At Home with Nettletown’s Christina Choi
BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT
PHOTO BY KELLY O
THE SUBJECT: You can’t get much more local than Christina Choi. The cofounder of local wild foods purveyor Foraged & Found now has her own Eastlake restaurant, Nettletown—which, naturally, emphasizes local, seasonal and foraged ingredients. Choi lives two blocks from Nettletown, in the apartment where she grew up.
To be completely accurate, Choi’s family lived there until she was five years old. “When the fifth kid was being born, my parents decided it was time to move,” she laughs; it’s a two-bedroom apartment. The family moved all the way to Montlake. When she was growing up, her parents both cooked, she says; with six kids, family dinners were the rule, restaurant meals the rare exception. They ate a lot of Asian food; her mother made homemade tofu. She remembers being served tongue: “I have a picture in my head of a whole, boiled tongue on a plate—one tongue, whole, on a plate on the table… Gross, but—oooh, this is really good.” For a time, her mother had a job testing recipes, meaning week after week of dishes containing Walla Walla onions or powdered potatoes from Idaho. Her father—who attended Garfield High School and the UW, and also worked at Trader Vic’s—was a businessman and community figure who ran for city council in 1972. When he passed away recently, the service was crowded with family, friends, and admirers, including Dino Rossi (which, Choi says, was nice but did not earn him her vote).
THE VIEW: The building (which Choi’s family owns) is vintage late-’60s, with windows and a motel-style balcony across the front. The view is sweeping, with the late-afternoon sun sitting over Queen Anne, the Space Needle to the south, the Aurora Bridge to the north. A racing shell rows by picturesquely on glimmering Lake Union below.
Choi’s aesthetic is an unlikely mix of clean lines and the adorable. Nettletown’s got knickknacks, but it feels spare and never trespasses into too cute. Her apartment’s the same way—an antique phonograph in a corner has a ukulele and a small parasol on its closed lid; a table holds an orchid, some old glass photo negatives, a few porcelain deer, shells, and a rock. She has seven shelves’ worth of cookbooks, one of travel guides; having no trips on the horizon is the source of new-restaurateur’s remorse for her.
Atop a sideboard is an Excalibur Food Dehydrator, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it—it’s black and sleek, like a stack of lacquered trays. Choi says she sprung for a nicer model because there’s more surface area, more settings, and the temperature is truer. She’s drying green beans, which is a Swiss thing (her mom’s from Switzerland).
THE RESTAURANTS: Choi’s first restaurant job was at Capitol Hill’s late, great Surrogate Hostess. “It still makes me sad that it’s gone,” she says. Then she worked at Leo Melina, Adriatica, Bandoleone, Cassis (“the only job I’ve ever been fired from”), Sapphire, and, briefly, the Herbfarm, before starting Foraged & Found with Jeremy Faber. She inherited Nettletown’s tiny strip-mall space from friend Matt Dillon, when he moved Sitka & Spruce up to Capitol Hill.
Right now, she’s excited about Sushi Kappo Tamura, newly opened on Eastlake, from the former chef/owner of Fremont’s Chiso. Likewise, Capitol Hill’s La Bête: “I can tell they’ve put a lot into it—they’ve put their whole beings into building the place and then doing the food.” She loves Green Leaf and Shanghai Garden in the I.D., and she misses the bar at Capitol Hill’s dear departed Jade Pagoda.
WEIRD THINGS: Choi’s kitchen is small and old-school, with tile, retro copper accents, and a separate electric cooktop and oven. “It’s a very unused kitchen,” she says. “I have a pantry full of old nuts and things.” A clear plastic multi-pocketed shoe organizer hangs on the inside of the pantry door, filled with spices, tea and part of a bag of fossilized marshmallows. (She gives credit for the storage idea to her brother Chris; he also works at Nettletown and used to be her roommate.)
The refrigerator serves mainly as overflow storage for the restaurant. There are four giant jars of sea beans that Choi got from Foraged & Found and pickled; they go on Nettletown’s banh mi–style sandwiches (delicious, especially the elk meatball). There are tons of green onions, and the crisper drawers are full of cabbage for the restaurant. More pickles, not for Nettletown consumption: “These are so old—spring onions with rosewater, some kind of apple pickle, I’m guessing that’s pickled huckleberries—I made a LOT of pickled huckleberries.” A jar of Vlasic pickles: “I don’t know why those are there.” There’s “someone’s rhubarb jam.” A jug of black tea has a suspicious precipitate, diagnosed as probably cardamom. There are organic eggs and a neglected bottle of Rockridge blackberry wine.
In the fridge door, a jar of Korean garlic paste reminds her of H-Mart in Federal Way, a huge Korean grocery store that she highly recommends: “It’s really awesome.” Then there’s Turkish chili paste, miso paste, coconut oil, mustard. The tubes of egg tofu came from her aunt—”kind of like soft tofu, but more of an eggy flavor,” good for sautéing or putting in soup.
As for the freezer, “I have weird things in here—I have lots of things that should be thrown away.” Not so weird: empty ice cube trays, Haagen-Dazs, and homemade muesli (she soaks it overnight for cold porridge). Weirder: “probably freezer-burned” elk wontons from the restaurant and “frozen candied pomelo I made last winter.” Then there’s something unidentified, possibly stew. A big plastic bag holds a dried green vegetable she brought back from Vietnam; Green Leaf uses it, rehydrated, in their signature salad, and it’s “crunchy, okra-ish.” Choi was in Vietnam two years ago. “I should be cleaning it out as we speak,” she says and laughs.
Garbage Patch Kids cards are magnetted to the front of the fridge, along with family photos. There’s a sticker for Loki Fish Co. and another for Dave’s Killer Bread—seedy sliced bread from Portland, which Choi emphasizes is “the BEST.” The campaign poster for her father’s city council run shows him in a suit with the slogan “Let’s get it all together!”
THE LEFTOVERS: Choi’s brought several already-opened bottles of wine from the restaurant. She tries the vinho verde. “It’s supposed to be sparkly,” she says and laughs. “If you don’t want to drink it, you don’t have to.” She provided the food for a Seattle Metropolitan photo shoot earlier that day, and here are the leftovers—bread from Le Fournil; a round of Seastack cheese; and a gorgeous whole baked Coho salmon, with a sour cream, herb, and salmon-roe dressing. A mushroomy, savory bread pudding is in the oven, and a few friends and friend-of-friends arrive as the sun goes down. (One, an architect named Kenny, brings homemade strawberry meringue cookies, better than from any bakery. Choi makes a salad without actually appearing to be busy; everyone drinks wine, and no one minds the flat vinho verde. Then there’s a feast.
Bethany Jean Clement is a writer and editor. Her work may be found regularly in The Stranger, as well as in the Best Food Writing anthologies.