The cosmetic remodel of iconic Tacoma restaurant Southern Kitchen looks complete.

About a year ago, the inside got a bright new coat of paint. Recently, the exterior was spiffed up with new siding, new windows and new paint.

That old plastic sign that promoted Pepsi as much as it did Southern Kitchen is gone, replaced with a painted wood sign that evokes the restaurant's down-home roots.

Some tables and chairs on the sidewalk add extra curb appeal.

Idling in my car at the intersection of Sixth-Sprague-Division last night, I stared at Southern Kitchen. I remembered that time I was a guest on Tom Douglas' radio show.

Back in November, Douglas wanted to talk about Tacoma restaurants. I didn't.

I watched his mental wheels spin as he thought of Tacoma restaurants.

"Southern Kitchen," he finally said.

As he said it, I visualized slumping siding and sweaty windows -- the impression Southern Kitchen instilled when I encountered the four-decade-old restaurant in 2004.

I did what a person shouldn't do on radio.

I said nothing.

What I'm saying now is this:

Bravo to restaurants that make the efforts to dress up their acts. Appearances matter.

I'm looking forward to my next fix of fried chicken and greens.

Southern Kitchen: 1716 Sixth Ave., Tacoma; 253-627-4282

Columbia River king salmon (left, $27.50 per pound).

Copper River salmon (right, $38.99 per pound).

It was a perfect storm: A gloomy opening to Copper River salmon season collided with my growing resentment toward purchasing anything more expensive than a gallon of gas.

Tacoma-area restaurants and markets report limited or zero supplies of the prized catch from Alaska. Some said Monday that they don’t expect any until Wednesday.

I bought an 8-ounce Copper River king filet from Metropolitan Market in Tacoma on Monday. At $38.99 a pound, it wasn’t exactly a bargain, but it was cheaper than what some South Sound fishmongers were charging: $47.69 at Northern Fish Co. on Ruston Way and $49.99 at Johnny’s in Lakewood and Tacoma.

I broiled the fish for mere minutes and served it with caper-butter-white-wine sauce. How was it? Delicious, of course.

Copper River’s ruby flesh glowed like Dorothy’s slippers. When the first tine of my fork hit the fish, the filet didn’t so much as flake apart as glide apart. The flavor and texture – like the oceans and the rivers churned into buttery flesh – made me proud to be atop the food chain.

But at today’s prices, I think last night’s supper might have been my one and only taste of Copper River salmon this season.

Some Ed’s Diner regulars seem to feel the same way.

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FEED THE GLOVE Food-service workers are required to wear them. What about diners?

I've been eating at buffets for about a week. Somewhere between Old Country and Indian country, I caught a cold.

(I also ate some pretty good buffet grub. My reviews will publish Friday in GO. Here's a sneak: Little Creek and Muckleshoot casinos, despite the weekend waits. Super Buffet, DuPont.)

I saw a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer at Little Creek Casino. It was at the cash register. It was about three-quarters full. In a very unscientific study, I witnessed no one using the hand sanitizer as I waited in line to pay at the register.

My first thought: Hand sanitizer should be on every table at every buffet, salad bar or all-you-can-eat pizza parlor.

My second thought: Patrons who touch tongs, spoons or ladles while loading up at buffets should be made to we wear disposable gloves.

My third thought: Ain't gonna happen.

First of all, it's just a head cold. Second of all, I'm not that anal. Third of all, nothing will keep me from grabbing the Muckleshoot buffet's sauce-slathered-full-of-meat beef ribs between my questionably clean fingers.

Kids sneeze. Old men scratch. How many ladies who lunch at casino buffets wash their hands after playing the slots? Did I wash my hands after giving my dog her nightly bowl of raw poultry?

That's life, ladies and germs. Just one more thing to sneeze at.

I've got a couple more buffets to graze today. I'll be the guy with the hand sanitizer on my gloves.

The culture card lay at the bottom of yesterday's Seattle P-I story about King County's top 10 violators of restaurant rules.

One of those restaurants is Wild Ginger, a pricey pan-Asian place in downtown Seattle.

Cooks drawn from China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam come from a food culture very different from that in the U.S., said the owner of Wild Ginger.

"It's still a challenge to try to get people to understand how we view what's sanitary versus (how a) culture that's 5,000 years old (does)," said the owner of Wild Ginger. "They think I'm crazy. I say this is the way we have to do it."

I almost went crazy when I worked at a Nicaraguan bakery in San Francisco.

On my first day I found a fossilized mouse beneath the mixer.

It got worse.

Bad plumbing. Burned-out refrigeration. Mold in the kitchen walls. An oven that looked like it was bought second-hand from a charnel house.

