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The ribs at Andre's Bar & Grill are served with fries and slaw.

The makeover inside Andre’s Bar & Grill in Bonney Lake is impressive. You might not even guess it used to be a Mazatlan Mexican restaurant.
Gone are the baskets of chips and the wooden booths. The restaurant now carries a sophisticated vibe that’s comfortably upscale, but still family friendly. The pendant lighting dims moody, the cushy booths trend stylish and the patterned carpet provides an attractive upgrade from most restaurants. The lounge looks downright swank with leather couches and low cocktail tables.

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Chef Billy Roberson prepares to place a prawn on the Cicada Surf-n-Turf entree at Cicada Restaurant in Olympia. The dish combines New York strip steak, asparagus-potato hash, prawns, and corn-tomato butter sauce. (Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

By Craig Sailor
The News Tribune

The scene: Occupying a corner spot on Olympia’s main drag and kitty-corner from the new City Hall under construction, Cicada is an intimate dining destination. Big windows look out to the street while local art fills its interior walls. The restaurant is named after the big, vociferous bugs native to the southern United States.

People in the kitchen: Billy Roberson is the chef and co-owner of the almost three-year-old restaurant – and a native of New Orleans (thus the name choice). Roberson spent five years with the Ramblin Jacks restaurant group in Olympia before striking out on his own. While Roberson concentrates on food and wine, general manager and co-owner Lisa Smith is the genius behind the restaurant’s inventive cocktail list. “She has a furious martini following,” Roberson says.

The food: Roberson says the two most important aspects of his cuisine are making everything he can from scratch and using as much local food as he can. All proteins on the menu are from the Northwest except for the occasional tuna, he says. Roberson has cooked on every coast from Maine to Alaska and “seafood is what I care the most about,” he says. He struggles to describe his cooking style but ends up calling it “a South by Northwest approach.” He leans more Italian than French, but “the basis of my cuisine is definitely rooted in the South,” where food was taken very seriously when he was growing up, he says.

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California farmer and author David Mas Masumoto, best known for his 1995 meditation on agriculture, “Epitaph for a Peach,” will be in Tacoma Monday to read from his newest work, “Wisdom of the Last Farmer.”

He’ll be at King’s Books, 218 St. Helens Ave., at 7 p.m. Monday. The event is cosponsored by the Tahoma Food Policy Coalition.

Third-generation farmer Masumoto describes his new book as a memoir that focuses on his relationship with his father, Joe Takashi Masumoto.

After the elder Masumoto suffered a stroke, says the author, “I had to teach him how to farm again. The only way for him to get his health back was to go back to farming.”

It was during the years following his father’s first stroke that “I began to realize the wisdom he had passed down to me... the everyday lessons he would teach me.”

The book deals with the role reversal involved when a son must become teacher to his father.

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Pictured here: Ginger-lemon ice. Craig Sailor/The News Tribune

Apply that concept to a grown-up palate with flavored spirits and you've got Adult Sno Cones, a shaved ice specialty concoction served every Tuesday and Thursday during August after 4 p.m. at Toscanos Café and Wine Bar in Puyallup.

We asked Chef Tom Pantley of Toscanos for recipes and he shared three. We modified one, a limoncello flavored shaved ice, by adding a homemade ginger-lemon simple syrup. Click read more for the recipes.

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Carol Yanusevich, center and Julie Jones, right, raise their glasses to toast the 50th anniversary of Harbor Lights Restaurant, Thursday evening, August 13, 2009. Long-time patrons Ardene Mattich and husband Ed Mattich, from left were among those attending the festivities.( Janet Jensen/The News Tribune)

You may have seen C.R. Roberts' story Saturday on Harbor Lights turning 50 years old.

Over at our Bizz Buzz blog, Roberts has a list of other local restaurants and watering holes that are 50 years old or older. Check out the list and let him know if he's left anything off.

Bacon pancakes at Original Pancake House.

TNT Diner reader Heather e-mailed me asking me about the new Original Pancake House on Meridian in Puyallup. I dutifully went to research pancakes and found a great discovery - bacon pancakes. It’s an efficient and tasty way to eat breakfast - bacon and flapjacks all in one vessel. What’s not to like?
The Original Pancake House, a Portland-based chain, also has about 15 other kinds of pancakes besides bacon: Banana, coconut, potato, blueberry, buckwheat, sourdough, corn, wheat germ, granola, Georgia pecan, Hawaiian pineapple, blueberry, chocolate chip and the classic pigs in a blanket. And there's a lot more breakfast on the menu - in fact, that's all they serve.

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Puyallup High School grads from left, Wade Reynolds, Jordan Caine, Tim Satre, and Scott Reynolds, right, opened Bagel Boyz Bakery July 19 in Puyallup. Photo by Dean J. Koepfler/The News Tribune.

Tonya Reynolds remembers when the idea for Bagel Boyz Bistro was just small talk around her kitchen table.
Her sons – fraternal twins Wade and Scott Reynolds – were kvetching that there weren’t any bagel bakeries in Puyallup. They grabbed a notebook and started jotting down ideas – those ideas formulated the yeasty origins of Bagel Boyz Bistro, which they opened with Puyallup High School classmates Jordan Caine and Tim Satre on July 19 in downtown Puyallup.

The four partners – all 19 years old – are 2008 graduates of Puyallup High School. They run the business with help from friends and family like Tonya Reynolds. The four partners are self-funded – they paid cash to start up the business. Wade is the foodie. He worked as a line cook at The Rose restaurant in Puyallup. Jordan and Wade both were students in the culinary arts program at Puyallup High. Scott and Tim lean toward the business side of Bagel Boyz.

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Julia Child’s birthday is this Saturday, Aug. 15. Do you have anything planned to commemorate the treasured chef? Going to see the movie "Julie & Julia" that opened last week? Hosting a dinner party, or cooking Child’s favorites?

Gordon Naccarato will host a celebratory Julia party Saturday at his restaurant, Pacific Grill (the party also celebrates the fourth anniversary of the downtown restaurant). Karyn Lindberg, a food columnist for our sister paper The Olympian, is taking a cue from Bon Appetit magazine and hosting a private dinner party at her home Saturday night toasting Julia Child with a menu of Child’s favorite dishes. Click "read more" to see the menus and memories that Naccarato and Lindberg shared with me.

Are you planning anything special? Even if it’s something small, such as seeing the movie, post a comment and let TNT Diner readers know.

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It closed July 12 - and in the same location, Royal Thai Bistro opened Aug. 1. Heng Han is the owner of Royal Thai Bistro. His brother Eric Han manages it. The menu is mostly Thai - a change from Indochine’s broader focused Southeast Asian menu – but one of the Indochine Café assistant chefs joined the staff at Royal Thai Bistro.

Hong Ngov and husband Sean Yean, who owned the Mildred Indochine Café, still own and will continue to operate the sister Indochine Café on Pearl - and the head chef Savath Sok remains at the Pearl restaurant. And here's the back story.

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A beer-sicle might have slid down parched pipes a little more easily two weeks ago during the heat blast, but even on an overcast Monday, Eggen had a better than expected turnout when he opened Hop Jack’s yesterday. And the brew was cold, as promised, he said.

The casual restaurant, located a few doors down from Old School Custard and Jersey Mike’s subs, is the first of its kind for Eggen, who also owns The Rock pizza franchises in South Hill and Lacey.

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