Southwest Washington has a bounty of great local veggies. This spring, asparagus, snap peas, carrots and green onions have found their way to the table in a variety of places — upscale restaurants, bars and even drive-thrus.
A pizzeria might seem like an unlikely place to eat your veggies, but Rally Pizza’s seasonal vegetable plate is an ideal starter before savoring their imaginative, wood-fired oven pizzas. On a recent visit, I tried a vegetable platter, featuring snap peas, broccolini, carrots, green onions and radishes served on sheep’s cheese and drizzled with a basil pesto (with pistachio nuts in place of pine nuts) and a Calabrian chile sauce. In Italy, a vegetable dish is served before the pasta, so having a bit of roasted seasonal vegetables before enjoying your carbs isn’t that unusual.
And next door, Smokehouse Provisions also serves a satisfying seasonal vegetable side dish — a great way to counter all that smoked meat. Currently, they are serving asparagus sauteed in butter with red onion, sprinkled with red chile pepper flakes.
When I think of roasted vegetables, I think of Lapellah’s array of roasted veggies with complementary sauces. Coal-roasted carrots with nettle-goat cheese and pickled onion with rye crumbs; marinated roasted beets with honey yogurt, microgreens, pistachios and citrus oil; and roasted asparagus with spring herb dressing, fava beans, bacon and aged gouda are all currently on the menu. Mt. Tabor Brewing Company’s head chef, Zach Burkett, hails from Lapellah and has brought a mastery of the roasted vegetable plate with him. The roasted carrots with brown sugar, hazelnuts, chevre, and sea salt, served at Mt. Tabor, offer a nice sugar-and-salt adventure for your taste buds.