It was my job to clean it up, or work around it. The owner didn't seem to care which.

One day, the health inspector arrived on his regular rounds.

He looked around the kitchen for about 45 seconds.

I counted up the critical violations in my head.

The health inspector scribbled on a form.

He handed me a copy.

See you next time, he said.

I looked at the form: the violations I knew existed were not noted on the form.

I called the San Francisco health department. My efforts to reach the inspector's boss failed. Same with the inspector's boss' boss. They were on vacation. I left messages. Nothing happened. I still had a filthy bakery to fix.

It was a moment straight out of Roman Polanski's "Chinatown."

"Forget it, Jake," I heard that voice say in my head, filled with defeat and grudging acceptance. "It's Chinatown."

Actually, in today's polite world, Chinatown is the International District. Shouldn't we all get along in the global kitchen?

Hey, Food Network, how about a show about food safety, in 10 different languages?

UPDATED Here's an e-mail I received shortly after I posted this. Kids today -- God bless 'em.

I am a 12th grade student and Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma. As part of a student group for an American Government class, we are interested in the potential hazards of the substandard conditions of some Pierce County restaurants. After meeting with Mike Davis of the Tacoma Pierce County Healthy Department, we believe that public perception of food safety regulations may be skewed and are hoping to correct this inaccuracy. Our group would like to speak or meet with you to discuss the feasibility of publishing an article addressing food safety and what to look for in a restaurant.

I was unemployed and packing for a camping trip when jets smashed into the World Trade Center towers Sept. 11, 2001. I left San Francisco and drove to Convict Lake.

Around a campfire, with my dog in the high dessert of the Eastern Sierra, it felt like Us Against the World. It was one of those moments of definition, of what do we do and where do we go from here.

I poached trout. I decided to go to cooking school and return to writing about food.

Something good happened that day.

Updated

This just in from the North American Self-Defense Association of Maple Valley:

Memorial Mug Lifting At Engine House No. 9 in Tacoma Tonight. This memorial event for ages 21 and older starts at 7 p.m. tonight. The cost is only $10 per person. We will have 38 Honorary Black Belts on display at this event which will be hand carried to the families of the New York Port Authority police officers killed in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

This follows on the heels of 343 Honorary Black Belts already presented to the families of the New York fire fighters killed in the 9/11 attack in previous years as well as 27 Honorary Black Belts presented to the families of all the New York City police officers killed in the 9/11 attack.

My dinner companions Friday night were ages 10 and 40. One stuck a straw in her nose. One sat quietly.

The 10-year-old is the one I dine with the least, and the one I enjoyed the most.

"I'm cranky," the kid announced when I met her and her dad at Farrelli's newest pizza parlor, the one on Pacific and Garfield in Parkland, near PLU.

"I hate tomatoes," the kid said halfway through the meal, joyously licking tomato sauce off a slice of pie.

"Bacon!" she exclaimed at one random moment. "I loooooooooove bacon!"

"I love Swedish fish," I said, matching her non sequitur for non sequitur.

"Sour gummies," the kid replied, hitting my candy curveball right back at me.

"I lost a tooth in a Big Hunk," I said.

"Beans!" she screamed, beaming at me devilishly. "Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeans."

Then she did more things kids do: rolled her eyes into the back of her head, stuck both ends of a straw in her nostrils, laughed, smiled rays of honey sunshine and looked cute as hell.

The straw up the nose was over the top for my tastes, and I wondered why her dad let her do it. His dad and my dad would have smacked us both upside the heads for doing that during any meal, anywhere.

But there was no question why I enjoyed talking and eating with this cute kid who'd stuck a straw up her nose:

Food, to her, was uninhibited joy.

Tomatoes may be fruit that taste like vegetables, but simmer some with sugar and spice and spread the sauce on a disc of dough with cheese and wait for the oven to do something nice. What kid of any age wouldn't lick that pizza?

(Which is now a good time to say: Farrelli's crust is too bready and under-baked for my tastes, but I enjoyed the meatball and veggie deluxe pies. The former looked like a marvelous Margherita dotted with bite-sized balls of mildly spiced ground beef. The latter was a democratic array of pine nuts, artichoke hearts, petso and feta. Adults loved that one; the kid wouldn't touch it.)

I looked around the restaurant and counted kids. Babies, tots, lads, lasses and those in various stages of adolescence ... I ran out of fingers and toes. Except for the straw in the nose, I saw minors acting up.

Last night, I walked into a bistro in University Place and encountered a baby on a table. That sounds like a set-up to a joke, right? (Mmmmm, stuffed kid a la Swift with Gerber sauce.) But seriously: The baby slept, and the parents dined in comfortable silence.

