On Seafood, iPhones, and the Indignities of a Grown Man Wearing a Bib

Chinook's cioppino is delicious and will rob you of your dignity.

Saturday noon-time my girlfriend and I are discussing where to get seafood for lunch, which has always proved problematic in Seattle, where a proximity to water and a supply of talented chefs rarely seems to result in a decently priced seafood meal. So we decide to bank on a proven commodity—Chinook's at Fishermen's Terminal in Magnolia.

Just to make the drive over a little more exciting, once we're in the car we decide not to map the route using our iPhones and just wing it by memory and luck. We've only lived in Seattle for seven years, which means I've only ever had to go to Magnolia twice: once for our first visit to Chinook's, and once a few years earlier to attend the filming of a hardcore porno.

We take Highway 99 north to the south end of the Aurora Bridge, where we turn off at the sign for the Queen Anne U-Turn, which nevertheless leaves us headed vaguely northwest rather than south. From there, we follow the signs toward Seattle Pacific University until we hit a street called Nickerson that jogs a memory of some sort, and leads us to the MC Escher-designed Ballard Bridge, where—in a rare instance of public art taking precedence over urban efficiency—motorists get to enjoy taking two lefts through an intersection in the sky in order to go straight on the same road. And then you're pretty much at Fishermen's Terminal.

Congratulating ourselves on getting less lost than the last time, when we actually did use Google Maps on an iPhone to get there, we wait for a moment at the front until our waiter comes to seat us. A baby-faced man whose name I later learn is Oliver, he sort of squints at me as he leads us to our table and then asks, "Have I served you before?"

Oliver was, in fact, the man who served us the previous time, and although I'm suspecting this is some sort of gimmick, I compliment Oliver on his memory. Laughing and shaking his head in a self-deprecating manner, he demurs: "Well, you did remember me, too."

The crab cakes. They're not on the menu, but they might have them.

Touché, Oliver.

Once we're seated, he takes our drink orders and lets us know that, although it's not on the menu, they have fresh crab cakes as an appetizer. This is all very familiar. Last time they also had crab cakes that weren't on the menu, which leads me to believe that they might just be lazy about updating their menu, odd considering they have an insert of daily specials. If anyone can confirm an occasion on which Chinook's did not have crab cakes, or they were on the menu, I'd like to know. Not that it matters much, because they're phenomenal—better than Tom Douglas' much ballyhooed ones that I've had down at the Dahlia Lounge—and we of course order them post-haste.

For the entrée, the fresh Alaskan halibut looks good, but $20 is a bit rich for lunch, so my girlfriend orders the blue plate special—Oregon ling cod with a dill-cream sauce, vegetables, red potatoes, and a cup of chowder—while I, at Oliver's suggestion, order the caesar and cioppino combination. Oliver leaves, and we get out our iPhones to check email and Facebook.

Needless to say, this leads to some self-consciousness. Why, after all, are we doing this? What possibly could have happened in the last 30 to 40 minutes that requires our immediate attention? We begin to discuss it, my girlfriend mentioning the recent news about a Stanford study on iPhone addiction. Apparently up to something like 4 percent of respondents even said that iPhone addiction had damaged their relationships.

"I don't really believe that," my girlfriend says. "People always want an excuse for why their relationships get messed up."

The crab cakes arrive. Two of them, lightly breaded, with no flavoring, paired with beurre blanc and some pan-Asian-y sauce—ginger based?—that I ignore because, hey, there's a pool of beurre blanc there.

When they clear the appetizer dishes, they lay out the service for the entrées and I grow concerned. There, on top of a fresh cloth napkin and beneath a packaged sanitary hand wipe, is a bib. I have to admit at this point that I've never before had cioppino, and it really hasn't occurred to me it might require a bib. But, being a tomato-based stew full of bivalves that are going to stick to their shells, cioppino is a potentially messy situation, particularly if you're wearing something you don't want stained, which I am.

I eat the salad first, dreading the humiliation of putting on a bib. I associate adult bibs exclusively with competitive eating events and other occasions for grown-ups to do exactly what we tell children of an appropriate bib-wearing age not to do—namely, eat too fast and to excess. I thought I was relatively light with a soup and salad lunch, and indeed, the bowl before me is of a perfectly reasonable size for a lunch. Olive Garden this place ain't. But I don't want to stain the new sweater I'm wearing, so, grimacing, I deign to put on the bib.

My girlfriend at this point is thoroughly enjoying my obvious embarrassment, and announces she's going to take a picture of me. So she gets out the iPhone, snaps the shot of me glowering over it, and (admittedly having asked first) posts it to Facebook, where on my profile page you can now join in my humiliation.

The cioppino, however, is delicious.