pork at Toulouse Petit

We don’t have a lot of late-night dining experiences these days, other than the meals we eat at 11 pm, battling over whether we’re going to watch The Daily Show or the local news. (And what does it matter, since we’re both exhausted by 11:15 and call uncle anyway?) Once we had a baby, the dinners in Seattle restaurants after Danny was done with his shift, with the two of us laughing toward the car at nearly 2 am? Those ended. Immediately.

Lunch, however? Lunches are great.

Most Fridays, we leave the island where we live and head into the city. We’ve lived on our rural island (but only 20 minutes from Seattle) for not even a year, and already Seattle feels like The Big City when we drive its streets. We have friends to see, errands to run, places to be. Lunch somewhere, with a different set of friends each week, is a great way to slow down and enjoy ourselves.

Especially when there is pork.

A few weeks ago, we went to Toulouse Petite, a New Orleans-style restaurant in lower Queen Anne. It’s big and spacious, with booths and tables and a long bar with gleaming bottles of alcohol above it. Clearly, at night, this is a hip scene, the kind of place where good-looking single people jostle elbows at the bar and hope for something more than a meal. At lunch, however, that vibe was not there. Our waitress knew how to deal with toddlers, since she has one of her own. We felt welcomed.

And the meal began well. These are pork cheeks, done confit style. That means they were cooked in pork fat, low and slow.

You can imagine these were pretty darned good. (I have to admit that I found it jarring that they were crispy. I expected the sort of meltingly tender texture of well-braised meats. But the jarring feeling gave way to satisfaction in the mouth.)

This is jambalaya. Pretty darned fine jambalaya, too. There were many kinds of meats, sausages, and heat in there. In fact, for me, there was way too much heat. I love a good spicy dish when I know it’s coming. However, when no one warned me that this would make the roof of my mouth feel withered and a bit like ashes afterward, this was a bit of a shock.

It was also a terrible loss for our toddler daughter, who loves to eat anything we eat. The heat made her scream. This isn’t a kid’s restaurant, and we had other food for her. However, I sort of agreed with her.

The bite of braised pork shoulder I ate was pretty great, though.

This is Danny’s lunch: fried oyster and bacon po’ boy. With all that gluten, obviously I couldn’t share any. But he was too busy chowing down on it, eagerly, to even tell me about it until after we were in the car. Those french fries looked pretty damned yummy, too.

So all in all, we had a good lunch. Danny highly recommends the po’ boy. He says it was extraordinary. I’d skip the jambalaya next time. I haven’t seen pork cheeks on many other menus in Seattle, so those are worth the trip.

And hey, we were in the city, eating pork. What could be wrong with that?

Toulouse Petit

601 Queen Anne Ave. N.
Seattle, WA 98109

(206) 432-9069