I haven't reached the stage where I'd consider breeding my own dining companions, but to those who have: Next time you see me, I'll buy you a drink.

Months ago, a caller complained that I eat "weird" food, not "American" food.

This week, an e-mailer wants me to tell him where to find the best pozole and the best borscht in Tacoma.

I love swimming in the melting pot, but I'm coming up empty on pork-and-hominy stew and beet soup recommendations.

Meantime, my colleagues and I are working on a series of stories about South Tacoma Way. I'm doing the cultural angle, which can often be told through food.

Hong Sheng Fung (aka The Pot Sticker) opened recently at 8302 South Tacoma Way, across from the drive-in flea market. The restaurant serves Chinese food cooked by a woman of Chinese descent who was born in Korea and later moved to Tacoma.

My first meal at Hong Shen Fung included pot stickers -- one-bite dumplings with crisped edges and mild, meaty fillings -- and once I got those out of the way, I moved into the small menu's more interesting territory:

Pigs feet and cold roast beef.

Chinese delicacies, both, according to Jennifer, the chef who came out of her kitchen to see who ordered her house specialty combo.

"I wanted to see if you are Asian," she said.

I hardly had to assure her I am not Asian, and we spent the next several minutes talking about the pan-cultural pleasures of pigs feet and what many American diners won't eat.

"These are my mother's recipes," the chef said. "I cook them how I want to, how they should be. If they don't like it, tough."

By "they," I assumed she meant anyone who wasn't Chinese or didn't have a taste for the edible unknown.

Not everything on the menu is "authentic." For instance, meals are served with banchan, mini plates of mixed Korean appetizers. Sweet and sour pork, fried rice and the like are on the menu, too.

I wanted pigs feet, boiled until the fat melted away. Roasted and glazed to a light-brown sweetness, they were chopped and served cold.

"Enjoy them with a beer," the chef said.

I enjoyed them for their swine simplicity: Shed of fat, the pigs feet were all about cartilage and collagen -- chewy, almost creamy morsels accented by pockets of meat.

Roast beef, too, was served cold, in slices that revealed no fat, just layers of meat accented by cracks that used to contain fat. This beef was dense and tender and intensely black from its soy-chili seasoning.

On my next visit, I opted for sweet and sour pork, plus steamed pot stickers (a little more slithery than the fried dumplings, but just as good).

Sweet and sour pork is one those dishes tailored to American palates. It's the chalupa of Chinese cuisine. I didn't expect to find crunchy slices of black mushrooms, or sweetly marinated cucumber tossed among battered pork and pineapple. An otherwise unimpressive dish made a slight impression.

Now, where to find pozole and borscht in Tacoma?

I know a place on South Tacoma Way that serves pozole. I don't recommend it. I'll gladly search the eastside's Mexican joints for the best bowls, amigos.

Borscht? Beats me, comrades, but there's a Ukranian deli in downtown Auburn where I'm hoping to find something "weird" and edibly un-"American."

Lutefisk, anyone?

One of my last assignments for Restaurant Ray was cataloging Social Security numbers from employees at two restaurants.

"You don't have to verify them," Restaurant Ray told me. "Just collect them, stick them in a binder and put the binder on that shelf."

When I said, "But ... ", Restaurant Ray said it's the government responsibility to verify whether the Social Security numbers were real or bogus.

I knew about the "no-match" letters that the government would occasionally send employers. I have no idea whether Restaurant Ray ever received a no-match letter from the government.

It's easy, on the streets of San Jose and other areas with immigrant populations, to buy fake identification. "Micas" is the Spanish code word, as I found out from some of Restaurant Ray's cooks when he asked me to ask them where his handyman could score a fake ID.

I did what I was told. I'd already figured that many of the employees' Social Security numbers didn't match their real identities. Saul, Miguel, Moises, Ulysses, Roberto, Elizabet and two dishwashers named Fabian ... none of them got their papers stamped at Ellis Island. I saw taxes deducted from their paychecks. I doubt they ever filed returns. This was another of those wink-and-go-on moments in life.

This one, however, isn't:

American businesses will be forced to fire employees whose Social Security numbers do not match government records. The new rule, imposed by the Bush administration on Friday, takes effect in 30 days.

"We strike at that magnet" of jobs, the administration's chief of Homeland Security said Friday, announcing sweeping border enforcement.

The biggest impacts are predicted in agriculture and service industries such as restaurants, hotels and nursing homes.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the Bush administration's new rule "will require employers to fire employees unable to clear up problems with their Social Security numbers 90 days after they've been notified or face sanctions and a fine of at least $2,200 for a first offense. Up until now, employers have routinely ignored what are called no-match letters."

