Savoury Bites Blog

Three Squares

Oh la la! If you love color you must make it to the Second Saturday Art Walk this month as our walls are splashed with the incredible colors of Fran Holt’s paintings. This color rich artist has been wowing Seattle with her beautiful works for many years and we’re excited to have many of her pieces exhibited at SAVOUR for this month’s art walk.

Highlighted at the exhibit are paintings from Fran’s Color Modularites series, which are single, vibrant color fields that reveal subtle variations in opacity, brush mark, and paint thickness creating a layer of playfulness within each robust color. “This series was realized as one of my bucket list ideas, whose sole purpose was to luxuriate in some of my favorite colors without iconography or representation. Color by itself is astonishing; the happiest of colors hung as squares on a wall, re-arrangeable into rectangles or even a single long line, has the effect of instant well-being.”

Sunbathers

Color is the unifying theme of the show. Warm, tropical colors are evident in Holt’s oil painting, Sunbathers, based on Gauguin’s representational depiction of two girls on a beach. Village Toy and Big Sky are bouncing, saturated revels of color, held loosely identifiable as object and landscape, respectively, and Relentless River is a mixed media abstraction of water, using rich blues played against composition gold leaf.

Please join us Saturday, March 9, from 6pm to 8pm for another fun evening of art, drinks and food. We’ll be honoring our Happy Hour all night for everyone!

Relentless River

A Piece from the 2012 Loyal Heights PTA Auction

It’s that time of year again—time for our walls to be adored with the local, talented works of the students from Loyal Heights Elementary produced for their annual PTA auction, and if you attended the showing last year, you know these are not what you’d call typical children’s artwork!

For this annual event parents volunteer to design and execute works of art in union with the students from each classroom. Pieces must be designed to include the involvement of every student and the results are high-quality pieces that auction for up to thousands of dollars each. Last year’s pieces brought in more than $20,000 revenue for the school from the auction.

So please plan on joining us Saturday, February 9, between 6pm and 8pm, for the Ballard Second Saturday Art Walk, to view the art pieces from the students decorating our walls. Take advantage of our all night Happy Hour to sip a glass of wine or beer and a nibble of food as you peruse the art on the walls!

The art you see will be auctioned at Loyal Heights 19^th annual PTA auction being held on March 9^that the Fischer Pavilion in Seattle. The event is the school’s largest fundraiser and proceeds are used to fund essential student programs and classroom needs. For tickets

Art Walk Attendees View LHE 2012 Works

and more information on the auction, including how you can donate for the event, visit the auction website.

Since many caviar companies are not environmentally conscience, we were excited to find Tsar Nicoulai’s sustainable caviars. The only caviar company to win a James Beard Award, Tsar Nicoulai Caviar are pioneers of sustainable practices and have provide caviar of the highest quality and integrity to discriminating connoisseurs around the world, including chefs such as Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck.

Tsar Nicoulai Caviars use proprietary tank-farming techniques that have significantly reduced the threat to declining wild stocks, water from their own natural aquifers, and unique recycling programs that have made them truly earth-friendly. Their entire selection of caviars come from sources, both domestic and international, that practice sustainability caviar farming.

From the less expense and beautiful Gold Pearl Salmon Roe to the Paddlefish Caviar that’s most like Caspian Sea Sturgeon, we have a selection of caviar to match your holiday budget.

The Gold Pearl Salmon Roe has a large, golden bead with a pronounced flavor and a generous pop! The Beet and Saffron Whitefish Caviar has a naturally brilliant red color and just a hint of saffron flavor, which makes it a great choice for adding glamour to your holiday appetizers. The American Paddlefish Caviar is light gray in color, with a small bead and sharp finish making it most like the more expensive Caspian Sea Sturgeon.

Additionally we have caviar mother-of-pearl spoons to add beauty to your holiday table and carry Tsar Nicoulai’s buckwheat blini mixes.  Small rounds of blini crowned with a mound of crème fraîche and topped with caviar makes an incredible, luxurious holiday appetizer—pair it with your favorite sparkling wine!

Give it as a gift or include it onvyour celebration menus and add another “pop” to your holidays!

We’re pleased to announce that our antipasti bar is open and ready for business! This isn’t the boring olive bar filled with basic olives and sad looking peppers that you’ll find at your local grocery. Our antipasti bar is filled with fresh, local and imported products, carefully selected to enhance your antipasti, cheese and charcuterie plates, and specifically selected to offer you a range of products not easily found elsewhere.

Sweet, hot and crisp Washington state grown Hungarian Goathorn peppers, crunchy Greek olives with crushed chilies, and juicy semi-sundried tomatoes are just some of the items that you’ll find in our new antipasti bar, and the bar that houses these treats is worth a visit to SAVOUR itself!

Ninty-five percent of the materials used to construct the antipasti bar were sourced from local salvage stores like Ballard’s ReStore and Earthwise in Sodo. Just wandering the jumbled aisles of these shops stimulates ideas, and when we eyed the long porcelain sink from some institutional building the antipasti bar was born!

The construction and craftsmanship of the bar were the work of George Klemaier, who patiently worked with ruggedly drawn designs to turn our ideas into reality (you can also check out George’s handiwork in our large, communal table in the event space of the store).

Boun appetito!