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Sue Kidd is the Lifestyle Editor at The News Tribune and the ringleader for the Food and Home&Garden sections. She has worked as a food journalist at Northwest newspapers since 1993, most recently as a food writer, editor and restaurant reviewer in King County before joining The News Tribune in 2004. Her food obsessions at the moment are honey, cheese and oysters.
Craig Sailor is the Arts&Entertainment editor at The News Tribune. He grew up on a garlic farm near Gilroy, Calif. and now farms oysters in his spare time at Willapa Bay. He’s traveled the world from Kyoto/Kuala Lumpur/Hong Kong to Zanzibar in search of great food.
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A search for parking turned me on to a really cheap $3 lunch today. I was intending to eat at Vien Dong, home to tasty, inexpensive Vietnamese soup. I turned right off 38th, looking for parking and found a surprise – a second Cafe La Vie tucked into a refurbished house in a residential street. It's an outpost of the other Cafe La Vie on 38th.
The second Cafe La Vie has been open for about seven months and, like its sister restaurant around the corner, the menu is micro focused on Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches and Vietnamese coffee. The second location, however, is far more clean and spacious than its original counterpart.
Our sister paper The Olympian reported today about The Mark restaurant in Olympia receiving organic certification last month by the state Department of Agriculture. Read the story here. The Mark, a restaurant serving Spanish, Italian and Basque style rustic cuisine with a Northwest sensibility, is the only restaurant in the state currently certified by the program (another restaurant, Seattle's Sterling Cafe, participated, but dropped out).
I spoke with restaurant owner Lisa Owen recently about the certification process. She said about 70 percent of what's on her menu is organic, and she alerts diners of organic menu choices with a system of asterisks explaining the extent to which each dish is organically sourced. "It doesn’t mean that every single item I’m selling is organic, but it says that everything I’m saying is organic, really is organic," explained Owen.
She takes organic sourcing to the extreme – even using organic oils and offering organic wine, not to mention organic herbs in cocktails and organic dairy in coffee drinks. It's much easier now to source organic ingredients than ever before, but she still has difficulty sourcing some products, such as pancetta.
Serving organic is a mantra she takes to a basic level: "My rationale is I can’t serve people things I wouldn’t eat or drink."
The Mark
Where: 407 S.W. Columbia St., Olympia
Contact: 360-754-4414
Hours: Dinner served 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; Tapas served until 2 a.m. Thursday-Saturday.
Website: http://www.themarkolympia.com/restaurant/