Full disclosure:

My father came here from Mexico on a tourist pass in the 1950s. He stayed illegally until he filled out the right number of forms 30 years later. In between, he built a business. He paid taxes. He raised a family. He's about as American as it gets, amigo.

Without guys like my dad, Saul, Miguel, Moises, Ulysses, Roberto, Elizabet and two dishwashers named Fabian, where are we going to find the bested damed chile verde in this whole stinkin' country?

Anyone care to add Hon, Tran, Malick, Ahmed or Nimish to the list?

What is that taste in the melting pot today?

That's not paté. That's potted meat.

I just filed a report for Friday's GO section. It's part of a cover story on thrifty things. My assignment was to build a cocktail party for $20.

Vodka ($10.60 at the state liquor store) consumed more than half of my budget.

I think I made some OK choices (read Friday's report), but I know I made a mistake in one way I approached my assignment.

Being "thrifty" doesn't imply cheap, or worse, ironic. I felt conspicuously ironic -- or was it ironically conspicuous? -- shopping at a discount grocery store I don't normally patronize.

I grabbed three cans of potted meat for 33 cents a can. I had some snarky vision that I'd find cheap capers and make paté.

Then I squeezed down an aisle, past a family of four and boxes upon boxes of the kind of food people buy when they're stretching dollars -- food that's eaten without irony.

As I walked to my car, a lady with a cart full of groceries used a pay phone to call a taxi.

I threw my potted meat on the passenger's seat. The taste in my mouth was flavored with shame.

I wanted to attend Zoobilee, the food-filled fund-raiser, but I'm currently between waist sizes and my formal duds don't fit.

So I stayed home, which, I insist, is what the management of a new Tacoma restaurant and lounge with fine-dining ambitions should have told its hostess to do when she showed up for work wearing the dress that revealed more than I, as a diner, could stomach seeing.

Hosts and hostesses are the faces of restaurants and lounges. They greet customers. They seat customers. They set the tone. We might come for the chef, but we're met by someone else -- the host or hostess.

The tone set by this hostesses' dress -- disclosure: I'm not a fashion guy, so I'll describe the dress as a mini print toga with a V-neck that plunged to her sternum -- turned my date and I into a couple of butch and catty schoolgirls. It was like "Mean Girls," but with a decent pinot grigio.

Actually, it was like this:

"Oh. My. God. I didn't know panty lines could stretch that far."

And this:

"Is that my veal burger under there? Or is her dress way too tight?"

Back when I washed dishes at my parents' restaurant, I tried dressing new-wave for work one night. I put on one red Converse sneaker and one orange Converse sneaker. My parents wouldn't even let me in the car. They ordered me to stay home instead.

The hostess at the new Tacoma restaurant and lounge sat near the front door, on which a sign announced that proper attire is required. I'm sure that's code for something like "no shoes, no shirt, no hoodies, no cammo, no beaters no service." It should also be a mandate to the staff.

I met two people on The Spirit of Washington Dinner Train. They were nice. I was tired of lying.

"I'm a restaurant critic," I said, when pressed for details about my work.

(He works for Boeing, she's a stay-at-home missionary. There wasn't a waiter in sight when I said it.)

With the couple under the impression that I worked for Haliburton, I had spent the Renton-to-Woodinville half of the trip mostly listening to them talk about disappointing food and views.

(About the food: stale rolls, wilted lettuce, gristly prime rib. About the views: some lovely views of Lake Washington and Chateau Ste. Michelle, but lots of old tires and industrial walls of graffiti.)

It was just before dessert on our return trip. The stop at the Columbia Winery seemed brief, and I regretted not following another couple across the road to the Hollywood Tavern for Redhooks and pull-tabs. Back on board, I could no longer stomach lying to the nice people with whom I had broken stale bread.

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I was listenting to whiny progressive radio bloviator Ed Schultz on Monday. He was whining about ordering food at the Miami airport. There was a language issue. Ed's Spanish is not muy bueno, apparently. I pushed in a Warren Zevon CD before Schultz's whining sent me into a sputtering rage. "Lawyers, Guns and Money" quelled me.

Then I thought about a language issue I encountered at the Puyallup farmers market on Saturday. I'd ordered pork and steak sandwiches. While we waited, my wife chatted up one of owners of the sandwich stand about her plans to open a restaurant in the South Hill area.

Although English was obviously the woman's second language, I understood every word she said.

Then the woman served another customer.

"Jake," she said timidly and softly, unsure of her pronunciation. "Jake? ... Jake?"

"Say it louder," snaped her son, who was working the cash register.

Disgust and embarasment in the kid's voice were palpable.

I enjoyed the sandwiches.

But the way that kid talked to his mother left a bad taste in my mouth.