WRITTEN BY GREG ATKINSON PHOTOGRAPHED BY BARRY WONG

	At the posh Polaris restaurant in the Bellevue Club Hotel, diners fresh from a workout can expect to get a meal comparable to a fine-dining experience elsewhere in town.

While fare at most fitness clubs is more or less an afterthought, a few clubs are drawing some real talent and delivering food that's truly fit to eat.

It could be said that innovative fitness-club food started moving into the mainstream when the late, great Café Sport opened on Western Avenue, just north of the Pike Place Market in the early 1980s. Intended as an adjunct to the Seattle Fitness Club, Café Sport exceeded everyone's expectations of what fitness food could be, and it launched the career of the Seattle food scene's uncrowned king, Tom Douglas.

"When we opened, the G.M. at the fitness club was my boss," says Douglas, "and there were some real benefits to being affiliated with the club. For one thing, we were nonsmoking at a time when that was pretty rare, and we found that a lot of people really liked that." The restaurant also benefited from the built-in clientele, even if they didn't look like the typical restaurant crowd. "I think it was the first time we saw people in a fine-dining restaurant wearing tights and workout clothes."

When Douglas took his talent to Dahlia Lounge, Sport fizzled; and when it closed, Douglas came back and opened Etta's Seafood at the same location. This time around, though, the fitness club and the restaurant have no ties other than the ordinary ones between landlord and tenant.

At the Bellevue Club Hotel, the tenant and the landlord are one, and no lines are drawn between the small luxury hotel, its dining rooms and the club itself. With more than 150,000 square feet of athletic facilities and a full-service spa, it might be easy for management to lose its focus on food.

But, according to hotel manager and director of hospitality Peter Christian, club President S.W. "Bill" Thurston told him that food and beverage might be the most important aspect of the whole operation. "And it's the hardest part to get right." With two full-service restaurants bringing in more than $5 million a year in sales, Christian does get it right. Both the elegant fine-dining restaurant, Polaris, and the more casual poolside café called Splash could easily hold their own without a club attached.

"It's all about the service," insists Christian, who once served as general manager at Seattle's paragon of service, Canlis. "I bring a lot of what I learned there to bear on my work here," he says. "And every week, I check out what's going on in other restaurants so that I can bring our members the same kind of dining experience they would have at their favorite restaurants." Bellevue Club's executive chef Paul Marks often dines with him both at the club and at other venues. And the club supports Christian's efforts to stay on top of trends with a generous dining budget and regular opportunities for professional growth, like week-long stints at sister properties around the country.

"It helps the staff to see us meeting here in the dining room and monitoring what goes on instead of locking ourselves up in a private meeting room," Christian adds.

Like Christian, chef Marks brings considerable restaurant experience to his work at the club. As a regional chef for the Italian-restaurant chain Piatti, Marks was executive chef for the U-Village branch, and his menu reflects that Italian influence in five thin-crust pizzas, among other things. Chef's specialties include chicken piccata and linguine with clams.

The Bellevue Club is limited to members. However, a temporary membership and access to the club's spa is granted to every guest of the hotel, which is one of only three four-star, four-diamond properties in the Pacific Northwest, worthy of a mini-vacation.

Another Eastside fitness club with a highly trained food-service team is Pro Sports Club on 148th Avenue Northeast in Bellevue. Food and beverage director JoAnn Bowditch has been in the restaurant industry for more than 25 years, most of them at Consolidated Restaurants in Seattle. Executive Chef James Somerville won accolades as executive chef at Leo Melina's and earned his high-volume-cooking stripes as executive chef at The Wedge catering company.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of food service at Pro Sports is a series of dishes that conform to the club's "20/20" program. A multidisciplinary approach to weight loss and management of metabolic disorders including high cholesterol and diabetes, the program supplements dietary advice with exercise and counseling. At every one of the club's multiple dining areas, any entrée presented on the menu as a 20/20 item will weigh in at under 650 calories with no more than 20 percent of those calories from fat and no more than 20 percent from carbohydrates.

With some 30,000 members, this branch of Pro Sports is Washington's largest athletic club. (Chalk that huge number of members up to the fact that several of the region's largest employers, including Microsoft and Honeywell, offer club membership as an employee perk.) With so many members, PSC need not open its eight dining areas to nonmembers, but to some extent it does.

Anyone can sign up for the 20/20 program and participate in club services for the duration. Nonmember business groups frequent five separate meeting rooms. And spa guests can enjoy the women's-only "Spa Dining Area," even if they are not members.