed a new crop of hungry little troops known as baby boomers.

For better or worse, most Americans alive today derived a lot of their nourishment from a wide and colorful assortment of prepared, prepackaged and precooked foods that a half century later continue to roll off the assembly lines like so many widgets. It's no wonder the rest of the world is baffled by our eating habits.

Yet we have another tradition that developed side-by-side with our culture of meals in a minute. That parallel heritage involves family meals shared around a table piled high with the bounty of this incredible place. Picture the bucolic scene in Norman Rockwell's "Freedom from Want." The eager faces of three generations surround a lace-covered table where a turkey is about to be put down in front of them. American food is first and foremost about abundance.

Oh sure, the family table has been the setting for many a dysfunctional scene, and certainly the abundance that makes the board groan has come at a steep price to the environment. But behind the doors of the American home, good food simply prepared defines our eating habits just as surely as the highly processed food that defines us to the world outside. That simple goodness is the spirit slowly cooking at the Frontier Room.

Greg Atkinson is executive chef at Canlis and chef at the Puget Sound Environmental Center. He is also author of "The Northwest Essentials Cookbook" (Sasquatch Books, 1999). Barry Wong is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.