Madison Park Conservatory Review: Madison Park Conservatory
After two weeks of Seattle posts, I think it’s about time to sunset this dying category since it’s just killing my page rank from shitty to shittier. Who knew!? While I mentioned that I had a good experience with Seattle’s Restaurant Week, I also mentioned that we went to a place that didn’t like RW and had their own little thing against it. That restaurant was Madison Park Conservatory. They held a raffle for support of not supporting restaurant week. I can dig it. RW ain’t for everyone. It’s a bit like sex-ed in public schools. Smart folks think kids need it, but if you’re super religious and want your teenage daughter to get knocked up and get married at 18 and pop out a kid in the middle of rural Mississippi, then by all means, don’t go for sex-ed.
I started the night in a good mood because I had What She’s Having. That’s not actually what Steph had, but the name of the drink. It was vodka, campari, pomegranate, lime, grapefruit, and rhubarb bitters. It was delicious for such a girly looking drink. I’m not sure what this ‘bitters’ business is all about or how to taste it in a composed cocktail.
Salmon is a popular ingredient in Seattle and Madison Square Conservatory was no different. Salmon gravlox, fiddlehead fern, and creme fraiche ($15) was a good starter that Steph got. I think the salmon and creme fraiche is a nice variation of the thing we get on our bagels here in NYC. And here we see similarity in price between what you’d get in Seattle versus New York.
I had the grilled beef tongue, house-made pickles, mustard, and grilled bread ($16). This is also something you could easily see in some hip restaurant in Brooklyn. The nice thing about it was that they gave two thick slices of tongue. You can never have too much tongue. The pickles were a nice touch to compliment the fattiness of the beef. This was delicious and filling.
A good way to follow up the strong appetizers would be with the day boat scallops, parsnips, preserved lemon and cocoa nibs ($25). Steph was enamored with her scallops and I thought the piece I tried was cooked perfectly.
And I settled with the pan fried whole Idaho trout, pine nuts, capers, currants, and brown butter ($24). A whole fish for $24 is a pretty good deal I think. Granted, it’s trout, so it’s the black elephant in the fish family. Crazy river fish. But it’s really tasty I think and very underrated for an affordable fish. The pine nuts, capers and currants went well with the fish.
Overall we really liked Madison Park Conservatory. It really reminds me of the kinda high quality food you can get in New York. Makes me think it’s possible to be a food blogger in Seattle and not run out of good places to try. The prices are very similar to New York, and their sales tax is 9.5%, which is higher than New York City. So I think if you go to Seattle you gotta be prepared for similar prices. Living in NYC makes one think this is the only city in the world, but it appears that the rest of the US is not cheap either.
Also, I got some comments from my friends from my post shitting on Sitka and Spruce. It seems that people like the Angry Danny. I should just make a facebook application and call it, ‘Unleash your inner asshole’ but I don’t know what the app would do. I just know people would want it.
Madison Park Conservatory1927 43rd Ave E.New York, NY 98112206-324-9701